Seeing You

19 Sunday May 2013

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“Put one hand here, one there,” I said.

And off he went.

“Ah, I did it wrong,” he said

“It’s okay,” I said. “You didn’t hurt anything. Ty it again. Just don’t stop moving when you put the drum down.”

I was teaching a fifteen year old to run a drum floor sander on an oak floor I was refinishing.

When we finished he said, “Thanks, that was interesting.” It was a good feeling for me too.

Working with young people — I like it, old teaching young, and young helping old.

Earlier in the day, in the parking lot at the church, I ran into Angelina. When I saw her, I got down on both knees. She’s five. We are friends. She comes to church with her grandma. Two years ago I adopted her for Christmas. She hasn’t forgotten. We always trade hugs when we see each other, and it’s safe and warm with us, like Christmas.

When I was in my twenties I remember wishing I had someone besides my parents who thought I was special, who believed in me, who would help me forward. It didn’t happen. When I was young, no one ever said to me, “Wow, you are going to do well as a thinker, as a writer, as a leader. Go for it!”

Very few people, besides my mom, saw what I was to become, and helped me move toward that. I didn’t get much help running the sander.

But more helping and mentoring of us all is needed, more seeing into what someone might be and calling it forth. More compliments are needed, more affirmations, more prophesy, more invitations to work together, more opportunity. More showing people how to do what we know how to do is needed. More crossing the generation barrier is needed.

Today I told a young mom who put on a garage sale for the church, ” I like you. You are really organized. You communicate well. I have something in mind for you. Let’s talk later.”

We will. She has got it, the organizational thing, the ability to make stuff mind, the smooth talk skill, the super woman energy source.

Last week I told my friend Glen, who was taking off on a camping trip with eight to ten boys and a few dads, “Man, I love your concern for young men! It is so cool how you have helped the kids in your group without dads. You are the real deal.”

He is! Glen is old, but he is helping young. He is believing in someone besides himself. Glen knows that young men without fathers should not be unattended. He is preventing something; he is crafting something. He is manufacturing social endowment, giving away the store, adding value to human beings.

We need this. People around us need to be adopted, empowered, endowed. We need to tell more people, when we see them doing well, ” You are the real deal! You are something special! You are going to go far!”

What are we thinking, keeping quiet? We are not noticing potential, not seeing the amazing person standing before us, not affirming genius when we see it. We should not be so silent. We should enthuse over them all, the old the young, the disabled, the failed, the smart, the average.

We should smile over them, beam on them, hover behind them, like good parents, shouting, “You can do it! Go for it! You’ve got it in you!” And we should include them in what we do, and show them how to sand, to refinish and to redeem life.

It isn’t that we ever want to flatter, bribe or manipulate with pseudo compliments or false affirmations. We aren’t looking to use people to do what we need to do. No, we want only the truth about each one; we only want to speak out the real value and actual potential in each person, teaching as much as possible as opportunity presents itself.

What is needed is to give the young an opportunity. What is needed is to give the old a vision for passing along their own precious, rich, beautiful familial, occupational, psychological, spiritual and social endowments.

The thing is to get out of ourselves enough to recognize that the amazing people around us are headed somewhere, and that we can help them get there.

There are two ways.

We can walk into rooms as if to say, “Here I am!”

Or we can walk into rooms gushing in redemptive, life-changing honesty and humility, “There you are!”

This Is What I Do — Kind Of

14 Tuesday May 2013

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What it’s like to do what someone else does?

What’s it like to be a rock star, the President, the criminal, the scientist, the spy, the addict, the mother, the etymologist the homeless?

I don’t know. I do kind of know what it is like to do what I do. It’s a bit complicated, but in a way I like, but maybe I can explain it to you. I have four vocations —  at once. I know the inside and out of a quadratic profession.

I am a thinker-writer-teacher-pastor, and I like that; I especially like the bleed between the four. I like the blood and guts and danger in the mix, and the safety in it too — swords, advances, battles, salves, bandages and medicines.

As a thinker I sit a lot and brood. I chew the conceptual cud.

Then I write. As a thinker-writer I become Adam, exploring Eden. I become Aristotle, sorting out the creation. I’m Linnaeus. I hunt for new species. I find little thought beasties. I name them. I tend to them with adjectives, feed them synonyms and poke them a bit with rhetorical devices. I classify the little lovelies, and groupify them.

I pick, sort and stackify words, sentences, larger units. At first, it turns out badly. Then I move them, again, again and again until I better like the ways the word-thoughts line up — just right, like school children at a classroom door.

Then I pat them on the heads, if they please me, and press “Publish.” Then people read them — a few do.

That’s a little bit what it’s like to be a thinker and a writer. Add eye strain, rejection and insecurity and you are getting there.

But it’s not like that. It’s never that clean.

Then, when I am the teacher, I throw the words I’ve discovered as a thinker and writer out of my mouth out into an open spaces with people in them. Then I’m like a Plato, Jesus, Pascal or perhaps Thoreau — or perhaps not. Its interesting what happens then. The ideas I send out scatter.

Written words hold their place a bit and shake, but spoken words run more crazy, like bottle rockets.

As the teacherly words come out of my mouth, they tangle up with the all the words that have ever been said before and with all the words extant in whoever is listening to me. Then my precious little word stacks bounce around inside their heads.

Then just for fun and to establish rapport, I may swing a verbal right jab or linguistic left hook or a kick in the funny bone or what ever comes to mind to try to get to the students. The goal is to get to them — fast and hard.

Sometimes my teaching words stick in people, like spears, and savage what they think, and sometimes the words I speak knock people sideways and they head off in a new direction. That’s kind of cool.

That happens less than you’d think. And then there are the weird things that happen to teachers. Sometimes the ideas I’ve delivered change shapes right in the air, right between me and the listeners, and magically becomes something I didn’t even say.

Then people compliment me or criticize me for telling them things the very stuff they packed into the room with them. It can get interesting. Sometimes it turns out great! I’ve gotten credit for many ideas that other people invented while I was talking. It’s one of the perks of the teacher — bogus credit.

That’s a bit of what it’s like to be a teacher. But not much.

And when I am a pastor my vocations kind of all combine. A pastor, as I understand it is a leader. He is a good thinker and writer and teacher who is taking people place — mostly toward God.

As a pastor, I lead a lot. That’s what I do. I’m not sure what other pastors do, but this is what I do. I lead other people into who God meant for them to be, and I lead places into what God meant for them to become, hopefully. That’s the medicine in what I do.

To do this I listen a lot, to other people’s words and to reality, and to my honed sense of what’s good and what is not, and I try to listen closely to God.

As I listen, I look for a pattern, a sense of things, a drift, a needed next step, a forming personality, a set of emotions that need validation and for a new word or concept. Often I listen through other people, listening hard for the thinker, writer, teacher and pastor within them. Then I help them explore and discover the medicine within the next clear step.

It’s my opinion that people trying to follow God often have a sense of what’s needed next, especially if someone is there to listen, challenge and affirm what they think they are hearing.

The writer, the teacher the pastor as I experience them are really the same thing. These professions are in interaction with each other and with a kind of deep looking, inside and out.

This is just a little bit like what it’s like to do what I do.

I love it!

If you did it, or anything even vaguely like it, you would like it too.

How To Be Okay With Yourself

09 Thursday May 2013

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“Green is a restful color,” she said. We were sitting in a kitchen in Washington, D C in the spring. The view outside, gorgeous green.

“Yes, so you might not want to do your yard back in San Diego in xeriscape,” I said. “No green, no rest — for your psyche.”

There isn’t enough anyway, anywhere, green or rest.

Our deep selves are like the seas in Albert Pinkham Rider oils that I saw in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art yesterday, all dark, tossed and stormy — threatening too. Perhaps we disapprove of ourselves and others too much.

We look through an imperfect spyglass. No inward, stormward peering eyes are 20/20. All human eyes critique, out of focus. We look out and see other people’s thunderstorms. We look in and see terrifying oceans. Better than anyone else, we see our own conflicted selves. Men in containers lost in wind-blown seas see what only the boated, angled and near-tipped selves can see — disaster coming!

Once, broken over her disabled condition, my daughter told me, “I hate myself.” We both wept. More tragicified salt water. What else was there to do?

I think God may see differently.

Perhaps we haven’t noticed but God is much less judgmental than we are. He rides the wind above our inner storms. His patience with our distubifying selfishness, greed, lust and brazen indifference is one of the the most obvious things about him.

Perfection is more relaxed with imperfection than imperfection is with itself. God looks at us, sees it all, and loves.

God sees us, within the forgiveness gifted us in Christ, as pure and good and even perfect. We have trouble agreeing with him.

But God is right about us. In Christ, riding in his sound, safe, shuttered, sea-worthy craft, the sea calms, and we rest. He places to our eye an accurate glass to look in and out at what he sees, and we see for the first time, good, in focus.

Can you be good with seeing yourself and others as good?

If so — then you too will see spring greens, and rest.

Kind

29 Monday Apr 2013

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The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness,
And time to speak it in–you rub the sore
When you should bring the plaster.

Shakespeare, The Tempest

“He called me a boy,” she said. “Why do people do things like that?”

“People don’t think; they just say stuff,”  I said trying to help. I could tell she was hurt. Someone rubbed the sore.

“You look very nice today. That’s your color,” I said, bringing the plaster the best I could.

“Thank’s!” she said and smiled, bandaged, just a bit.

Kind –  it’s a medicine. It’s salve to the soul. We need it more. Shakespeare got it right, as usual; too often the truth we speak lacks “some gentleness.” We bring a wound when we should bring a bandage. We get fired up, we don’t think, we comment, we misread, we blame, we critique, we attack, we wax unkind.

The other day I locked myself out of my office. My office manager drove from home, to let me back in. She didn’t say, “You should pay more attention.” She just smiled, and let me in. Kindness. Beautiful.

Kindness is the reaction that has a way of minimizing embarrassment, normalizing weakness, affirming loss. Kindness is a warm blanket draped over a shivering soul.

I told someone about a failure of mine. She said, “You did the best you could with what you knew. Using the facts you had at hand, you made the best decision you could at the time.” That’s true, and kind.

My disabled daughter Rosalind can be shockingly kind. If I mention, in casual talk, that her friend Steve can’t speak, and he can’t, she’ll say, “But he can sign really well.” If I say about another disabled friend, “He has trouble controlling his anger,” she responds, “But he really tries. I think he is frustrated.” Rosalind’s default response toward others with disabilities is kind.

This is revealing. When we get it, the pain, when we have experienced it, disability or failure or loss, then kind gets worked into us.  Kind hugs come from the one who knows what it is to need a hug.

Kindness is a kind of strength. Recently one of my friends stepped to a table after a meeting to help another friend, suffering from Parkinson’s, rise from his chair. Another went to his other side, and both, taking an arm, lifted him up so he could stand, and then they waited until he could gather control of his body and leave the room with dignity. That’s kind.

Kindness is not a wimp. Kindness is a tough guy. Kindness does some serious shutting up about things that could be criticized. Kindness does some heavy lifting for those who cannot lift themselves. Kindness crushes criticism with  help. Kindness has a kind of super strength. It can nullify meanness. It can erase hurt. It can doctor a broken ego.

How unwise are they that lack the gentle touch.

Every healthy soul is constructed out of a thousand kindnesses received — and given.

Elizabeth

17 Wednesday Apr 2013

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Then I asked, “Why do you like the trees?” speaking loudly to be sure she heard me.

“They make me feel calm and peaceful,” Elizabeth said.

“I like the trees that grow over the walk,” she went on, pointing to the ones that met and formed a canopy ahead over the sidewalk. “I like the birds in them, and I like the clouds that look like angels.”

I looked up as we walk along together, slowly, to accommodate her cane. There were some patchy white cumulus clouds overhead, but I couldn’t see the angels.

“The birds sing in the trees,” she said.

We walked under the leafy canopy, I luxuriated in time with her, ambling along beside her, passing now through this wonder and that, and suddenly the world felt magical to me, seeing it from her angle, through her eyes.

“I have a lot of memories of this community,” she said. “My mom and I pushed a shopping cart up the hill from Target with our Christmas tree in it.”

“How long have you lived here?” I asked.

“I lived here with my mom for twenty-one years,” she said.

When we reached her apartment, I felt like I was entering a sanctuary. Right away, our focus went to the cat, sleeping on a paper bag under the old TV. Cinderella got up, and came over for some love, rubbing against her leg.

“She likes me to pet her,” she said, “and rub her ears. What color do you think she is?” She paused and then answered herself, “She’s white, and black, and gray around her head.” Then she asked uncertainly, “Isn’t she?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Those marks around her eye are gray. She is a sweet kitty. She’s perfect for you.”

“She’s skinnier than when I got her from the animal shelter,” she said,”I think she lost some weight. Probably needs to lose more.”

The cat was overweight. It was also deaf. It had formerly been abandoned, but it now it had bonded with her, in only two weeks.

She looked up at the wall above her, covered with photographs, clippings and paintings.”My mom liked Indians,” she said. She paused, then said, “It’s really hard sometimes, with all her stuff here around me.”

“You’re doing really good,” I said, “With Cinderella and your therapist, your recovery groups and your church family.”

“I guess,” she said. “I’m trying. I’m trying.”

We talked a bit more. I left with a hug. Her hearing aid screeched.

Walking back though the old neighborhood, under the canopy of bird-filled trees, underneath the unseen angels in the clouds, I thought about her life.

Fifty years, side-by-side with her mom, fifty years of being completely taken care of, and then suddenly, boom, her mom is gone, and she is alone, deaf, caned, uncertain, grieving desperately, struggling like all of us, for sanity, and yet ever so bravely, taking the first, small, courageous steps forward into a new world.

I’m so glad I know her.

Elizabeth is taking care of her cat.

Elizabeth is taking care of herself.

She is taking care of me too.

Tidal Worship

09 Tuesday Apr 2013

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The water was high on the rocks in the flood control channel. I flew along parallel with the water, powering down the freeway, ogling the tidal flow beside me, eager now to see the marsh.

I accelerated up the overpass and swept down the other side of it, through a long banked turn, and there it was — the salt marsh, flooded. It was filled floor-flat. Where there had been mud, now there was a lake; where there had been sinuous narrow marshy channels, now there were wide rivers — marsh to bay, one body of water, with the ocean beyond, rocking the continents.

Life is tidal. I love it. I don’t. I don’t when my emotions flood me under. My experiences, thoughts and feelings, taken at the flood and not, at high tide and low tide, can be a little disconcerting.

Last Saturday evening I sat in Brown Chapel at Point Loma University and watched a band, all young musicians and singers, lead worship. People in the audience stood, some raised their hands, some went forward to stations to do art, to write, to reflect.

I did nothing. I just sat, and watched. I felt nothing. I didn’t stand. I never raised my hands. What was moving some of these worshipers, what filled them with passion, left me as placid as a mud flat.

It’s interesting, how we are differently moved.

And then again, the other day, driving my car and listening to worship song playing loudly on the car system, I broke and cried. It was a song I’ve heard many times, stored on my iPhone, but this time it washed me under.

What’s the deal? Obviously, the movements of our emotions, our spirits, these are not something we control. Our passions, our worship moments come on us as they will, not by choice or by plan but somewhat inexplicably — low feelings unscripted and high emotions unanticipated.

But despite this tidal reality, this emotional norm, we are easily made uneasy with ourselves. When others are moved by a worship service, a prayer, movie, song or other public performance, then sometime we too feel that we should be moved. In church, I have experienced an identity shift crisis over this. Should I be true to my own feelings, my own identity, or must I conform to the current group’s identity, their experience? It is common, in church, to experience a peer mandate to “get with it,” spiritually.

But when we experience church differently from others, the worship dissonance may disrupt our sense of harmony and create internal conflict. “What’s wrong with me?” we sometimes muse in worship settings. Others around me are most alive to the moment, I feel most shockingly dead.

I can stand should-to-shoulder with others who are pouring out their hearts to God in worship and feel nothing. I have even had the unpleasant experience of feeling critical of fellow worshipers, as I stood with them, and critical of the whole “worship” experience around me. It is possible, to be insanely yucked up while others are insanely fired up.

What’s wrong? Nothing. Nothing is wrong when we experience a worship disconnect more than is wrong with anyone else.

Jesus himself explained this quite nicely in John 3:8, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

Jesus was saying that we who are born of the Spirit, the children of God, the ones who know and worship God, don’t control the coming and going of the Holy Spirit of God.

Face it, we don’t know when or where the Holy Spirit will flood us, move us, emote us, inspire us, and when He won’t.

“Duh!” we don’t control God. We don’t control inspiration. We don’t control the presence of God. We don’t control the tidal movements of God. We don’t decide when we will be moved, when not. We don’t control the inner workings of our souls. We don’t have much control over emotions.

That acknowledged, here’s the deal: Don’t try.

I’ve been through it all — the ecstatic moments, the inert ones, the high tide, the mud. I’ve been struck emotional by the presence of God. I’ve been in his presence and felt absolutely no awareness of him. We all have.

The upshot of all this?

Relax. The tide comes in, the tide goes out; that’s normal, within you, with God.

Life, worship, emotions, your own soul — it’s all tidal.

Hungry for the Desert

04 Thursday Apr 2013

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As I looked up, I saw one of the little ones jumped to a higher rock, slip – all gangly legs and feet — and slide down again from where it had started. It was a mistake of inexperience.

The lambs had been born in February, and now — only the beginning of April – there hadn’t been enough time yet for them to master the heights.

Through the spotter scope I watched three ewes and three lambs hop to another rock, stroll into a grassy spot to munch on the new grown green of spring, then scramble on up the high ridge. They stopped for a moment at the top, white bodies silhouetted against the bright blue California desert sky, and then disappeared.

To find these reclusive Bighorn Sheep, I had looked high, I had looked low, and I had looked  long, through the binoculars, and then –magically –they were present, like unicorns found when turning the page in a fairy tale. They were high in the rocks above me. When the rangers brought over the spotting scope, a small crowded gathered.

“Oh, I see them now. Ah, there are the little ones!”

We ogled and oohed for a while, a community of lookers, looking.

I loved the day in the Anza Borrego desert, the sheep, the fellow gawkers, all the wonders that we saw.

We hiked the cactus loop trail, clomping up the mountain between flaming magenta blooming beaver tail and hedgehog cactus. The chollas glowed all around us as if they had put on halos.  In a nearby wash we found a sand plant, growing by a cheese bush. It looked like a tiny pine cone with purple and white flowers popping from its dry, grey sides. It was small, and we had to kneel to focus in on its tiny flower-decorated sides.

Later we off-roaded back to a Kumeyaay Indian site where we scrambled through round boulders to find mortero after mortero in the rock tops, proof of family and community and lambs and ewes of a different kind previously thriving in the desert.

On the drive home, up the mountain and out of the desert, we switchbacked through the mountain lilac all purple and blue-flamed around us a wild turkey flushing in front of the car, sailing over the top of us to the road side, finely feathered and stately as it strutted down the bank and under the bright green trees.

We chatted as we swept up the fields and forests in our wake, trekking down from Julian and back to San Diego. I mentioned the very young homeless couple who I had found sleeping in one of the classrooms at the church last week. They broke into the church, ate up all the children’s snacks, smashed an unlocked storage cabinet, and when discovered in the morning, explained their behavior thus: “We were hungry.”

That gets it. These young broken ones, addicted to the meth, are very hungry, and I think they will be more and more.

And the mountain sheep and their lambs are hungry too, for the bright green grasses growing high on the ridges, and the Indians too, who lived here long ago, they were hungry, hunching over their morteros in the desert, grinding grain for bread and waiting to eat. And the sand plant hungry and thirsty too for more spring rain to sooth it’s drying sides, and the turkey crossing the road, headed somewhere to feed and drink in safety, and me and my friends too, headed back to our homes, from a day out —  all hungry.

I love the desert!

I need the desert.

It fills me up, just a bit, to live a little more, in a stunningly beautiful and hungry world.

Blessed Are The Poor

25 Monday Mar 2013

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“I’m frightened!” he said and clutched his little bag of chips with both hands. He was sitting on his nanny’s lap. The whale leaping from the water in front of him was way too big. It was a scary, crazy, child-eating whale!

When he left Sea World that day, he broke, on the sidewalk, yelling and screaming. It was all just a bit too much. He was eventually picked up and carried off to the car. He needed a good nap.

“Blessed are the poor…” said Jesus.

The little four-year old, on the sidewalk breaking down, was blessed, I think, because he was poor, and he knew it, poor in emotional reserves, poor in self-control and in poor in comfort. And so he was blessed by his nanny, holding him at the whale show, picking him up off the sidewalk, carrying him home to rest.

There are many kinds of poor, and there are many possible blessing, but it is safe to say we are all poor; and therefore, we might all be blessed — maybe.

There is poor in righteousness. That pretty much covers the globe. There is poor in health. We all get there one day. There is poor in self-control, (which is episodic for all at best), poor in insight, poor in resources, poor in wisdom, poor in freedom from addiction, poor in peace, poor in love. It goes on, and on, and on beyond on until it is obvious that it is all.

Poor, and frightened and screaming, eventually —  all!

On the same sidewalk — all.

Poor – all!

And so all are all blessed, according to Jesus, if I understand him right, if we realize, recognize and embrace our poverty. If we don’t we aren’t blessed because not knowing we need, we won’t look up, won’t ask and won’t say, “Thanks,” and therefore will miss the blessing of being helped.

It is only when we honestly realize that we are poor that we know we need something more than ourselves and look up and get that needed help. Blessed are all the poor who open the door to the rich comfort of God. Blessed are the nannied.

There is one way more that the poor might be considered blessed. They have the opportunity of figuring it out.

Today I’m poor –  poor in peacefulness. I’m upset.

I’m doing my taxes. That’s enough right there to turn the stumach acid pump on. And there is more, much more, of life, to stress over, responsibilities to mangage,  payments to be made,  contracts to be signed and killer whales to stay out-of-the-way of. There is, life! It’s a kind of constantly stressful poverty.

But I am realizing that each moment has its answers, its solutions, its calm-making decisions, if I will just figure it out. The tax questions, after some hard work, are now answered on my worksheet page, and so will all the other pressing business be answered, as I, figure it out.

It is a blessing, to get to figure it out. It is a blessing to have poverty of some kind, to have taxes of some kind, and to have a brain of some kind, and to get to figure it out after some fashion, and to get up off the hard sidewalk and go home and take a rest afterwards.

Poverty is always our blessed opportunity to figure it out.

And so, happy indeed are the poor, for a least two good reasons.

One, they will be helped, if they look up from their tantrum and ask.

Two, becuase they don’t have enough, they get the blessing of figuring something out.

Happy indeed are the thinking, thankful, receptive poor.

Easter Is For Everyone

17 Sunday Mar 2013

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P1020582We ripped fabric for the cross.

The house filled with the sound of tearing, then came the rhythmic hum of the sewing machine and then the hiss of the iron and the soft sound of voices.

Soon there were piles of bright thread on the floor and stacks of colored strips, four inches wide — blue, green, red, yellow, black and white. Then we sewed the same-colored strips together. We ironed down the seams and folded the strips into piles of looping colors, each now thirty feet long.

It looked like we were making streamers for the Olympics. We weren’t. The colored strips, representing the nations, will be braded together and draped on the cross at the front of the church at Easter this year.  We have it in our minds — Easter is for everyone!

Steven Chan emailed me this week. His Chinese Bible study group wants to use more space at the church. I emailed back, “Yes, we’d be glad to work with you on expanding your use of the building.”

Ricardo Rivas, one of the leaders of the Hispanic congregation which meets in our building told me this week that their start time is 2 pm on Sundays. We’ll change that on the sign.

When we met to do the Easter basket project on a recent Saturday, the family from Sri Lanka was there, as well as black and white and Hispanic children. The nations had gathered to care for the poor.

On Easter we plan to read the scripture in several langages, Japanese, French, English, Spanish, Portugese and Chinese.

The Sunday after Easter, when we celebrate the communion, and our leader from Jamaica will prepare the elements. One of the members of our food team, from Peru, will hand out the bags of food after the service.

Last week my new Hispanic friend Hugo and I worked on the banners that will grace the staircases to the front door of the church. Hugo and I have a lot in common, a love for mechanical things that go fast, and a passion for all kinds of people to know that God loves them.

The first banner we will put up on the front staircase of the church,  it says, “You’ll fit here!”

They will.

mixed

13 Wednesday Mar 2013

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P1020582When I came around the corner of the breezeway in the church, I was a bit surprised to see a shopping cart stuffed with suitcases, and on the hall floor a rectangle of lumpy sleeping bags and blankets. Then it came to me; a bedroom had been set up in front of my office door, the lumps, under the blankets —  people sleeping.

I had just walked to the office from a large room down the hall where polling booths had been set up and volunteers were in place to receive the ballots of people coming to vote in the special election of a new senator.

There the stuff to make a senator; here, a temporary homeless camp.

Sleeping bags, ballots, blankets and voting booths – the ebb of life mixes the levels and layers which ferry us along, some on concrete, some on mattresses, some with acceptance speeches in their dreams, some harboring alarms and starts and stops and frights all night.

I recognized them, woke them, offered a bit of food from our pantry, and sent them off with some little plastic bowls of peaches and a kind goodbye. They had been at church on Sunday and it came to me with a slight shock that I had never before woken parishioners sleeping on the sidewalk of the church.

But really, this is no anomaly. This is life everywhere. The poor and rich rub shoulders all over the world, one huddled under a dirty blanket, one housed and roofed and clean and safe and voted into power not far away.

It is our nature to seek out a compartment, a place, a niche and corner for the classes, the races, the ages and the genders. You live here, you over there, you up high, you down low, you in this church, you in that, you with this role, you play that, you sleep here and you can lay out over there. We tend too much to craft walls of common social bricks, of preferred addresses, and of identical building blocks.

We tend to set up our camps where we get what we want, moving to the suburbs for the schools, the inner city to blend in with our people, moving downtown to be upscale, moving to the country to get away from the city. We move west or east or north or south to find that little nook, that sequestered cranny, that briefly quieted corner where we can toss out a blanket, lie down a moment with our people, shield off something fearful and recover from our differences.

But when I go to my church, and I see the mix, the family who drove over in the Lexus, the family that walked over from the homeless camp, the one who took the trolley, the one who came in the Mini Cooper, the family from Peru, the one from Porta Rico, the beautiful woman from Jamaica who lives alone, the man with the addiction to power, the one addicted to meth, the woman who just moved up from Mexico with her children, the navy couple from the east coast, and I see them sing the same song and lift up the same hearts in the same place, then I know the truth, we are much the same.

Mix, toss, mash, mingle and lump together — the church is a sacred corner, a wooden floor and a cross-covered roof where we may see we are the same. There we all, with hands raised — children of one father, with identical hearts weighed down the same sins, weak and strong all in need of the same forgiveness — there, we cry out to the same savior.

I like the mix.

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