There's Nothing Cool About It

One of the tropes of studying Southern Literature centers on Richard Wright and Eudora Welty. You can’t find two more different writers, but their similarities of geography heighten their differences, and illuminate broad themes in Southern Culture. They were born within 2 years of each other (I think—Wright in 1908 and Welty in 1910—I am not near any source to check and I can guarantee you I am too lazy to look it up later. You check it out.) They were born in houses on the same street, Congress Street, in Jackson, Mississippi.. Their lives were so different, that being born on the same street almost begs for comparison. A sympathetic white man let Wright use his library card, under the guise of getting books for the man, but they were for Wright. Richard Wright was beaten by his mother when she caught him reading. Welty, on the other hand, remembers her mother throwing volumes of Dickens out the window when their house caught fire. I guess the part that gets me is how two ends of a street in a small town can be so different (Jackson is Mississippi’s largest “city,” but it did not pass 100,000 until the 60s.) In the end, I don’t think Eudora Welty has much to say, but you probably should read (at least) Wright’s Black Boy (and probably Native Son, too).

I’ve got this idea for a series of videos, “Evangelism Stuntman.” It’d basically be me and some other hardy individuals doing pain-inducing stunts so people will believe in Jesus. “So” is a huge word there. The gag would be something like, “If I beat Rosario in a shopping-cart race down Upper Street, will you believe in Jesus?” (Courtnay: stop whining. Your man won’t get hurt. And even if he does, he is cool with taking one for the team.) Thoroughly post-modern: on the one hand, a backhand to the Come-To-Our-Church-Festival-And-Win-A-Car method of “church growth,” and on the other, a clear idea that indeed, this will get some of my kids’ attention. Michele Rodriguez assures me that she has a rap of the Lord’s Prayer that can be our theme music. All I need now is Michael or Nathan to say, “I’m Johnny Limestone, and this is Evangelism Stuntman.”

But back to the lecture at hand (10 points to anyone who can spot the reference there…) Over at Arlington School, there is a wall display, a letter sent from the fourth grade class at Sayre School to the 4^th grade at Arlington. Sayre School is a nice private school, a prestigious one, on the other end of Limestone from Arlington. There, on opposite ends of a street are two terribly different worlds. In the end, it’s not that there aren’t problems for the kids of the rich. My loyalties are to the kids of the 05. [In a minute, or in another entry, I will have to have an episode on de-coolifying the Rock La Roca—because right now, we are struggling with people thinking this is a cool place to be, and coming to watch but not participate in our life.]

The kids have a lot on their plates. A few of the teachers told me that this year is the worst mental health for the incoming kindergarteners they have seen. I can vouch for it. There’s a lot of sadness, anger, and anxiety in the kids. It’s what they see at home, or maybe what they don’t see at home. Here’s something Jean Vanier says in Community and Growth: “When a child feels that it does not belong to anyone, it suffers terrible loneliness and this is manifested in anguish. Anguish is like an inner agitation which affects the whole body, transforming the digestive and sleep patterns, bringing confusion, destroying all clarity about what to do, and how to act. It closes the child in on itself in feelings of uselessness and death, but also of anger and hatred which are intolerable. A child that is unloved , knows it is not lovable; it is not good; it is evil. Loneliness is quickly transformed into terrible feelings of guilt” (13).

Wow. How many of our kids are like that? The young man whose anger wells in a flash. The little boy whose mom just left the house one day and no one knows where she went. The little fellow whose mom is a stripper—he’s so young, but knows to be ashamed. The girl who has moved four times since November, all around a rocky relationship between her mom and mom’s boyfriend. The two boys who fight each other, because one boys’ father lives with the other boys’ mother. The one boy hates his mom’s new live-in, the other boy hates his dad and the other boy’s mom who took his dad from his mom. They can’t beat the adults (kids always have to take it) so they wail on each other.

Here is the conflict that will emerge at The Rock La Roca. I say it now so that no one will be surprise when we have to face it. The conflict will be around the disruptive behavior of the kids. We are going to keep pushing hard to work with the kids and youth of the community. But what will happen is that some people—parents, other kids, volunteers—will start to balk at working with the difficult kids, at being patient, at being firm in love. We’ll start to say things like, “They’re disrupting the other kids.” And that will be (is) true. We’ll say, “We need to be able to minister to kids without the disrespect and the hassle.” All of what we will say is reasonable, and no one would argue with it. Except me and a few others, because we see that this is, as Bob Lyon put it, the terrible logic of Caiaphas. “The Caiaphas Principle,” that someone should be sacrificed so things will run smoothly or be “manangeable,” makes such sense, is so effective, that Christians agree with its basic premises, even though it got Jesus killed.

Our Superintendent, Paige Williams, has a saying: “Meat-eaters take care of themselves.” What she means is that the stable people, the ones who have a Christian walk have lots of places to go where they can worship, participate in “church life.” They are, to some degree, on the right track. At least, they aren’t suffering from the kinds of terrible issues that plague the people who are messed up. The meat-eaters, then, need to do two things: the first is, quit being gluttons, assuming that it has to be about them “being fed.” That is, they will have to bear with the weaker ones (gee, and the Bible even says that!) Then the second thing is, they need to walk alongside the folks that have not quite made it to where the “meat-eaters” are. This, as best I can tell, is what Jesus meant when He said, “Go make disciples.” I know we all want to think it’s some magic process that the pastor is supposed to do.

But will this happen? Will the people who know Jesus, who have been privileged to lead moral, stable lives step out? It’s a simple fact that many of us have assumed that leading a moral and stable life has meant avoiding not just the things, but the people as well, that are immoral and unstable. Perhaps even in church, we reduced Jesus down to a series of things to do and not do. Jesus became nothing more than a plan for managing sin, not the life-giving power that crushes sin and its effects in our lives. He is life! Not an avoider. He was confrontational—both in the sense of causing the kind of trouble we call “rocking the boat,” and in interfering in people’s lives to the extent that because of His witness and presence, they either had to change or choose to die.

There is an amazing principle at work in the Jesus Life—it doesn’t take many people to lead change, to show a different way. A little bit of yeast works through the whole lump of dough.

p/g,

Aaron