LESSONS I LEARNED LIVING AT JONAH HOUSE THIS SUMMER

by Josh Cohn

Leaving school this past spring a lot of people were concerned first and foremost with finding jobs, internships or applying to graduate school. Most people started their searches well before actually graduating. Really I was no different, but there was something about the conversations I was having with peers and professors - though there were definitely exceptions -throughout this time that was off-putting to me. “Life-after-school” (which is supposedly completely different from, even more “real” than the entirety of the twenty two years that precede it) was usually discussed in the context of career, rather than jobs, grad school and whatever else being discussed in the context of ways-of-life. We talk about what we will be doing, which is important, but it is rarely framed within larger questions about how we want to be or should be living.
To be a bit more specific, here are two examples of what I mean by “how we live”:

I read a book by Bell Hooks this summer in which she explains at one point, “ In my adult life I have seen few white folks who are really willing to go the distance to create a world of racial equality-white folks willing to take risks, to be courageous, to live against the grain. ” I read another collection of essays in which Thich Nhat Hanh writes about peacemaking: “ Go back to the present moment, become fully alive. Don't run anymore. Go back to the here and now and get in touch with the wonders of life that are available for our nourishment and healing. This is the basic practice of peace. ”

I offer these examples because I do not know how to transform my and others' roles in racist and other interconnected systematic oppressions in this country, and because I still move too quickly through the day to be fully present to my own experience. But how I will choose to live my life in response to these and other truly urgent questions is all that has been going through my mind since entering, and all the more so since leaving school. I want my life to be an expression of my deepest beliefs and values and right now it is not.

So what does all this have to do with Jonah House?

For me it goes something like this: Life at Jonah House is deeply based in the belief that one must act on behalf of her/his personal accountability in the perpetuation of oppressive systems (specifically U.S. imperialism). But that personal accountability is always linked to collective organizing, acting, and living. This is important because community building in and of itself is an act of resistance to hyper-individualist consumer society, and our consumption is a primary motivation for and justification of U.S. imperialism. In this sense, the ideal is that resistance is not just something that someone does sometimes, but that it is a way of life.

When I would pick fruit with Ardeth in the cemetery yard, she would sometimes talk about the “humanizing work of the day” as spiritual nourishment, but also as an act inseparable from direct acts of resistance in front of, say, the Pentagon (others in the community talked about this with me too). So picking peaches can be an act of resistance: Developing right relationship with the land; growing one's own food, but also growing enough to share widely what one has; committing oneself to a life of work that is meaningful; living an alternative to working in an institution imbedded with the social hierarchies of dominant culture; being able to go to or organize at, say, the Pentagon on a moment's notice without having to respond to a boss's agenda.     

 The point is not that the model that Jonah House has created is perfect, that it works all of the time, or that it is completely right for me. The point is that trying to create a way of life in which what one does on a small and large scale is intentionally connected to a larger purpose- to a consciousness of people and world beyond just oneself -is simultaneously an essential source of meaning and root for substantive change. ( I don't want to oversimplify this- it is complicated. For example, one person believes working for U.S. AID means commitment to developing poor nations and ending world hunger (a larger purpose) while another person believes U.S. AID is a neo-colonial institution (furthering oppression). In other words, the means to and the meaning of the “greater good” are hugely controversial. )

It is not about selflessness, it is about connection. This is something that people may say often, but that Jonah House made a reality for me. Everyone in the community is trying to live with a kind of intentionality I have never experienced before and it was incredibly empowering for me.  

Simply put, living at Jonah House has been one of the most grounding experiences I have ever had. It has been a mirror for me to see more clearly the questions that matter most to me right now: Am I really dedicated to change? What matters deeply to me? How will I live it? At this moment what does right life mean for me? Jonah House and everyone who makes it enabled my ability to live these questions actively. Susan, Mike, Liz, Eda, Carol, Ardeth (in reverse-alphabetical order for no particular reason) and the extended community:

The inclusiveness and openheartedness that you all have showed me is as great a lesson as anything else I learned from you all this summer and I am endlessly grateful for it. Thank you so much for all you have given, I hope that I have been able to give back even a fragment of what I have received. Of course, we will be in touch and I will see you all soon. With Love, Josh