June is always a bittersweet time at Life Together, and this year it feels especially so. Yesterday we completed Disorientation, our annual closing retreat in which we reflect on the past year and say goodbye. And for the first time all year, we were able to be together fully– no masks, no distancing, an embodied experience in ways we didn’t even think about before COVID-19. Its very normalcy felt miraculous.
Yet the year left an indelible mark. For the first time in my memory, the closing cohort photo was not staged on the steps of 40 Prescott. Some moments lacked that easy interaction between people that one would expect of a group that had traveled together all year– the full cohort had formed largely as a virtual community, not in-person as with previous cohorts. And even as we laughed at one another’s River Stories, kayaked together down the Charles River, and finally, finally lifted our voices together in chant during closing worship, I felt a twinge of loss. This was what we had missed in our year of Zoom trainings and remote work.
With the promise of vaccines and falling case numbers in the United States, there is a strong impulse to move past the last 15 months. Forgetting, however, would allow us to ignore the painful realities that the pandemic has surfaced, challenges that cry out for God’s justice. It would prevent us from absorbing the lessons this difficult season has to teach us about who we are and where the Holy Spirit is calling us to go. That applies to us as individuals, as we discern how to live out our own prayerful and prophetic leadership with integrity. It also applies to Life Together.
Our next program year won’t look like this one, thankfully, but it also can’t look like ones in the years before. It will see us with a smaller group of fellows, living together in our new home in Dorchester. Together we will ask what prayerful and prophetic leadership looks like in this season, as we commit with renewed energy to our core practices while continuing to build the structures of racial and gender equity into everything we do. And we will move forward with plans for new fellowship models that can widen the circle of young adults who experience transformation in Life Together.
I’ll admit that following the Spirit into uncharted waters is a bit scary. What new thing will emerge from this Covidtide? But if the past six years of change in this community have taught me anything, it is that we can grow without losing ourselves. Life Together exists to form prayerful and prophetic leaders, young adults with the hearts and practices to challenge systems of Empire and build new pathways beyond our current imagination. That core purpose abides, in every season. And it does so in part through the varied ways each of you continue to participate in this community. Your accompaniment, in so many ways, has sustained us through the pandemic and will continue to support us moving out of it. Thank you.
Please pray for us as we say goodbye to this year’s cohort and welcome in a new one this August. I hope that your summer is one of miraculous normalcy, joyful reunions, and time to reflect on how the past year has helped you stretch and grow.