The Beatitudes

In preparation for attending the play "Jesus Christ Superstar" with a friend of ours who is not too fond of Christianity as he conceives of it, I emailed him this short introduction into the Christian ideal.

Matthew 5:1-10

Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them, saying:

"Blessed are the rich, for theirs is the kingdom they have created.

Blessed are those who are impervious to sorrow and trouble themselves not with the pain of others, for they comfort themselves.

Blessed are the powerful, for they have received their inheritance.

Blessed are those who are self-righteous, they have already filled themselves.

Blessed are those who are unwavering and unbending in their pursuit of justice as to not let a single error go unpunished, the favor will be returned to them.

Blessed are the self-unaware, for they do not have to worry about God.

Blessed are the lovers of war, for they will be called sons of men.

Blessed are those who persecute others in the name of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of this world.

Blessed are you when you insult people, persecute them, and falsely say all kinds of evil against them because of me.
Rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward."

Of Rabbits and Men

With a thick cover of snow covering our back yard, we've recently discovered a couple sets of animal tracks indicating that we may have a couple more neighbors than we thought. We had so far made our acquaintance with a tattered tom cat, the raccoon who occasionally raids our garbage, a family of pigeons who seem to have taken a liking to our bedroom window, a pair of crows in the maple tree, along with their entourage of silly sparrows, and the three boisterous squirrels who chase each other around our alley. We've become familiar with all of their sights and signs, so we knew right away that the long tracks in the snow must have belonged to somebody new. A few nights ago, as I was opening the door, my eyes suddenly met with the frightened stare of a little white rabbit crouched by the jasmine bush. We looked at each other for a good minute, both surprised by each others presence, before leaving each other alone and going our separate ways.

The sight of all these animals in the city still startles me, even after living here for over a year. Where I come from, cities are ancient human enclaves effectively separated from nature over the course of many centuries. The sight of a squirrel in a city park is a rare and celebrated occurrence, and rabbits can only be spotted far off in the country, away from human dwellings. The only time I had ever seen a raccoon was at the zoo - a funny creature who liked things so clean that he meticulously washed all of his food. When I first looked in the dictionary to see if I knew the Polish name for the scary creature that dug in our garbage, I could at first not believe that it was the same thing - in fact, I still wonder if the animal I saw at the Polish zoo as a little girl might be a different type of raccoon than those in Minnesota?

Even if it should be so, I can't hold the same disbelief with regard to squirrels - they are definitely the same species, yet I am about the only person I know who stops at their sight with amazement and wonder. There are, in fact, so many of them here, and they cause so much damage to people's houses, that they are seen as an outright nuisance - much like rabbits, who nibble on people's flowerbeds and gardens. One man's joy is another's pest... We even have a friend a couple of blocks away - if you are a child in Poland you may want to stop reading right here - who regularly shoots squirrels with his BB gun!

The culture of shooting is a subject for a post of its own, but the various connotations of raccoons and squirrels actually made me think of people the other day. They remind me of a man I got to know back in Poland, who came on numerous missions trips with a deep sense compassion for the young people of my country. Shortly after I moved here, we had a conversation about the part of the city where Billy and I chose to live, and I was taken aback by his open hostility towards my new neighbors - "these lazy troublemakers who live off others' taxes and make our streets unsafe." I was instantly struck by his radically different attitude towards two groups of people who live in very similar realities. It would be an understatement to say that Polish cities are no safer than the south side of Minneapolis - the difference is that they are an ocean away, and so the pain does not cut as close; it is not as personal as having your car broken into or a friend's child wounded by a gunshot in the back yard. It's less of a challenge to love broken people and to see their beauty at a distance - like an occasional squirrel in the city park.

I wonder, however, if the depth and transformation that love is really about can ever truly happen at a distance - unless it begins in the back yard, in close community with others different than us who will occasionally eat our lettuce or bite through our roof.

The Poor will Always Be Among Us

The more I work in the social services arena, the more I come to see the grim reality behind Jesus' words. I often work with clients whose poverty(material and spirit) is a result of a complex web of addictions, mental illness, poor parental modeling, and plain old selfishness. I have recently been thinking about what it would take to end poverty forever.

We all know that just throwing money at poor families will not lift them out of their circumstances or break the deep cycles in which they are imbedded. Let us imagine then that we were able to provide the most comprehensive wrap around services possible. We give the family stable housing in a neighborhood with mixed income so as not to concentrate poverty, we provide them with job training and positions in jobs making livable wages, we provide their children with day care and the best education money can buy, then we have counselors and therapists provide intensive therapy for both the family as a whole and the individuals, we give them domestic abuse training, chemical dependency training and support, life skills education on how to budget and manage a household. We then connect these families with spiritual communities where they can be loved and cared for, and be given meaning and connection. Even if we did all of this, we still cannot account for an individual's choices. A person's unwillingness and lack of desire to change can make all of these lovely programs as useless as giving vegetables to a lawn mower. I have been in many sessions where I bend over backwards trying to come up with new and creative ways to help families and when the dust clears it comes down to the fact that they do not want to change their ways.

Even if every person on the planet was freed from the curse of poverty there would still come along people who make poor choices both for themselves or in regards to others. A mother chooses herself over her child and uses substances in the womb, that child does worse in school, is less equipped to get a high paying job and thus the cycle begins again. A son is born mentally ill and when he comes of age goes in search of a mate, having children, the cycle begins again. Another people group is oppressed because they are different and given less opportunities in society, the cycle begins again. A company lays off a third of its workers to show an increase rather than a decrease in their already large profits, the cycle begins again.


So what is to be done? Should we give up since the end goal is hopeless? Even though I don't believe we are ever going to free this world from hunger, war, poverty, or hate, there are small successes that give me hope. There are people who do desire to change even though they are oppressed by a myriad of issues. There are people who do change. It saves my mind from despair to know that each individual or family that is brought out of the cycle of poverty means that we have not only freed them, but the generations that proceed from them.

A Stork Apology

Just so we are all on the same page to start out, a few words about storks. I suspect that there are a few of you out there already wondering if this blog is meant to be a chronicle of an imminent parenting endeavor, and a few others, who happen to know about my secret pregnancy phobia, guffawing at the irony. To set the record straight, our association with storks has other sources though - it all began soon after our wedding, when we moved in to a lovely apartment on the top floor of a duplex, high above the surrounding city and accessible through a rickety staircase. Before we knew it, or my phobia had time to get activated, the place named itself the Storks' Nest. As it turns out, it had great insight in doing so... Did you know, for instance, that:

• The white stork is the national bird of Poland, my home country. Along with other Slavic nations, Poles believe that storks bring peace and happiness to the family on whose house they nest.
  
• One of the largest stork populations is found in Ukraine, where the two of us first met. There, it is associated with the start of a new family in a new home (!)
• Storks are migrant birds - they spend part of the year in Europe, and travel to more tropical parts in the winter. While Minnesota is in no way a tropical destination, the element of migration is a constant in our world - one of us is and always will be living in a foreign country.
  
• Is it any wonder then that Pithagoras thought that storks impersonate the souls of dead poets??

Welcome

Greetings wanderers, vagabonds, and pursuers of beauty.  Welcome to our cozy home among the electronic rush hours and dilapidated telephone poles of cyberspace.  We invite you to join us as we take refuge with our thoughts and reflections on life.  We hope that our thoughts stir your thoughts - and vice versa.

Best read with a cup of tea with lemon.