Big Apples Don't Cry

Its been 15 years since I made NYC my home.  I believed then -- and still believe -- it is the greatest city in the world.  The energy is palpable.  "The lights will inspire you," as the song goes.  Since roughly a third of the residents were born in another country, I feel like the immigrant spirit full of hope and optimism is still alive and well. It's what brought me here.  It's what keeps me here.

But lately I have been noticing something.  We don't know how to grieve here.  We like to "send our condolences to the family of the deceased," but just as quickly we say meaningless things like "I just try not to think about it" or "he wouldn't want us to be sad."  And that's not the worst.

The real vacuum of grief can be seen after the more subtle tragedies.  When is the last time you saw candles lit in the street for someone whose spouse cheated on them? When have you seen a vigil for those that are missing their home country?  When have you seen a special service held at a house of worship for all those that lost jobs in a corporate restructure? What about a wake for the family who lost a son to mental illness? Where does a teen go to recover from yet another "stop and frisk" incident which if not handled well could have been life threatening?

We have no words for these things here? "Bereavement leave" doesn't apply to these things. Instead we get angry and march and sue and fight.  There certainly is a place for anger and action, but nothing can suffice for the healing silence of grieving in a safe space. 

Contrary to the tough stereo-type, New Yorkers are hurting. Did you know we have more suicides here than homicides?  The numbers shocked me.*  We never talk about suicide here.  I am a Social Worker at an organization run by Social Workers, but even we don't talk about suicide.  Its as if New Yorkers are not afraid of anything except prolonged grief. We quickly cover things, and so there is a crusty attitude that forms in our heart over all that mess.

And I get it.  Much of the cover up is necessary for survival. If you listen to the stories, you quickly understand. It is actually a form of white privilege for me to sit here and suggest that people stop and grieve. Who has that kind of margin? When you are working and going to school while raising three kids as a single parent, you don't have time to grieve.  If the tears start flowing, will they ever stop?  If you are in the shelter, undocumented, work below minimum wage and still send a third of your salary back to your home country because you are the "rich family member that made it to America," how will you have time to stop and grieve?  Reality bites, and there is no time to stop and heal the wound.

We are also intoxicated with optimism.  To grieve, is to question the optimism that keeps us going.
People come to NYC to make it big.  In my own way, I suppose I did too.  We are so convinced that we will "make it" if we try a little harder. We love phrases like "believe in yourself" and "just stay away from the haters."  In churches, this thinking is sometimes called faith.  The image is reinforced as we daily walk past, $20 Million penthouses in Tiribeca or $300 hand bags on 5th Ave. The images of "success" are all around us.  As much as we hate Trump, he is a true New Yorker in so many ways -- addicted to the image of success.

I have no solutions here. I am just wanting to help break the silence, the silence we cover with noise. Somehow, we have got to create spaces to grieve.

Maybe we could start with the immigrant experience.  No matter how much we love our lives here, don't we all feel the loss of the places we left?  Don't we all believe that NYC is not quite what we hoped it would be?  Are these not almost universal losses carried by all New Yorkers?  Could we acknowledge that at least?

Could faith communities be the space for this?  Tragically, many use religion to avoid grief.  The faith rhetoric is a thinly veiled version of the American dream.  "Just believe it and you can do it."  That is not the model I see in our Creator who came to die.  If He wept and died and calls us to die, wouldn't that mean at least that we are not afraid of the same feelings.  Maybe the promise of His resurrection could give us courage to go deep into the realities of our losses and the losses of those around us.

I think it could. The caver with the strongest rope can descend into the lowest crevices.  Religion if it means anything, I think it is that it is okay to grieve.  "Blessed are they that mourn," Jesus said.  I think this is true even if all we have to spare is a New York minute.

Who knows? Maybe it would take the edge off that crusty New York attitude as well.

I included a few graffiti murals here because they show more than words can.







 

The promise of Easter is that we can be kids like this, crying/smiling in the rain.



* https://www.villagevoice.com/2016/09/15/report-suicides-surpass-homicides-in-nyc/

What does white privilege look like? (3 stories from my life)

"I'll take it without a bag." I said as I bought a snack at the corner grocery store.  The picture of the island of plastics in the Pacific Ocean has been getting to me, so I have been trying to cut down on unnecessary plastic.  I grabbed my Arizona Green Tea and headed out the door.  How easily I had saved the world the burden of disposing of a piece of plastic, a process that could take hundreds of years I am told.  Why doesn't everyone do this?  Then I looked around, and thought for a second.  What would happen if the young men of color in my job development program would choose this option?  Immediately it clicked.  There is no way in a million years they would want to walk out of a convenience store with anything not in a shopping bag. The optics of that could be dangerous.  If police would happen to be there, there is a good possibility they would be questioned or worse.  Its just not something you do if you are a young man of color.

It got me thinking about the relationship betwen white privilege and moral superiority.  I felt like I was doing the right thing, and for a second this satisfaction was making me feel a step above, but . . . white privilege was making it all possible.

It happened again the other day.  There was an incident at one of our internship sites.  Two customers got into an argument that escalated into an altercation.  Our participant, a young man of color, tried to break up the fight and got physically involved. As I was hearing about it, I thought immediately, "Noooooooooo."   I knew where the story was headed.  The security guards at the site responded and our young person was implicated along with the two who were fighting.  He was trying to do a good thing but lost his job because of it.

How would that have been different for me?  If I was in that situation, hopefully I would have done the exact same thing.  As with him, safety would have been my concern; losing my job would not have been.  Why is it that our young men of color have to be taught not to help break up a fight?  I, on the other hand, would have been considered a hero.

Allow me one more story, I like to run the Brooklyn Half Marathon each year.  People like the notion of a middle-aged guy staying healthy, raising money for the poor urban community of Cypress Hills. Then yesterday, I worked all day in the backyard doing normal stuff, setting a few stones for a patio, painting a chair, trimming the rose bushes, basic manual labor. At the end of the day, I was beat.  I was not interested in doing a training run for a half marathon.  Then I thought of the two men who pick up my trash each Tuesday and Friday, and the thousands of sanitation workers in this city, many who are middle aged men of color.  Every single day, they put in a day of physical work like I did yesterday, more physically rigorous actually.  They are not going to be using their evenings to train and run a half marathon for charity.  Yet I am the one lauded for fitness and overall good will.  They are no doubt much more fit and doing a more needed service.  What value is there really in running 13.1 miles when a train would easily get you there?

Why do I share these stories?  Who knows? but I wonder if one of the ways white privilege persists and remains invisible to us White folk is that it doesn't present itself like we think.  When I hear the word white privilege, my initial picture is a smiling Southern belle sipping sweet tea.  In reality, it is much more subtle, and often comes with a self-rewarding hint of moral superiority. I wonder what the rest of you think.     

What if grace applied to corporate sin?

Have you ever been engaged in a discussion on racism that degenerated?  What starts as a vulnerable and productive process ends in hurt feelings and more rigidity. What starts as bridge-building ends with a widening chasm. 

I have been there.  

"Why are you trying to create division? Its time to move on" people tell me. My heart weakens.  Division is the last think I am trying to create!  

This is usually followed by some snarky comment from me about "White fragility," and a deep freeze settles in. Like Elsa in the movie "Frozen" something inside of us says, "Let it go, let it go, the cold never bothered me anyway," and we build our ice castles.

So the question I ask myself is, "What better option could there be?"  Might the Gospel actually provide a different path.  Is there something about the Gospel that empowers me to engage in ever deeper ways. Is there a theological framework to think about race that energizes me as a White Christian for the difficult conversations and gives me hope for better living in this racially charged world? 

I think there is.

Here are some pieces of a theological framework I am finding helpful. 

1. Sin can be corporate or systemic in addition to the individual acts we normally think of. As a White person, it is easy to get stuck on this point.  "I don't hate Black people. I don't cause mass incarceration or discrimination in hiring today? How can you somehow implicate me in racism?"  This represents a very Western view of sin.  We forget that the Bible is full of examples of systemic sin. All through the O.T. the prophets railed against the sin of this group of people or that nation. Jesus did it too. He calls out a couple of Galilean towns for their sin (Matthew 11:21) and weeps over Jerusalem (Matthew 23:37).  

2. Sin is also generational. Have you heard this exasperated declaration from White folk? "Slavery was a long time ago. Jim Crow was over before I was born. Why are we still talking about racism?"  We forget that there is an element of sin that is generational.  We are less than three generations from a campaign of terror in this country. On average there was one lynching a week for 80 years. The psychological trauma of this sort of intimidation is hard to comprehend. God said that he visits sin up to three or four generations (Exodus 34:7). And have you heard of the story of the Amlakites(I Samuel 30:1-2)?  Its a hard story for me to read, but the implication is clear.  This is a group of people that sinned once and were judged some 400 years later. This is evident in the New Testament as well.  Romans 5 goes to some length to talk about how Adam's sin was passed down to us. Could it be that specifc sins are passed down as well?  I find quite a bit of evidence for generational sin by looking at genetic studies. "Family studies that include identical twins, fraternal twins, adoptees, and siblings suggest that as much as half of a person’s risk of becoming addicted to nicotine, alcohol, or other drugs depends on his or her genetic makeup"    (https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/genetics-epigenetics-addictionis).  Feel free to do the research on your own, but my recollection from my Social Work education is that a great many social vices follow generational patterns, so why not racism?  You may have heard of the nature vs. nurture debate about whether behaviors are taught from one generation to the next or whether they are influenced by genetics. My hunch is that there is a little of both. In either case, sin follows groups of people for generations. Why would racism and its effects be any different?  

We may like the famous line, "I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul," but the Bible seems to say that we are born into streams of generational sin. Its a paradox, but past sin is present. This is probably a topic for a longer discussion, but I suggest to you that at the very least my fathers' sins are my unique temptations.  Sins against my fathers, are my unique vulnerabilities. 

3.  Self-justification is a dead-end street. Universal sin is stated in the most graphic of terms in the Bible.

"As it is written:

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
     there is no one who understands;
    there is no one who seeks God.

All have turned away,
    they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
    not even one.”[b]
 “Their throats are open graves;
    their tongues practice deceit.”[c]
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”[d]
     “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”[e]
 “Their feet are swift to shed blood;
     ruin and misery mark their ways,
 and the way of peace they do not know.”[f] Romans 3:10-17).

And John says it straight up, "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." (I John 1:8).  

Practically speaking, if you try to say that you are a good person because of the virtue of your race, we have a bit of trouble, mostly because every race has a lot of flaws and historical evil. . 

4. It may be that these first three points are a bit depressing -- sin is systemic, sin is generational, self-justification is a dead end street -- but here's the good news. .  

First, a bit of background. One of the problems with discussing generational or systemic sin is because we feel some responsibility, but don't know how to deal with it.  We know how to address our individual sin, but how do you find redemption for sins that I didn't commit? We, therefore, avoid conversations about race because we think it is a dead end street to perennial guilt filled with grief and shame.  It feels counter-productive.  Naturally, we then build all kinds of defenses or rationales to silence the issue and make it go away.

But acknowledgement of sin, doesn't have to be a dead end street. It can lead to redemption and freedom instead.  

While grief over sin for the Christian may be perennial, guilt and shame are not.  The Gospel releases us from these things and gives us the power to grieve and really listen to our brothers.  This is not a dead-end road.  I have found it to be highly productive and energizing. Sugar-coating the truth, ignoring facts, having to convince everyone of your position is the dead-end road. Repenting of the sin of our culture and generations leads to freedom.

This freedom from guilt and shame is available to us simply as a gift called grace.  This grace is not only for our individual stuff, but also for the systemic and generational stuff as well.  

Genesis 19 tells the famous story of God's corporate judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah, but did you ever stop to think about God's bargain with Abraham?  God is willing to spare the entire city if as many as 10 righteous folks are found. Beautifully, the individual repentance of a few results in a sort of corporate redemption.  A similar example occurs when Israel was facing judgment.  God was threatening to judge them because they had deliberately and emphatically walked away from his care by worshiping their own golden calf.   Because of Moses' prayer and willingness to face the consequences of the corporate sin of Israel, the systemic judgment doesn't fall (Exodus 32:32).  Similarly, Daniel prays for his sin and the sin of "his people." (Daniel 9:1-19).  This approach seems instinctual for Isaiah when he cries out, 

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King,the Lord Almighty.” (Isaiah 6:5)

The pattern is incredibly beautiful. People of God identified with the sin of their people and through their act of solidarity, humility, and repentance, God's judgment was spared. These heros identified the sins of their tribe as their own and repented of it and found grace.

This is, of course, precisely what Jesus did when he became one of us, identified with all our stuff and embraced the consequences for our hate. "For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive" (I Corinthians 15:22). 

As I identify with the sins of my own White race, redemption comes, and oh how sweet it is!  

I struggle with words to describe how amazing this has been in my life. Tears come as I write.  When we repent as a member of our race, good things happen. I dare you to pray this, "I am a racist, and I am part of a country that has always been deeply racist. Lord, have mercy on us sinners."   I don't completely understand it theologically, but I have found freedom in that sort of prayer and energy for the struggle. It is hard work to have to defend your people and your race. Freedom comes when you fully accept all of your systemic and generational identity and let it all go at the same time. Try it, perhaps an angel will come and put a searing hot coal on your lips, but you will never be the same.  The American or Canadian or ethnic Mennonite in me is transformed in that moment, and I am raised up as part of the kaleidoscope of God's redeemed kingdom -- a beautiful multi-color kingdom that retains its diversity into eternity (Revelation 7:9).

There is no more need to justify any of my sins -- individual, systemic or generational. You can say many things about me or my race that grieve me; indeed I have already grieved many times over my sin and the sin of my people and will continue, but it is not a depressing pointless grief. Its a sweet, empowering grief, because the greater my sin, the greater God's grace, and the greater his grace, the more power I have for action. 

So is it easy to talk about racism as a White person?  Of course not, it is hard for me to think about belonging to a race that has caused much pain for about 400 years. It is harder still to discover ways that I struggle to love my neighbor today, but God has grace for it all!  Here's a verse I like.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, . . . For when I am weak, then I am strong." (2 Corinthians 12:9-10)

In this experience of repentance, grief, and grace, I die and am raised again with new power to be a strong aly as a White person in the struggle against evil in all its forms. I highly recommend this grace. 

Why do 25,000 normal-looking people run to the point of exhaustion?

It's 6:15 am, the air is crisp, the glow of a sunrise is stretching across the sky, and a crowd is gathering. They are pacing, stretching, or munching -- no doubt the odd remnants of a well-planned nutrition regimen.  They are dressed in all sorts of ridiculous outfits that you normally would not wear in public.  Many are chatting excitedly like elementary kids before a pageant. But they are not kids, these are adults, 25,000 of them to be exact, who have paid good money to run their guts out for 13.1 miles.  I am among them, and I can't help but think, "Why do we do this?"

I have heard it said, "Americans nowadays are lazy." Its hard to "get people to do things." As a non-profit leader, I am always trying to get people to do things, donate money, work hard, attend workshops, enroll in training, etc. etc., and it is not easy.  We add all sorts of incentives, work the networks, craft our pitch, and maybe we get 100 or so if we are lucky. Churches are the same way.  We have full time staff dedicated to recruitment and they struggle to fill 50 seats on a Sunday morning.

But here I am, with 25,000 New Yorkers, who are volunteering their time, making great physical sacrifice, committing to months of training, getting up early, giving every muscle in their bodies in search of a little medal that has almost no monetary value.  How can we make sense of it? Are Americans really lazy, or are they hungry for something we are not giving?

Since I am one of these 25,000, I asked myself that question. Why am I participating in this arbitrary and odd social phenomena?  What am I hungry for?

1. Difficulty. It is seen as a hard thing.  One sign I read among the cheering crowd said this, "If it were easy, we would be doing it."  Doing something hard makes us feel good.  To put everything you have on the line is a sort of spiritual experience that I can't quite explain, but I know it is real.  We are hungry for something that requires a lot of us. 

2. Community. There is a close community of support.  When you talk to another runner, there is instantly a bond and plenty to talk about.  The vibe is always positive.  Rarely if ever have I encountered another runner who made me feel like my target time was pathetically slow.  You might compare target paces but it is not really a competition with others it is a competition with yourself, and there is nothing but positivity toward each other as runners.

3. Care for the body.  We are obsessed with health and fitness.  This certainly is part of the equation, but there are quite a few easier ways to achieve our fitness goals.  So, I make this a minor point.  Still there is something meaningful about listening to your body and caring for it.  Something inside tells us we were made for  care and dominion over physical obstacles. 

4. Clarity. My generation has been hurt by post-modernism and self-esteem trophies.  We have been pummeled with the message, "Just be yourself, just be happy," and that is something hard to achieve when everything around seems underwhelming.  A race, however, is primal and clear.  It is 13.1 miles not 13.  There is a precise start line, ending line and route. We can see exactly how fast we ran, and we know exactly if it was faster or slower than last time.  The clarity of a race is psychologically soothing in its own way.

5. Inclusion. My generation has been hurt by modernism also.  In spite of the move toward inclusion and acceptance, the world still pretty much operates on a survival of the fittest mentality in the tradition of modernism. Regardless of the sector, there are constant rankings and comparison.  There is a top 10 list in almost anything you can imagine. On this race, there may be competition toward the front of the pack, but for the most part the focus is on supporting each other.  The goal is to finish well, not necessarily to beat the next guy.

6. Assurance. Finishing is a given.  Even though I always desperately want to quite.  I have never quit mid-race. I have slowed to a walk, but the idea of actually not making it never really seems like an option.  I have a bib number.  I have sponsors. I have the shirt. One way or another I am sure that I will cross the line.  There is no real doubt.

7. Reward. It may only be a piece of plastic with a ribbon, a bag of refueling treats, a little after-party and a selfie, but finishing a race is like no other feeling in the world. What felt like it would never end is suddenly over. The eternity of steps between me and the finish line all of a sudden blurs into one little experience.

So there you have it. A few simple concepts, but they go deep, and when you experience them like I have over and over again in my body, well, you just sign up again.  If I can sum it up, its like the race offers a story to be in.  It reminds me that I was not made for the sidelines. I was made to be included in the company of the finishers.

The race feels like a microcosm of life, a little model of what life was meant to be.  Difficulty, Community, Care for the Body, Clarity, Inclusion, Assurance, Reward, maybe this is what we were meant for.  What would happen if our real lives had more of these things?  What would happen if our Faith included more of this?  I am not sure, but we just might wake up at 5 am, just so we don't miss something.

What kind of good deeds are good?

In the Book of Matthew in the Bible, Jesus tells a bizarre story of judgment day at the end of time.

Folks are divided into two groups, the sheep and goats.  The "sheep" are said to have fed, clothed, visited Jesus himself and the "goats" are said to have ignored him. I have always thought of this story as a firm warning to be sure that you feed, clothe, and visit people or you might get the axe on judgment day.  That is certainly the most obvious point, but the other day I noticed how strikingly confused both groups were  The goats are incredulous.  "When did we not do all those things to you?"  The sheep are similarly confused. "When did we do all those good things to you?"

There is an irony in goodness.  It is not well-suited to measurement and verification.  Even those doing good are confused about the relative value of what they are doing.

Like so many of Jesus teachings, He seems to be trying to confuse the score keepers.  We want to measure our good deeds against our bad and make sure we are on the positive side of average at least. We are very invested in keeping score even it is sub-consciously.  Have we made it?  Are we winning or loosing?  Jesus throws this line of thinking on its head.  Most people who are good don't even know where they have been good.  It appears to happen almost by accident.

Similarly, I have often found that my most loving deeds are mostly done for wrong reasons.  I want to be noticed, recognized or at least thanked.  If nothing else, I want the satisfaction of feeling I had made a difference.  As the saying goes, I want something to "justify my existence." It seems the true sheep barely noticed when they had done something good or at least did not see the great significance in it.  Perhaps that's because it wasn't about being noticed in the first place.  It was just more of a spontaneous action springing from feeling accepted.  The goats on the other hand were disappointed to discover that the "castles built on sand" were all washed away.

This is not an isolated teaching.  Other Scriptures talk about the importance of your good deeds being done in secret (Luke 17:10, Matthew 6:3).  Its as if Jesus knew that self-satisfaction would drive many good deeds.

What is the way out of this dilemma?   Picture yourself in a moment when you were most in love.  What did you act like during those times?  You probably opened the door for random strangers.  Maybe you tipped better or stopped to pet a dog during your commute.  When a person is overwhelmed with love, the goodness just sort of randomly flows out in all directions -- not in a clear transactional or strategic way.  Certainly, you don't keep score. Thomas Merton just said it so well, "The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith to believe that one is loved."

Forgive me if I sound harsh, but doing good for any other reason is an elaborate psychological mechanism to use the less fortunate to feel better about myself. I am sorry to say I know what I am talking about on this.  I am an expert at it actually, but this is not the way of the sheep.