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the community with which you are
even willing to endure some minor
disappointments—and the occasional major disappointment—because
beyond offering most of what you
hoped for, you find in the good-enough relationship
the gradual unfolding
of additional experiences, challenges, and
opportunities that you
know are good for
you, even if you had
not been looking for
them when you began
discerning.
Though it may
initially sound like a compromise,
the good-enough community—the
good-enough relationship—is far
richer and lovelier than the perfect
one you started out searching for. it
If you can
love a community,
then that good-enough
community will more
than likely return the
favor of loving a
good-enough you.
“
is built on honesty and knowledge of
the other—in other words, intimacy.
Good enough reaches beyond initial,
oftentimes healthy infatuation and
ripens into a love that embraces limi-
tations, both the community’s and
one’s own, as well as
the gifts, promises, and
good works each party
brings to the relation-
ship.
when you think you have found it,
one final, decisive question remains:
is this a community that i could love
as is?
Any wise person will tell you
not to marry someone with the
expectation that they will change
once you marry them. The same
holds true for religious communities. Before you join a group of men
or women, it is important that you
love them and their way of life as
they are today. True, a community
will change with time, and hopefully
for the better, but an individual who
joins a religious community with
a plan of changing or “fixing” the
community is in for heartache and
disillusionment. if you can love the
community and its life as it exists
today—ugly orange couch and all—
then that good-enough community
will more than likely return the
favor of loving a good-enough you.
in the end you are likely to find that
the community will bend a bit to
your hopes and expectations as you
bend to theirs.
Have faith
“As is” is OK
described this way, the
good-enough com-
munity takes time to
discover and may very well require
walking down a few hallways, moving
closer, taking risks, and working to
know what a religious community
and religious life are really like. And
As saint Paul writes in his First
Letter to the Corinthians: “We see
dimly now as in a mirror” (13: 12).
our knowledge of the future, of
another person or community, of
God, even of ourselves is now and
will always be incomplete. But in the
end absolute knowledge is not what
is needed for discernment. Faith is
what is needed. Faith is the most
important ingredient in discern-
ment because faith takes over where
knowledge falls short.
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