Guest blog: Encountering Christ in Hodge Hill

This guest blog is written by Jack Belloli (@giacbelloli), who has been sharing life with us in Hodge Hill as part of our Common Ground Community since September 2018.

If what Jack writes here inspires you to want to explore coming to join our Common Ground Community - for a year like Jack, or for longer - we'd love to hear from you. If you're interested in coming as a resident member in one of our Community Houses, for a September 2019 start, we'd be really keen to hear from you by the end of May. For more details click here.

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As I write this, Easter Week has just finished – and the story from the week’s lectionary readings to which I’ve found myself returning, as I look back on seven months so far in Hodge Hill, is the risen Christ’s appearance to the disciples at Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35).

This story’s always meant a lot to me, but particularly since 2016, when I was pointed towards Henri Nouwen’s book With Burning Hearts, while I was beginning to reflect more deeply on God’s call for my life. Nouwen reads the encounter as Christ’s way of confirming a pattern for sustaining the ‘Eucharistic life’, which He announced at the Last Supper and fulfilled in His Resurrection. He comes to us, as He does to the disciples in their despondency, and reveals Himself first in the Scriptures and then, more completely, in His breaking of bread.

This year, however, I’ve found myself paying more attention than I had previously to the ways in which the turns or hinges of this pattern are made possible by the disciples. Jesus can explain the Scriptures to them because they are already thinking about Him, about what He had done ‘before God and all the people’; He is revealed at the table because they choose to invite Him in.

These details confirm a way of understanding just what kind of thing “the life of Christ” is. It’s one that runs through Luke’s Gospel in particular – right from an opening in Mary consents to bear and raise God’s Son – but which I’ve also seen particularly clearly during my time living here: that Christ goes where love already is, to dwell with and enhance it. If this is the case, being Christ-like might not be a matter of establishing new patterns of living as much as of being open to the patterns that are already out there, containing the seeds of their own transformation.

One of the sites I’ve found myself going to this year has been The Hub, a shopfront on the Firs and Bromford Estate which provides a base for two grassroots charities that Hodge Hill Church supports. Here, a group of us commit to sharing time with whichever neighbours cross our threshold, and sharing in whatever aspects of their lives they choose to bring with them. Our aim is not to treat these encounters as opportunities to solve problems, but (where necessary) to remove obstacles to our neighbours’ flourishing and (more importantly) to build connections among them, finding other people who share their passions or can celebrate their gifts. It’s a matter of focusing not on somebody’s struggle to use a new iPhone, but the love and support for family on the other side of the world that inspires them to keep trying; not on the ways that someone’s disability requires asking for special provisions, but brings with it gifts for openness and empathy that enable those around them.

This principle of cherishing what is already there is also expressed every Thursday, when a team of us prepare and share a pay-what-you-can community lunch and boutique, using “real junk food” donated from supermarkets. In a world in which the only response to financial and environmental crisis seems to be one of imposed scarcity and sacrifice, we insist that God has always provided enough for His creation and that is already being made new through redistribution.         

The other place where Christ is already at work is The Old Rectory, the house that survives from the Anglican church property that previously stood on Hodge Hill Common. Here, we’re in an ongoing process of working out what a ‘homely expression’ of church might look like, and what particular benefits it can bring. The room in which some of us gather twice a week to share the Eucharist is the same as the one in which other meals are shared, craft is collaborated on, space for conversation can be held, and quiet days can be hosted: where the boundary between what is sacrament and what sacramental is particularly thin, and where individuals can find themselves guided from one to the other as they need.

It’s here, too, that the Common Ground community meets once a month for one of its regular times of fellowship (the other is a monthly Bible study hosted by different community members around the estate). Rather than following a set rule of life, we support each other in discerning a sustainable rule that emerges from our own developing sense of where our passions and gifts lie, and how they might be oriented towards God. I’ve been struck by how people’s descriptions of their apparently “secular” habits and pastimes – their exercise, or pets, or holidays – bear witness to a confidence that God is part of these too. And by how Common Ground can provide a space for the particular ways in which we live our lives individually to be “held up”, and begin to be shared. In a culture where quality “family time”, for example, can feel unachievable, putting children at the heart of our time together doesn’t simply compensate for or replace that time, but might expand our sense of what family values might be, of how and by whom they are expressed.

Before I arrived in Hodge Hill, part of me was expecting to encounter Christ in quite a radical way while I was here, as startlingly or disruptively as he appears on the road to Emmaus: perhaps in the witness of someone remarkably “unlike me” in age or ability or social background. Another, slightly more concealed and embarrassed part probably hoped that I was bringing some kind of previously unavailable gift with me: that I was capable of doing something, however small, to shape or transform this place.

Both of those expectations have been met, in a way, but neither particularly dramatically, and neither to the point that it overwhelms the other. Both processes together have been part of an ongoing rhythm of life here, and it’s this quiet ongoingness that’s worth celebrating. In doing so, we’re continuing to participate in the task that God the Father trusted His Son with, when He gave the world to Him: the task not primarily of changing it, but of allowing ourselves to be given over to the world, so that the world may become more fully itself.