Within the drama of this year, I actually became rather distracted. When my routine changed and I was no longer seeing my friends consistently, and I moved in with my parents for six months, it was as if I had an excuse not only not to do the work of School of Community, but also to largely disengage from what was happening. After the initial emotional response to Covid, I went on autopilot.

When things started opening up again, I resumed some of the things I'd been doing before, but more as a mode to get back into a routine and pick up some activities again. But it all started gaining a level of urgency when my fiancé and I decided that we were going to get married. That triggered something in me, and I started caring about taking my life more seriously--not so much in intellectual terms, because I always intellectualize and I think about my life a lot--but more because I realized that what I am saying "yes" to, a life with the person I love, needs to be embraced and sustained by what I belong to. It was so much easier to think of myself as free-floating before I took a step forward toward my vocation.

So, the School of Community reading on the "dwelling place" in particular has been helpful to me because this is a moment in my life in which in order to say "yes" to another person I need to know where I belong, and I need to cultivate that--otherwise it's just thought and words, whereas belonging is actually a life that I must participate in.

So, if I'm starting a home with the person I love, I need to know what my Home (with the capital H) is, and then I need to love it not just with my thoughts and emotions but with my active work.

Saying "yes" to my fiancé--which is not just words but an entire life of "yes" through lived actions--helped me realize that my "yes" to the Movement and to the Church as my dwelling place needs to be a lived action too. And, very concretely speaking, I started reading School of Community, taking notes instead of skimming, taking time to write down my judgments instead of thinking "that makes sense" and moving on, and talking at SoC even though I've always been reluctant to do so. These are steps that I took in the past few months in response to the realization that my "yes" needs to be living, and they have actually made a difference because I'm not just lingering in the outskirts and watching. In small ways I am participating in the life of my Home, and this in turn helps me keep what happens to me from sliding off of me unnoticed.

Leti, Los Angeles, California