Episode 9: Living in Intentional Community
Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is Episode 9: Living in Intentional Community with Others. So welcome, everyone. This is our inaugural episode of Season Two on the Moderate Catholic. We have wrapped up Season One, and we are now moving on to Season Two.
And I teased the topic a little bit earlier, but it is radical family, and the topic, radical family, is about families making bold choices to live out their faith. And I’m so excited to kick off this season with four very dear friends of mine whom I met at a stage in my life and continue to be inspired by.
And they’re going to talk to us today about what it means to live in intentional community with others. So, with [00:01:00] that, let’s get right down to it. My dear friend Jonathan will introduce himself and his wife, and then we’ll pass it to Carla.
Jonathan Wittig: Good morning. Thanks for having us here. I’m Jonathan, and this is my wife, Lisa. And we have three children: Caroline, who’s 11, Ben, who’s nine, and Katherine, who’s seven. We were longtime Chicagoans and are now new residents in Minnesota in the past couple of years. So, I’m excited to be here today.
Carla Lents: Hello. Thanks, Christina. We are Ryan and Carla; we actually grew up together in Indiana and then moved to Chicago and have lived here for over 20 years. We have two sons, Caleb, who is 15, and Micah, who’s 10. Yeah, really excited to be here and talk about this.
Christina Gebel: I am really excited to have you here. So, the reason that I know these folks, these awesome folks, is through a program that I continue to hold near and dear to my heart, which is Amate House program in Chicago. It’s a [00:02:00] faith-based service program where folks who graduate college can decide to dedicate a year or more as a fellow in service at a job in Chicago.
And I was blessed to do that between the years 2007–2009, and that’s how I got to know Lisa as one of my house coordinators and eventually Ryan came on as program staff. I’m really glad that our faith connected us in this way, and what a better launching pad to discuss the topic of living in community.
So, the first thing we’re gonna talk about is just how y’all came together. How did you get to know each other? What time period in your life? What were you doing? Enlighten us into how this all came to be.
Lisa Wittig: Yeah. So, as Christina mentioned, I was working at Amate House back in 2007 when she was a fellow with the program. I had recently graduated from the program myself as a volunteer. That’s actually where Jonathan and I met.
We both volunteered [00:03:00] together for a year, and I was working at Amate House. And then a few years into that, there was a staff transition. Ryan actually came on staff and started working at Amate House. We were in the same role, working with the program, supporting the volunteers. Ryan quickly became a good friend, and Jonathan and I met Carla and hung out with Ryan and Carla a few times.
And at one point, Ryan came to me, and he had this crazy idea. Would you be interested in living in intentional community again? Certainly, a unique situation because we were married, and Ryan, I believe at that time, you had Caleb, who was a baby. And so just thinking about that idea, I was like, oh my gosh, you’re crazy.
I wasn’t completely opposed to it, but I was like, you know who you should talk to? Jonathan has actually mentioned this before in our relationship to me as something he is interested in, and he’s also the dreamer and the doer in our relationship, and I am like the planner and
executor, so I was like, Ryan, you need to connect with Jonathan. You two need to talk because I don’t think I’m the one to carry this dream to fruition, but it sounds exciting.
Ryan Lents: Maybe I can pick up from there. I would say, for me, I think part of the curiosity of this was that a big part of our role at Amate House, Lisa and I, was being these house coordinators, and so it’s a very unique role. It’s like being a campus minister and an RA, although we didn’t live with the fellows.
But we were a primary point of contact for them and would do things like office hours, community nights, retreats. So, we really accompanied them throughout their experience, and I would say vicariously lived through their experience of community, all the ups and downs.
And it made it very rewarding and very challenging, and as Lisa mentioned, we had transitioned from a life stage of being right out of college where we had lived in community. I had not done Amate House as a fellow. I had been at a different program called Nazareth Farm in West Virginia, and that was a deeply formative time in my life.
And I would also say I was pretty immature. There were a lot of things I needed to learn about life and about living with other people and about just how to grow up, and community was so deeply shaping in that way. I came to really realize how much I had missed it by being in this role where I was walking with people that were experiencing those ups and downs.
Initially, I thought this is just something that you do when you’re not tethered to marriage and children and mortgages and things, but then I interrupted that presumption and said, what would it look like to actually go on this type of journey?
And to think about this stage of life. And so that was the launching point of some conversations with Jonathan. We became fast friends, bonded around a lot of things that we had common interests around, but I think that idea of saying, hey, what would it look like for us to discern together and to think about how we could live out our faiths and our commitments as husbands, as wives, as friends in this unique stage of life as we’re starting family where there are a lot of just really big pressures and challenges and difficulties.
It’s hard to live in the modern world. There can be a lot of really unhealthy messages that we get about individualism and doing things on our own. I got those messages really loud as a twenty-two, twenty-three-year-old. And those messages are just as powerful when you’re twenty-eight, twenty-nine, especially as you’re thinking about some of the real adult things that come on at that stage of life.
I think we found a lot of common challenges and ideas that really started to make this thing seem like it could be real.
Jonathan Wittig: Yeah. Just adding on to that, when I was in college, I was involved with a lot of intentionality within the campus ministry department at my university. And so, my roommates and I would try to live out community together in our own ways, even counting the toilet paper squares to see how much of stewardship we were living out on a day-to-day basis. A little crazy. But my year of Amate House was a challenging year where our sense of community was difficult. The service in the community was wonderful. Amate as a whole was wonderful, but I had a very [00:07:00] challenging year. But the concept of community living—I believed in it strongly.
My simple explanation is Jesus lived in community. He was with these other guys, and they just went around together. And I’m sure that some of the disciples were frustrating to live with on a day-to-day basis. But they found the goodness in it.
And they probably rose higher from the challenges that they faced on a day-to-day basis. And that’s how I hold community living, even when we chose to do it, or even in college or in Amate House, like there were a lot of hard days. But I think that those, like, you learned patience, and you learned kindness, and you learned self-reflection.
And you hopefully are growing and not just so self-involved all the time. And I share that perspective with Ryan. I think that’s one of the many challenges we face right now in our common societies, that we’re all kind of self-involved in.
But yeah, that made me want to continue to live this beyond this ate volunteer year because it makes total sense. I wanted to be able to have that community as we raise our kids. And there’s more to that, but I’ll share that [00:08:00] later.
Christina Gebel: Yeah, so I really love what you all have been saying, and Ryan, I was like, you and I did Amate House. I can relate to thinking like this is something you do in your mid-twenties, and then you do other things and include other people and even little people and bills and all that stuff.
And as we were talking, I’m realizing that we were kicking around this phrase “intentional community,” and the five of us have an idea of what that is, but to anybody new to the concept, maybe just a few reflections from you all on how you would define that. We use this phrase, “intentional community,” in conversation, but what is it?
And in this pre-decision period of making the bold choice, how were you thinking about that? What kind of values were coming up for you?
Ryan Lents: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that phrase, “intentional,” is really important because I think with so many things in life, we can have a lot of hopes and dreams for things. But for me, the piece about intentional is, what are the routinized kind of ongoing daily practices that reflect a commitment?
And I think the same is true in marriage. It’s like you could talk about intentional marriage. Just because you make a commitment on one day doesn’t mean that on day 1725, that it’s gonna be as easy. It takes an intentional effort and commitment to say, yes, today I will love my spouse and animate those commitments that we made on the day that we exchanged rings.
I think the same is true in community. Our experience was one of a lot of active discernment where we would do a good job of framing big questions that we were living into with our lives. We didn’t just say yes one day and then cut a check for a deposit for the house that we ended up living in for two years.
We actually spent a whole year meeting on an ongoing basis. I think at one point we were meeting every two weeks. Part of that was just to build relationships together. The four of us had come to become good friends, but there are different conversations you have when you’re going out for pizza and beer versus, hey, what would it look like to share a mortgage together or share the cost of groceries or cook meals and that sort of thing.
We really went through a whole process of asking questions like, what kind of living arrangement would we want? We had a chance to visit a community of two families that were living together where they had a two flat. So, they actually had two separate spaces, but then they made active efforts to do meals together or have hospitality.
We talked about what would a commitment to cooking meals together look like. How do we want to commingle resources around finances and things like that? We realized that there were so many of those questions, then begat like a lot of other questions and this is where it was helpful, where we had a good mix of gifts.
We had high level thinking of what we’d like this to do, how might some of these things be a reflection of our values? And then to Lisa’s point around logistics, like how are we gonna keep track of things? How are we gonna balance a checkbook? How are we gonna keep track of receipts?
How are we going to make sure that we are following through with things? And so, it took a mixture of our collective gifts to really sort that out.
Lisa Wittig: Yeah, and another like important piece of intentional community is really understanding what it means to be intentional. Working at Amate House and certainly many of us having lived in community before, had a little bit of a basis of understanding of what it means to be intentional when you’re living with a group of people.
But I think it’s not like we’re just choosing our best friends and living in an apartment together for a couple years and taking turns making dinner and hanging out at night, playing games. That did happen and that was one of the great parts of living in community with the Lenz family.
But also, it was about living with people who you would maybe be irritated with or have a pet peeve that would rub you the wrong way. And then you were in a place where you had to make a decision, like, how am I gonna handle this feeling I’m currently having? Am I gonna [00:12:00] brush it off and ignore it?
Is it something that I can ignore and it won’t be an issue? Or is it something that’s gonna fester and get harder and harder? And Carla, I don’t know for you, like, where your head space was going into it. You all had a child. We went into it as just a couple. We didn’t have children yet, but, like, knowing when you become a parent, like you are now, you have so much more to consider in your decisions, in how you wanna be intentional, especially in raising a child. For me, trying to be really intentional about how we were approaching relationships and what decisions we were making was a really important piece of it.
But I don’t know, in parenting, if you feel like when you came into it, you had that whole extra thing to consider in terms of what it meant to bring your child into a house with these other people.
Carla Lents: Yeah, when I think back at the discerning time, that was the thing that loomed largest in my mind the whole time, like, do I feel comfortable moving into a place with my child and these people? It was like this balance [00:13:00] of having the values conversation—what are our shared values? —then also the nitty-gritty of all the finances and the day-to-day stuff. We spent almost a year meeting together, talking about these things. So, by the time we were getting to the point where we were making the decision and saying, yeah, let’s figure out where we can live together, I actually felt pretty comfortable with it. People have talked about this idea of naivete of moving into an intentional community and learning what the word “intentional” means as you’re living that out. And that was really the case for me because I had not lived in community prior to this experience.
I had lived with roommates and things like that, but it was not a community situation. I think there was a big learning curve for me personally, in terms of what that meant, but also, as Lisa alluded to, I didn’t really know what—I didn’t know about what parenting in front of other people would be like.
Also, I had one child, and so everything [00:14:00] that we were encountering with our child was new to us as we were going along. So, we were just like, okay, I don’t know if this is normal in front of these other people or anything like that. It was very raw and real that first year.
Ryan Lents: Just saying what most parents know, right, is that the first child is the test child. So, like, for better or for worse, we were able to figure a lot of stuff out with us.
Carla Lents: Yeah, it was also a very grace-filled time in that I think hopefully Lisa and Jonathan benefited from seeing us fumbling through dealing with a toddler once we moved in together.
I know it was very grace-filled for us to at least talk about, like hanging out together and stuff. But one of the most amazing things of having a young child in community was, like, you put them to bed and then you can be like, “Hey, we’re gonna go for a walk.”
And there’s people in the house. That’s not a thing that, like the majority of parents who live in a single-family [00:15:00] home and have little kids, you’re, like, stuck. That was just one little thing that I remember as being, like, amazing.
Jonathan Wittig: I just wanted to jump in on some of the pre-decision formation that I recall. And even if you meet for a year, you can’t go through every scenario and answer every question. And so, there’s stuff you’re gonna realize the first day, the first week, first month, first year that you’re living in a community that you just couldn’t have planned for.
And so, one of the things that I always think of our formation period was being very intentional about, what do we do when we come upon conflict? And just thinking it through, we don’t have to know the answer. Let’s figure out the method by which we’re gonna approach this.
So, we can all feel heard and respected and hopefully find a good resolution. I think that was a critical part of our formation, just figuring that out. And then likewise, on the joyful side, if we want to bring something forward, what’s our approach for doing that?
We had monthly meetings that were focused in terms of planning and stuff like that. And then I won’t say we had weekly prayer that would be a space for kind of connection. And then [00:16:00] there’s probably space in between for how we bring up new ideas and we can talk through those. And so, there are different spaces for each of those. We could figure out those ideas together. I think that was critical for having a sustainable community.
Christina Gebel: Wow, there’s so many gems coming up. Like, my mind is buzzing with all of the things that y’all just said. What a beautiful way to reflect on all of it. And Carla, I was really struck by what you said. Bringing parenting into this, the first child, the quote, unquote, test child. And I’m assuming that child turned out really well if I know you two.
So, it’s just special. What a unique coming together at that moment. And you’ve been talking really beautifully about just the balance between values and logistics and what stood out to you as concerns, and what were some of the things that you thought might happen and how to anticipate [00:17:00] those. At what point did you feel like a decision had been made?
Did y’all set, like, that one-year timeframe, or did the spirit come down and tell you, “Hey, it’s time?” How did y’all arrive at the actual decision point and to use parenting language, did you have any big feelings about that as you went in?
Carla Lents: My memory of, I think it was in the springtime or, like, late winter after we had been meeting for several months, I remember someone asking the question at one of our gatherings and just said, “All right, we’ve been talking about this for a while now. Are we ready to take the next step?”
I think there was definitely a consensus around, “Yeah, let’s do this. Let’s try it out.” We stepped into it, but we still left our outs. We didn’t sell our condos. We were renting. We had a one-year rental lease of the place we were gonna live in together.
It was like, “We’re gonna try this for a year and see how it goes.” And so, it felt like a natural and appropriately sized step to start trying things out. It didn’t feel like, “Oh, we’re getting married right now.”
It felt like this is just a natural step forward. My memory of it was like kind of excitement, the feeling that I remember.
Ryan Lents: Yeah, once we, I think, found that there was a lot of alignment around some of the big things that we were discussing, it was like, “Okay, we can admire this from a distance for a while, but what would it look like to actually start to work towards a plan?”
And so, as we started to zero in on neighborhoods that might make sense, I think that was part of the challenges. Geographically, we were pretty far-flung when it came to our jobs, and then adding in childcare, where Caleb was going during the week, there was no one place that checked all the boxes, and we were sensitive to wanting to be in a place where we felt like we could thrive in community. We wanted to make sure it wasn’t a place where gentrification was going crazy, and we wanted it to be a place that we felt like, yeah, we could really live this out. That ended up being uptown for us.
We ended up renting there for two years, and yeah, it was a house that really worked great, I think, as we were getting started for this kind of experiment that we had entered into.
Christina Gebel: Awesome. And y’all have touched on this in your different responses and even bringing up, “Hey, Jesus lived in community,” but even with Jesus’ kind of being the example with his 12 disciples, a lot of people still don’t make this decision. So, I’m curious, what was it about your faith that spoke to you and really was the underpinning of making this choice?
Ryan Lents: Yeah, so I think all of us had been formed in Catholic social teaching in some way, shape, or form. I think as we were talking about it, I see Catholic social teaching as ways that we actually make the kind of big idea of faith like practical and real.
Like what are the commitments? What are the things that we actually walk in our daily practice that reflect that faith in Jesus? I think that it was a way for us to put our values into action together. There’s lots of ways that you can live your life, but I think, for example, as we were starting to surface some of the values that were important to us, we named things like sustainability.
We wanted to make sure that we were being responsible with the resources that we had, a lot of things around stewardship and connectedness. Jonathan pointed to simplicity. What were ways that we could be, yeah, just be more responsible with resources? We were all Catholic, all of us came from a Catholic background and perspective, but we talked about how we didn’t necessarily want to be exclusive in that way.
If there were other people who were to come into our orbit who would want to join us, we wanted to figure out a way that would necessarily be a prerequisite. And that ended up being helpful, especially as we offered hospitality, which was another big value.
One of the things I remember most about our first two years is we had this incredible first floor that was great for hosting people. And so, there were these meals and dinners that we would host, where at times we would have over 30 people in the house, and it would be like a potluck, and it would just be this beautiful place to start the evening in prayer, but really just to encounter one another.
And many were neighbors. Some were folks that we had met through other circles. And it was just a really beautiful way to put that into practice. For the first two years, we also lived with somebody that Jonathan had met at Loyola who had a real devotion to a monastic kind of tradition.
And so, for him, morning prayer was really important. That was something that I remember from my experience at Nazareth Farm. We struggled with that a little bit; the 6:00 AM or 6:30 AM start, whatever it was, became a little bit more difficult. So that was a place we struggled a little bit; we all valued this practice of prayer, but in terms of making that a tangible commitment, that was one that we had to do a little bit of testing around.
We did a few in-house retreats during our time together that were powerful; we would either be self-directed or find something that we could go to together and then discuss. I think that we were trying to be active and accompanying one another in our own faith journeys at various points.
Jonathan Wittig: I would say also at this stage of our lives, we were younger and eager and searching and trying to live out our faith without as many distractions as there are now at this stage of life. And having other people who live out their faith in different ways was so empowering, like, oh, I’m gonna sit down and meditate.
Do you wanna join me? And I wasn’t thinking of doing that, but sure, I guess I will, or all of us worked in some type of service-focused job, or we were involved in some way in the community, so there were just a lot of opportunities to push ourselves in a positive way that came organically from living together. And it paid a lot of dividends to our children. Ryan’s a talented guitarist. And we would do worship sometimes in the house, and Ryan would just jam, and I can’t play anything.
And so, it was great for my kids to see that and just be exposed to that, and Carla was just very artsy, and our youngest kid, that’s all she does. And I don’t know, I like to believe that Carla had an impact on her. And so that exposure is one of the many joys that I had from community.
But the faith component of that is something I wanted at that time, and it was definitely a major benefit from living together.
Lisa Wittig: I would say too that spontaneous exposure was definitely a huge benefit and something we valued and appreciated. But I also want to say that another piece of that intentional community aspect is the accountability piece, where it was great to have exposure to new and different things so that we could learn and grow ourselves.
But also, just being with other people all the time is a form of accountability that not everyone experiences in that kind of intentional way. And so I think that was another piece of it that was really helpful to us in this very formative part of our lives, where we could say faith was important to us, or that stewardship or simplicity was important to us, but we actually had [00:24:00] these four other adults that we were living with that were like, “Oh, now I gotta prove to them that it’s important to me, I gotta walk the walk,” which is an important piece of growing. I really value having that kind of accountability that we provided to each other.
Christina Gebel: Yeah. What better way to practice accountability than to live with other people? That’s such a key point. It’s not only about your inward actions, but also about your communal actions, and those actions are in, of, and around each other. I loved the piece about sustainability because that’s something I think a lot about too, and just how we are on autopilot in the US. We’re all kind of living in our respective dwellings, and maybe there are intergenerational households, but we all have, you know, a kitchen mixer, or there’s a proliferation of things [00:25:00], and to really be intentional is counter-cultural in that sense.
So I’m very curious as to what people in your lives thought about these decisions—loved ones, friends, random people next door to you, whoever was observing, because, as you were saying, this is more than roommates, and I’m wondering what the people around you thought and how you explained to them that this is more than just living together or simply living together with roommates.
Lisa Wittig: Yeah, such a great question. We had the benefit of coming from social circles in Chicago that had heard of or seen or even experienced intentional community, so that certainly made it a little easier in some instances to explain or to share about. Although even people who had lived in intentional community before were like, “Wait, you’re gonna do this with children? Are you crazy?” Or like with a husband or [00:26:00] with a partner. It was definitely a shock to a lot of people, like when I think about explaining it to my family in another state who had never really had that kind of exposure to the idea before.
I remember having to talk them through it and explain it. And like with my family, I was like, “It’s like roommates. We’re just gonna be living with roommates.” I got to the point where they couldn’t exactly understand it, and so I had to just default to that.
But I definitely remember trying to be like, “Look, here are the good things about it. We don’t have to buy as many things because now, we’re in a house with people who have some of those things. I only have to do half the chores because we can split up chores among four adults.”
For my family and my side of it, who hadn’t really been exposed to those ideas, it was a little easier to default to the more simplistic ideas behind it, because they just didn’t quite grasp or understand what it meant to do something that was this spiritually challenging or emotionally investing.
It was just such a farfetched and new idea to my family.
Jonathan Wittig: For me, my family is a little bit more understanding. Three of my siblings had done volunteer programs, and so they lived in community, and so they at least understood the concept as adults. They were like, that’s cool.
I would never do that, kind of thing. I think that was a common reaction. My parents were very excited and supportive, and that was good for me.
Carla Lents: It’s funny, I can’t remember in the beginning how we explained this to people. I think what Lisa said, around people can understand the economic benefits very easily, so if you lead with that, then they’re like, oh yeah.
So, anything that’s weird, you’re just gonna put up with, because you’re getting so many economic, I think that’s the language that our society kind of understands. The countercultural aspect of it, people just shrug off. They’re like, that’s good for you. I know now in hindsight, our parents, really, over the years as they interacted with us and came to visit and got to know Lisa and Jonathan and the kids, just experiencing it and seeing how it was different. So, I think there’s that. As you explain it to people in your life, then you start hearing about other people, oh, I know somebody else who does that. I feel like we did get connected to a few other intentional communities in the Chicago area where people that we knew who knew someone else and that sort of thing.
Ryan Lents: I think, yeah, with my parents there was this, oh, that’s nice. And there was this, I don’t understand it.
I just think about how the last couple of generations before our generation, there was such an investment in independence. Those were the first generations where you saw this widespread phenomenon of people moving across the country. A lot of that was seen as economic mobility and independence, and it was often lauded as this like thing of progress, but there was a lot that was given up in that process, right? Like, I think about how for most of human history, families lived intergenerationally together.
Part of it was an economic necessity, but there was a lot of bonding and mutual support that was just part of that deal that became very easy to see as replaceable, and so I think in this time where we are experiencing so much loneliness and isolation, for many people as they really start to think of it, they would maybe say, yeah, I like having my own space, or I like having my own privacy. And I would say, yeah, like there are things you give up, right?
Like you don’t get to just pretend like you have the whole house to yourself, but then I would quickly name off eight things—here are all the things that we gain that make life meaningful and rich and supportive. Those are things that are hard to quantify, but they make life so much more livable, and what can be a really hard time to live in these days, most people, I think at least, even if they said, I could never see myself doing that, most people we encountered were able to be like, oh, okay, I can understand.
Lisa Wittig: Yeah, and just to put an example to what Ryan was just saying about the benefits, I sometimes think about the COVID times, and I reflect on that time as literally like maybe the best three months of my life.
Some of my favorite memories come from those, like that March through June. Society across the world was just sheltered off from everybody in their lives, and us included. But because we lived in community, we had this built-in support and trust and emotional stability for each other where we were able to say, all right, this is a weird, strange, difficult thing that’s happening, but let’s make the most of it.
There’s so many memories I have from that time period I just think about and laugh and smile because we had such an amazing benefit of being together and being able to support each other during that time that a lot of other people didn’t have.
Christina Gebel: Yeah, that’s such a great point about COVID, and talk about two unique situations, COVID-19 and living together. What an interesting time to be in intentional community, and my heart just warmed up when you said those were some of your best memories.
We all who were more isolated at the time started to miss that connection, and you had that really built into your life. And I’m gonna insert a little curious question here. Y’all have talked about receiving the thoughts and reactions about what you did from people, saying, “Great, or that’s great for you and not me.” And when I’ve talked about this, even when I’ve talked about you to other people, because again, you really are my heroes in this, a lot of people have said, “I could never do that because I’m an introvert,” or “I could not do that because I need privacy.”
And the people in my life who I think I would want to do that with are probably smiling, because I have some dear loved ones with some strong introvert energy in my life, whereas for me, it’s like, oh my gosh, I get to be around my friends all day. This is great. I could go on in perpetuity, obviously with challenges, of course. Did any of you have that concern around introversion or even privacy?
Did you encounter that?
Lisa Wittig: I don’t know. I’m introverted, and I loved it because as a parent, you have certain obligations to ensure that your children stay alive, and in order to do that, you need to be present. But when you have other adults in the house, okay, now I get to go for a walk because I have three other people that are here and can make sure the children stay alive.
I don’t know. I don’t think that argument stands very well because I feel like I was given a lot of opportunities to be introverted in that communal space.
Jonathan Wittig: I think it strengthened our marriage because, as we were still young in our marriage, we were trying to
navigate differences in how we communicate, which we’re still doing. So, I think it’ll be a lifelong journey, but I was able to seek Ryan or Carla or Tony for different needs, and I didn’t place all that on Lisa, which I think would’ve been what I would’ve done had we continued living together.
So, it gave us more time to grow in our marriage together and navigate just these things that are difficult. I think that having those outlets probably freed Lisa up. I’m an extrovert, and I like to chitchat, and so I think it ultimately benefited us, I would say.
Ryan Lents: Yeah, I think where I land on this is I, as I’ve gotten older, I think I come to appreciate introversion. Extroversion is not a binary for me, like going to a cocktail party where I have to do a lot of small talk and go up and introduce myself to people, I don’t know is like the worst thing I could ever imagine.
When I have to do that for jobs or other things, I’m like, what’s the earliest I can leave, and I come home and I just want to be in a quiet room by myself, right? If you are in a dynamic where you’re with people who you have been vulnerable with and there’s like a mutual sense of trust, that’s a very different thing, and it can still hold intention, like with what Lisa said, like even in a nuclear family, you have to have boundaries. There are times that, yeah, I’m raw right now and in a bad mood, or I need some space, and those boundaries are important no matter what kind of arrangement you’re in.
To be in a place where you can be radically loved and accepted for yourself, for all of your warts and shortcomings, and know that people are not gonna throw you away. Yeah, I hope everybody has an experience of that in their life, whether it’s intentional community or not.
Like that’s, I think, a precious thing that we have the opportunity to cultivate together in community.
Christina Gebel: Yeah, that’s incredible. We talk about spousal love as a type of radical love of accepting each other at all times—the good, the bad, the interesting—and to bring that type of love, which is, I think, the way God loves us, to bring that type into the fold with more people. I can’t say it enough that that choice is just so profound and interesting and really powerful in its vulnerability.
Switching back to those early days, was there anything else you realized maybe once you had made the decision and were finally in it, that you might have overlooked or underestimated or overestimated, or just anything else from those early days of creating norms and habits and flow?
Carla Lents: Caleb was two when we moved in together, and we were moving in with people who had never really lived with a toddler. I do remember feeling self-conscious about, like, how.
He [00:36:00] was acting, even though he was just being a 2-year-old in general. But also, as we mentioned before, I didn’t know that. But there were a lot of graces, and I think people also recognized that this is what it is. We’re living together.
That’s definitely something I remember. But also, in hindsight, you just recognize that that’s life, and he would’ve been a two-year-old wherever we had been living with him. I don’t know, Lisa and Jonathan’s memory of that early time, the first two months probably, of living with Caleb and what that was like.
That was probably the biggest thing for me as we moved in together. It was like, okay, how do I manage this?
Jonathan Wittig: I definitely watched a lot more Cars, the Pixar movie, than I ever would’ve watched on my own. That’s for sure.
But I would give Caleb chocolates before bedtime as revenge, so it’s all good. No, I mean, I agree. I think the parenting aspect of community living was probably the hardest, just ‘cause we have different parenting styles and approaches. And so, like you, you see [00:37:00] something and you’re like, your judgmental side wants to come out, but I think that was part of what I liked about community, is the challenge of living community and just, okay.
What am I feeling? Why am I feeling it? And how do I react to that feeling? And then that was an opportunity to grow or not to grow, depending on what we wanted to hold there. And I agree that it was challenging many times, but it was also like, I loved it.
Like, I loved Caleb, and I loved hanging out with him, and I had the maturity of a 2-year-old sometimes, so it was perfect for me. I just wanted to play with him, and it was so much fun because I didn’t have any kids at the time, and I loved his energy.
Lisa Wittig: Yeah, it was a bit of a parenting warmup for us, ‘cause we got to live with Caleb for a year before Caroline was born, and we got to see, like, the challenges that parents face in their home with their child, and start to fast forward our thinking to be like, oh, okay, like what are we gonna do when we’re parents? And oh man, they have to deal with this toddler throwing a tantrum right now. Let’s just go for a walk. And we still had the freedom to be like really appreciative of that freedom, so it was [00:38:00] nice to be able to have that exposure, have that learning, and be able to learn from the wise parents that Ryan and Carla were. Once our kids came along, there was a lot more that we were able to understand and knew a little bit better how to approach, ‘cause we had that early exposure.
Christina Gebel: Did you ever, like when your kids came along, kind of eat the humble pie and say, oh, this is toddlerhood, or did you have any of those humble pie moments?
Jonathan Wittig: It’s delicious pie. So, for sure.
Lisa Wittig: Yeah. I’m sure there definitely were some of those moments, but I’m really grateful for the experience of being able to co-parent during that time because I feel like parenting can be really hard.
Anyone who’s a parent knows the challenges that come along with it. And to be able to have that kind of support from people who are there in it with you who can see when you’re reaching your limit and maybe step in now that we’re just a single family, not living in intentional community anymore.
If we have a night where I hit my limit and like just need to walk away and Jonathan’s doing something else, like the dishes don’t get done. They just are there for whenever we pull ourselves back together and can come back to the kitchen. But when we lived in a community, we had an amazing, like, dish fairy who would come in, and it would be something we wouldn’t have to worry about or a stress that wouldn’t be on us later because we were able to support each other in those times when things were really challenging and hard. It was great to have that support.
Christina Gebel: Yes, definitely. Honestly, I think about my line of work being a doula and a childbirth educator. I’ve always felt that families that do the best in the postpartum period, especially with your first, are the ones who have a lot of support in close proximity. And something I’ve thought a lot about in our modern context was what you mentioned earlier: upward mobility is becoming synonymous.
With [00:40:00] darting around the country and getting the next big job, that pushes you a little bit further and farther. And so, there’s this interesting time in humanity where grandparents aren’t always living down the street, and I support so many families who are trying to make it work. And maybe that means the grandparents make a move to where they are.
Or you hire a postpartum doula to get through those really tough nights. The loneliness of those early days with your first, and you’re constantly questioning, “Am I doing this right?” Am I doing right by this child? Am I feeding them? Are they okay? Lisa, as you’re talking, I’m thinking what a gift it is to have had another mom so close to you who can tell you, Hey, you’re doing good.
Maybe try this and try that. Like to me, that is so crucial. If we are going to stay in this being, we are in different places from our immediate families. The village that we had in maybe the first part of our lives lives a lot farther away than maybe we thought it might.
I like this phrase that I saw on a meme, like you can build the village, but you still have to be the villager. You know, you can have people around, but people still have to show up and do things amid their own stuff. Living in a community, the village is really proximal during that vulnerable time.
Carla Lents: Thinking back like I had my first child when we were just living on our own. And then our younger child was born while we were in community. We also had some pretty difficult like medical issues with the second child.
And yet thinking back to my mental health through both of those experiences, first child, no matter what happens medically or anything, it’s a big transition. Your brain is totally changing and all that. But I think back to [00:42:00] my mental health space in both of those experiences, and it was like, hands down much better the second time.
There were challenges with both maternity leave times. The first biggest challenge for me was loneliness because I went from working full-time to just hanging out in a little apartment in December in Chicago when it felt like it was dark all the time.
And then, the first month with Micah, I talked about some health challenges, and basically, I was in, like, this breastfeeding/pumping cycle that felt never-ending and not getting a lot of sleep.
Every time after I fed him, I just needed somebody to hold him, and I would just wander around and be like, “Who’s holding this baby?” And Lisa, 90% of the time, was like, I’ll hold that baby. And that was just amazing. I think Lisa and Micah have a little bit of a special bond from that early time, not even just the first month, but the first six months of his life, which is interesting ‘cause Micah is a personality that I would be like, “That personality [00:43:00] does not match with Lisa’s personality.”
But yeah, just from that experience, she understands him and he understands her on a level, so that’s something that I think is like a little miracle from the whole experience.
Lisa Wittig: Yeah. I think back to our nights, Carla, where we’d put the kids to bed and we would go watch Call the Midwife.
Carla Lents: Yeah.
Lisa Wittig: Very happy memory for me.
Christina Gebel: Oh, I have so much love now that you brought in. Call the midwife to the conversation. I’m just effusive in my giddiness in this conversation. I love that you all had kids and still turned on. Call the midwife. That’s amazing. So, just sitting here listening to you talk about that, Carla, I’m thinking of so many moms that I’ve worked with who have felt similar and would love to have a loving person like Lisa say, Yes, give me the baby.
That’s amazing. So, we talked a lot about the joys and challenges at some point, and eventually this all [00:44:00] came to an end, and I’m really curious about how it came to an end. And also, what it’s been like since. So maybe you could start by telling us how this came to a close.
Jonathan Wittig: I’ll take responsibility for that one. Lisa and I enjoyed living and experiencing culture, and that was one of the things that united us in our relationship. And one of my desires, or our desires, was to live abroad with the children and expose them to another culture and to another language and be the minority in that space and feel the comfort and discomfort of that.
We were living in a community, and we had bought a house together, and it was the perfect house for us. And we lived there for five years.
But we all stayed roughly the same size, but the kids kept getting bigger. And we were approaching the end of life for that house. We probably could have gone another year or two.
We were approaching a space where we had to make the decision. And that plus the urge of desiring to live abroad was something that I was like, oh, maybe this is the time. We ultimately made that decision in concert with Ryan and Carla, and they were supportive of that.
And so that’s what kind of ended that time there. In terms of how I feel now, I’m grateful for our time abroad and for where we are now, but I miss community living dearly. I miss living with the Lents. I desire to live in a community again for all the benefits and the challenges that brings.
That’s something I desire for my future life, even at 40.
Carla Lents: Yeah, I think a predominant thing that I remember right after we moved out of the community and we were living in our own house is that the first six months after we did that, Caleb kept asking, like, are we ever going to move into the community again? And.
As he’s gotten older and he’s become a teenager, that’s waned a little bit, but I believe there’s a little seed inside him that, when the time comes that it could be reinvigorated in his life, he will look for that.
I’m a happy crier. I’m sorry.
Ryan Lents: Yeah. It’s crazy to think about, like, in 2020, that four out of the five [00:46:00] kids that two couples have, like, all three of Lisa and Jonathan’s kids and then yeah. Like our younger son Micah, we’re all born in community. I just think about how formative that was for them; up until 2020, when we did go our separate ways, like four of them had known nothing else.
Yeah. The beautiful thing is, we’ve remained very close friends. We were just together last weekend. We’ve seen each other three times, I think, in the last three months, with just a little bit of a rarity because we are six hours apart now.
But just the way that things have worked out, it’s been a lovely happenstance. When our families get together, it’s like cousins; they’re more than just friends. There’s a dynamic that they just pick right up together.
And that bond is something that I think we’ll carry forward for the rest of our lives, which is a really beautiful thing. Actually, you should interview them. That would be really good. One of these days, maybe you could interview the kids and see what they have to say about this.
I don’t think Caleb would actually agree to that, but I’m just saying hypothetically, it would be really interesting to hear their insights about this because they, even though it’s been over five years now, like, so [00:47:00] many of those core memories are there with them. So yeah.
Lisa Wittig: I think one of the things I’m most grateful for is having given that gift to our children, because I think in the way children grow up in our society, they have to deal with the struggles and challenges of figuring out how to live with siblings, but also when you add in siblings who aren’t siblings, it’s a new dynamic.
And there were special friendships there and special pieces to those relationships that I’m so grateful that they have. When we moved out, I think it was even like two years after we had moved out, and Ben was like, “When are we going to move back in with Micah again?” Just ‘cause he values that relationship, and every time we meet together with the Lents, he’s always so excited to see Micah, who was his best buddy when we were all living together.
Jonathan Wittig: Still is his best buddy.
Yeah. And he still holds him in that regard. It is also something that builds me with joy every time. And then Katherine, who was two when we left the community, so she really wasn’t able to experience [00:48:00] it. She doesn’t skip a beat. I think she loves every member here as the same as though she did live it.
Like she just maybe just realizes that Caleb has a special bond with her and takes care of her like a little sister. And I don’t know. I love the kids’ dynamic together.
Carla Lents: For several times when we saw the wigs after we moved out of the community, but Katherine was still really young.
Then Caleb would always be like, “When are you going to make me a little sister?” So yeah. When we had Micah, he really wanted a little brother, and then he was like, why didn’t I get a little sister?
Christina Gebel: I love that so much. So, we’re winding down. I’d like to offer one question before my final question to each of you. So, the second-to-last question is for someone considering this. Maybe people aren’t ready to take the plunge like you did, but what would you recommend to read or think about or people to talk to?
Is there a world in which you can kind of do a [00:49:00] community light, if you will, and start trialing some of these things? What would you say to someone who’s just in the beginning stages of discerning something like this?
Lisa Wittig: I think one of the most important things is to probably outline what your end goals would be or like what your priorities would be. I think for us that piece was pretty easy, I think. It took that year of discernment to come together and all voice them.
Figuring out what that is, I think, was a really important piece because you obviously don’t want to go into something that high of a commitment without making sure that you’re at least on the same page with the other people that are going to be there doing it with you. Whether it’s like trying to live more simply, trying to build intentional community, or whatever those goals are, try to make sure that you have them written down and focus on them.
Carla Lents: Just to elevate what Lisa just said. It’s like both the high-level values and goals behind it, making sure you’re aligned [00:50:00] there and then creating the structure, the containers, for coming back together on a regular basis, rechecking in on a regular basis. I think those were the two things that made us successful because we always had those values to remember the why, but then also you had the structure for keeping things on track on a daily and weekly basis.
Ryan Lents: I think in the process of discerning, coming to understand like what our non-negotiables were. Like, what were the things that were absolutely essential. What were the things that there could be flexibility around? It’s interesting; we didn’t necessarily come up with an exit strategy specifically.
And that could have bit us bad if we had not come to agreement about how to part ways. I think that the first two years we had a good experiment because we knew we were just doing this for a year, and then the first year went really well.
So quickly we’re like, “Okay, we’re going to do a second year.” When you get to the level of sharing a mortgage and your lives are really, truly intermingled, it just requires that ongoing communication and cultivation of trust to make sure that, yeah, we’re seeing eye to eye about our vision and future together.
It really just takes ongoing communication to really make it work. And that would be true even if there were arrangements or agreements in place that weren’t as commingled as what we ended up doing. That piece around communication really helps quite a bit with addressing things as they come up, as opposed to letting things fester and getting to a place where then things completely unravel.
It’s often when people just don’t share their needs in a healthy way that all kinds of things can happen that can cause a lot of harm.
Jonathan Wittig: I’ll add that there are a lot of types of intentional communities that have a full range of values that they live by and how they live.
And so, a resource, I think it was [The Foundation for Intentional Community] ic.org [http://ic.org] or something like that. But Chicago has a ton of intentional communities, and I recall most of the ones I was aware of or was drawn to [00:52:00] had hospitality as a value. And so, they would have an open dinner, and you can just come as an individual or as a family or whatnot and just be exposed.
And so, you could just slowly get your feet wet without having to find five people to live with or anything like that. You can just get there, and a lot of ‘em have opportunities to enter into existing communities, so you don’t have to, like, go through the full process, and you can just see what’s already set up and opt in versus having to start from scratch.
Lisa Wittig: I’ll just point out that, like, we chose to live in an intentional community with another family, and I don’t think there’s anything in the definition of intentional community that says it has to be someone that you’re not related to. So, there are plenty of ways that you can try to live out intentional community with the people you’re currently living with.
I think that’s a great first step to figuring out what you want your journey to be and look like. Again, sitting down and thinking through, what are my goals? What am I hoping to get out of this? Like in what ways am I willing to make a sacrifice and be intentional about something?
And just taking those kinds of [00:53:00] smaller steps. Like Jonathan said, there are a lot of great examples of different communities that we got to see and experience. People who maybe just lived next to each other or in the same neighborhood and made intentional choices to come together every once in a while or do certain things.
In the same way or together, there are a lot of different ways to do it. But again, just sitting down at the beginning and deciding, where do I want to be? Where do I want to go? And what am I willing to really give to the experience?
Ryan Lents: And you had asked Christina about resources.
There were two books that were helpful in terms of some of the framings that we used for some of our own discernment. One is a book called [Building Community: Christian, Caring, Vital] by Loughlan Sofield, Rosine Hammett, and Carroll Juliano. It’s about a 30-year-old book now, but it’s one that I think we used at Amate House and incorporated some of the conversations that happened during orientation for those communities.
And it was helpful for us. Then there’s a book called [Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities] by Diana Leafe Christian. She’s spent most of her adult life living in ecovillages; it’s like people that want to go off the grid and want to form their own community, buy land, raise livestock, and have gardens and things like that.
There are people that kind of take it to a whole other level. She has a book that talks about a lot of things that didn’t really relate to our reality around purchasing land and those things, but some of the things around agreements and ongoing practices were helpful for us to look at and just to open our minds to the range of decisions that we might need to consider.
So, both of those resources were helpful for us.
Christina Gebel: Those are some really great suggestions, and I don’t think those were actually on my radar up to this point, so I appreciate you offering them. And again, the theme of this season is radical family, making bold choices to live out faith. And certainly, I think many would agree that the decision that y’all made to live together in this community was bold.
And we’ve talked a lot about faith and all of that. [00:55:00] But to bring it back to faith, where has this choice that you made deep into your faith been, or has your faith grown deeper in the years since as a result of making this decision?
Carla Lents: For me it is, recognizing that God puts other people in our lives that act as God that are God’s hands and God’s heart; conversely, it makes you recognize how much the culture of individualism has affected you.
And it’s something that still exists even after living in community for seven years. It definitely still exists in me, but also you were talking about before the idea of it. Wanting to be a part of the village and having to be a villager wanting to see God’s promise enacted on earth.
You have to be God’s hands.
Ryan Lents: Yeah. Yeah. I think that community offers amazing opportunities to [00:56:00] deepen one’s faith and spirituality. Because in the daily things that you encounter, you get a mirror of both your own giftedness and the divinity that lives within you and the ways that hopefully a community affirms that.
But also, yeah, seeing the divinity and the godliness of others that we get to walk with. A community that just is focusing on itself is one that is going to suffocate; it needs oxygen. Communities that are healthy and vital are the ones that are engaged out in the world, that give a damn about what’s happening on the block in the city.
And we’ve talked very little about our commitments to justice in this conversation, but the organizing work that I do now and, like, living in community, just like my own clarity around my own vocation, and much of the work that I’ve done over the last 10, 15 years has really been shaped by that opportunity to live in community.
And that’s been, I think, a really important part of it as well.
Jonathan Wittig: For me, it was and has continued to be the challenge and example that each member of our community has given. I was sharing with Ryan when I was in Chicago with him, just [00:57:00] how I’m inspired by his work and I’m challenged by his work that he’s living out the example that he’s setting right now.
I use that as an opportunity for me. How am I living out justice in my faith? And with Carla, it was her kindness and her peace that she carried with her all the time. And with Tony, it was his spirituality and his self-reflection. And Lisa brought us all together in terms of just keeping our house cohesive.
And so, all of those were opportunities for me to witness other people living out their faith. And then also. Either be challenged by it or learn from it or grow from it. I believe in faith in action and each of those components as an opportunity for me to grow in my faith.
And I appreciated it then, and I still appreciate it now.
Lisa Wittig: I don’t know that I’ll add anything new to all of that great wisdom, but I think my summation is we are called to live in community. We’re called to be together and be with one another. The actual physical presence of having one another in your proximity just provides that extra accountability to [00:58:00] acknowledge that yes, you are here, I am here, and we are doing this together.
We’re living this life together. And hopefully, being a positive influence on each other, hoping to enact change or make an impact in some way that’s possibly greater than if we were just by ourselves.
Christina Gebel: Wow. I don’t even know how I can follow that because I am just awed by the wisdom of this conversation and probably will be for the rest of the day and the week. I just want to say I feel incredible. Lucky to know the four of you as people. And regardless if we had been talking about this topic and there were so many other directions we could have gone with, I admire each of you and the social justice that you commit yourselves to every day.
And what a gift it’s been for me to be your friend in my own formation. I hope that this conversation will spark something [00:59:00] for other people, so that even if they’re not living under the same roof, maybe they’re just thinking more intentionally about life and how we live it and how it impacts other people around us in our immediate household but also in our community at large.
So, I just again want to thank you all. It has been an honor, a joy, and a pleasure.
Jonathan Wittig: A joy being here. Christina, thank you for having us.
Ryan Lents: Thanks for the invitation. It’s been lovely to, yeah, Revisit this time of our lives.
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