Baked Bean Suppers & Phones on the Wall

A daydream of village life in lieu of Instagram

Hi, I’m Deidre. Every week, I write or podcast about theology, poetry, or the re-enchantment of life. I believe that life is more wondrous than we realize and that heaven is far closer than we imagine. If that’s your jam, I hope you’ll subscribe.

I first published this post for paid subscribers in August 2023, but since the Cultivate Retreat with

Kimberly Phinney

and The Way Back to Ourselves community a few weekends ago, I’ve had the word “village” on my mind all over again and wanted to resurface this essay for all to read. I hope you enjoy it.

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I’ve found myself daydreaming about the word ‘village’ lately.

I’ve been pining for bean suppers in a small church, for phone calls on a telephone attached to the wall, and for neighborhood kids wandering into the house for popsicles.

I’ve been wanting to bring somebody warm pumpkin coffee cake, and to sit at their kitchen table and drink coffee from the pot and to tap our crossed feet on the floor and to talk, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. As if, in the backs of our minds, we’re not wanting to pull out our phones and check our notifications and see if some stranger, somewhere out in the world, has approved of what we posted earlier this morning.

In my dreamworld, the kids fall asleep in an exhausted heap because they’ve played outside all afternoon with the kids next door. They close their eyes imagining what they’ll build when they come together again tomorrow: a Roxaboxen-esque world of their own, where children make the rules and govern themselves and find that their competence extends far beyond what the adults could imagine or give them credit for.

Here, we all know our place. We have a place. We aren’t working to establish ourselves, we aren’t needing to say, Look at me!, and we aren’t tiring ourselves out by gathering shiny, worthless things that amount to little more than clutter for our souls. We hold tangible things, like our friends’ babies and glasses of wine that glitter while we spin dreams with people who actually listen.

This village isn’t transactional. It isn’t quantifiable. It’s just flesh and blood and flawed people who know each other and bear with each other, and who offer one another whatever they’ve got. It is not glitzy. It is the opposite of curated. Rather, it is a solid place where, at the end of the day, our bellies have a warm settledness. We don’t lay awake worrying, Have I done enough? because we know that we are enough; we have a place in the world cut out for us already, by simple default of living in our village.

And I can’t help but wonder: will this type of life and contentedness only ever exist in our dreams? Or is it possible to cultivate village life again, even when our local Target only has self-checkout lanes now and our number of followers is used to measure our relevance?

We are the products of markets and times and movements that do not want village life for us. They want us to believe that we are not enough and that we do not have enough—for if they can convince us of these things, then they own us. We will keep scrolling and keep buying and keep performing and keep trying to fill the empty, restless pits in our bellies that keep us awake at night and wondering, Is this all there is?

And as long as we keep turning to these systems, we are slaves. Worse, we are isolated. We become ‘for ourselves,’ when we were created to be ‘with each other.’ And the masterminds laugh and call this a win as they capitalize on our fragile humanity.

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I laid in bed the other night and flipped to the Psalms. I read a few stanzas aloud to Ethan, and as he began to doze and my own eyes felt heavy, I whispered into the quiet corners of our bedroom, “Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things; and give me life in your ways” (Psalm 119:37).

I fell asleep soon after, but woke up with those words still reverberating around inside me.

Turn my eyes…from looking at worthless things.

Give me life…in your ways.

A restlessness swirled in my stomach—the substance of all the worthless things I’ve been consuming lately. It’s funny: sometimes we don’t know how unalive we’re really feeling until the possibility of fresh life is brought to our attention.

So I said out loud to God, “What worthless things am I looking at?”

Instagram, he said plainly. But it was more than just the platform, and I knew it. It was the way I was looking at it. It was the way I had, somewhere along the line, allowed online interactions to replace my appetite for real community. The way I puffed with imagined importance at the relationships I was building online because I could count them; I could point to them and say See? I have value in the eyes of X amount of people.

I hesitate to admit these things because they are not virtuous and they are not pretty. But in that moment, it was as if someone took a hold of my chin and pointed it elsewhere and said, “Look—you’re hypnotized and it’s all a mirage. You’re not a crow, you’re a human. You don’t need to collect dazzling oddities to appease your base instincts; you need solid things, basic things, tangible and real and good things.”

The spell began to crack and fizzle; I felt the empty clanging of everything I thought bought satisfaction, and suddenly it all just felt busy and dizzying.

It felt…worthless.

And since then I’ve been dreaming of a place to dwell; I guess that’s why the idea of village life has been so intriguing. It feels like it’s the opposite of where I’ve been looking, and when my chin points in the direction of a community that I can touch and hold and share, I feel the elusive settledness that the gods of the marketplace hope we’ll never find.

[Of course, God offers each of us a place to dwell in him, first, and without learning how to rest there, even the most tender and welcoming village will never satisfy. Experiencing meaningful and abundant life starts with experiencing him; from this dwelling place all other beautiful things grow.]

And God has said to me every day since, The only thing getting in the way of you having more life is your refusal to look away from the worthless things.

So I’m practicing pointing my eyes elsewhere—first toward a dwelling place with God, and then to the village daydream—and reaching for both the best that I can in a world that’s no longer structured to support those lifestyles.

Have I kicked Instagram? Not entirely. But I’m setting aside my phone more, and trying to take longer drinks from the wells of with-ness. It has looked like:

• conversations with God under our giant oak tree

• nights where the television stays dark and my husband and I talk and rub each others’ feet instead

• showing up when friends say, Come! instead of spending the afternoon chasing a platform that I hope will love me back one day

Will you join me?

Because I wonder: if we all find the courage to ask God to turn our chins from the worthless things we’ve been consuming, will he turn each of us around…and point us toward one another? Will he push us together into smaller circles, and say,

“Live together. Take care of one another. This is my way. And in my way, there is life.”

Maybe I’ll never have another phone attached to the wall. Maybe our village right now looks more like takeout pizza with semi-crazed kids than a bean supper in a church basement. Maybe I still use the self-checkout because it’s pretty dang handy.

But in response to my earlier question—Is it still possible to cultivate village life in this time and age?—I claim a hopeful and defiant YES.

But I believe there is one caveat:

We need to agree, collectively, to begin turning our eyes away from looking at the worthless things.

We need to allow Life himself to grab a hold of our chins, shatter the mirage of sparkly things, and point us toward the real and the tangible and the good again.

Maybe village life isn’t so far out of reach, after all. Maybe it’s just a matter of getting together and agreeing to look at something new.

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P.S. Did you catch my interview with Drew Jackson, author of God Speak Through Wombs?

He has some really thought-provoking things to say about the value of "useless" beauty, unanswerable questions, and using words to invite rather than tell.