A harmless and simple thing to fix.
Contagious and spreading quick...
Like cracks in ice,
Wholly claiming our lives
While we sleep.
We'll pray for Heaven's floor to break,
Pour the brightest white on blackest space,
Come bleeding gloriously through
The clouds and the blue.
Forcing one place from two,
Filling formulaic views,
Only love proves to be the truth.
When heaven meets the earth,
We will have no use for numbers
To measure who we are and what we're worth.
When Heaven meets the earth,
We will have no need for mirrors
To tell us who to be
And where we fit into this awkward point of view.
When angels meet the earth, may our bodies be light.
When angels meet the earth, may our heavy hearts untie.
When angels meet the earth, may our bodies be light.
May our bodies be light for you.
I continue to develop my thoughts on heaven - I still have a long way to go, but I love the lyrics of this song by Sleeping at Last. It's called Heaven Breaks.
Recently I started to work on getting our Uptown community newsletter up and going again - it had "gone out of production" pretty soon after we moved to Uptown.
So, Here's the first edition.
After finally getting our first edition printed, I had some fun walking around Uptown delivering these things - it was a great excuse to meet people and admire some of the older homes that are scattered throughout our neighborhood!
In the process of delivering newsletters, I also realized that most of the homes that have a "Beware of Dog" sign posted on the door, for the most part, actually do have a ridiculously scary dog on the other side. I used to think this was just a security "fake out" tactic, but I no longer believe this to be the case. Some of the dogs that I saw could have eaten me in two bites.
Ever since moving to Memphis, I've always been fascinated by this city's obsession with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Just take a drive around Memphis and you are likely to see Steelers flags waving in the air and Steelers logo magnets stuck on the side of cars.
Recently, I had someone explain the phenomena to me. Apparently, back in the day, the only teams that were on TV in the Memphis area were the Steelers or the Cowboys, and for some reason in the Memphis area, the Steelers became the team of choice. Today, despite the fact that the Tennessee Titans are only a couple of hours away, I wouldn't be surprised if Steelers fans outnumbers Titans fans.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers, but there is another Steelers team that I'm rooting for - The newly formed "Uptown Steelers"! The Uptown Steelers are made up of 3rd and 4th graders from the neighborhood and just started practicing this week. They've got a great team of coaches and they seemed to be having a great time yesterday when I went out to get some pictures of them for our upcoming Uptown newsletter.
Check them out:
Until the color of a mans skin
is of no more significance than the color of his eyes -
Me say war.
-Bob Marley, from his song War
I've always liked this Marley song. Can you imagine if, in our society, the place in which you lived was determined by your eye color? All of the green eyed people lived in "this" part of town and all of the blue eyed people lived in "that" part of town. And then, somehow along the way, the blue eyed people became more powerful than the green eyed people and started limiting access to resources for the green eyed people. As a result, the green eyed people lived in the "bad" part of town and the blue eyed people lived in the "good" part of town.
Overtime the blue eyed people began to refer to the green eyed people in derogatory terms like "those people". The green eyed people then grew to resent the blue eyed people for their disrespectful attitudes and responded in various ways, sometimes violently.
Over time, the blue eyed people began to feel bad for their rejection of the green eyed people from society and so they started to conduct political campaigns, service projects, and mission trips to assist the lowly green eyed people from the terrible conditions in which they lived. They called this justice.
Ok so maybe this isn't the best metaphor, but I think you get the picture. It's completely ridiculous. Blue eyed people despising green eyed people?
You would call me crazy if I told you that I didn't want to live next to a green eyed person right? But do you ever wonder how we got to the point where skin tone is considered to be any more sane as a way of separating groups of people than that of eye color?
Churches and politicians are notoriously bad at perpetuating these ridiculous classifications. They use the almighty "demographic" to determine who is most likely to "vote" for a particular platform or "attend" a particular service. And so the cycle of segregation continues. Old people here - young people there. Black people here - white people there. Liberals here - conservatives there. Rich people here - poor people there. Blue eyed people here - green eyed people there...maybe it's not so far fetched.
I know a man who has spent most of his life living in the streets of Memphis. He now lives in an apartment of his own. One of the things he likes to tell people is this: "At the end of the term "homeless person" is the single word "person"'. I think that's a good reminder to us all. At the end of all of our societal identifiers is always the word "person". Black "person". White "person". Poor "person". Gay "person". Green eyed "person".
I believe Memphis would be so much better off if we just scrapped the demographic sheets and the political agendas and gave up the language of segregation. No more political agendas catered to blue eyed people or green eyed people, because that's just ridiculous to begin with. We're all just people - we all deserve justice. A blue eyed person doesn't deserve justice anymore than a green eyed person.
I also believe churches would be so much better off if we would quit spending so much time on "cultural relevance" (code phrase for catering to specific demographics) and more time on "people relevance". Culture divides people into groups. But the Christian scriptures speak of the absence of this segregation: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." If we believed this, would have churches created specifically for blue eyed people and those created specifically for green eyed people? What about for black people and for white people? It's completely ridiculous when you really stop and think about it.
Ignoring these distinctions results in a different way of living. Now blue eyed people can live next to green eyed people. Sounds reasonable right? Now blue eyed people can go to the same schools as green eyed people. Now blue eyed people can vote for the same candidate as green eyed people. And now blue eyed people can be a part of the same spiritual family as green eyed people. Is this idea really that crazy?
As Bob Marley put it, until we learn to put these ridiculous societal distinctions aside, we will continue to experience "war".
I'm really fascinated by the way cities are shaped. The more I learn about my own city (Memphis) the more I see the practical implicatations that various development strategies have on the life of various neighborhoods. As a Christian, I am also deeply concerned about the impact that any development strategy might have on the lives of the poor.
One of these strategies is often referred to as "gentrification". I hear about the evils of gentrification all the time. Some even toss around that term when they discuss the neighborhood that Emily and I live in. Typically, gentrification is reffered to as a an influx of wealthy people into a low-income neighborhood for the purpose of redevelopment. The wrong approach to gentrification can often result in the formerly low-income neighborhoods facing an increase in property values, which in turn increases rent, and as a result can force some lower income residents to move out. I would have to agree that this is something that must be addressed and countered, but let's not stop there.
Arguing that gentrification is the primary source of problems for the poor in 21st century urban America is ignoring the reality. I'm by no means a proponent of gentrification, but before we get too far in an analysis of gentrification we must first stop and consider the more pressing questions like: What made a particular neighborhood become classified as "low-income" to begin with? What factors contributed to the creation of a neighborhood that would cause the "gentry" to want to come in and redevelop? How can we keep from recreating these concentrations of poverty in other parts of our city in the future? To me, these are the "root" questions. If we hadn't established these huge concentrations of poverty in years past, the idea of "gentrification" wouldn't even exist.
One of the biggest factors in the extreme segregation of our city is urban sprawl. Over the last 20 years in the city of Memphis, the low-income population has been scrambling to stay close to the jobs that have steadily moved further and further east. I would have to imagine that the impact of this sprawl has forced thousands and thousands of low-income residents to either be dispersed or settle into a life of desperate poverty, isolated in the shadows of downtown Memphis. To me, this alternative is no more desirable in terms of justice for the poor than are the effects of gentrification.
Somewhere, we have to find a place to meet in the middle. I recently came across an interesting article in Time Magazine that was written in June, 2008. In the article, the author quotes a study done on gentrification and the actual impact that it has on neighborhoods - here's a pretty interesting segment:
"A new study by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Pittsburgh and Duke University, examined Census data from more than 15,000 neighborhoods across the U.S. in 1990 and 2000, and found that low-income non-white households did not disproportionately leave gentrifying areas. In fact, researchers found that at least one group of residents, high school–educated blacks, were actually more likely to remain in gentrifying neighborhoods than in similar neighborhoods that didn't gentrify — even increasing as a fraction of the neighborhood population, and seeing larger-than-expected gains in income."
The article goes on to state that there is no denying that problems do arise out of gentrification, but that many of the perceived problems are largely over-exaggerated and sometimes actually non-existent. I would guess that a similar case could be made by those who would defend the sprawling model of development - which could be described by some as "newer, cleaner, and safer". It just goes to show that when we begin discussing something we don't understand or have set our minds against, we tend to only point out the negative extremes - but rarely is anything all bad.
It seems that cities tend to play up both of these extremes - massive sprawl and massive central city redevelopment can both get caught up in the corporate engines, primarily running on a profit motive. The developers will continually promise of a life problem free living - for a certain price - but the reality is, that will never be the case. It's time we come to grips with the reality of community living.
Community living requires a resiliancy and willingness to fight and care for those around us, even when the problems seem really big. Unfortunately, the more we run (sprawl) or the more we make "them" run (gentrification), the bigger the problems become. So what if everyone just stopped running? What if Memphis just stopped worrying about "growing" and just started worrying about sustaining and living with the things we already have? If we did so, I believe we could see a beautiful new Memphis emerge. Our city, already one of the most diverse cities in America, has the opportunity to become a national model of justice based gentrification. In this new Memphis, no longer will we ignore the forgotten residents of our city (because it's hard to forget about them when they live next door). In this new Memphis, no longer will schools be segregated, no longer will churches be segregated, and no longer will jobs be available only to those who can afford the commute.
My hope is that our city can integrate intentional efforts at sustainability with a healthy dose of compassion. I believe they must go hand-in-hand. I like how the great Bob Lupton puts it:
"Gentrifcation is our new reality. Some rail against it; others laud it's arrival. But for good or ill, it is our new reality, and it will only increase in the years to come. Gentrification means to welcome a new economic and social life for our cities and, with the proactive involvement of the saints, can introduce a whole new era of hopefulness for the poor. Our mantra must be: gentrification with justice."
Poverty is a really difficult thing to grasp. What causes it? What impact does it have? How can we address it?
It seems everyone has an answer to poverty: Government creates welfare, churches set up programs, celebrities set up publicity campaigns.
But maybe in all our efforts to address poverty we overlook what poverty really is. Some might say it's the lack of adequate resources. I'd say that's partially true.
I like what Bob Lupton says about poverty:
"The greatest form of poverty is having nothing of value to give."
When we look at poverty through the eyes of charity, we only see ways for us to maintain our role as the "giver". But when we expand our view, we seek out ways to initiate an equal exchange, allowing everyone to experience the joy that comes with giving.
Poverty isn't just about resources - it's about equality and God's humanity. No one, whether they live in the heart of Africa or in the heart of Memphis, should be stripped of the dignity that comes with giving. God has placed in each of us something of value to give. The role of "giver" was never meant to be assigned to a select few in society.
So how can we address the overwhelming drain of poverty? It seems to me that we have the responsibility to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to give of the gifts that God has generously given to each of us.
