The Voices of St. Johns Youngstown

It’s Holy Week, and the aspect of this time that makes me sick, that is a punch in the gut, is the unnecessary violence. When I went to Israel both times it was the pit that Jesus was lowered into to wait Thursday night, wet, dark, sharp with bare stone, that drove home for me just how alone Jesus must have felt, just how painful this must have been. Just how cruel the world can be.

This morning I was scrolling through my email and saw a post from a neighborhood group about someone shooting out of their car down Belmont Avenue last night. And there it was, more unnecessary violence. More building up of hate, misunderstanding, revenge. 

We are told that Jesus suffered so horribly to end all suffering. I am not the first person to point out that just didn’t happen. My current theory is that we are willing to say that violence is unacceptable until we think we need it, and we are unwilling to look at all forms of violence with equal judgement.

What about the violence of poverty? Is it a coincidence that most violence occurs in areas of the most desperation?  We can all agree no one should be hungry, everyone should have a job that pays what it takes to survive, we need to improve our housing stock. Who is willing to give up some of what they have to make that happen? What will we sacrifice for our brothers and sisters?

We say that we are against the violence of racism. But we are unwilling to address the economic disparities that racism has caused that would help create a more equal playing field for people of color. We are unwilling to stand against laws that limit voting or gerrymander districts to disenfranchise whole groups of people. 

We say that domestic violence is wrong. But where are the laws that protect victims? Where are the laws that protect rape victims? Where are the laws that protect children from abuse? These are separate issues but all point in the same direction. We are unwilling to take on the power that is being protected. 

All violence is not physical. And violence cannot happen without support from the community. But we can’t pick and choose which violent system we want to change. It’s all or nothing. Until we stand strong and willing to give up something of ourselves, we will continue to see the suffering of Jesus in too many of our neighbors.

I do not like the word tolerant. It implies that you are not passionate, not fully engaged. To be tolerant is to do just enough, which most of the time is not enough.

I went to lunch yesterday with some of the international students. (How I miss going out to lunch!!!) I was particularly interested in their safety in light of the attacks on Asians that have been happening lately. I had checked in with them a few months ago when things started heating up in California, and they said they were OK. But with the murders in Atlanta, I wanted to check in again.

Several of these students were from countries in Asia, and they said they had not been mistreated at all. The Black student mentioned that she has had bad experiences in Youngstown, but the Asian students had not. I was relieved for the Asian students. I don’t know exactly what I might have done if they had specific complaints, but there would have been some action. Advocacy for the Black student is ongoing. 

Interesting to me was what they wanted to talk about. They wanted to talk about meaning, what matters in life, who they are close to and why. They wanted to talk about career paths, and how you chose a career that made a difference. They wanted to talk about connecting with people and helping others. It was a lovely and deeply meaningful exchange with people who are going to make the world a better place. People who are passionate about life. 

Once again I feel compelled to say that it is not enough to say you are against violence against any group of people. It is not enough to bemoan other people’s bad choices. It is not enough to be tolerant. That young man in Atlanta learned violence, learned hate, learned dysfunction.  Someone taught it, modeled it and probably encouraged it in his life. 

So what can we do? Speak up. The jokes aren’t funny, the slurs are unacceptable, violence is never the answer. Unless you say that, those exact things, then maybe the only thing a young man will learn is hatred. Call family and friends to make sure they feel safe. Offer to be with them, to walk with them, to shop with them, to accompany and not to control. Tell people that they matter, that kindness matters, that life matters. Make an intentional and bold difference.

Last week I went to Rotary in person for the first time in literally a year. I have been on their zoom option so I have been able to see people, hear the great speakers, and remember the kind way they treat one another, which is what attracted me to that group. I also had the seed money for the weekly raffle, $100, in a zipper pouch in my desk drawer, and I felt it was time to give it back (they knew I had it ). 

It was great to be with people in a social setting. They took good safety precautions, and everyone was careful.  I really miss going out to lunch. But about half way through the meal I realized that my table manners and social skills had suffered during the pandemic. I wolfed down my food, had to remind myself not to talk with my mouth full, and there was no mute button. I had to behave. I was a little shocked. 

The realization that I am used to being alone, eating alone, doing what I want when I feel like it, is important. I have been changed by the pandemic. It has brought out my introversion, made me less tolerant and gracious, less attentive to others. I have to re-learn how to drive at night, what to wear to a birthday party, and how to listen and eat at the same time.  All of that can and will be fixed. But it is critical to realize.

We have all been changed by this past year. It is foolish to think that we can just flip a switch and everything will be back to “normal.” We don’t even know what normal will be. My concern is that if we are not aware of the damage that this has done to us, we will take it out on each other. The joy of being back together will fade soon enough, and then the reality of our time alone will be on display. Will we re-learn how to be a community that gathers in real time, of course. Will it take work? More than we realize. 

So pay attention. Ask yourself hard questions. How am I really dealing with my anxiety? What are the griefs that I have suffered? How do I adjust to the needs of others when I have been so focused on myself? How will I keep the good things that I have become and let go of the challenges?

Let’s pray for each other in this process.

When my kids reached about 3^rd grade I gave up my relentless pursuit of being the Parent of the Year and chose to not know much of anything  Where are my soccer socks? I don’t know. When is this paper due? No clue. Did you pack my lunch? Probably not. When is my next practice? I’m just not sure. 

Seriously, of course I knew the answers!!!!!!  I just admitted to nothing. The kids would function in response to my lack of functioning, so I aimed low for myself and high for them. They could handle it, and eventually we worked out a good and proper balance of labor. 

I expected my kids to be fine. What I didn’t expect was how much I would love not having to know everything, not having to be right all the time. What a relief! I admit to being a control freak, but with 6 kids, that is a straight shot to blood pressure medication. I needed to learn to let them become responsible kids on the path to becoming responsible adults, and to learn that this benefitted all of us. We all needed to function. No one needed to over-function,

One of the virtues that I suggested that you pray about is humility. At its heart, humility is about honoring not just our gifts, but every person’s gift. It is about allowing each person their power and giving space for people to thrive. It is about sharing and cooperation done out of love, out of a deep regard for what God has created each of us to be.

Humility is not about being less, it is about allowing everyone to be enough. It is not about feeling bad about yourself. It is about knowing yourself and trusting in your gifts. It is about seeing Christ in every person, and yourself. It is about healthy and holy balance. 

Humility is not about apologizing, it is about building healthy relationships. It’s about giving everyone a chance, and especially those who are often not included or listened to. It’s about being quiet enough and present enough to notice. Not being at the center so you can build a circle. And most importantly, knowing when it is the appropriate moment for you to be a leader.

Pray about this with me. Humility is hard to practice in our self-centered, power driven culture. Jesus is our example.

I have been paying attention to gratitude this week. I was provoked by a book I am reading to think more deeply about grace before meals, thanking God for the bounty I have been giving but also thanking whatever gave up its life to feed me. It moves me to be grateful with beauty and intention.

I was raised to say prayers before meals, especially for the evening meal where we all ate supper together as a family. We always said the same prayer in a plodding way, and my dad would add a postscript that I am sure was sincere but that I always found irritating. Let’s just say that the whole experience was not inspiring to me or probably to God.

When I raised my children we followed the same basic tradition. We would try to change it up. And sometimes there were power struggles, which I am sure also didn’t inspire God. Trying to instill piety in teenagers can be epic in levels of stubbornness. But I wonder now how much I seemed to really care about prayer. How much was I an actual inspiration for gratitude?

Not that I can do anything about that now, but it has made me think about how I currently offer thanks. I find I mean it more at lunch, when I am truly grateful not always for the food but for the time, for the quiet, for a break. Hopefully for the food too, but I am not always excited about leftovers, so it is more that I have the provision I need, my daily bread. 

I am less grateful at supper, when many days of the week I am squeezing it in before my next zoom engagement. I often do not have the time to muster gratitude when I am thinking about the next meeting and my responsibilities in it. When I am not frenzied I am often tired, being a morning person I am usually spent by the end of the day.

Which doesn’t mean I am not grateful.  Or that I should not make space for gratitude regardless of the circumstances. Remembering to thank God should be happening all the time, for all my blessings. Maybe that is the key for me. A brief moment of silence or a deep breath for the sustenance and bounty with which I am provided at a meal, and a more extensive prayer of gratitude in the morning when I am awake. I am working on it. Finding the right way for this time in my life. How about you?

Someone asked me recently what the point of prayer was when the people she is praying for die anyway. It’s a legitimate question and is probably in the back of everyone’s mind. Will I be the lucky one? Is there a formula for being blessed? Will my prayer be the one that gets answered?

This is a heart wrenching question that many people have written books about, but it is one that we are all struggling with, as a friend’s father that I had been praying for died just this week. There are easy answers and hard ones. One easy answer is that we are finite. Our bodies are not perfect. We get sick and sometimes we don’t have the resources to recover. One easy answer is social sin. We pollute creation, our healthcare system is not fair, we don’t invest in health as we should, personally or nationally. 

But those answers offer us no comfort.

Neither do the hard ones. Let’s take a couple things off the table. We can’t earn God’s love, we can’t bargain for God’s favor. It is almost impossible for us to imagine a scenario where we are completely and eternally loved as equally as the person standing next to us, but it is true. God loves us beyond our capacity to measure or understand. We are each absolutely beloved. 

I also believe in all my being that God’s heart is broken by suffering and death. God lives every day with the consequence of giving us free will, just as we do. We do not begin to take advantage of the consolation and compassion that God offers us in every grief, big or small. We choose to engage with God or not, depending on our mood, even though God is waiting to flood us with love. I know that I do anyway.

I do not believe that God picks and chooses who lives and dies. I don’t believe that God has a magic wand. I do believe that God can do anything, so when God “chooses” to let people die, I get very angry. But anger is a stage of grief, and a reasonable response to loss. So is it really God that I am mad at, or God that I trust enough to love me and hold my anger? 

When I pray for God to intervene, I know that means that I also have work to do. I can’t expect God to engage and fix when I am not willing to be a part of it. God is always willing to work with us, and gives us the skills we need to live into God’s call to build the Kingdom of God. When I ask God to heal someone, I have to work on my own healthy response to the world, my own relationship with the one who I am praying for, my support of their family, my kindness to those who are caring for them, or whatever I can do to help. I can’t pass the baton to God and expect a miracle. Sometimes we have to be kind of miraculous too, a sign of love in the world. 

And…

And a part of me believes that God does intervene. I still ask God for a miracle most days, things I think are beyond me but I just know are the right thing. I hold on to hope. I want my way, my desired outcome. And most of the time I believe that God agrees with me. It isn’t rational, but neither is faith. I hold on to God’s infiniteness, God’s expansiveness, God’s big picture, and I trust. And when things are not what I want them to be, I have to take a deep breath, believe in God’s love, and keep walking the path.

I told the woman who asked me that I didn’t know the answer. I don’t understand why bad things happen. And that is true. In that moment of her grieving she didn’t need theology or explanation, she needed compassion. I told her I was so sorry and that I loved her and that I didn’t have a good answer. But I have thought about it, prayed about it, and this is my more complete answer to an unanswerable question.

Last week I received two unexpected gifts in the mail. One was a belated Christmas present from a fellow priest who was looking for the perfect thing and definitely found it!  The other was a book from someone in the community who thought I would appreciate the read. And I will. 

These gifts were unexpected, which made them even nicer to receive. To be thought of and cared for is always so much more than the object that is sent. In fact, that is the essence of gift giving, not the gift itself but the building of relationships and memories.

Gifts are not transactional in the tradition sense. It is not in the spirit of giving to expect something of equal value or better in return. You give a gift to express a bond of love or friendship or common humanity. Once the gift is offered, the giver let’s go of control and invests in the hope of a stronger bond, a deeper sense of care. It isn’t about tit for tat. It is about generosity and care. Gift giving is an act of humility. 

When a homeless person on the street asks you for a dollar, and you offer it, that is a gift, and you trust the person to use the gift as they see fit. Yes, they might spend it in a way that you would or would not choose, in a way that you think is not appropriate to their circumstances, but how do you really know what another person needs. If you give a gift, it is about relationship. If you give charity, it might be about control.

If what you really want is something in return, then you have to let the person know your expectations, We are not mind readers, it is only fair. I tell some of my boys gift choices they might purchase because it helps them. But I know that there is a difference between an offering of love and an obligation, and we are careful about conveying the love. Resentment over poor communication is not the fault of the other.

Valentines’ Day might be a time to look at our sense of generosity and what gift giving means for us. To examine our relationships and make sure they reflect out values, mutuality and respect. To shed some of the control that giving often is strangled by. To love is freedom and joy. Let’s reflect on that!

My furnace is old. Way old. And every once in a while it reminds me of its age. I know people like that. For several months it has been touchy. I had someone out in November and it seemed to fix the problem, but around Christmas, it got cold, then in the beginning of January it got hot, and two weeks ago it got very cold. 

The guy came out again and installed a new thermostat. That is what I thought the problem was, with all my HVAC experience. I asked the guy what happened if this didn’t work, and he said he was out of ideas. About 5 minutes after he left it got really really cold. I gave it a few days to see if there was maybe a delay in the benefits of his work. By Friday I was cold and cranky, so I asked for another service call. No reply. 

Saturday I called another company, and they came, and they found the problem and they fixed the problem, and by evening I was in a warm house again. The difference in my mood and ability to get things done was significant, and I prayed for people who are cold for whatever reason, I don’t usually think about things like that until I have to, and I am going to try to be better about remembering people who are suffering.

But what I have been wondering about is why the first guy didn’t find the problem after two tries, and the new guy found it in 10 minutes. I asked my hero what he thought about that, and he said people see different things when they look at a problem. It depends on their experience but also their mood and the day they are having. He was actually pretty nice about it. 

I wonder how many problems that I do not solve because I am stuck in my way of looking at things. How often do I try to get a new perspective, have a new experience? How open am I really to learning and growing and getting better? The isolation and anxiety of a pandemic don’t help. But I am committed to thinking more broadly, more openly and intentionally about the problems that need to be solved. 

Perspective is everything.

I was recently in a local bookstore looking for a cookbook I was interested in, and thought I would just browse a bit in the religion section, out of professional curiosity you know. I came across a little book by one of my favorite theologians, N. T. Wright, entitled God and the Pandemic. I bought it with the cookbook, equally valid coping mechanisms in a chaotic world.

It is a helpful book, and makes two points that I have been resting with in my prayer. The first is that we should be mourning this pandemic as a people of God. Not looking for fault, but holding people in prayer and expressing our grief. He also talks at length, with scriptural reference, about how our job as Christians is to help, to do the work of relief and healing.

I have heard from multiple sources recently how pandemics were not unusual in the ancient world. Christians set themselves apart because they didn’t flee but stayed to help. They established hospitals and fed the hungry. It moved people’s hearts and was one of the reasons that the church caught on. People were affected by the witness of generosity and caring. 

I am not suggesting you do anything risky or unadvisable. Please be clear.

But I am also thinking that there is a lot of sin and evil that hasn’t taken a break during Covid. There is still racism, there is still poverty, there is still human trafficking, there is still domestic violence. I am lucky enough to be in my warm and peaceful house sitting this out, but that is not true for most people. I am definitely privileged.

So what do we do? First, stay informed. We are sponsoring a training on human trafficking next Thursday at 6:00 on Facebook Live. If you have children, grandchildren, neighbors who are vulnerable, sign on and be informed. One of our campus ministry students was talking last year about knowing where not to go in Youngstown to prevent being kidnapped. This is real and it is here.

Next, check on your neighbors. Violence knows no boundaries, no income limits, no education limits. We often don’t realize that friends, family and neighbors are being abused, or suffering from depression and anxiety, or hungry. Call, check in. Don’t pretend everything is fine or you can’t do anything about it.

Finally, take care of your own mental health and spiritual life and physical well being. It’s hard but be kind to yourself. If we aren’t well, we can’t help others. If we aren’t aware of the log in our own eye, we won’t see the splinter in another’s eye. Not to judge, but to care and help and love.

Let’s pay attention to what is happening in our world even in the midst of this pandemic. We are called as Christians to actively build the Kingdom of God. And we need each other. 

This weekend we commemorate and celebrate the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. With so much happening with the pandemic and politics I want to be sure it is not overlooked. I am doing the invocation at the local service Sunday afternoon. As I was contemplating what I wanted to say, it became clear in a sad and heavy way that the message hasn’t changed very much. 

There is still racism. There is still war. There is still poverty. There is still white supremacy. There is still violence against Black people because they are black. I can only imagine Dr. King looking down on us and shaking his head with dismay.

I hear people say, we need to go back to four years ago, or 12 years ago, or some time in the past when everything was “OK” or “normal” or “nice.” The problem is I don’t really know when that was. I am reading “Stamped from the Beginning” by Ibram Kendi.  Maybe some of you read his book, How to Be an Anti-Racist? You cannot find a more complete and well researched history of racism dating back to the 1600s. And here is the bottom line, not much has changed. This isn’t as much as spoiler alert as a depressing reality check.

I am glad every time I hear someone is appalled by the current level of vitriol and hate, sickened by the violence both verbal and physical. I am heartened by every expression of desire for something better. But let’s not be naïve. I am from Chicago, where in 1976, my neighbors burnt down a new home being built by a Black couple twice to try to get them to go elsewhere. I might not have seen an actual lynching, but they were happening. Going back isn’t helpful. 

I hope the way we go is forward. That we articulate a vision of acceptance, fairness, safety, education, housing, jobs, etc. etc. that is for everyone, and especially designed to level a playing field that has always been a minefield. I hope we can point a finger right back at ourselves and examine all the ways we hinder justice and benefit from inequity. I hope we commit to learning and accepting hard truths, listening to important stories that are heartbreaking but real. I hope we really mean it when we say we want change.

And then, of course, I hope we live it.