The Jeanie Wylie Community

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This Saturday the Jeanie Wylie Community held a blessing for their new intentional community on Larkins Street in Detroit. These 5 women, and the host of supporting friends and "conspiritors" gathered that evening prayed, ate, sang, bonfired, and perhaps even danced their new place of hospitality into being.

I'm sure this crew was one that could have just as easily marched in protest to the nearest nuclear weapons installation as it did march from this house's front porch, through the blessing ceremony in the living room, and out into the backyard garden. I'm sure they could have put pens to papers in combatting the most minute to the most glaring political injustice.

But tonight they celebrated a quieter revolution. In remembrance of mother, wife, and friend Jeanie Wylie, these folks celebrated the world changing power of a home and a neighborhood whose members care for one another with the love of Jesus Christ. With the prophets of the old testament, and the flavors of a healthy anarchism, these poets stood together to rehearse and reaffirm the tenets of the Beloved Community and how it just might upset all the unsettling things of the world as we know it.

It was a pleasure to take part.

Behind the Jeanie Wylie Community house there is a quizzical artifact of urban gardening that captures for me the proclamations made during this house blessing. It is a tower for growing potatoes built with discarded car tires stacked one on top of the other with dirt filled inside. With each new layer this funny combination of materials rises as a somewhat off-kilter altar to new life, nourishment, creativity, and care for the world. With each new house that we plant or pray for through EMERGEDETROIT and the Detroit Villages, with each new funny combination of people stitched together on a street as disciples of Jesus, and with all the rich nourishment of the soil that surrounds them in their neighbors and neighborhoods, I think God's garden is grown, and one more part of God's whole world is fed.

Carl
carl(at)emergedetroit.org

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