Monthly Archives: January 2013

This week in homelessness

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Another flurry of news (to go with the week’s snowstorm) on homelessness in Madison.

First the not-so-good. The property Occupy Madison was hoping to purchase for housing was sold to another buyer. The group held a successful fundraiser this week and is hoping to locate another property that would suit its needs.

Token Creek, where Occupy has spent most of the winter was under water this week. Fortunately, churches in Sun Prairie again opened their doors. They have to leave the county park in February, and there are no solutions to this ongoing crisis. Here’s a pic of the scene from earlier this week:

76321_4144614817646_874521071_nIt’s not my photo; it was shared with me and if you would like to know more, I would be happy to speak with you privately.

A couple of pieces on Sarah Gillmore and the Day Center. From Joe Tarr of Isthmus, a profile and a look at what’s happening at the day center, as well as some questions about the future after the temporary facility closes in March. I’ll put a plug in for Sarah. I first met her almost three years ago and was knocked over by her passion, her no-nonsense approach, and her deep commitment to the homeless community. She rocks! Here’s an interview with her as well.

Also from Joe Tarr, a brief piece on an effort to provide a shelter for homeless vets. The man he interviews was homeless and a guest at the Drop-In Shelter in December after being released from the VA hospital. Where have we heard that story before?

Right now, the best place to find out about needs of the homeless community in Madison and how you can help, is the Feeding the State Street Family facebook page.

It’s going to be bitterly cold tonight again.

Bishops inspiring

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By one of those remarkable coincidences I came across the addresses (or reports) of three bishops to their dioceses. They are very different in content, context, and tone, but each in its way, is inspiring, offering hope for the future, and reflective of an Episcopal Church that is mission-focused and forward looking.

From Bishop Shannon Johnston of Virginia, the remarkable story of his developing relationship with the Rector of Truro Parish, one of the congregations that left the Diocese of Virginia.

From the Diocese of North Carolina, Bishop Michael Curry’s convention sermon. If you think Episcopalians can’t preach inspiring sermons, have a listen. I heard him preach a powerful sermon at a conference a year ago. If you ever get a chance to hear him in person, jump.

And from Bishop Andy Doyle of the Diocese of Texas, a report on the innovative ministries and mission that are occurring their under his guidance: council13-bishops-report. I’ve blogged about Bishop Doyle before and I commend his book, Unabashedly Episcopalian.

One of the things Bishop Doyle mentions very late in that report is his effort to recast the role of the Bishop: as preacher, teacher, communicator. Looking at the episcopacy from below, it seems to me that for the Episcopal Church to thrive in the present moment, such re-visioning of the bishop’s office is crucial. (Recasting the role of rector is equally crucial, especially when the tendency is to focus on the administrative tasks at hand (I say this after a day spent in a two-hour executive committee meeting, followed by a couple of hours dealing with issues that grew out of that meeting as well as the ordinary tasks that cross my desk and my email inbox each day). Still, Bishop Doyle is right on. I don’t know if he’s aware that in articulating those areas of teaching, preaching, and communicating, he is returning to the Early Church’s notion of the bishop’s office, as well as the importance of those particular roles in later reform efforts. Such refocusing is needed today, and the three bishops I direct your attention to are doing that to great effect.

Redeeming Civic Life in the Commons

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We’ve been having a lively conversation about sacred space at Adult Forum on Sundays, about where we find it, what it is, and then we moved into talking about the understandings of sacred space in scripture. Our conversations are part of the master-planning process Grace Church has been undergoing for the last year or more. You can learn more about that process here. Many of my own reflections on Grace’s unique role as the church on Capitol Square can be followed here.

I came across an essay written by Eric O. Jacobsen: Redeeming Civic Life in the Commons. He writes about developments in urban planning in post-WWII America that have transformed the landscape across the country and also transformed communities. He also writes about church’s role in rebuilding communities and the notion of the common good:

I think that one of the most important secondary roles that the church plays in the neighborhood is to help redeem the notion of community. Whatever else I’ve already said about the specific attributes of shalom, underlying all of them is an implicit commitment to some aspect of a common life that is lived out in the common spaces of the community. It is getting increasingly difficult for members of society to articulate on what basis this common life exists.

A second role for churches is this:

I think that the church in the neighborhood could exert this kind of centripetal force on a neighborhood if it was cognizant of the value of this role. In order to do this, a church would have to have a pretty strong sense of its physical connection to its neighborhood. This perspective would have been taken for granted when there was a stronger sense of church parish in the community.

Unfortunately, many churches have completely lost any sense for how to do this. Many churches have adopted the suburban campus model that places its buildings in the middle of a large parking lot and is completely cut off from the fabric of the neighborhood. Or older churches that are more embedded in a neighborhood often develop a kind of fortress mentality toward the neighborhood in which they are located.

We are now two years away from the protests of 2011 which were, in many ways, a spontaneous outburst of community–people coming together around a notion of the common good. I’m struck by the way the State Capitol has been transformed in those two years.  The actions of recent months on the part of the politicians have transformed the Capitol into a fortress. It certainly is no longer “the people’s house.” And our common life has suffered for it.

Grace Church served a unique role during the protests. For a few weeks our open doors were both a witness to a shared common life and a haven of respite for many. Among the key questions we need to ask ourselves as we talk about our physical spaces is how we might make those spaces available for the whole community, and how our physical spaces might witness to the good news of Jesus Christ and to a vision of a common good.

Some other ideas on place and space:

The pathetic battle over diocesan seals

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Last week, the conflict among Episcopalians in South Carolina reached a new low with a court battle (and restraining order) over the right to use the seal of the Diocese of South Carolina. We used to fight over doctrine or LGBT equality, even property (of course, we still do). Now we fight over diocesan seals.

If anyone on the outside would care enough to take notice, I’m sure this would open up a whole line of jokes. I can imagine the cultured despisers in Charleston issuing bon mots over their chardonnay or whiskey, if they even pay attention any more to the internecine battles of dying institutional Christianity. I can imagine, too, how this battle might become a marketing campaign for Episcopalians (of whatever variety) who are embarking on evangelism (we’ve got the truth and the true seal!). I can imagine how generations alienated from the institutional church for all sorts of reasons including our propensity to fight among ourselves, will laugh, and ignore, and seek meaning and purpose in life elsewhere than in the good news of Jesus Christ.

What pains me about this is not the conflict, although that is very painful. What pains me most is the energy and expense spent on a battle that no one will win, energy and expense spent in a futile effort to retain the signs, seals, status, and prestige of empire. For a seal is nothing more than that—a symbol of power—used over the centuries by the ecclesiastical hierarchy to impose its will on the people. Blessed by empire, a seal tries to preserve imperial power. And that, ultimately, is what this battle is about.

We saw earlier this week at the inauguration Episcopalians praying, worshiping, kowtowing to empire, praising the president while our drones continue to destroy innocent lives in Yemen, and the poor here at home languish. We see in South Carolina last, desperate efforts by Episcopalians on all sides to grasp at and retain power, wealth, and privilege.

In South Carolina and elsewhere, the Episcopal Church, which proclaimed its commitment to restructuring and “putting everything on the table” at General Convention last year with restructuring resolutions and task forces, rejected a possible future in order to preserve a past that is long gone. What would happen if instead of speaking of “continuing dioceses” or “faithful remnants,” the Episcopal Church used these situations to experiment with new possibilities? What if we gave up the power, prestige, and wealth of the past (and present) and seek to be the people of God, the body of Christ, in new ways, no longer bound to the power and property of previous centuries? What if we imagined and dreamed a new church, new ways of being church into being? What if we let go of the past, of all that it means, and venture forth on new journeys, trying to live faithfully to the gospel of Jesus Christ in new ways, new ministries and new missions? What if “we had the same mind in us that was in Christ Jesus, … who humbled himself, even to death on the cross?”

What would happen if we gave up our power, prestige, property, and seals?

Faith and unbelief: some links

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I’ve gathered some beautiful and challenging writing on faith and doubt and the struggles many have with identifying as “Christian” in the twentieth century

First, Christian Wiman, raised Southern Baptist, estranged from the church, now exploring that complex relationship between faith and doubt in our contemporary world:

I do feel that some people may be called to unbelief—or what looks like unbelief—in order that faith may take new forms. Emily Dickinson is a good example of this, or Albert Camus. But I also believe that God requires every last cell of yourself to bow down. Or perhaps that verb, requires, is wrong, or that it’s God doing the requiring: It’s more like your nature requires, in order to be your nature, that every last cell of yourself bow down. There is still some satanic pride in me, for which I pay a high price.

Casey Cep on the spiritual journey of Reynolds Price (part I, part II):

It pains me to know that Price considered himself “a literal outlaw” of Christian churches because of his homosexuality. In one of his final books, A Serious Way of Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined (2003), Price confessed “though I’m not a churchgoer, for more than sixty years I’ve read widely in the life and teachings of Jesus; and since at least the age of nine, I’ve thought of myself as a Christian.”

Like the mystic Simone Weil, who resigned herself to “the conclusion that my vocation is to be a Christian outside the Church,” Price found his community with Christ beyond the sanctuary.

I never met Reynolds Price, but I carry his meeting with Christ in my consciousness, hold the words of his translations in my heart. Here was a writer, who many assumed would appeal to me for all his imaginary worlds, but who I only ever understood as a brother in the faith.

Pained as I am that he felt himself an outlaw of Christianity, I cherish the knowledge that he and I meet forever in the communion of saints.

Justin Erik Haldor Schmidt writes beautifully of “coming out of the closet” as a Christian, and the difficulties he has in confessing his faith publicly:

Those who know me or have read me will probably know that I have often claimed that I am an atheist. I would like to stop doing this, but if I had to justify myself, I would say that it is for fear of being confused with that blowhard with the ‘John 3:16’ banner that I am unforthcoming about what I actually believe. I am infinitely closer, in the condition of my soul, to the people who feel God’s absence– the reasons for this feeling are a profound theological problem, and one might say that it is only smugness that enables people, atheists and dogmatists alike, to avoid grappling with this problem. I am with the people who detect God’s hand, perhaps without even realizing it, where the smug banner-holder sees only sin: in jungle music, dirty jokes, seduction, and swearing. I am with the preacher who puts out a gospel album, then goes to prison on fraud and drug charges for a while, then puts out a hip-grinding soul album, and then another gospel album. I am with the animals, who can’t even read, but can still talk to the saints of divine things. I am sooner an atheist, if what we understand by Christianity is a sort of supernatural monarchism; if we understand by it that God is love, though, then, I say, I am a Christian.

The food stamp challenge and the faces of the hungry in Madison

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I participated in a press event organized by Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice. They are encouraging faith communities to participate in the Food Stamp Challenge. I was invited because Grace Church has had a pantry since 1979.

Here’s what I had to say:

In 1979, visionary members of Grace responded to the growing need in our community by starting a food pantry. Those founders aren’t around anymore but I’ll bet if they were, they would tell me that they had no idea that the pantry they founded would still be in operation nearly 35 years later.

I see them every afternoon lining up before our pantry opens its doors. White, African-American, Hispanic, Asian; old and young, parents or grandparents with children, occasionally even college students. I see the diversity that is twenty-first century America, the diversity that is hunger and poverty in our great nation on display within sight of the State Capitol. Their stories are as diverse as their ages and the color of their skin—the elderly or disabled on fixed incomes who are trying to scrape by until the next check comes, unemployed or underemployed people trying to supplement the pay from a job that doesn’t provide a living wage; college students who can’t afford to pay tuition, room and board; homeless people, too. On Saturday mornings, our guests are mostly employed, but their low-pay jobs don’t pay them enough to make ends meet. I’ve handed food out to people who had absolutely nothing to feed their children that afternoon; I’ve given formula to a grandmother whose baby grandchild had been abandoned by her mother and she had come to us in desperation.

These are the faces of the hungry in America. The SNAP program, what we used to call food stamps is intended to supplement, not provide, food for people who have nowhere else to turn except to food pantries and meal programs, people who are supposed to be able to feed themselves. And the amount that’s provided is barely enough to ensure adequate nutrition—the equivalent of $29 and change every week per person.

Those of us with homes, jobs, adequate clothing, and adequate food have no idea what it’s like to live without those things. As the gap between rich and poor continues to widen in our country, and we’ve learned that the US has the greatest income disparity of any of the world’s developed nations, the gap of comprehension of what it’s like to live without is growing as well. Most of us never see those lines waiting outside the pantry, or later in the evening, the line of men waiting to enter the Men’s Shelter at Grace. If by chance we encounter it, we avert our eyes or cross to the other side of the street. To experience that world, the world of want and deprivation is a greater shock than traveling to another country. To experience it, even in something so simple as the Food Stamp Challenge, is to begin to comprehend the struggles faced by so many in our society, struggles faced day after day, year after year.

As we approach the Christian season of Lent, traditionally a season of fasting and repentance in preparation for the remembrance of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, it’s appropriate for us to imitate the one who we believe became like us, by walking in the footsteps of our brothers and sisters who live in poverty and want.

 

Old, female, and homeless

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It’s an article on San Francisco, but it’s about every city in the US, too; including Madison.

In San Francisco, there’s drop-in center just for women:

Located in the Mission District, the drop-in center is basically two large adjoining rooms, the otherwise bare walls brightened by a single big-screen TV. When I visited Oshun, I found a diverse group of forty-five women, each sitting or sleeping in a chair surrounded by her belongings. Some had old suitcases with broken zippers, while others had stuffed their things into ripped garbage bags. The lucky ones found a spot near a wall. They’d at least be able to rest their heads by putting a blanket against the wall behind them. The rest had no choice but to let their heads hang.

Yet what choices do older homeless women have? Despite a spike in older homeless clients, says O’Connor of the St. Anthony Foundation, there are still precious few services to help women like Marcia and Dorothy. “If you’re a homeless woman, you’re guaranteed to be assaulted on the streets,” said Paul Boden, organizing director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP), a West Coast coalition of homeless organizations. Boden, who was homeless himself at 16 after the death of his mother, also served as executive director of the city’s Coalition on Homelessness. “Women try to double up with guys to be safe, but they usually get beaten up by those guys, so their options are limited.”

One of the regulars at Oshun is an Argentine woman named Zulema. She’s a 65-year-old who, when I met her, had been sleeping in the plastic chairs there for six years. “I stayed in shelters for four months, but the process is inefficient and I never felt safe,” she said. “The shelters are very bad for women, especially older women.” She told me she had become accustomed to sleeping sitting up on hard plastic. “You have no control of your life at the shelter,” she said. “At Oshun, I can come and go.”

It’s cold in Madison tonight, do you know where you’ll be sleeping?

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Do you care where the homeless are sleeping tonight? Some people in Madison do.

This week’s cold snap has demonstrated the power, innovation, and love of Madison’s newly-energized community of advocates for the homeless. They’ve exploited social media to highlight the problems, strategize solutions, and mobilize the community. The bitterly cold weather energized activists and volunteers in new ways, to provide shelter for those who remained homeless last night–at a church in Sun Prairie and at Prairie UU Church. And now there’s an effort to actually plan for weather emergencies! You can follow all of this at the Feeding the State Street Family facebook group, and find out how to help out. A brief visit to that group will also make clear who all are taking leadership and pointing the way forward.

There really are some amazing things occurring around homelessness in Madison. For example, there’s the work of Sarah Gillmore and the staff and volunteers at the Daytime Warming Shelter. They’ve got a website that details everything that’s going on from help with resumes to yoga. And each week there’s an update on news and other activities. Here’s this week’s.

 

And Occupy is working to purchase a building to provide transitional housing. You can read about that here.

If that’s not enough, it looks like we’re making progress as well in beginning to talk about shelter for people with medical needs.

A news item last week helps to explain the continued prevalence of homelessness in Madison. The vacancy rate for rentals in Dane County is a little over 2%, meaning that landlords can be very choosy and as we all know, when demand exceeds supplies, prices rise. According to statistics compiled by Madison Gas and Electric, the vacancy rate in several Madison zip codes is 1.5% or below. This vacancy rate may also explain the boom in apartment construction, though from what I can tell, most of that is directed at students or the high-end market.

 

A little cold water to throw on Obama’s speech yesterday

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From Tom Junod: The War Obama Forgot:

I am not speaking, of course, of the wars that the president spoke of yesterday, in his second inaugural speech — the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that he spoke of without naming. I am speaking of the war that is currently being prosecuted in countries where we are not supposed to be at war, like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. I am speaking of the perpetual war, the shadow war, the invisible war against invisible enemies, the war whose latest manifestation came just two days ago, when three men identified as militants, names unknown, were killed by an American drone. I am speaking of the war that the president did not speak about, even though his Administration has never called it anything but a war, and it has killed thousands of people.

Read every word of it.
But here is the difficulty: the technology is so good that the criteria for using it are likely to be steadily relaxed. That’s what seems to have happened with the U.S. Army or with the CIA in Pakistan and Yemen. The overuse of drones and the costs they impose upon the civilian population have been carefully and persuasively documented in the Stanford/NYU Clinics’ report, Living Under Drones. I will focus on only one striking example of how the moral criteria have been relaxed in order to justify the overuse and the costs. According to an article in the New York Times by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, President Obama has adopted “a disputed method for counting civilian casualties” that makes it much easier to call drone attacks “proportionate.” In effect, it “counts all military age males in a strike zone as combatants.” If the targeted insurgent or terrorist leader is surrounded by, or simply in the vicinity of, a group of men who are, say, between the ages of fifteen and sixty (and even drone surveillance can’t be precise about that), an attack is permitted, and everyone who is killed is counted as a legitimate target. But this isn’t targeted killing.

Christianity and the Second Inauguration–Our Perilous Journey

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Today began with the traditional service of Morning Prayer at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square.

Merlie Evers Williams offered the invocation. Video and text here.

Luis Leon, Rector of St. John’s Lafayette Square, offered the benediction. Part of that prayer:

We pray for your blessing because without it, we will see only what the eye can see. But with the blessing of your blessing we will see that we are created in your image, whether brown, black or white, male or female, first generation or immigrant American, or daughter of the American Revolution, gay or straight, rich or poor.

We pray for your blessing because without it, we will only see scarcity in the midst of abundance. But with your blessing we will recognize the abundance of the gifts of this good land with which you have endowed this nation.

During the Inaugural, Evangelical superstar pastor Mark Driscoll tweeted this:

BBJX5-nCAAAeKnDThere was considerable controversy last week over the inclusion of evangelical Luis Giglio, even more controversy when he withdrew. There was controversy in 2009 over the decision to have Rick Warren pray. These are rituals of civil religion; even the service at St. John’s is largely a ritual of civil religion (to the extent that when FDR began it, the Episcopal Church was by and large the civil religion of the US).

I think Episcopalians would do well to engage in a lively conversation over whether bowing to that tradition of civil religion bodes well for us in the twenty-first century. Today,  I cringe at the Episcopal Church’s association with political power and prestige, and our apparent implicit consent in the wars, torture, use of drones, and assault on civil liberties, as well as domestic policies that have worsened the plight of the weakest in our society.

On the other hand, whatever conversation we might have would be drowned out by those like Driscoll who reject our Christian faith and the president’s; and by the shouting match between the religious right and the secularists who want nothing religious in the Inauguration; for example decrying the use of bibles in oath-taking ceremonies.

Negotiating our faithful journey among those alternatives requires a great deal of prayer, scriptural reflection, and much more humility than most humans have.