Old quavery man, you with the limp in your heavy-heeled step and the wrinkles in your brown polyester pulled over faded cargo pants, why did you do what you did? You with the quiet etching of nameless grace. You shuffled on to the bus at the corner of Crawford and Hadley where the shadows of the freeway loom over the cigarette butts, the topsy-turvy Coke cans and the evening lines of the homeless waiting for hot meal on plastic. It …
It isn’t your fault that I woke up to 6.32 on the alarm with the wish to curl back up underneath my crazy quilt before I even put sleepy toe to cold floor this morning – but the lilting drawl of the small woman, already clad in Kroger’s green apron, as she pressed phone to ear at the back of the bus, the smell of fresh, newly smooth green paint underneath shaky towers of green beans, corn and diced tomatoes …
I like how you never know when you’re about to stumble across an unexpected kindred spirit. One found me at 8.03 this morning. She had crinkly dreads laced with silver and calluses the size of her family on both palms: a lifetime of working in someone else’s house. I, running late to from the shower to the closet to the bus to work, was predictably unprepared for the day ahead, wet-headed and shivering in bare-sleeved autumn light. “Isn’t it glorious …
It never ceases to amaze me how, time after time, I am the one who walks away transformed from encounters with the “poor” and “needy” in our midst. Whether it’s during an afternoon of laughter, conversation and photos with Burmese refugees-turned-weavers or through a stirring theological debate over homemade curry and rice with several homeless friends, I am constantly running up against wisdom, strength, compassion, vulnerability and persistence like I’ve rarely known before. This, then, is what I’ve taken away …
In the context of the First Ward, ever evolving levels of trust and close personal involvement in the lives of dearly loved neighbors has led to a shared sense of grief: three of the girls I’ve spent some of the most time pouring into this year — 11-year old Kaila, 6-year old Briana and 3-year old Jayci — are currently navigating a period of immense loss as their beloved grandfather and primary provider/father figure, Mr. Neil, passed away last Saturday …
Support raising. Those two words have the tendency to conjure up an almost instantaneous series of images that scroll across my mind in rapid succession: sweaty-handed speeches from a distant pulpit, awkward door-to-door knocking sessions (despite the fact that I’ve never actually engaged in that style of interaction, the notion still remains vivid in my imagination) and maybe even a stilted phone conversation or two with my 97-year old grandma’s best friend. Until last fall when I committed to living …
Although it can play itself out in a variety of ways – whether through the sharing of home space, time, a listening ear, emotional investment, physical resources or other forms of generosity – at the essence of God-breathed hospitality remains the indisputable fact that the recipient receives a tangible sense of welcoming, grace and kindness. Philoxenia, or the love of the stranger demonstrated in tangible ways, serves to create a social and emotional space in which both host and recipient …
Another discovery to revel in: I’ve learned that more often than not, it is the poor themselves – those like my friends Ana, Vidal and Esmerelda living in a small, one-room shotgun home, sitting on the floor in order to share their three wooden chairs with a guest and containing their entire weekly grocery supply in a plastic crate nailed to the wall – who have the ability to teach the privileged, such as myself, about the true nature of …
I’ve tasted first-hand this year the immeasurable joy that stems from offering an attentive, empathetic understanding to the one traditionally viewed as an outsider or an other, thereby participating in a discovery of ways the ordinary can intersect with the sacred. This type of hospitality and welcome, explains Christine Pohl in her moving work, “involves attentive listening and a mutual sharing of lives and life stories. It requires an openness of heart, a willingness to make one’s life visible to …
One of the early church fathers wrote the following in reference to hospitality: “Such [welcoming of the stranger] should be face-to-face, gracious, unassuming, nearly indiscriminate, and always enthusiastic.” The call for physical proximity and lack of discrimination when it comes to offering welcome to another has made an indelible impact on me this year. Although I, unlike the Hebrews, do not live in a culture where traveling by foot and a subsequent emphasis on practical care and shelter is the …
“Ma’am, I don’t mean to cause no offense or nothing… but – well – I just don’t get why you would ask someone like me to eat with someone like ya’ll. I mean, usually when I walk through downtown, people stare right through me as if I’m not even there. As if I’m invisible. But ya’ll,” Leroy paused, and then continued on in a rush of words, “ya’ll meet me, look me in the eyes and ask me into your …
I should welcome the poor to my feast, For they are God’s children. I should welcome the sick to my feast, For they are God’s joy. Let the poor sit with Jesus at the highest place, And the sick dance with the angels. More often than not, the concept of hospitality is assumed to be synonymous with that of entertainment, denoting an intimidating sense of preparation, expectation, formality and maybe even perfection. After a look throughout Scripture, however, and a …
BUT I CANNOT TREAT OTHER MEN AS MEN UNLESS I HAVE COMPASSION FOR THEM. I MUST LEARN TO SHARE WITH OTHERS THEIR JOYS, THEIR SUFFERINGS, THEIR IDEAS, THEIR NEEDS, THEIR DESIRES… FOR IT IS PRECISELY IN THE RECOVERY OF OUR UNION WITH OUR BROTHERS IN CHRIST THAT WE DISCOVER GOD AND KNOW HIM. — THOMAS MERTON With every week that goes by, it seems as though we’re included more and more into the “real life” situations of our neighbors… and …
“Girl,” she laughingly confessed to me yesterday, “Somehow I just got too attached to you.You like one of my own now!” As the month of February has unfolded, various interactions like the one above with my precious friend and neighbor, Miss Doris Mae, have each demonstrated an indisputable fact: the mustard seed work in which we’re seeking to engage in this stubborn, diverse, colorful, loud and resilient neighborhood is not disappearing into a nameless vacuum. “Miss Dorisl” Instead, deep bonds …
Arts Pulse As many of you know, this year offers the unique opportunity to better explore an understanding of urban community development through a focus on the arts. Specific manifestations of this commitment in my regular schedule have included: – Partnering with the artist-in-residence at my church, Ecclesia (this involves everything from building frames to stretching/prepping canvases to running errands at the local art supply store to meeting with other local artists to collaborating on a text-to-audio “commuter” liturgy and …
“Out of the heart are the issues of life and no external force, however great and overwhelming,” reads a powerful line from Howard Thurman’s corollary work on the historical figure of Jesus Christ and our own communion with the poor, oppressed and disinherited today, “can at long last destroy a people if it does not first win the victory of the spirit against them.” As I celebrate both the beginning of a new calendar year and the successful completion of …
On the first Tuesday of last month, my beloved 10-speed (a blue Raleigh by the name of Harriet) and I were winding our way through downtown Houston’s rainy streets around 7 in the morning when I was broadsided by an SUV making an impatient right turn on red. The vehicle then drove directly over my right leg once I had bounced off the bumper and was lying in the middle of the road. One mangled bike, a very hysterical driver, …
I’ve never before lived in a place (and in the inner-city of Houston to boot!) where golden brown pecans litter the ground in such an abundant windfall – but I love it. The dark, chipped husks rival in number with the accompanying pieces of broken glass, cigarette butts and oil spills strewn everywhere along our neighborhood streets. Many of the nuts are still in perfect condition so, earlier this week, one of my roommates and I went for a nut-foraging …
I know, I know — I’ve woefully neglected this little corner of space in the blogging world… my only disclaimer is that I’m still learning how to navigate the “limitations” (perceived or otherwise) of going without a personal computer this year as part of my commitment to radical simplicity. As much as I love libraries, I’ve also learned I do NOT love library computers, even though they provide some of my only Internet access time during the course of the …
“Most of the time we forget to notice this place where we live,” writes author and theologian Frederick Buechner, “because we’re so used to it, because we get so caught up in whatever our work is, whatever our lives are – but every once and so often, maybe we notice and are filled. “He restoreth my soul,” is the way the psalm says it. For a little while, the scales fall from our eyes and we actually see the beauty …
