I saw the hedge around my alma mater.

Context
I’m in Houston today, so I visited the Rice University campus, which is right across the street from the Texas Medical Center. Rice has a wholly contiguous campus that is surrounded by a hedge. The hedge is not physically imposing enough to prevent anyone or anything from coming on campus, but it does clearly delineate the borders.

I graduated from Rice twenty years ago, so of course I see changes whenever I go back and visit. For example, sometime after my departure the Texas Medical Center built a really ugly building just beyond the Rice hedge.

Commentary
I was planning to go to church this morning, but instead I was moved to visit Rice. As I was walking around trying to figure out what drew me there, I saw this much-taller-than-everything-around-it, windowless building and was somewhat afraid that it might be on the campus itself. But no, as I got closer I realized that my beloved hedge was standing guard, keeping me from having to think that some of my alumni giving might have contributed to this monstrosity. As I sat on a bench facing away from both the ugly Med Center building and the hedge I started thinking about the protective aspects of communities.

Rice is an interesting place to go to school. It's an academically challenging but close-knit community. For four years Rice gathers people together and tells them that inside the hedges, it’s safe to be smart and obsessive and all-around different from the norm. In spite of the fact that the hedge is a puny little thing, I still felt shielded there.

It’s not just a shield, though. During those four years (or five or six or whatever) Rice tries to prepare you to go out in the world and accomplish something, not only by making you smarter, but by giving you the emotional tools to answer some of the crap the world throws at you. Four years of being told it’s great to be a nerd makes you likely to continue to believe it even twenty, thirty and forty years later.

I am blessed that I continue to have two communities that work the same way for me even today. My marriage is one. People get and stay married for any of number of reasons, but both my husband and I have come to treasure the refuge aspect of our relationship. We feel like we really can go out and do battle with all the problems of this world because we know someone will love us at the end of the day. Or sometimes in the middle, when we really want to scream! At its best, our marriage is not a hiding place, but a place where we can both rest and be reassured that we are capable of facing the next challenge to come.

My Quaker meeting is another such community. We're a pretty heterogeneous group in terms of religious beliefs and values, but we hold sacred the idea that everyone should be safe at the meeting. Not unchallenged, not coddled, but safe. It's a place where a person may hear a hundred times, "that's different from my experience," but will never hear, "you're wrong to think that way." So we get to examine the Spirit of God within us in an atmosphere that celebrates that Spirit and inspires us to go share it with the rest of the world.

I think everyone would benefit from belonging to these types of communities and I'd like to give you some advice about finding and/or building your own. Unfortunately, I can't. As far as I can tell, I came to both of these communities by the grace of God. So instead I'll pray that God provides you with the gift of a supportive community as well. I'll also invite you to come to our Quaker meeting at 10:00 a.m. Saturday mornings at Charlie Cook's Art Studio, 3500 Texas Blvd., Texarkana, TX. My marriage is not accepting any new members at this time.

What did you see today?