7/31/11

I live in a predominantly black neighborhood.  I find, even as I type this, that I’m saying it as if I have been diagnosed with a disease.  I moved here because I felt like the Lord told me to—pure and simple.  Different circumstances added up to it, and I felt and feel called here, although this is not easy.  However much it bothers me, I see the Lord’s hand all over it.

He often works this way with me.  Months ago, I realized that although I had prayed a thousand prayers of forgiveness for my father, I had not actually forgiven him for the years of abuse, neglect, lies, and abandonment.  I was living in a community of Christian people who, among other things, spent a good deal of time and effort in care for the homeless people of Gainesville.  Because it has a VA hospital, homeless people flock to Gainesville.  There is a larger-than-normal proportion of homeless people relative to the rest of the population.  I noticed in myself an enormous reluctance to go out to serve them.  At some point, I noticed a strange correlation:  most of the homeless people in Gainesville were my father’s age and station.  Many of them had sons whom they had abandoned in a way similar to the way my father had done.  I had also recently learned that my own father was homeless himself.  After years of surfing on couches, he ran out of other people’s good graces. 

What God showed me was that serving these people was exposing the grudge I was still holding.  So there is no surprise that He commanded me to serve them.  In their faces I saw everything I still hated and resented about my father.  In their faces I saw how my father stood in need of mercy and compassion.  Over time, by God’s grace, I served my father in those men.  It was him to whom I extended warm food and a good conversation, him I came to know in their stories of success, failure, and the ongoing struggle to outlive their regrets.  It was him I extended compassion to when I told them “I’m sure they’d just be glad to know you’re warm tonight.”  And, before I knew it, I was healed. 

The ancient church practice of penance has been deeply misunderstood by protestants.  The church fathers recognized that sin involves a certain amount of denial, a pulling the cloak over one’s own face, so as not to see things as they are or be seen for what one is.  Penance revisits the place of denial, where the deception began, and tells the truth at that place.  It is the closest thing humans can experience to time travel.  By going back to the deception and telling the truth, we can create an alternate reality predicated on that truth.  So, as Lewis says, we unsay the spell, word by word.  It is for this reason that the tax collector, after dinner with Jesus offers to give back four times what he had defrauded others.  It is not a matter of buying redemption; that price only One had the means to pay.  It is rather a matter of telling the truth where one had believed a lie.  

Let no one tell you different, because this is the truth:  racism is still pervasive in this country, and particularly in the south.  Towns and cities that were segregated by unjust laws are now segregated almost as sharply by unjust economic conditions and the kind of systemic racism that shows itself in neighborhood zoning decisions and gentrification.  I knew none of these things as a child, when I explicitly resisted whatever I recognized as racism on all fronts.  In downtown Gainesville, I tried to extend a hand of fellowship to people of all races and backgrounds.  I did what I could.  A few days in my new neighborhood reveals to me that those interactions cost me nothing.  There was virtually no risk in showing benevolence from the implicit position of power I was in.  Here, outnumbered, I realize that if I was never consciously racist, I was practically so.  I internalized beliefs I was unaware of.  I am seeing them now for what they are; and I am repenting.  I am begging that God will give me grace to follow him into this discomfort extract the lies that have rooted themselves invisibly into my soul. 

And so, here, in the middle of a Durham night, I hear the Lord’s voice in the empty sanctuary that is my living room, saying he will not be content that his children should be oppressed by lies.  The devil is a liar, for he has lied from the beginning.  But God has called me into his fellowship, and into neighborhood with those he loves, without asking whether it would comfort me.  I find him here in Durham as he was once found in Bethel, And I struggle wth him.  I will do so until He releases me; I will stay here, desperate for the blessing for which he brought me out of my country.  I will find a way to sing the songs of God in exile and look forward to the days when all nations and tribes sing his praise.