[image:20061214162931604 align:right]College students throughout the years have been an integral part of the
ecological or “green” aspects of the community, cultivating, planting and
harvesting in the organic garden. They’ve also helped in building and
maintaining buildings, which include a straw bale house, named Brigid House,
with solar energy, a compost toilet and wood cook stove. Wood splitting,
gathering and stacking are part of the community rhythms as well as
filtering vegetable oil for our automobile that runs on grease from a local
restaurant.
The ongoing ministry includes welcoming college students from area colleges
and universities for weekend retreats, ongoing programs and activities at
Agape, as well as annual events and regular witness days. Prayer and music
solidify office work and a daily schedule of work and witness in the local
community and on the homestead. We use our voices and our instruments as we
engage art, music and poetry as key ingredients in lives of practicing
nonviolence.
Agape is a vegetarian community, Catholic in practice and ecumenical and
interfaith in outreach. Prayer three times a day is optional, but
encouraged and includes many sources, as well as daily Scripture.
Summer internships offer trips to local lakes, involvement with inner-city
youth who come for programs, on-site volunteers, as we stack wood together,
plant organic vegetables for the fall harvest, work on outreach in
nonviolent education for the fall, enjoy the beauties of nature here in the
Quabbin Reservoir. We study, think, talk about, pray about and practice a
nonviolent lifestyle. Trips to other communities are planned and always a
part of our ongoing desire to stay connected with other small communities of
peace.
2005-2006-Summer interns from University of Notre Dame, Amherst College, New
College, FL. and St. Anselm, will enhance the social life and just plain fun
as we live in community together!!!
Agape 2062 Greenwich Rd. Ware, MA. 01082
413-967-9369-peace@agapecommunity.org www.agapecommunity.org
Reflections on my internship at Agape
By Brandy Parker
Wellesley College, 2009
Hello, my name is Brandy Parker, and I am a student at Wellesley College. I
had the pleasure of interning at Agape for the month of January in 2006, and
I can definitely say it was a worthwhile experience. There are many
different aspects of Agape life that a student can get involved in, whether
she is interested in non-violent issues, environmental issues, spiritually
issues, or homesteading. In fact, one thing I ended up learning from my time
at Agape was the interconnectedness of these issues. The root of all of the
community work seems to be based in nonviolence, and from that nonviolent
base stems the need to live in a way that does not promote violence.
My time has taught me to think more in depth about the world I live in, and
how I make my impact in it both consciously and unconsciously. It has also
taught me a great deal of skills that I never otherwise would have known:
how to run and maintain a wood stove, how to deal with the volumes of
paperwork (and dust) that accumulate in the house, how to nail up your own
walls by hand- the list goes on.
I learned how to connect to a homeless man that the community took in, how
to find peace in myself when the problems of the world can seem
overwhelming, and how to sled down a snow hill without running into trees. I
truly cannot see any way that an individual could come to stay at Agape and
not learn a great deal about herself, her world, and the world of a
sustainable community. I would recommend the experience to anyone who is
looking for any of these things, and who doesn’t mind getting her hands
dirty.
The Nonviolent Life at Agape
By Joe Mitkevicius
Agape Intern, 2005-06
The nonviolent life here at the Agape community has provided an avenue for
me to deal with a growing awareness of the current global situation. To the
people at Agape, nonviolence does not mean simply spending time protesting
the War in Iraq (although we do indeed protest the war). At Agape,
nonviolent life takes into consideration all of the suffering and violence
in the world and tries to implement the resulting awareness into each part
of daily life.
I am a twenty-three year old recent graduate of New College of Florida
living as an intern at the Agape community for one year. Over the past few
years, the global condition slowly crept into my awareness: massive
extinction of species due to human activity, the warming of the planet,
children dying of starvation at every breath we take, the possibility of a
peak in oil production that has already resulted in the tragedy of war in
the oil-rich middle east. For me, this awareness was too much for a college
student to take in. I did not have the tools to know what to do besides get
angry, frustrated, apathetic, or depressed.
Fortunately, here at Agape there exists a place where people have developed
a way of life specifically dedicated to integrating an awareness of the
suffering and violence of the world into one’s life. The nonviolent life at
Agape not only combines a sustainable lifestyle, simple living, and war
resistance as ways of contributing as little as possible to the overall
suffering of humanity, but also includes a regular prayer life with an
emphasis on contemplation, meditation, and solitude which helps one arrive
at a place of inner peace. My experiences here at Agape have allowed me to
calm down, envision a more positive future, and begin to help with the
construction of a more peaceful world.
