I have just finished reading a blog post that everyone should read. Hugh Hollowell has managed to capture the deep down unease which so many of us feel when we are truly aware of, and in relationship/conversation with, those whom our society ignores or considers irrelevant. (Here is the link, for those who wish to check it out.)
Though I am in no wise in a class with this inner city minister who runs Love Wins Ministries,I can relate. The sheer ignorance and lack of compassion that I see every day can be daunting. It is, in the end, one of the reasons I left organized religion, and it is one of the reasons I sometimes am almost debilitated by the unbelievable size of the task that lies in front of us if we are to see real change.
I can relate to the worry. Realizing suddenly that an recovering addict (and true friend) has disappeared again on the street and I haven't heard from them for several days, sitting in a council meeting where the (rich white) business owners are allowed by our (now governor elect) mayor and the city board to pass a massively unpopular bill to tell (specifically homeless) people they can't sit on the sidewalk in front of the shelters where they spend their nights and eat their meals, trying to decide how to teach my kids to not just care, but CARE, wondering if my chosen educational track will allow me at some point to create true Change.
I can relate to the sadness and sometimes almost shocking sorrow. When the 4 year old who escaped with her family from the violence in the Congo looks at me with big eyes as I help her mother set up a donated computer and asks "are you going to hurt me?" When I read (on the Internet because it doesn't make the news) of massive public rape and killing of innocent civilians in Guinea and realize that no one I tell that day really even cares, when I read Bishop McLeod Baker Ochola's appeals for peace and reconciliation (to whoever will listen) in Northern Uganda knowing that his wife and daughter are dead because no one in the Western world could be bothered by a dirty war in which tens of thousands have died (His daughter committed suicide after being abducted and gang raped.)
And I can relate at times to the anger. Having a pastor reject my notion that recovering victims of the war in Uganda deserve help ("Aren't they pagans?") or that we should try to help the needy in a nearby city ("don't you go down there?"), seeing the legislative changes that help the underdogs (laws that have been sweated and fought and prayed over) burdened with so many changes, amendments, requirements, and licensing fees that they only benefit well off old ladies on the "good" end of town, reading the manifesto of David Adkisson and realizing that he had allowed the conservative values that I grew up with and loved (the ones that taught me to value family, to value individuals for who they were, to distrust hegemonic authority) become so perverted in his mind that he felt he had to open fire on children during a production of Annie Jr.
But there are rewards as well. Just recognizing that people like Hugh Hollowell exist, watching the documentary of Transcendence Gospel Choir as they worship God in between dual worlds where they don't really fit, knowing that my friend has been clean for over a year, realizing that the 4 year old from Congo (and her big sister, and her new born sister, and her mother, and her father) actually have a chance to live free of fear now, sitting with my (spiritual) brothers and sisters in a living room and singing/worshiping/testifying/loving, listening to a room full of students discuss religion and intolerance and how they can possibly make a difference, seeing a "like" on a really important issue on Facebook, simply knowing that dialogue is happening, a few want to make a difference, a few care. Sometimes, this is enough
The task is not insurmountable, the odds are not too great, our numbers are not too small. In the end I must find comfort in the words of the great (and pretty "progressive" for his time) Apostle Paul: "If God is for us, who can be against us?" - Romans 8:31
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