Walking Through The Villages

When Jesus walked through the villages of Galilee, was this because he did not have a vehicle?  We would suspect as much.  After spending most of the last 3 years without a car, and the last 10 or so living in places where it is simply more advantageous to walk than drive, I have come to really see the value of walking to where you are going.  I often walk around our city, reading a book.  It is incredibly peaceful.  It is a paradoxical discipline of isolating yourself from distractions like the chores of your home, but it also opens the mind to a liberating sensuality of being stranded in the middle of the city scape, with the sky as your roof.

Walking, especially without a cell phone, leads me contemplation and prayer, and it forces it upon me, because I tussle not with the temptations of shallow digital consumption.  It changes the way I read books, the insights are happening to me in the clarity of the outdoors.  It challenges my patience, because I can get places only as fast as I want to sacrifice my energy for the day.  It humiliates me, when it starts raining and I have walked myself downtown, a mile from my house…with no one to call and pick me up.  It forces me to drop into my friends’ local businesses and say hi as I pass.

I also see my neighborhood differently.  Our neighborhood, as I have mentioned, is teetering on gentrification.  There are people who want to better our neighborhood beautifying it and chasing out crime.  I have been critical of late that these ventures can be shortsighted.  I admit there is some restoration needed in our neighborhood, but I think I understand better why I am nervous about Neighborhood Associations and Community Initiatives.  I fear we are going to simply deport our misfits to another neighborhood.  Misfits walk around.  I do not want to categorize anyone by name here, but those are my friends I see walking.  There are people in neighborhood with schizophrenia, alcoholism, veteran post-traumatic stress, and maybe just an aimless wanderlust that turns to sloth with time.  We bump into each other in the streets.  See I have learned something walking here, in some neighborhoods, maybe the less clean, less kept, people do not use sidewalks in the broken down blocks.  These friends ask for a dollar for the bus or a soda, they forget my name, they ask about my puppy.

There are churches in our neighborhood, there are pastors, there are yuppie activists, and they want to see transformation, but in order for transformation to go deeper than the superficial beautification of our blocks or the improvement of our own properties, we have to walk our streets.  Not with our dogs, not with our children, just by ourselves, with the proverbial sign on our forehead reading, “please talk to me, I want to know you.”  That is what Jesus did.

Gentrification & Urban Mission

There is a tension many of us face in the U.S. when it comes to Urban Mission. If you are white (though not necessarily), middle-class, and educated, you bring a certain culture with you, wherever you go. That is essentially gentrification. It is a bit of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation, and it is happening in our neighborhood right now. I have recently been getting lots of emails from our Neighborhood Association, generally well-intentioned I might add. They usually entail something like, “have you noticed the people offering to shovel snow…seems like a convenient way to case a house during the holidays” or “watch out for people who drive slowly, they may be interested in stealing metal from your house.” I hear that! The last thing a Neighborhood Association wants is people driving slowly and offering to help each other in a snow storm.

So someone posed to me, “what do YOU do?” Am I part of the gentrification? Gentrification really is not a racial issue, but there is a racial tie often associated with the socio-economic group that moves in and the group displaced. It seems if you are part of the hegemony, you are either gentrifying by moving into low-income areas, or contributing to economic, usually racial, segregation through homogeneous congregation. There really is no benevolent choice in either, but there are bad choices. I think the worst choice is to move into a neighborhood with the intention to “transform” it, but through investing in transforming your own property.

Gentrification happens when the following unfolds without engaging the core of the neighborhood: Someone who can afford to live in other neighborhoods chooses a low-income neighborhood, buys a cheap house, uses the savings to fix it up, buys a $100 rain barrel from Whole Foods, and develops an isolated utopia with a great front yard garden…maybe even forming a Neighborhood Association. This raises property values and taxes and pushes out the people who made THEIR life in that neighborhood. The only upside is it probably chokes off the slum-Lords. (I am looking at you Mark, with the white pick-up, who owns the boarding houses on Franklin Street and evicted a jobless man who was going through chemo for Throat Cancer).

Our Neighborhood Association breeds mistrust of the people living on the fringes and it communicates primarily through meetings setup through online social networking, excluding the long time residents who (based on KNOWING most of my neighbors), do not have computers. There is only one solution…the choice of the Christian (though not exclusively). You can segregate or you can gentrify…or you can be a middle-class person, move into a low-income neighborhood to save money, and instead of re-investing that money into a Prius and hard-wood floors, you can use it to empower your NEIGHBORS to invest in their homes, their gardens, and to simply have them over for a meal. This is beautification, enrichment, in the name of God, which does not displace, but empowers. I know Christians doing this in our neighborhood. They care for single moms, they invest money in re-decorating OTHER people’s houses, they share meals…and I might add I never get emails from them about “suspicious” activity, because they know who those people are. Those people actually know the man others always see walking around with long hair, dark hats, and just looking at people’s houses…and those Christians know he is not a creepy predator…he is Keith, a 53 year old long time resident with special needs, who lives on his own.