Young people in Community

Sometimes there needs to be a stepping stone between family and the world.

A month or so ago I was talking to Colin Piper, of International Youth Works, in Germany, about Poatina, and he was fascinated by our assumption that the only way you can build a healthy community is if that community exists for something other than itself.

At the heart of every Fusion community are young people, and our intentional communities like Poatina, always have a place for young people the world would normally deem to be “at risk”.

Regular readers of this blog would know that I am putting up a series of extracts from Jean Vanier’s “Community and Growth”.

At the start of chapter 2, Vanier specifically focusses the place of young people in the community:

I realise more and more how many young people are wounded in their capacity to live in relationship and remain very immature emotionally. Perhaps they lacked a warm, emotional environment when they were young and, above all, genuine and trusting relationships with their parents. So they are on an emotional quest, frequently confused and lost, particularly in the area of values and of the meaning of sexuality. They need a community in which grow towards greater maturity and healing and wholeness; they need a secure and emotionally warm environment where they can establish the relationships they need without danger. They need older people who have time to listen to them.

Some young people will find healing and meaning to their lives in these communities, and then will move on and put their roots down in another soil. Others will put down roots in one of these communities, which then becomes the earth in which they grow and bear fruit. But between the initial call to community and the final rooting, there are many passages, moments of doubt and crises of all sorts. The final rooting is the recognition and acceptance of a convenant, a bonding between people that is holy and sacred because it is given by God. And this covenant between people is founded on the bonding or the covenant between the individual person and God.

In my next post I will share the next part of this excerpt, which helped me see more clearly, what is in my opinion,  an important part of Fusion’s mission.