“I’m soooo hungry….”

Thanksgiving Sunday

I continue to be changed by the stories of others at Valley View Presbyterian Church, a predominately African American community. And its no small irony that the most significant community gathering times in story-telling are those when parishoners are invited to share of themselves at length.  It was a Sunday of thanksgiving and ‘testimony’, where we shared the places we could identify the fingerprints of God, his orchestrated movement in our lives. I was struck again by the strength of a community of people who have been systematically oppressed, and landscape of their stories. And, yet again, was moved to tears listening to the character of those who shared, their reliance on God, and their faith and resilience of character in the midst of adversity. The stories are that much more poignant to me in this context.

The last woman who shared some of her story read this passage of Isaiah 58. It’s one for me that has a great deal of history; it reveals the heart of YHWH that beats for the justice and love for the oppressed, the unjust.

Fasting For “Me”

Tell my people what’s wrong with their lives,
face my family. . . with their sins!
They’re busy, busy, busy at worship,
and love studying all about me.
To all appearances they’re a nation of right-living people—
law-abiding, God-honoring.
They ask me, ‘What’s the right thing to do?’
and love having me on their side.
But they also complain,
‘Why do we fast and you don’t look our way?
Why do we humble ourselves and you don’t even notice?’

“Well, here’s why:

‘What Language Do You Speak?’

Yesterday, one of my 11 year old neighbors caught me off guard. He’s American born, of African descent and raised in the city.

J: Where you from?
Me: Hershey, near Harrisburg.
J: [blank stare]
Me: Know the chocolate bar? I lived in the town where they’re made.
J: [recognition] Oh. [pause] What language do you speak?
Me: [blank stare] huh?
J: What do you speak?
Me: [confused] As in language?
J: Yeah.
Me: [Suppressing Smile] English.
J: Do you speak Latin?
Me: [Pause. Blank Stare. More Pause.] No.
J: [Confused look] Oh, cause you talk funny when you’re mad. Like this [uses nasely impersonation]
Me: [surprise at his reference to my anger, and recognition of his line of questioning] Oh, I have an accent. Right. Didn’t know that.

The white man accent, nasal included. I am the other. And so transition happily continues…

Lord Voldemort and (an)Other: Naming, Power and Street Basketball

In my continuing urban education, my street wisdom comes in bits and pieces. As I’ve written before, I’ve been immersed in another story. I’ve learned that there’s compassion and grace needed like never before; I need it from those who are host to me, my family, our story. We come from a culture that writes its story differently, with different characters, structure, literary cues, expectations, behaviors, and plot lines. I’ve felt the friction of my projecting my own story on my hosts, which has been a significant source of stress in my life. Culture shock, in other circles.

Accio, Basketball!

One of the most difficult places has been our very home. Well, at least our corner. We moved in after some folks who partied. A LOT. As in, SWAT teams 3 times in 1.5 years. They’ve still got some close family members in 3 houses in direct vicinity of our corner, some in our  row. (We live in a row house.) Over their time in our  place, and the months it stood empty for reclamation, people came to understand it as the place to be. Folk of all ages knew this as the place to be. We’ve had folks we don’t know hanging out on our porch, leaning against our car, letting basketballs repeatedly strike the side of our house. It’s been tough; its still a busy corner.

However, its calmed down quite a bit; folks don’t congregate on our porch like they used to, the car is less a butt rest, and the ball isn’t is active as a hammer on our siding. However, the basketball continues to be a part of my education. Somehow, the aforementioned still-local family members acquired a mobile basketball hoop. (These are ubiquitous to youth life in Pittsburgh.) About a month or so ago, some elder teens moved it from the  alley on the other side of our row-house row, and walked it through the narrow sidewalk behind our homes to our street. They played the first game, setting the precedent as the place for street b-ball. (They haven’t been back since.) The tweens took over, and now don’t bother taking it back to the yard it belongs too. It’s a permanent fixture on the street across from middle of our row house, where they play to (and past, sometimes) midnight. Grrrr. (The physics of a basketball bouncing between two row houses amplifies the noise to ultra annoying levels.)

He-Who-Should-Not-Be-Named: Darkness, Naming, and Identity

Here’s a confession: the basketball has become traumatic for me. The moment I hear it bouncing on the street at our corner, cortisol flushes my veins. I may never get over this; it makes me sad to think so. It’s associated with curb ball, a simple game of even the littlest ones in our neighborhood, and often the source of bumps and bangs as the ball endlessly hits the side of the house. I also would find my stress remaining elevated as they continued to play curb ball, or basketball for that matter. I felt like a caged animal in our house, waiting for something to happen. (Part of this stress is connected to the stories our neighbors told of their own experiences with both the family and the corner, and the not-so-innocent presence of folk on our corner. According to them, these kids push the envelope to see what they can get away with. This is true, to a point, but unfortunately maybe a bit more overspoken than is for a majority of them.)

Harry Potter knew something that many of his peers -and elders- didn’t: unnamed fear/s breed more fear. We create a reality around our perceptions, for lack of truth or awareness of the other. It blinds us to our stereotypes, and jails us into something that is based on limited interactions and imaginary creation. The mystery feeds the darkness and demonization, perpetuating the created false story of the other. Encouraging violence, our self-told stories fail to engage with the true fear, only fighting the created ones. Although Voldemort embodied some of the most violent and ugliest of fears, Harry knew when we failed to name them they only became mythical, epic, unreal. When you can name your fears, you can begin to release them.

(an)Other’s Story: Education Without A School Room

My posts, lately, have been heavier on the cultural side. Fueled by our recent immersion in a new neighborhood where our story is not the dominant one told (but still in power), my story has run up against another story. This has brought on all the caution, joy, unsurity, friction, tension, and wonder of hearing new stories while living among them. My recent vignettes have largely been with children actors/actresses, and this one is no different. Likewise, it follows the sub-theme of violence that has run through some of my recent posts.

Rubbing Shoulders: Life in Suburbia

Sunday evening we took our little’s to a neighborhood park to get the last minute energy burned off a mostly-inside day. The playground wasn’t bristling, but it was comfortably populated. Enough room for all the kids to play, but interaction without rubbing elbows was impossible. While our sons shared the swings with other children, we heard fireworks in the distance. Our three year old asked (as he often does) “what was that?” “Small fireworks”, came my reply. Another child, no more than six, was swinging next to us in the “big girl” swings. Of African American descent, she told us matter-of-factly: “It wasn’t gunshots. Don’t worry. It wasn’t gunshots.”

My wife and I exchanged incredulous, sad looks. How is one so young to have such knowledge, recognition, awareness? Even typing this, I realize it’s not the fact that she is able to tell the difference: it’s how; It’s why. At six years of age, I could have likely done the same, coming from a family background deeply tied to the outdoor “sports”: hunting, fishing, and the like. But my story is told from the perspective of the shooting range or the woods. Not from the streets. It’s out of my contextual understanding -hence the shared disbelief and sorrow of me and Megan- to believe a six year old not in contact with hunting could have that ability. She knows what she knows because those who pulled the trigger did so with intent to hurt, kill. Having posted about this elsewhere, its possible that her knowledge is due to personal experience with gun violence against her family. This is her context, her story. Because it’s not mine, I can only shake my head, and pray.

Life Together: What Does This All Mean?

I’m so in the thick of other stories, I can’t process it all. Culture shock. The reeling from it and merely grappling with it makes it difficult not to hyper self-oriented. (Oh, the irony is thick here, yes? My struggle with learning the others story has me struggling more with not getting sucked into my own stereotypes, walls, real/perceived safety, etc. The escape from selfishness is a life long, difficult process.) It’s difficult to think about the religious institution I called home for most of my life, and see the lack of work  of reconciliation and learning stories has been limited to a homogeneous metanarrative. Let’s call it what it is; Christianity has failed in this place. The oft quoted “most segregated hour of the week is Sunday at 11am” reveals this as well.

I’m not ranting here, or even angry as I post this. I feel its more a sharing of what I’ve experienced as real on my corner (and playground), and the lack of any worthwhile theology that engages with this story. Western, U.S., White Christianity -my story- has fallen victim to only telling, learning, and retelling its own version of the story. I’ve got nothin’ to use, here on Hays and Mellon, given the majority of my theological background. Some exceptions are there, but very few and far between. Most of them have come from interactions with others stories.  No small irony.

The Longing for Sabbath Rest

I am tired, though. The work my family has before us is vast, and we need to be connected to the greater story of YHWH as we share stories with our neighbors. YHWH’s story is not above or bigger than my cultural story, nor that of my neighbors, but rather told through it. And there’s the rub: the friction of contact can be exhausting. Lord, Have Mercy. Christ Have Mercy. Lord Have Mercy.

The Stories of (an)Other: Unfolding Narratives

The Integration of Stories

Over the last ten days, I wrote of our personal experience in a church where gun violence had been a tragically accepted part of life. The tragedy of lost loved ones -mostly youth- was a sobering listen to the door opening on an others story. Only two days after I posted a reflection on the church’s effort towards mission, this story penetrated our families reality. It is the story of people we know. Sean was a the father of an unborn child, a child who lost his young dad to the violence of the streets.

Sean Thompson, Father to Be

PITTSBURGH — Channel 11 News has learned a 34-year-old man who was killed after being shot in

Lawrenceville early Thursday morning was a father-to-be.Police said Sean Thompson was shot along Keystone Street shortly after 1 a.m.

He was taken to UPMC Presbyterian Hospital, where he later died.Channel 11 News learned Thompson’s fiancee lives in the neighborhood and is pregnant with the couple’s first child.“It’s sad. No one deserves this,” one neighbor said.

Nearby residents said they heard the shots fired and ran outside to see what happened.”I’ve never been around violence like this before,” one neighbor said. “Maybe 12 to 16 shots were fired. We came outside and the guy was lying on the ground. He was still bleeding.

“Thompson was an employee at a car dealership on McKnight Road. His co-workers said he was a good man and a hard worker.

Stories Sittin’ on the Front Porch

Where is this world we live, when problems are solved with hand-held power of life and death, triggered by emotion?

Postlogue to The Story of (an)Other: Urban Faith and An Education

The (White) Church, Systemic Racism (?) and Mission

As a brief shift of focus from this story, it became apparent to me that in some of our church conversations mission is a topic of dialogue is rooted very much in our own story. The white, evangelical (or formerly so, perhaps) conversations fueled by the emerging/emergent conversation push for “missional” foci for churches. However for a church like Valley View, the missional part of their participation in God’s work of reconciliation to creation, others, and self is always before them: they are in mission, or they do not survive. Literally, in this case. Could it be that the comfort of some of us in the missional conversation from an Anglo background are missing the places of work alongside YHWH? The search goes on, and yet for some the missio Dei carries a gun, taking lives of a group of people. Where are we looking for participation?

I don’t mean to make a poster child out of this church community we’ve become attached to, nor paint a picture for furthering our “white wo/man’s burden” phenomenon. I wish to offer, for dialogue, how the white church -those in systemic power- talk about mission, how we struggle at times with it, and how it seems we know little of the “other’s” story enough to see where God desires freedom from the oppression of Smith and Wesson, poverty and systemic racism. We discuss from/within a position of power. My friend, Drew, wrote eloquently of this. I don’t have it all figured out, for sure. My ignorance about life from my suburban upbringing and that of my urban peers, I hope, reveals this. I desire fodder for the conversation; hence, my thoughts found here.

What does it mean for the church to love the other? How does it shape mission? How do we live outside of ourselves, learn someone else’s story, if we continue to only talk amongst ourselves? How do we begin to give up power, especially if we continue living and pursuing YHWH in homogenous communities?

The Story of (an)Other: Urban Faith and An Education

Suburban Beginnings

I grew up in a suburban community in South Central PA where I attended school in a township with one of the highest tax brackets in the state. My dad was an avid hunter and fisherman, and he invited us into his joy of the dance with nature, the hunter and hunted. Likewise, my socio-demographic background was made up of folk very much like myself: German, Austrian (often culturally Mennonite) or Anglo; diversity was limited to infrequent trips to the closest urban geography. Harrisburg is not that big, but culturally, was nearly 100% more diverse than my home town: African descent, Latin descent, Asian descent, etc., whereas less than 1% of my suburban home-town was non-white.

Urban Life With Others, 101

About 2 months ago, we attended church at Valley View Presbyterian Church in Garfield, Pittsburgh. Our family just moved into the East Liberty neighborhood, and had begun the search for a community to commit to. (Since this story, we’ve begun attending regularly.) A friend of ours is pastor there, while another has just finished interning here for his Masters of Divinity at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (PTS). It was one of about four churches we attended. We happened to be there during a month long conversation about gun violence, gun control, and its effects on the neighborhood, residents, and parishioners of the East End. The church, when regular attenders are all there at the same time, is a beautiful picture of diversity of mostly Black and White folk. Our new commitment has yet to give us the opportunity to enjoy this, but we look forward to seeing it.

During the service, our friend Pastor Chad invited those present to share the names of those affected by gun violence. That is, to honor and remember those who had been killed by a gun. It was a hotter Sunday morning, and there were about 50 people in the sanctuary. At Chad’s invitation, one by one people began to share of sons, cousins, close friends, popular or respected members of local neighborhoods, etc. Quietly, but with firmness, they shared: To be remembered. Some were sad, but most spoke with a matter of fact-ness that I found hard to process. These fallen ones were almost all youth, and many were the innocent victims of cross fire. Unintended victims of others use of firearms. Out of those 50 present, about 12 people spoke in memory of around 15 loved ones lost.

Metanarratives and Faith: Is America Islam? Christian? A Critique of Acts 17 Apologetics on YouTube… (Part 2)

In part 1, I offered some critique to David Wood’s allegiance to story. Having embraced the metanarratives  of America, he proposes that the laws of America somehow fit into the the story of the Bible. Within this argumentation is the assumption that the U.S. is Christian, and that the American Government is somehow unfaithful to its own story for its sociopolitical actions.  It must also be restated here that I find Davids message spun with the fear as we find in big media, while sowing seeds of discord. Although I haven’t stated it yet, the message of this video (and what seems that of his other online content, further evidenced by some of his fans/followers comments) and its tone, context, etc. are not offered in the way that I understand following Jesus would look like. In fact, this conversation itself would have never happened this way. The whole practice and method is abrasive at best. I would not myself be posting this, had it not been fodder for a public foil for another who shares an orientation towards Jesus with David, but with a completely different understanding of what living that out means.

The Koran in Context

At around the 8.00 mark, David begins reading from the Koran. It describes the supremacy of Allah, and that Islam will be made the religion over religions to the disgust of infidel’s. To be sure that we don’t miss out on the true meaning of the line he reads, he summarizes verses following this reading which instruct fighting/killing of the unfaithful, the sub-human quality of the unfaithful, judgement to unbelievers, etc.

Perhaps David is quite good with his Koran, understanding it in context and all of its complexity, theology, etc. Perhaps again, some of the contributors at their blog Answering Muslims are from Muslim background themselves. However, I would offer that its problematic to “read this in context” without first telling us what context is mean being referred to by this. Literary context? Historical context? Cultural context? Literary structural context (as in what verses are around the key text read to inform understanding)?

Metanarratives and Faith: Is America Islam? Christian? A Critique of Acts 17 Apologetics on YouTube… (Part 1)

I got an email from my mom late last week, with a request to view this video by David Wood and friends, and offer some perspective. Because David and I both share a faith in following Jesus, and my mom does not, she wanted some other point of view from someone who shared an orientation with David’s. Having never heard of David and his ministry before, I briefly perused his site, his work and posts, video titles, and blog followers comments. Because of this, I hold my brief reserach in context with the video that I watched. What I found online about the Acts 17 Apologetics organization he’s connected to was interesting, but at times at odds with my understanding of what following Jesus is about.

America and Culture: Christian Nation vs. Nation of Islam

I must share that his video is very compelling, and put together well. He follows a rational argument that pokes holes at the policies with which the U.S. Government has mandated for interacting with holy texts. I found myself becoming drawn into the claims he made, the seamless arguments that offered that illuminated the lack of consistency with the decisions of President Obama, General Petraus, and the US military on its response to managing the Koran and the Bible.

However, there was also a splinter in my mind. While I was taken by his argument, the discontent grew within me. At first I had trouble naming it, but it became more clear what I was struggling with over time: This video reveals what seems to be a conflation of following Jesus (& perhaps Allah) and of being an American. He goes back and forth, describing the sociopolitical landscape as it pertains to the metanarratives of both the Bible and the Koran, and decides/demonstrates that America is already practicing Sharia Law. Using what I percieve to be the spin of fear, sowing discontent with any potential viewers, he describes a U.S. politik that is no longer Christian, but Islam. It also, in my opinion, breeds stereotypes and discord between peoples.

The Story of Nations; the Story of Jesus of Nazareth

I can’t speak for Muslims, but my first critique of his argument is rooted in this: Whose story are we to follow? As people of Jesus, its his story. He was Hebrew, but he was not a Hebrew “national”. In fact, most of his public life was contra to both systems he was subject to: Jewish and Roman. He often spent time in outlying towns on the margins of his home territory, because he incensed those he challenged. He was culturally Hebrew, but in no way tied to either his ancestral metanarratives or those of the Roman sociopolitical occupancy.

Religious Faith Communities: Subject to Review on Amazon.

Web 2.0 Is Dialogue

There is an incredible shift going on in culture. Perhaps this is a tired statement, perhaps it rings true. To add some external statistical, err, rational thought to this statement, here are some numbers to elucidate this: As far back as eleven years ago the internet had reached 50 million domestic viewers, outpacing radio (40 years) and television (14 years) in only four years. (Leonard Sweet, Soul Tsunami 1999: 32)

Web 2.0 has empowered people to talk across to each other. Where we individuals used to depend on corporations and organizations for granting authority for influence in decision making, we now have the capacity to engage each other for advice, opinions, direction. How many of us read the user reviews on, say Amazon, for the “real story” on the product?

Spirituality: Reviewed

What is also emerging in this -at least in regards to organized religions’ awareness- is that cultural individuals have thoughts, opinions, beliefs, etc., that are not necessarily connected to organized religions. Where in some faiths’, like in Christianity, there is already some pushback about how an experience within the institutional faith system is received. Check out this YouTube post.

What’s more significant than the post is the comments found below. The video has some affective and moving bits to it, and espouses some of the Christian tenets of faith, including a “Christian” welcome, hospitable atmosphere. However, the day that I posted this were these statements, amidst commenter’s who found positive meaning in the message:

What does religion have to do with it? They use that to control theirs and other people’s lives while at the same time, we turn to them to help leads us to Jesus Christ. It’s how they were raised as children and how they’ve been brainwashed as adults. I tend to avoid people and churches like that.

Reasons (why people don’t come to church)—for the same reasons they don’t go to mosques, temples and synagog services—because they don’t believe bronze age mythology.

Or this comment, found at this video satire of Starbucks marketed like a mega church:

You don’t have to beleive in an invisible man in the sky to live a good life, or to feel motivated or happy. If you would have been born in India, or Iran, or Africa, etc. you would probably have different relgious beliefs. Why anyone would want to go to church and listen to someone else tell them what ‘god’ thinks or wants, or what jesus wants? Think for yourself….read books…make your own thoughts and beleifs, and sleep in on Sunday. [spelling sic]

The Culture, or the Troll Under the Bridge?

Perhaps at this point two arguments come to mind: the first is that people have been saying these sorts of things for a long time. And secondly, how do we know that the comments are accurately reflective of the cultural milieu and not the just the 7 angry folks that troll these vids?