Putting Roots Down

Next week I'll be taking a step that is pretty much the closest thing I've come in my life to "putting my roots down". What I'll be doing is becoming a "tochtgenoot" (loosely translated: "journey companion") of my community. This is only a one-year commitment, so that in itself is not a very daring step. But it does mean that I'm seriously considering joining Spe Gaudentes, the semi-monastic core community which consists of people who consider it their lifelong calling and take something like a "vow of stability".

Could I see myself spending the rest of my life in this community? This question brings about more thoughts than I could discuss in a blog entry of polite proportions. But let's just start writing and see what happens.

We'll start with this: I'm an uprooted person. Unlike some uprooted people I know, I haven't moved around all that much. Although I was born in Germany, I lived in Brazil til I was 7, then in Ecuador til I was 19. Sure our family took some extended "furloughs" (in Germany and/or Paraguay) that were longer than an average vacation, but that doesn't really count as "having moved around a lot". If anything, it amounts to "having traveled much".

So my uprootedness doesn't come from moving around so much during my formative years, but from growing up between cultures. Sure I spent the bulk of my childhood, adolescence and teenage years in Quito, but I feel no "roots" in that city; at most I have fond memories and plenty of nostalgia, but not a feeling that I BELONG there. At home we were a sort of German family (though my mother is Paraguayan Mennonite), and I went to an American school and spent a great deal of time on and around a "mission compound".

The one place I've ever WANTED to put my roots down was Vancouver. After my student visa for Canada expired in the late '90s, I was willing to try to immigrate. But then I saw the cost: I needed a job in my field of study, with an employer who would "sponsor" me, and I needed to pay tens of thousands to Immigration Canada. Then I would have to wait a good five to ten years for the application to process, and in that time I would not be allowed to change jobs, lose my job, or leave the country for any reason. If my employer decided, after four years, that he was tired of sponsoring me, then I'd be back to square one. If there was a death in the family and I'd fly out of the country to attend a funeral, all my visa application would have to start over from scratch.

You may say I'm lacking in commitment for not having tried that, but it just seemed like too high a price. I figured, I'm a European citizen, I have a whole continent where I can live and work without jumping through such ridiculous hoops. So I lived a few years in Germany. When people ask me why I left, the short answer is "because I couldn't put my roots down". There was no real reason to leave; but there was also no real reason to stay.

I came to Amsterdam for a three-month stint in 2004 and have been here ever since. Again, there's not much reason to stay. But there's no really pressing reason to leave either.

But why join a community? Why put my roots down at all? And, why join THIS community? Why put my roots down in AMSTERDAM, of all places?

The thing is, for an uprooted person, any place seems like a sort of random choice. Amsterdam might not be a very logical place to put roots down, but it's not like there are more logical places out there. I've now lived here for seven years, I know the city quite well, and I have some very good friends here. I feel that any place I move from here, I'd be seven years behind the curve.

I lived a summer in England once, and spent a few weeks in northern Italy. In both places, I made faster inroads towards making a life for myself there than I did during my years of living in Germany. I often wonder what would have happened had I stayed in either of those countries. But again, the choice feels just as random as Amsterdam.

So one question in the equation is: "why Amsterdam?" And the answer is really no better than "why not Amsterdam?" For an uprooted person, that's really all you ever have. There may be very little that holds you to a place, but there's equally little to hold you to any other place. My reasons for Amsterdam might not be very strong; my reasons for moving anywhere else are even weaker.

But then there are trickier questions: why put roots down at all? And why join a Christian community? And why join THIS community?

I have frequently been accused of over-analyzing things, but I think most of my decisions are taken intuitively rather than analytically. This is actually one of the things that has caused the most frustration and tension with people who are close to me. I make decisions that I can't fully explain, even to myself, and that of course is not easy for someone else to have to observe.

I'm not sure what the advantage is of putting roots down somewhere. Maybe there is none. I wouldn't know, because I've never really had roots. Maybe I blame my problems on my own uprootedness, and hope that things will get better once I have a place where I "belong". Or maybe I just see it as a simplifying (and, to be honest, liberating) step if the question "will I still be living here next year" ceases to be relevant.

I do know the advantages of joining a community. To be honest, I wouldn't have it any differently. The world is too complicated for me to face by myself. I do need other people. Sure, a "normal" network of friends would be "enough", but my lifestyle has made it difficult to keep friends in my life for extended periods of time. I find that the people I trust most are still the people I grew up with, no matter how much we've grown apart over the years. But they're all far away. Here in Amsterdam (and in fact in the entire Netherlands) I don't have any "old" friends. There isn't even anyone here that I even knew 8 years ago. And as I get older, I can no longer make friends with the same ease that I used to have. Without community of some sort, you end up a helpless old lonely person, and since I'm not thinking of starting a family, I'd need either a solid group of friends or an "official" structured community of some kind.

I've actually said, even when I was young, that I'd become a monk someday. It was sort of a running joke with my classmates. But I didn't really know what that would entail. I thought of either a hermit living out in the woods, or a "Friar Tuck" who travels around with some group of merry men but is, you know, more independent than they are, because he doesn't have any belongings and no need for any romantic attachments. I only learned later that the essence of monasticism is the community. Of the three vows (celibacy, poverty and stability, as they are popularly known) only the "stability" one was a real problem for me. That would involve putting roots down and all that. And strangely, that's the one vow that I would have to take in joining Spe Gaudentes.

So why Spe Gaudentes? Again, it feels like it's just a random place where I've ended up due to some arbitrary developments and decisions in my life. How have I gotten to the point where I think that this might be my surrogate family until the end of my days?

That question will have to wait for another entry. The short answer is: I have no idea why this should be "my" community, which is the whole point behind doing this year as a "Tochtgenoot". I'm hoping that I can get to know it all a bit better, and that by this time next year I'll have a clearer image.