hnkconnect

"Let them eat cake!"

2011-10-29T10:53:00.000-07:00

We mean well, we really do, when we try to say nicethings upon seeing the plight of others. “Send them away so they can find something to eat, Master,” hisfollowers told him, as if so many of them could find anything of substance in thatwild country.

“Let them eat meat,” said Emperor Hui of ancientChina, when hearing his poor subjects were short on rice. And Queen Marie Antoinette is said to haveexpressed that famous line, “Let them eat cake,” on being informed French peasantswere starving during a great famine, as if they could get their hands onenriched foods at a time when no food was attainable.

The response of the Master in that first story wasto tell his followers they themselves were to provide food for the hungry. Never mind that, in the ordinary, this was animpossible task. But the Master was noordinary thinker or doer. He certainlywas not one to let the obvious get in the way.

Our temptation, even in our best moments, is tojudge the source of the need in others. “Ishis sickness his fault or his parents?” we ask, just as those same followers ofold did. “If you are out of work or arenot rich, it’s your own fault,” our leaders echo. Surely the poor and the sick and the lost areto be blamed for their own situation.

And even if they are?

The Apostle Peter said it this way, “What I have Igive you.” No questions asked.

A man and his little son walked into our foodpantry yesterday. We were closed, ourshelves waiting to be refilled this morning. It was raining out and the two had gotten wet on their long walk, onlyadding to their plight. The man startedto explain. “I lost my job two monthsago and…” Sometimes people want someone to listen to their story. In this case, he was trying to show justcause for his asking.

“Never mind,” I said, “you can come back for moretomorrow. For now, I’ll give you a fewthings to hold you over,” as I grabbed a loaf of bread, a can of stew, and a coupleother items as well. You don’t need toprove anything to me, I was thinking.

According to one Chinese saying, “a person who hasintegrity and honor won’t accept food handed out in contempt.” The story goes that a man passed by a beggar,looked down at him and with contempt threw him something to eat. Looking up, the beggar smiled, not the waythe benefactor had expected.

The poor man said, “Sir, I am poor in my body, butnot in my ethics. I would be grateful somuch if you would treat me the way you want to be treated – like a friend. But since you treat me like that, you do notsave me, because I would rather die.”

This benefactor probably thought that all he hadaccumulated was his own doing, much like the man in the parable who lovedbuilding bigger barns with which to hoard the work of his own hands. Yet those who love God know that everythingwe have is a gift, not of our own making, but of divine love. We, who really own or create nothing, aremere stewards of that impossible grace.

One of my all-time favorite passages in Scriptureis the one where the writer says that when Jesus saw the multitudes, he hadcompassion on them.” His first responsewas not to evaluate or to calculate or to postulate. It was to have compassion.

How do we have compassion? The Golden Rule is a good place tostart. Treat others as you wish to betreated. Doing to others as you wantthem to do to you is a principle found among great teachings the world over. The truth is we only understand compassion aswe realize our need for compassion ourselves. In the end, we learn to give, not out of our bounty, but out of our lack.

A faith network for Cully

2011-10-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

Had one of those evenings last night that came offvery satisfying. As friends, we’d beenitching to convene people of faith to see if we could take our efforts atproviding emergency food and clothing to the next level in Cully neighborhood. Could we ramp up our endeavors in developmentwhile building on our record of relief? Couldwe provide people in need jobs and training, creating jobs even, in addition tooffering free food and used clothing?

Cully is a wonderfully demographically diverseneighborhood of some 13,000 souls. Oneout of five residents are foreign-born, a fair representation from fivecontinents. At the multicongregationally-supported Northeast Emergency Food Program (NEFP), we display signs in nine languages as over half of ourthousands of clients are non-native English speakers.

Yet the eastern end of Cully is one of those economicallydepressing parts of the city, neglected by city and county. While the west end gentrifies, the east endlanguishes. Census Tract 76 in the east sports a rate of 38% at or below thefederal poverty line.

And here we sit – our faith-based emergencyfood and clothing program – right in the middle of this Cully East End. Northeast 72^nd Avenue, a narrow streetwith no sidewalks for our clients on foot, divides one mostly white tract withone of the lowest median incomes in the city from another with a slightly moreprosperous demographic and majority non-white.

Annexed late by Portland, Cully remains an odd networkof potholed, undeveloped and privately owned streets providing form forrandomly-sized lots ranging from barely sustainable to small plantation. On the one hand, the neighborhood evokes a small-town,even rural pristine natural feel. On theother, it remains neglected by some of the most basic of city utilities,transportation services and retail outlets, its most thriving business centeredin the triangle residents would prefer to see burned to the ground.

There are some very good stirrings in Cully – a “Main Street” rezoning project and a drive to eradicate the neighborhood of its mostinfamous blight at the triangle. The areahas an active neighborhood association and some very engaged citizens who havesuccessfully campaigned for a much improved Cully Boulevard, a new as-yet-undevelopedpark, and a new community garden. Meanwhile,its schools are coming alive with reform-minded leadership.

The faith community has a presence as well, with ascattering of churches, and representation in key civic posts. But by and large, faith makes a weakpresentation in this public square. Whathouses of worship exist are often small and struggling, making little dentin a world fast changing and far too bewildering for many of the faithful to comprehend,let alone influence.

Even so, there are very good signs that this sub-communityis stirring with fresh vision and passion. I met with a handful of such faith people last night in the fellowshiphall of Grace Presbyterian Church, a quasi-town hall for the Cully Association of Neighbors’ monthly gatherings. Our groupwas much more modest in size. We filledone round table. But what we lacked innumbers we more than made up for in creative vision.

The meeting, convened by the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon (EMO), was attended by a total of eight, one of those one-year-oldMicah, of Mosaic Church, our good-natured canary-in-the-mine who let us knowwhen it was a decent hour to adjourn. Onthe other end of the age scale was another good-natured fellow, Andy, who hasresided in Cully for 55 of his 88 years. Andy came representing Luther Memorial Lutheran Church, home toNEFP.

I looked around the table and recognized a Pentecostal(me), Evangelicals, Andy the Lutheran, and a Roman Catholic. Numbered in this small gathering were a unionlaborer, an entrepreneur, clergy, a retiree, and students. What drew us together was a common beliefthat faith has something significant to say in a neighborhood high in chronicunemployment, low median income, questionable or non-existing enterprises, andlots of children deserving a fighting chance at a decent future.

Together we account for a significant amount ofrelief work in Cully and beyond. NEFP aloneserves half a million pounds of food and 50,000 articles of used clothing tosome 11,000 unduplicated clients each year. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul and local congregations also carry out a good deal of care. We also are at theforefront of numerous efforts at food sustainability, health and wellness, micro-enterprise development, and neighborhoodtransformation.

The key word in that last paragraph is together. That was something we were doing for thefirst time last night, coming together as Cully people of faith and identifyingwhat we were doing separately and how we could move forward corporately. Concerns identified included:

immigration issues
lack of employment and economically sustainablework
language barriers
the need for personal advocacy in banking andhealth
healthy, affordable and culturally appropriate food
available and affordable transportation
skill training
zoning changes to foster community-servingbusinesses
a community center for children

Far from discouraged by the overwhelming needs, we leftenergized. As a group we are determinedto continue the dialog, to explore what more we can do to take our commitmentto serve those in need to the next level, and to be a stronger voice in thepublic forum for change for the better in Cully neighborhood.

If you’d like to join the discussion and getinvolved in this Cully faith network, email me at nefp@emoregon.org or leave a message for meat the NEFP office at 503-802-7384.

Taking a stand at the pole

2011-09-28T08:51:00.000-07:00

My youngest, the most shy of the four, makes up forit with a contagious sweetness. Shewanted to be at school really early this morning, so I agreed to driveher. “See You at the Pole” Day forChristian high school kids.

Hannah invited a friend and was confident shewouldn’t be by herself. Even so, as shegot out of the car, I encouraged her that if she was the only one there, shewouldn’t be alone. Thousands of kidswould be meeting at similar school flagpoles across the country to pray. “Allie will be there,” she said, matter-of-factly.

As a dad, I couldn’t be more proud of her fortaking such a stand. All four have madeit habitual to do so, usually taking stands that go against the common grain. Which, I guess, is what a “stand” is. Just like their mother’s favorite Far Sideshot of a sea of penguins and one shouting, “I just gotta be me!”

Robert serves in Afghanistan, and while even thosewho oppose the war tend to be supportive of individual soldiers, his work iscertainly not public front and center – or crowded with joiners. He chose this war over the other one, hesaid, because he believed in it. And sohe stands guard or goes out on missions in a remote, dusty place calledKandahar because he believes it is the right thing to do.

Stephen and Hope, the two middle kids, are perhapsthe most vocal about taking stands, not the least of which was not saying oneword for a whole day, as when they observed the Day of Silence as high schoolstudents. Such a stand wasn’t all thatpopular with their fellow classmates and certainly not with their churchfriends. But they remained silent in theface of criticism and misunderstanding. As Hope said, “No one deserves to be bullied, Dad.” For whatever reason.

As parents we like to take credit for what ouroffspring achieve. But mostly it’s aboutgiving them roots and then letting them fly. Allowing them to fly means just that – releasing them to live out theirroots as best they know how. The rootstheir mother and I gave them were the core of our faith – love God with yourwhole being and love your neighbor as yourself. They’ve been flying ever since.

No, Hannah, you won’t be alone at the flagpoletoday. Allie will come, and even if shedoesn’t make it, your Maker will be there with you - and your dear old earthlydad will be proud of you.

Gone is the neighbor I never knew

2011-09-20T21:41:00.000-07:00

He popped his whitened head through the fence oneday, while repairing a broken post, and said, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Now the house lies dark, a “For Sale” sign posted.

I’ve always endeavored to get to know my neighborswherever we’ve lived. New Jersey,Florida, Texas, Missouri, Taiwan, NW China, and a brief stay in anotherPortland house. I think this has beenthe hardest neighborhood of all. We huga busy street, no sidewalk, high fences on the other three sides. Not really a neighborhood as much as acollection of isolation wards. Early onafter moving in, I went over to meet each of the adjacent property owners, tono avail, though my chicken eggs opened the door a crack at one house.

This elderly gentleman, with whom we’ve shared abackyard fence these past three years, was also a breakthrough of sorts for ourgood neighbor plan, or so we thought. But apparently he understood the need for boundaries in relationshipsmore than the relationships themselves, at least as far as neighbors areconcerned. However, as a follower ofJesus, I live with the idea that the onus of friendship is on me, not on myneighbor. And so, from time to time, I’vetried to make contact.

Then one day earlier this year a couple who liveon the other side of him informed me that this neighbor’s wife had died. I was doing my Easter tradition, passing eggsaround to our neighbors, eggs from our five laying hens. I left a carton on his darkened doorstep.

Fences are good for some things, like protecting ourchickens from mischievous raccoons or keeping our pug from wandering off. And in this world of full self-exposure on theinternet, boundaries are certainly underrated.

Robert Frost famously took to task the old Englishproverb, “Good fences make good neighbors,” writing, "Before I built awall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out / And to whom I waslike to give offense." Frost wenton to say that nature itself seems bent on bringing down such barriers.

His observations about nature certainly hold truewhen it comes to my neighbor’s fence, whose posts lean precariously inward evenmore than before they were fixed. There probablywas good reason to build such fences in our neighborhood, and we enjoy theprivacy as much as the next one. But Iwonder if the fences themselves have kept the neighborhood from forming ormerely reflect the intent of its inhabitants to remain islands unto themselves.

I never got to know the answer to that wonderment fromthis man who exercised constant futility to maintain a wall that protected himfrom our pug. He really didn’t know howto repair that fence. If you’re going toreplace the posts, at least anchor them deeply and with cement. But who am I to judge? Building fences has never been my forte.

Now his house of three decades sits silent,waiting for the highest bidder in a market begging bidders. Meanwhile, I’ll be watching keenly for the “ForSale” sign to come down. Quicker thanyou can say “Robert Frost,” I’ll be over there knocking on the front door, eggcarton in hand. After all, goodneighbors bridge fences and mend breaches in relationships one good egg at atime.

In Praise of Work

2011-09-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

On this Labor Day, I count it a privilege to work. In the midst of the Great Recession, I huntedfor employment for over a year, watching in vain as the family nest eggdisappeared. That year of job-huntingturned out to be the most difficult job of my life.

Whenever I meet someone asking for work, I feel astrong connection. Like I recognizemyself in his or her face. And ithappens often; I now direct an emergency food program in Portland’s Cullyneighborhood.

Recently a lanky, haggard-looking young man came in, stifflyasking how to do this (get a food box). Neverdone this before, he said. He appearedon the verge of tears, distracted by three children he struggled to corral evenas he sought to find them food. He’dbeen out of work for nearly four years and all he knew was construction. Good luck on that, I thought but did not sayas I placed the info for him, his wife and his children into our database, theticket for three emergency food boxes every six months, enough to cover 10-15days out of 180.

I understand. I don’t have to try to imagine. Isense the desperation tug at the muscles in his neck and squeeze at his heartand know the feeling. At least his heartis young and his neck strong.

The job I found a year ago, part-time then, hasbecome full-time, with benefits (sort off). Even better, a great team to work with and a great cause to work for –providing emergency food for one out of every 53 Portlanders.

Our identity is not found in our jobs, I know. However, work is part of the fabric of life, producinga sense of satisfaction that comes from being productive, doing good, andproviding for family and others in need.

When my kids were small, I taught them a quotefrom John Wesley, the eighteenth-century preacher:

“Earn all you can,
Save all you can,
Give all you can.”

Well, I’ve done better with the second two thanthe first line. In our world,productivity, hard work, ability, and need do not necessarily coincide withincome. But until recently, work, albeitoften lower pay, has come looking for me, not me for it.

Not everyone has been so blessed. I’ve met people who struggled to find worklong before the Great Recession and I’ve met plenty who are still huntingnow. It makes me grateful I have a joband all the more determined to live out that third line from Wesley.

When I enable someone to leave with a grocery cartfull of food, I feel good, knowing I am blessing them in their time ofneed. But I also pray for greaterresources, tools to help them move beyond the emergency food box level. The people who come to us don’t want ahandout, they want a way out. I wish Ihad the funds to hire a person trained to help those whose situations are morecomplicated, who can’t see their own way out, who struggle to overcomeadversities that would swamp me too.

I understand what it is like to want to get to agoal and not see my way to it. I alsounderstand what it is like to give up on having a goal because to do so feelslike bashing your head against a brick wall. Been there, done that, and don’t want to go back. Truth be told, I’ve never pulled myself up bymy own bootstraps. Whenever I’vesucceeded, there’ve always been others to give me a hand up, provide rungs formy ladder to success, hand me a flashlight in a pitch-dark tunnel . . . pickyour metaphor.

Meanwhile, for many, the situation is fairlystraightforward: there are just not enough jobs to go around. We’re starting a discussion among faithcommunities in Cully neighborhood this fall to talk about what we can dotogether beyond providing for emergency needs, maybe even turn vacant land andbuildings into food and jobs. Cully, acommunity with great ethnic diversity, has way higher than averageunemployment. It lacks many basic cityservices and ladders up which people can climb.

On this Labor Day, I find myself grateful I amable to work and have a job. And as Irenew my lifelong commitment to bless others with what God has given me, I seta new goal of making the Labor Days of the future days of celebration forothers for whom today is no picnic.

The MLK Legacy

2011-08-28T16:24:00.000-07:00

But for titanic storms of natural elements, today would have been graced by another colossal event, the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial in Washington, DC. Although Hurricane Irene and a rare earthquake may have postponed that dedication, King’s memorial, if not his work, is finished.

While I was out-of-country much of the past couple of decades, King’s legacy underwent a dramatic transformation here in the USA. Time has a way of doing that, of smoothing over rough edges, of filling gaps, of blurring memories like a Monet.

As a boy of 13, I was singularly impacted by King’s death. He has remained a hero and an influence ever since. Not every one of my generation shared my enthusiasm.

Way back on that fateful day in ’68 when King was gunned down in Memphis, much of the nation held King in high suspicion. This catalyst for disruption of a faulty social order was ascribed all sorts of odious labels, a fate common to prophetic voices. Surprising to me therefore that in such short order he would become highly acclaimed as a voice of democracy and truth by those who had accused him in vilest terms of being a communist agitator, and thus a traitor to his nation.

I suspect there remains an undertow of unease among some of those who now quote King or speak well of him publicly. But the dead, especially the long buried dead, become convenient heroes for those who oppose the living of similar vision. None other than the co-founder of the Salvation Army was called a socialist in her day. In any case, King has been transformed into the ubiquitous quotable of most spectrums of American political and religious life, even by those who feared him when he lived and fought his legacy long after he died.

He was no perfect leader by any means. He hesitated, then joined and led crusades others more bravely launched. He vacillated in his own convictions, loyalties and commitments. While not excusable, these faults put him up there with the best. But he had metal of heart to seize an historic moment and the vision and voice to fight the beam in the eye of the American dream as no one else of his century did or could.

If he, the pacifist, unwittingly unleashed the demons of inner city convulsion, he likely saved the nation from an even greater catastrophe, for justice delayed will have its day in court and the longer the delay the more violent the trial by fire. If he, the Moses of American minorities, seemed to lose his way in opposing the war in Vietnam, it was only because others failed to recognize the moral connectedness the two causes shared.

Great leaders are invariably complicated and largely misunderstood in their own generations. True greatness is rarely recognized in real time. And so it was with MLK.

My present concern is not with the mistakes of the past, but with the blunder of not owning those faults and connecting the same dots in the present. When we fail to comprehend how we “missed it” back then, we allow our vision in the present to be clouded by the same ineptitudes of judgment. Sadly I daily uncover those very misperceptions in the rhetoric that graces our own 21^st century.

Someday I hope to visit the new King Memorial in our nation’s capital, to meditate on its inscriptions, to walk through its Mountain of Despair and to gaze up at the Stone of Hope. Meanwhile, I pray that all Americans will realize how central to our collective vision King’s dream really was and how vital it is to continue “to work and fight until justice runs ‘down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’”

Remember Why You Play

2011-08-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

I’m not a football player – weighed 115 pounds on high school graduation night. But I love a good game, especially when I know something about the team. And I’m a sucker for feel-good-in-the-end sports stories. Remember Why You Play (Tyndale, 2010) by David Thomas delivers on all that – except to turn me into a football player.

The story that brought the Faith Christian Lions to national fame isn’t told until the final chapter and by then, most of the main student characters have moved on. But by then, you’ve fallen in love with this team and understand why the game with the Gainesville State Tornadoes was not just a fluke, a blip on the perennial Friday night Texas football scene.

Disclosure here. I’ve known Thomas since he was a cub reporter in high school. And he comes by his writing skills, love of sport, and feel-good endings rightly by his own dad, who died just as the book was coming out. Which makes sense why son/author affirms the concept of fatherhood so strongly in the book.

Thomas has honed those cub skills into some fine nationally-recognized credentials as a senior writer and sports humor columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Remember Why You Play reads like the reporter-embedded-in-team that he was for a season. There’s enough emotion already in the do-or-die world of high school football without a reporter’s own lather. Thomas provides the setting, the real-life characters and their own actions and words, then lets the inevitable feelings build of their own accord.

While Coach Hogan sometimes comes off as too good to be true, cynical me, Thomas shares enough to remind us that even the best coaches don’t start off that way, that skills on and off the field are honed through time, grit and focus – and remembering that Friday night is only once a week, even in Texas.

Whether or not David intended the book in this way, it is a fitting tribute to his father and friend of mine, Larry, who himself was almost too good to be true.