Robert H. von Thaden, Jr.

The Grace of Community

I am a nomad, a vagabond, by profession. Well, technically, I'm an academic, but on one level that's just a fancy way of saying the same thing. Born and raised in Rockland County, NY; college in Allentown, PA; a master's program and high-school teaching in Chicago; a doctoral program in Atlanta; assistant professor in Erie. I've moved around a little in the past 17 years.

This mobility, not unlike what many Americans undergo in their lives, means a life of shifting communities and changing faces. Perhaps this is why I am always so grateful for the circle of friends I have always been lucky to have in each place. That most of these communities were designed to be temporary in geo-spatial terms only makes them more precious to me. Anchors of grace in a life always in motion.

How different my experience of community is from that of my mother, for example. Until recently she lived in the same town her entire life. In fact, her side of my family is so rooted in place that my sister and I were the sixth generation of that side to live in my mother's hometown. For her, community is rooted to place. For her son, living in a mobile, wired age, space seems incidental. I constantly live as the outsider looking in on communities of place. As one who does not share the rootedness of these communities, I must admit to envy.

My communities over the years have been built around less concrete things than place, but they are not less powerful for that. While I look with a certain covetousness at those rooted around me, I delight in my multiple circles of family and friends from various stages of my life. All of these people envelope me in the grace of community.

The grace of community, so precious to the nomad, both lifts my spirits and keeps me grounded. My circles of family and friends save me from my solitudinary and misanthropic tendencies. These same communities of grace also keep me honest - pulling me back to earth when I threaten to lose my moorings in near delusional flights of grandeur. The only way that communities can function in this their proper way is when we allow ourselves to become vulnerable to those close to us. This vulnerability to be raised up and to be brought down, I believe, is what makes us fully human.

And so the vagabond opens himself up to vulnerability again and again knowing that by doing so he is chasing after the grace that roots us all in a common humanity.

About Robert H. von Thaden, Jr.

Robert H. von Thaden, Jr., Ph.D. has just started his third year as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. His favorite aspect about Mercyhurst: The dedication of and camaraderie among the faculty.