Real Neighbors
By Charles Rush
September 8, 2013
Luke 9: 10-17 and Acts 2: 43-47 and Acts 11: 2-12a
[ Audio
(mp3, 6.4Mb) ]
e Op-Ed writer for the New York Times, Frank Bruni, wrote about a reality that we all know all too well this week, “Traveling without Seeing”.[i] With a 20 hour flight to Shanghai, he downloads a full season of ‘The Wire' and somewhere over the pacific, he is addicted to the show, which was admittedly very good. He's been on the ground for a day, in one of the more exotic cities in the world, at least the old part. And he notices that, rather than taking in the sights and smells of this far off place, he is actually walking around staring at a wee screen most of the day, typing with his thumbs.
That is the
irony of the internet age. It opens the world before us and at the same time we
are constricted through this portal more than ever, this ‘unprecedented ability
to tote around and dwell in a snugly tailored reality of our own creation, a
monochromatic gallery of our own curation”… “In theory the internet… should
expand our horizons… to uncharted territory… But at our instigation… it also
herds us into tribes of common thought and shared temperament, amplifying the
timeless human tropism towards cliques.”
We know how
this happens. It starts off filling dead time, like waiting for a late train in
Penn station. We know how it continues, when you have to communicate with
clients and your team that are all across the country and all around the world.
And then, there is your family that now has instant access to you, like my
daughter when she was in college, “Daddy did St. Augustine write the Summa Theologica?”
“Dear that would be St. Thomas, 900 years later, and this is
really not a good reason to
interrupt my meeting.”
We are
standing around, waiting for an appointment, check
some stuff. And sometimes I just zoom out during the morning commute and I picture greater Gotham, going to work
in the morning, each of us absorbed in our own bubble of concern, like that
video of the bees landing in the hive, crashing into each other like skaters in
the Roller Derby.
Of course,
the marketing people at Amazon, Netflix, and Google think it is a wonderful
thing to tell you what you need to watch or read next, based on what you've
already read or watched. On one level it is, but as I used to say to my
children, when they were in college.
You know, if you grow up in Summit, New Jersey; go to college at
Middlebury; take your junior year abroad in France with an inter-collegiate
program; graduate and go to work at JP Morgan, live in Brooklyn in your
twenties; get married and move out to Scarsdale, New York. You've gone all the
way around the world and you've never left home. Your good friends might be from
families that originally hailed from India, Korea or Trinidad but they think
pretty much just like you.
Unfortunately,
as Bruni notes, Cyberspace is a gated community, much like suburbia up and down
the East Coast. We have more access to variety but a more powerful
“technological ability to screen out anything that doesn't reinforce our
viewpoint”[ii]
Practically
every parent of Adolescents is concerned about where this is going. The New
Yorker had a cartoon where a kid asks his Mom, “Can I have some friends over so we can stand around and instant message
each other.” Now, I imagine that the 8th grade dance we have a
circle of boys standing around texting catty comments and another circle of
girls texting catty comments.
Unwittingly,
we've given the next generation another layer of emotional prophylactic which
all of us would have used if we could have when we were kids to avoid the
emotional embarrassment of actually having to ask someone to dance, knowing how
risky and really frightening it is to just put yourself out there, and maybe
get shot down.
But all
parents of this generation worry that their kids might just choose to break up
on twitter, avoid the face to face contact, the emotional pain… except that it is
also the source of our emotional growth, and really one of those things that
make us humane. No, we don't want that for them to avoid growing! We didn't
mean to create another barrier for them to hurdle.
What we need
is something that allows us to transcend these barriers and break on through.
In our text this morning, Peter has this break through moment when he realizes
that it doesn't matter if we are Jews or Romans because the Spirit of God blows
through all of us and brings us together in seemingly miraculous ways when it
moves in our midst. For an Orthodox Jew that was raised to be kosher, this is a
revolutionary change in thinking.
It took a
long time, but he took his cue from Jesus who fed the multitudes, regardless of
who they were. Jesus welcomed the zealous, like the Pharisees. He ate with
Roman tax collectors as well. He kept company with known prostitutes and the
religious leaders of his day. Peter just assumed that anyone that wanted to be
really spiritual would become Jewish, just like him. And then he has this
profound turn around when he realizes that the Spirit of God transcends each
and every one of us and is drawing us all towards a new relatedness that is
richer for us all being different and emotionally/spiritually whole.
I've been
watching a mini-version of this in my own family this for a year. My daughter
Annie met a boy in Brooklyn-where all the cool people now live by the way- and
they had a few dates. But he had to go back home, to Rome where he lives. He'd
been here on an exchange program at Columbia University and for the last year
he has been finishing his senior year and Masters thesis in economics at the University of Rome.
So, for the
past year, they have been calling and texting each other, sometimes
infrequently, but much more regularly in the past few months. It has been
wonderful because her boyfriend speaks only limited English, so as a Father, I'm wondering how these people will actually be able
to connect to one another emotionally because emotional conversations are
pretty hard to have in a new language. I've never really gotten beyond remedial
directions, ordering a table for two, and scanning the headlines. How do you
talk about hopes and dreams.
More than
that, for this generation, just taking a few months to talk to each other… In
my mind, that can only be good. So now I see her for dinner and ask, ‘what is
Antonio up to?' And she will tell me how his day or his week is going. This
summer he graduated and he's moving to New York in a week or so, to seek his
fortune. We'll see how it goes.
But I've already
seen a picture of him, his sister and brother, his Mother. His father, as it
turns out, grew up in New York and moved to Rome to marry his mother… The world
has become such a smaller place. I'm driving down the road with Kate, and I
say, “honey what if we end up with in-laws in Rome?”
She is like,
“Stop that now”… She's right… but sometimes I wish my great-grandmother, who
lived all of her life with a few hundred people, mostly second cousins and went
to the big city only a couple times. I just wish she could meet Antonio from
Rome. We are a lot better when we mix it up and I remember my great grandmother
decrying being so isolated. That part of our world is very promising, that we
might just transcend, draw the neighborhood bigger and become emotionally and
spiritually more interesting people.
But
spiritually, it is the humane part that we so need to grow. George Saunders
spoke at commencement this year at Syracuse University. He told our graduates
that he started coming to grips with what was important, reflecting on what he
regretted in his life.
“So what do
I regret?” he asked. “Working terrible jobs, like ‘knuckle-puller in a
slaughterhouse? No. I don't regret that. Skinny-dipping in a
river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys
sitting on a pipe-line, pooping down into the river in which I was swimming,
with my mouth open, naked? And getting deathly ill for
7 months afterward. Not so much. Do I regret the occasional humiliation
like one playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including this girl I really
liked, falling and emitting a weird whooping noise, to score a goal on my own
goalie, while also sending my stick flying into the crowd, nearly hitting that
girl? No.
“But here is
something I do regret. In 7th grade this new kid joined our class.
Ellen was small, shy. He wore these blue cat's-eye glasses that only old ladies
wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a
strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.
“She came to
our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased
(“your hair taste good?- that sort of thing). I could
see this hurt her. I still remember the way that she looked after such an
insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded
of her place in this world, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear.
After a while she'd drift away, hair strand still in her mouth.
At home, I imagined, after school, her mother
would say, you know: ‘How was your day sweeti?' and
she'd say, ‘Oh fine.' And her mother would say, ‘Making any friends? And she'd
go, ‘sure lots.'
Sometimes
I'd see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it.
And then they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing. One day she
was there, the next day she wasn't. End of story.
Now, why do
I regret that? Why, 42 years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to
most other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word
to her. But still it bothers me.
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those
moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering and I
responded… sensibly, reservedly, mildly.”[iii]
These days,
we might not even notice. I found myself driving past someone this week who was broken down on the side of the road. In the old
days, I probably would have stopped to ask if he needed help but he had a cell
phone. I was past him by half a mile before I thought
to myself, maybe you should stop anyway.
I think that
maybe that is what the church is becoming, a space where we can pray and
worship together and by praying and worshipping together, maybe becoming a
space where we can see one another. Maybe this is what we are called to do, to
see one another in need and respond in kindness.
I'm coming
to see the truth of what St. Paul suggested the older that I become. I'm coming
to see that growth in love is the point of our spiritual life. St. Paul said
“if I possess all knowledge, but have not love, I've missed the point… I can
have all things, but if my life is not driven by love, I've missed the boat.”
Or as a
colleague put it, after he had said Mass in the Maximum Security Penitentiary.
One of the prisoners, in for 25 years, summed up the point of the worship
service by saying, “Compassion is
Jesus… Compassion is God”…
Compassion is right at the heart of things.
It is really
what the community of the church is when they are doing the right things. They
let compassion happen. I remember a family from my youth who had a suicide that
blew apart their world in the middle of the week. I was remembering just how
mute people were back then, at least in the South, about suicide. Nobody knew
what to say exactly but the family was going to have people over and their
dining room which was in the middle of the house, had
all the wall paper off of it. They had been in the middle of changing the room
around.
Guys from
the church just appeared after work. They called more guys. People brought
everything they needed and they just kept working until they got all the walls
repaired and painted. It doesn't take away the pain that those deaths bring,
but sometimes sprucing up the house is exactly what you need. In its own way,
it is much better than words…
I think of
when our foster-children were just starting school and they had substantial
learning issues. School was about to become a much bigger problem than it
needed to be and Bev York came out of retirement and worked with Gio, Jessie and Annie in the afternoon and she was so good
at what she does. Gets rid of the threat of learning… makes kids comfortable in
their own skin… turns frustration into a positive presence.
And words
are helpful too. I got a card this summer from Alex Knox. She mentioned that
when she was going through the difficult time in her life as her husband Squire
died, that one of you wrote her this lovely note that really helped her
re-frame what she was processing, so that it became much more holistic- I'm not
sure what the word would be. But you were constructive and compassionate in one
fell shot. That is certainly the promise that resides
in this particular community of faith and it is a gift.
Compassion
is the piston that moves the spiritual engine of our life. Somewhere during
this next week, we will all pause for just a moment, and bring that to mind as
the country remembers September 11th.
I've
mentioned in the past that Darla Stuckey had just gotten off the ferry that day
and was headed to World Trade 1 when that first plane hit. She happened to be
walking by the nursery school that was in the basement of World Trade 1 when
the nursery school teachers made the executive decision to hand out the
toddlers to adults for an emergency exit and Darla found herself running,
walking all the way to mid-town clutching a two-year old.
They were
able to connect with her mother by the day's end. You can only imagine what
that young mother's day was like. Not surprisingly, they have kept in touch lo
these many years. And every year the mother invites Darla over for her
daughter's birthday. They never mentioned why she was there, she just blended
in as a friend of the family.
This year,
that two year old girl had her Bat Mitzvah, a reminder of just how much time
has passed and why we need to re-frame it too. Darla goes to the Bat Mitzvah
and the girl comes up to her at one point and says, “Are you the woman that
saved my life?”
“Well, yes…
I guess so”. We don't always think of it like that at the time. But the
recipients of compassion do… I hope that you will plug in here and make real
neighbors right around you. I hope you will share who you are and what you are
about with these people and become substantively compassionate. And, one day,
may you become blessed enough to save someone's life. Amen.
