CruciformMe

Today I’ve been reflecting some on a day that changed my life: May 25, 2008.

On that date, I picked up a 13 year old kid from the Freedom neighborhood to come stay with me for two weeks. A year later, Romeo’s still here and I have no regrets.

Unsure of what to type next, I just went to his room to check on him. When I opened his door, it made such a loud noise that I was worried it would wake him. It didn’t. Some things don’t change - he still sleeps like the dead. I remember, though, when the door had to be open and a light on so that he could get to sleep. This was back in the days when he would still hide food and sharp objects near his bed and even under his pillow, when he would still keep all his things in a box, when everything I asked him to do was a battle, when he just as soon lie to me as look at me. Thank God those days have passed, for the most part; there are still a few battles now and then, but what good would being 14 be if there wasn’t?

Over the course of the past twelve months, he has made several significant strides. He burned his gang’s flag (a handkerchief that signifies gang membership). He went from reading at a 3rd grade level to reading at an 11th, from missing 55 school days last year to only missing 1 this year, from straight F’s to all A’s and B’s. He’s responsible, honest, well-behaved… where did I go wrong?

We’ll probably get his TAKS scores in this week. As I told his teacher, if he passes one, we’ll be doing the happy dance at my house. Those scores may never give anyone a full picture of his progress. I really don’t give a rat’s ass what the tests say - and ass of rat is not a highly valued thing to me, except to feed the snake. He’s progressed farther than anyone ever could have dreamed. I know I’m proud of him, and I hope he can learn to be proud of himself, too. None of these things came easy, but he made it anyway.

“In all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”

Romeo's Crip Flag... On Fire!

Romeo Eats a Pomchi

Romeo the Cowboy

Slow shutter speed and a lighter. Yes, we're playing with fire. At least he's a boy scout!

Failure.

Many have overcome it.

Everyone has experienced it.

Reality TV is really based around it.

True, isn’t it? We watch shows like American Idol, and just as much as we pick winners, we pick the losers, too. We judge the giftedness of others on the largest stage ever devised, and we’re all very comfortable with that. And we even brag about how good we are at deciding who will stay and who will go.

After all, there can only be one winner, right?

We take a moment to say a quick requiem for their broken dreams, usually taking the form of an, “Awwwww, look, they’re crying.”

We have all become very good at this. Our cynical nature takes over, sometimes from the moment we see them. That’s what happened in the video linked below. However, as reality (but not necessarily Reality TV) often does, it surprises us.

Cynicism, while often giving us an excuse to laugh, may not be the best thing for the soul. Cynicism tends to expose the bankruptcy and emptyness of the judge rather than the judged.

One of the elders from Highland brought his wife, who has many medical problems and is very frail, to Freedom on Saturday night. Normally she stays home, but I guess she wanted to come. She’s very sweet, and everyone at Highland loves her, but she hasn’t been at Freedom very many times.

She came in her wheelchair. A note about our building: it is possible to get into the sanctuary if you’re on wheels. However, accessibility was clearly not a major concern when it was built in the 1920’s. So once you’re in, you either need to step out of your wheelchair, or you have to stay at the very front of the auditorium. As everyone else is facing the front, where the band and the speaker are, you end up just to the left, facing the action from the side.

Her husband didn’t sit up there by her. He helps direct things from the back, so she was sitting by herself, singing along and tapping her hand to the music.  At one point, she apparently felt very moved by the music and decided to stand.

Watching her struggle to her feet was almost painful. Her thin fingers took hold of the black armrests on her wheelchair, and she began pushing herself slowly up, clearly straining for every inch of vertical movement. Finally, she was on her feet, though she look as though she might fall at any moment, perhaps even if someone coughed too hard. Growing more and more unsteady, she stood in front of us, wavering as she sang every word of the song. All the while, her knuckles remained white, still gripping the armrests with all her might in a valiant attempt to remain standing.

I was just about to try to figure out a way to get to her, when the door from the hallway opened at the front of the auditorium, on the other side of her from the congregation. For a moment, I hoped it was somebody who could help her, but was disappointed when I realized it was only Darlene.*

Darlene is one of our mentally handicapped members. Slow and simple, but sweet, she helps with the children most of the time. As is often the case with someone of her mental capacity, she is often socially inappropriate. For example, it took a long time for me to explain to her why I would really rather not be tickled whenever she sees me. As I’m not ticklish and didn’t respond to her whenever she did this, I’m still not sure how she got started. Regardless, it took a couple of months of reminding her before she switched to just giving me hugs. (”But Zaaa-ach, it’s supposed to make you laugh when you’re tickled,” she would pitifully say.) During the summer, with Abilene’s many 100-degree days, she often reeks of body odor. This does not stop her from giving out hugs, however.

Darlene stood at the front for a moment, unsure of where to sit. She slowly (little ever goes quickly with her) looked across the sanctuary, until her eyes settled on the woman who was struggling to stand just a few steps away. Darlene took a couple of hesitating steps and ducked under one of the woman’s arms, lifting her and allowing her to stand more comfortably and with stability. Together they stood until the song was over - the woman sang and Darlene just smiled under the burden that she was sharing.

My jaw dropped, and tears came to my eyes. So often, those of us who have come over from Highland see ourselves in the supporting role. Middle-class in our assumptions and self-assured in our role, we find our support back at that other building or in some other place. Its our job to support these people here, not the other way around, right?

We are so wrapped up in a false perception of self-reliance that we think that it is our own strength that holds us up along with those around us. From our perspective, we look down on these neighbors, pulling them up as we say, “When will they learn to stand on their own two feet?” I’ve been wondering now if God must look at us and say, “When will they realize that no one stands on their own?”

This is the real Body of Christ. Every part with its own function, every piece desperately needed. Some are teachers, even without meaning to be. I’m learning this lesson over and over again. We need to remember that we believe in the upside-down kingdom where the king rides a donkey instead of a horse, to die is to live, and where the educated wealthy ones need a hand up from the retarded poor ones. This kingdom is not only possible, I saw it on Saturday night.

* name changed

This is the new place. Yes, it’s exactly the same.

In the movie Joe Versus the Volcano, Joe Banks has a miserable life. He’s a hypochondriac working a dehumanizing and dead-end job managing the catalogs at a company that proudly produces sexual prosthetics. Joe is having an even worse week. He is diagnosed with a terminal yet symptomless condition called a brain cloud. Then he is hired by a billionaire Samuel Harvey Graynamore to jump into a volcano to appease some islanders from whom Graynamore wants to buy a mineral needed for his super-conductors, the upside of this being that Joe receives an all-expenses-paid cruise to this island on a private yacht before he dies. To round out this week from hell, the yacht goes down in a terrible storm. He and Graynamore’s unconscious daughter, Patricia. are the only survivors.

One night, Joe is in the middle of the ocean after several days of floating aimlessly with the comatose Patricia, effectively alone on a makeshift raft created from his waterproof luggage. He looks at the full moon, which appears to be much larger than usual, reaches towards it and quietly says:

Dear God, whose name I do not know - thank you for my life. I forgot how BIG…. thank you. Thank you for my life.

He does not know the correct religion, who God is or even which god to pray to, but he realizes that there is something or someone that is in control of gracing him with the gift of his “miserable” life.

The third step is:

3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

The “as we understood him” part of AA and other recovery groups has fascinated me for awhile, mostly because it causes so much controversy. For some, the Twelve Steps just aren’t Christian enough, leading to spin-offs such as the eight steps of Celebrate Recovery. For these people, this kind of openness towards all belief systems is a weakness that cannot be overlooked and sometimes downright heretical.

The problem with programs (or churches …or people) that have a very defined picture of God is that there is little room for God to get any bigger. It’s safer because God can’t take over something in which we don’t let him be involved. Since we think we know who God is already, he will not grow and neither will we. Most of us change only when absolutely forced to by the circumstances of our lives. “As we understood him” grants us the freedom to not be stuck with one immovable picture of God our whole lives. In fact, the it assumes that our understanding now will be different from what we once “understood.”

I got to go to a twelve-step recovery meeting a few nights ago, in order to see one of my kids from Freedom pick up his 30-day chip (these are given at many intervals: 30 days, 90 days, 1 year; represents X days clean from drugs/alcohol/whatever). As each person received their chip, they were instructed to say who they were and how they did it. “A lot of help from my sponsor,” said one. “A whole lotta prayer,” said another. And one, who was re-establishing (starting his count over with a desire chip after a slip), said, “I just have to let God have every part of me.”

He knew that he would continue to flail around like what he had been doing so far unless something changed. What he’d been doing so far had not been working. Just to survive, he needed to grow in his relationship with his higher power. This is important because if he had turned his will to same God he had used before, nothing would change.

I don’t think it is a mistake that the step that involves turning our will to God also involves understanding that we cannot fully know that God. My knowledge is so minute compared to how large the universe is, let alone alone compared to the God who created it. As he helps me grow, however, my picture of him grows, too, until I finally realize that he is bigger than I will ever know, which is the best understanding for which I can ever hope.

In this way, our faith is sometimes like stumbling in a dark room until we realize it is not the lack of light but our own blindness that keeps us from being able to see. In this world, this concept is not the beginning of the path towards wisdom, it seems, but the destination. “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.”

What should the church look like as a result of this realization? Not very “Christian.”

It looks like people who aren’t so caught up in being right. Self-righteousness in the knowledge of the mind of God doesn’t exist because we know that we are no better off than those who are not as far along as we are. We know that the faithful life has its share of “Blessed Assurance,” but also its share of when “‘Tis Midnight and on Olive’s Brow,” when even those who know the most have trouble dealing with the way things play out. Knowing all of this, we go forward in the hope that perhaps in all of this unknowing we will find peace. Together, we seek truth without the belief that we can ever have a monopoly on it.

But first there are demons we need to deal with - step four.

Often, in the neighborhood I work in, you will see a tattoo of a tear on someone’s face, or sometimes several. In urban areas, tattoo tears can symbolize one of two things - that the owner has murdered somebody, or that they have lost someone close to them. These tears are many times translated to mean, “a mother’s son is dead.”

These tears represent death, telling a story told and retold through the myth of redemptive violence playing out in gang warfare. There are thousands and thousands of drug related deaths every year. These deaths are often considered justified by those who commit them, because they were wronged first.

Often, in paintings of Mary, the mother of Jesus, I have seen that there are tears on her face. Mary’s tears can be seen in pictures of her standing alone, holding the Christ-child, and holding his crucified body. You’ve seen the headlines about those scams where they set up a statue of Mary in a church to cry water, oil, and even blood. The tradition of displaying Mary with tears is an old one.

These tears represent death, telling the story of an innocent man senselessly murdered at the hands of those who didn’t understand what they were doing. This unjustified death happened once to put an end to death and injustice everywhere.

All of these tears for death, but where is a solution?

Christ entrusted himself to humanity in order to break this terrible cycle 2000 years before any of these were born. He showed the world what it was like to choose a death of shame and disgrace, rather than exercising his right to live.  Instead of righteously paying the world back for everything it had unjustly done to him, he redeemed it by allowing its own sinful violence to complete his work and end the cycle.

Yet, this cycle of violence persists everywhere. A young man told me yesterday that during the first part of his life, his mother had a strange policy: He would only be in trouble for fighting if he lost. If he won, he was off the hook. I asked him what happened when he lost. “I dunno, ‘cuz I never lost. I knew I always needed to win.” A little while later, he informed me that he would definitely raise his kids the same way. My question is this: If everybody’s always trying to win, won’t everybody eventually lose? As Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

[Don't let yourself get away with thinking that this "Welcome to the Jungle" kind of attitude only exists in the ghetto. Two words: Little League. You've seen the crazy parents. From a young age, their kids are taught not just to excel, but to win.]

What are we teaching children when we teach them to always come out on top?  Is that we want to be most important? What if we took the idea of Kingdom ordering seriously (”The first shall be last”)? Would that apply to trying to get ahead?

Meanwhile, the new Marys, mothers of sons brutally murdered in a world that has yet to realize how free it is from the bondage of such warfare, wait for a day with no more tears.

Three nights a week, I provide respite care to an eighty-six-year-old man who lost one foot to diabetes. Tom is in a wheelchair, and though he tries hard, he’s almost completely helpless - he can’t cook for himself, he can’t clean himself, and he can’t even use the restroom by himself. When he first had his foot removed, he wanted to make sure he wasn’t a burden to anyone, so he chose to live in a nursing home.  Unfortunately, he was then severely neglected. He was left alone for large parts of the day, and they often missed giving him his medications.  Francis, his next-door neighbor, went to visit him after a couple weeks, but what she found was a incoherent, drooling shell of the person he had once been.  So she took him home and began caring for him herself, unwilling to lose him to poor care.

In Tuesdays With Morrie, Morrie is speaking with a reporter. He is dying, and to his surprise, this is news to some people. During the interview, he is asked what he fears most. “Well, one day,” he says, “Somebody else will have to wipe my ass.”

For a long time, I felt that becoming an adult was about trying to arrange my life so that I was dependent on no one.  “Being my own man,” so to speak.  One problem, though: I was always doomed to fail at this.  Some people have figured how much I like to do things myself and have made it their mission to make sure I take help, even when I don’t need it.  It happened this morning in the Highland office.  I sliced my thumb open with a pair of scissors, and when I asked Carla where the first aid kit was, she proceeded to get a big kick out of not letting me deal with it myself. (Note: Carla is secretly a sadist. Would it be too much to ask to use Neosporin instead of alcohol?) I was annoyed, but attempted to be grateful and graceful about it. 

It is hard to accept that we cannot do everything on our own, that no man is an island. There are different stages of life at which this lesson can be learned, but it’s never easy. Admitting dependence on anyone or anything is against every instinct we have.  This is why step 2 of the 12 Steps is that we:

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

At some point along our journey towards becoming the people God meant us to be, we have to admit to ourselves that self-reliance is only an illusion.  No matter how hard we try, we really can’t wipe our own metaphorical asses.  We are hopelessly dependent creatures by nature, even if we manage to fool those around us and ourselves into thinking that we have everything together.  We need God like we need air (he makes it anyway) because he brings order to our disorder.  When we don’t understand, we have to know that he does. We daily rely on his power, grace, and goodness before we ever get out the door.

I think it is significant that this second step focuses on the restoration of sanity.  Not stopping or starting a behavior that is bad or good for us - this is a probable result of sanity. Not looking good - we’d just be fooling others and ourselves. Not to give us control - we are powerless over the brokenness of this world (See step 1 for details).  We are looking to have a recalibrated perspective whenever we admit that we don’t do anything for ourselves.

With all my best efforts constantly striving to attain independence, it’s only recently that I’ve figured out that this is not the goal of my life.  I know that I can’t save myself, and while I’m glad that today I can breathe, bathe and dress by myself, there’s no guarantee about tomorrow.  In the meantime, I have to choose to look to God’s providence and direction for everything - step 3.

If foul language is a serious offense in your book, stop here. It’s not worth offending people with a bad word just because I’m finally breaking my month-long blog silence. I promise I’ll post again soon. I’ll admit that, much to my mother’s dismay, I have developed a certain liking of the words that our culture has warped into being “bad,” because they can add emphasis that nothing else can. Oh well, my blog.

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Last night, my friend Ernie and I made a late night run to Whataburger. As we neared the Orange W of Greasy Goodness, we both groaned as we saw that the line of cars went around the building. Accepting the wait, we decided to wait inside so we would burn less gas and inhale less fumes. As we entered and joined the also lengthy indoor line, the cashier was just greeting the next customer in a very loud and unorthodox, yet rather jovial, way.

“Welcome to Whataburger, where we’re screwin’ up all kinds of shit tonight.”

The restaurant was quiet for a moment, while people took in this outburst. It was the late-night crowd, though, so we all took it in good humor. The place that had formerly had the low hum of a burger joint at midnight now buzzed with laughter and comments. A guy in front of Ernie and myself turned and said, “That kinda makes you wonder what you’re gonna get, doesn’t it?” We all laughed harder.

Eventually, we made through and sat down with an orange number tent labeled 30 to wait for Ernie’s food. I stuck with a drink - they don’t wear gloves when they make your food at Whataburger and I’m sometimes convinced I have a mild form of OCD. As we waited, I wondered aloud if this was part of what the church is missing - total, brutal honesty. I proposed a new welcome for the church I work with: “Welcome to Freedom Fellowship, where we’re screwin’ up all kinds of shit!”

This goes into my ongoing idea of church as a twelve step program, which I’ll continue to post on. This is the first step: universal confession or “Admiting that you have a problem.” Even better is the original wording that AA uses:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

Powerless. Just as alcoholics feel powerless over alcohol, just as the cashier expressed powerlessness over the shortcomings of herself and the establishment, so are we helpless when it comes to our bondage to decay and sin. “All have sinned,” and all that.

Think about what actually believing this would change about your church-going experience: No longer would there be distinctions between those who seem to have it all together and those who can’t even pretend anymore. Whether we’re drunkards, whores, liars, fags or anything else, we would accept that we all stand equal before God and each other. We’ve all screwed up and we’re all screwin’ up. No matter how far along we are in the healing process, we are all still in “recovery.” This is where all can find our belonging - in the admission of not doing right, not in the insistence that we are doing right.

Church then becomes as unpredictable and imperfect as we are, a place where we can freely and unashamedly admit weakness, because we actually believe that His power is made perfect in it. In true Ragamuffin spirit, mistakes are accepted and embraced jovially, because we know and are confident in what God has done in us and in what he can do in the world. But that’s step 2.

I’m in the Highland office now, working at the computer in the community ministry office.  Mike Cope is in his office across the hall.  I occasionally wonder if he remembers the time in Randy’s and his Bible class when, from the row behind him, I poked his bald spot with a pencil eraser.

I don’t think I’ll bring it up. Two years is a long time.

Six shots rang out Tuesday on a street where children were playing. The target ducked down in her car, which the gunman destroyed with his bullets. Amazingly, no one was hurt.

Maranatha.