By Andrea Lingle

Community is difficult.

People hurt.

Flying over the Continental US this summer, I thought about all the lives I was passing over. Clusters of experience scattered between the mountains, fields, and rivers called to my soul. As the snow-capped peak of Mt. Hood filled the many-layered airline window, farmers plowed, physicians diagnosed, bus drivers paused, mothers nursed, and children crawled over the landscape below. How many of those lives are laced with poverty? With abuse? With neglect? How many of those lives just received a diagnosis that will change their lives forever? How many are down to their last shred of grit: catching the four am train to the city to work under artificial lights while life passes between their fingers.

People hurt. Vicious words dropped thoughtlessly. Panicked people clawing over each other to stave off the dread. Passive aggressive notes left in mailboxes. The snide comment left on a preteen’s video creation. Belittling, bullying, shaming, othering, screaming, whispering. The disgusted snort that ends the conversation, the gossip in the hall, the unwillingness to see how my privilege requires another to suffer.

To be in community is to undertake the reality that community is made of hurting people. When difficult conversations must be had, there is a deep and wide need to start with the human.

If we don’t agree, this isn’t going to be easy.

It’s also not impossible.

It takes care. So much care. It takes stopping and tarrying with a woman in the glaring sun of a Judean noon. She was a Samaritan. He was a Jew. There was no Venn diagram for the Jews and the Samaritans. Their worlds were incommensurable: they didn’t overlap. There were no universal statements for them. Except thirst.

Thirst.

It might be all you share with the other, but it is a start. Perhaps the conversation is so difficult all you can do it agree to share the length of satisfying a deep thirst. Then walk away. It is enough. No one said that you have to have difficult conversations in complete sentences. Feel free to let the sharing and slaking of thirst be the work you do.

Thirst lends a pressure to act. If you come, daily, to the well with the other with whom you so desperately disagree, and ask no more than to share the reaffirmation of your embodiedness, that could be enough to become human to each other.

Sometimes it takes all the bravery you have to show up and recognize when to leave. Living in healthy community always, and especially if things get complicated, requires knowing yourself and your limits well. When will staying in a conversation be harmful? While we know that hard doesn’t equal harm, the mindset that growth requires scarring leaves many of us calloused to harmful situations.

Drinking from a poisoned well doesn’t cure dehydration, and allowing our communities to be harmful kills as surely as arsenic in the ground water.