If you live close to St. Luke’s, you probably consider yourself to be part of our very close knit and small community. My wife grew up in this neighborhood, and I visited the Fort Hunt area plenty of times before moving here, but I did not really get how close knit this place is until I lived here for a couple of years. After we got settled in our new home in 2021, I saw the Kaye family on their golf cart, I knew I had to get one for myself. Two years ago, I managed to find a used one that a retired drag race car driver was selling, and have enjoyed riding it around ever since. If you didn’t know, in Virginia you can drive a golf cart on roads that have a speed limit of twenty-five miles per hour or slower, and you can cross busier streets as long as there is a traffic light. Anyways, getting the golf cart was a game changer for me and my family. I got to know all of the back streets and crossing to get pretty much anywhere I need to go on my silly, windowless, approachable golf cart. I can get to church, school, the grocery store and our community pool all while putzing about and chatting with people along the way. It simultaneously made me more familiar with my immediate community, while reinforcing the bubble that exists in our safe and often extremely privileged neighborhood.

The task of being a Christian should always be focused on loving God with our whole being, and loving our neighbor as ourself. When we ask, “who is our neighbor?” The simplistic and profound truth must be, everyone. If you think there is an exception, then especially those people. Embracing our small and close-knit community and the bubble that envelopes it, comes with its strengths and weaknesses.

The downside for me is that the problems of the world often seem that much further away. I have been a news junky for as long as I can remember, but I stopped listening to the news years ago, once I found my anxiety revving up with each news cycle. I still have my BBC app (though I hate it’s last two updates and feel less informed because of it), which I read every morning, but even then, the more I get enmeshed with the local life here, the problems of the world seem more like ideas, rather than the actual tragedies that they are.

The strength of being in such a close knit and insular community is that I find people feel more profoundly when tragedy strikes home. In the times of my life when I tried to burst whatever bubble that I perceived to be around me, I was so focused on being aware of the suffering of the other that I left little for those closest to me. The beauty of our community is that we cannot help but feel something when a member of our community is in need. They cannot be just an idea or a representation of whatever ideology they may champion, or what role they filled in our community. We are simply too close to each other for our humanity to be ignored.

This past week an employee at our local “little’ Safeway was murdered in a case of domestic violence. Alison Kate Laporta has been a fixture at our Safeway for as long as I have lived here, and I have to confess that I did not know her at all. It was only after her death I found out that we are almost exactly the same age, and we are both parents of young children. We had much to talk about, but perpetually too invested in the business of buying and selling groceries to notice. I know that I am not alone in feeling disturbed by the loss in our community. Some got to know her more than me, and have since been in touch with her family. Even if you did not know her, I hope you do indeed feel something, and when you pray for her and her family that your heart hurts for the loss of a life so close to us.

The closeness and violent nature of this tragedy compels many of us to do something. The plate offering on the first Sunday of every month goes into my discretionary fund, which I use to help people in our community. On May 5th it will be designated to go to help Alison Kate Laporta’s family. A vestry member has been in touch with the family, and we are currently coordinating how to get those funds to the children along with sympathy notes. If you feel compelled to join us in sending messages of love or support for the children, I encourage you to do so.

The golf cart is fun and quirky, but the best part is that you feel more connected to the people walking around than if you were in a car. There’s not a huge difference between the two modes of transportation, but it feels dramatically different. People are more apt to stop and chat, and you notice a lot more. The more I get to know our community through meeting people at Church or just putzing around on my comically small commutes to Safeway or Village Hardware, the smaller our world feels. When we lose someone in our community in such a tragic way, we are called to do something to help. Then we can take a step back, look at statistics and remember what a massive issue domestic violence is, then we can take a bigger step back and look at the children who have lost parents in countries at war, and for a moment our bubble breaks.

We are called to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as ourself, and we have no choice but to start at home and take a moment to feel something. We live in a unique place. It is far from perfect, and there are certainly downsides to being so close-knit, but I encourage you to go about life here a bit slower and drink in deeply the people that are part of our community. St. Luke’s, the little Safeway, the Variety Store, Village Hardware, and the pool are all nice, but what makes them remarkable are the people within them, so let us not take them for granted.

-Nick