Urban Village of Pasadena

One of the biggest decisions in my life - or at least I thought so at the time - was choosing where I was going to work and live right after college. Upon graduating in the mid 90s, I was fortunate enough to have multiple job offers from a few companies here in Southern California. One was a printer company down in Irvine named Printronix, the other, which I chose, was a company in Santa Monica, which, at the time, was named Lear Astronics.) Looking back, it's funny how both of these company had 1950's sounding names.) I chose the latter because I wanted to be geographically closer to several of my close friends, people whom I'd known since high school and even one I'd known since junior high. I assumed, and rightly so, that they would remain in the area, and I figured if I was going to work somewhere these relationships meant more to me than the promise of a job that might be slightly more fulfilling.

While the two friends I mentioned above are close to me, we as a threesome aren't any part of a larger community. We know each other as individuals and while I'm close to each individually, they aren't close to each other. We grew up in two different circles of friends and their association is only through me, primarily in the last ten years as they've run into each other at events I've hosted such as birthdays and other reasons for celebration. They've also been invited to functions of other communities I've been a part of throughout my life - Christian groups, cooperative housing communities, and Urban Village which I'm now a part of.

Becoming a community, a group of like-minded people, or perhaps not-so-like-minded people, who share life together, is really a strange phenomenon. Most of the times it happens unintentionally. Think about how we were brought into our biological families. We really had no choice in the matter, yet over the years, whether or not we intend for it to happen, our family members end becoming some of the people closest to us. As I reflect on this now, I thank God for being a part of my immediate family, my mother and father - the thought that I belong to a group bigger than myself grounds me, despite the fact that I still experience pain from being and having been a member of this group.

Throughout our lives we move through various communities. Here in Upland where I grew up, the typical pattern was that one went to elementary school, then junior high school, then college. It was at college where we moved away from our hometown, found increased independence, and went on to the working world, where, presumably, we would detach in a very significant manner from the familial and fraternal ties that bound us in childhood and adolescence. Given that I remained in Southern California, the break for me wasn't quite that drastic. In fact I visited my family almost every other weekend, and I saw the two friends I mentioned earlier fairly regularly.

Today I'm part of a group of people who occupy the 500/600 block of Madison Avenue in Central-West Pasadena. They officially began some ten years ago, though their relationships with one another began even before that. A few years back, my wife and I also invited a couple of men into our home to engage in a sort of shared-living experiment that included chores, shared meals, and prayer. In this entry I'll reflect on the latter experience first, then the former.

For me inviting people into my (our) home was both a practical move, financially, as well as an expression of some of the values I held that have to do with my understanding of housing, population, and isolation in an urban environment. Our landlord told us that our rent was to be only $1400 if only Glory and I were to live in the house, but $1500 if were to have roommates. I figured that if we had two, each paying just under $500 each, we would more than make up for the $100 increase. At the time, I also considered Pasadena to be an overpopulated city, meaning that there were some places where too many people were living under the same roof; I'm referring primarily to both immigrant and low-income populations at this point, so our having targeted middle-class seminary students probably didn't help in that regard, but I suppose my overall impression of housing in the city made me not want to waste potential living space. Finally, part of my ethic behind wanting to share our space in the house, and to have our weekly meal/prayer time (the weekly chores were more of a pragmatic element introduced a year later), was to combat urban isolationism, the phenomenon whereby people can live less than a stone's throw away from each other and not know each other by name. I wanted to honor, sanctify if you will, our physical space by honoring, recognizing, and getting to know the people who lived closest to us, our housemates.

The experiment was, now looking back, amusing at times. I remember the first week of class when we read through the Liturgy of the Hours at seven in the morning with our two housemates who had never done it before. From appearances, they felt as uncomfortable participating as I did leading. It was an awkward time. I remember another time where one of our roommates, probably due to time constraints, had us watch a session from the Earth series. It was fairly interesting, but not very communal. Another time one of our housemates prepared a devotional for us, which looking back, I appreciate for the effort he put in and for the way it made me feel as if were at church.

Eventually, one of our two housemates left in order to continue his seminary education at Duke, his dream school, and we ended up finding an international student through a web-site that I had created for her seminary, which at the time was my employer. Given that our soon-to-be housemate was female, we were somewhat apprehensive of any potential housemate attraction that might occur between her and our current housemate, but we proceeded anyway. Nothing of that nature ever occurred, and it turned out to be an empty concern.

This second year was extremely difficult for all involved. At the beginning of the year we introduced a weekly chore routine - I think at this point my wife had had it with having what she considered to be a messy house. That chore routine was to become a source of contention between myself and our roommate who had had been with us the previous year when we had no chore schedule but cleaned the house upon being exhorted to through semi-regular unctions which. on average, were uttered on a monthly basis. This second year we also discontinued the devotionals that were part of our meals. Originally, the one assigned to prepare the meal also prepared a devotional for all to participate in. Although it felt somewhat forced at the time, I feel that it was also one of the few ways that we (formally) worshiped together, and for this reason, I missed it. Prayer is a difficult thing to manage. Especially when people come from different worship backgrounds.

The big question at the time was: can one force community? If one has a bunch of people living under the same roof, following a chore routine, a prayer routine, a meal routine, will those people automatically become community even if they don't share a whole lot else in common. I remember being quite excited about one of our earlier housemates because he seemed to share a similar vision to what we held. Even to this day he's still probably my favorite housemate of our 545 North Madison experiment. He was probably the most dedicated and the most sympathetic to what we were trying to achieve. Still, the arguments, the tension, and whatever else got in the way over the three years that he was here strained our friendship. Looking back on it, I don't know what he or I or we (the house) could have done (much) differently. I realize that I've had my own share of weaknesses, failures, personality shortcomings - that's a given. And perhaps he wasn't perfect, either. I've thought about it over and over and over again, how things could have been different, and I don't know, fundamentally, if they really could have. Maybe for things to have been radically different we (each of us) would have had to be in very different places in life. I'm glad that my wife Glory was able to go with me on that ride - as were all our housemates - but as with many experiences, oftentimes our shortcomings are made much more evident than our strengths.

If I could do anything differently, would I? No, I would still try. I would still live up to my ideals. I would hope that others would want to participate with us in them, too. Looking back on it, I did enjoy the times when we would just hang out and our housemate would just pop in on us on the couch and talk up a storm about random things. And I enjoyed our theological discussions on the porch with our neighbors and even when our atheist/agnostic friend would unwillingly participate due to being in the conversational crossfire. I wish in some sense that we could have tried this experiment without me, with someone more capable, but, like the recent house renovation in which my wife and I labored, if it weren't for me, here, at 545 North Madison Ave, perhaps this whole experiment would never have been conducted.

So there you have it. After three and a half years, we still have no functional heater. (That's a story unto itself.) Now we have four housemates, two of them under the age of five. And we have no official meal or chore schedule. But we do have community - people hanging out, talking about their problems, giving advice to one another, arguing with one another. We still have that.

I enjoy our current roommates. We tried to mix things up a little bit. I realized this time around that we tended to pick people who were white or middle-class or attending Fuller Seminary. One of our roommates is actually an ex-classmate of mine, so it's been interesting reconnecting with her even though I don't know her that well. Another woman who lives with us is someone who is from the neighborhood. She's African-American and a full-time mom. It's been great having her daughter play with our son Jude.