To Steve. With Love.

A little bit ago, I saw the guy who took your place walking down the street in my neighborhood. When I spoke to him, he looked at me and smiled a little and hurried on down the street. I looked down at my clothes. They were dirty from the garden. I hadn't had a shower. A dirty baseball cap hid most of my dirty hair. I laughed when I realized what had happened. Oh, I thought. He thinks I'm about to ask him for money. I laughed. Maybe a little bit because I thought it was funny, but the heft of my amusement came from knowing I must have done that a hundred (a thousand?) times. That's what the neighborhood teaches you. When you judge the book by its cover, you've only got a fifty-fifty chance of being right. But this isn't his neighborhood, so he doesn't know that. You would have laughed your ass off.

Can you see how much things have changed here? Do you get to fly up and down and around the streets where you used to walk and really take note of things? I saw your journal entry about Tommy and I wanted to tell you that he's still here. He's getting older and grayer and he doesn't try and kiss the pretty girls like he used to. Maybe someone slapped him and maybe he just got too old for it. He doesn't go to church anymore, but he isn't alone. The church is gone from here and he can't see you, but people are still taking care of him. The Neighborhood People do it. And it is good to see.

To see it now, you'd think our entire community had just been beamed up by aliens and taken away. There isn't any archaeological evidence of our time here. Well, our Mexican restaurant went out of business when the church left and I bet that's no coincidence. There's a new church here now with a new pastor who sends his kids to the public school. People from there came into the neighborhood right before Easter and handed out flyers. They were so surprised to see us here and maybe a little disappointed, too.  I laughed. I'm hopeful for them, but I'm a realist too.

What made us think it was going to work? What made us think that we could just buy up the houses and live in them and somehow (by osmosis?) transform this place. This place has always been like this. And it always will be. We might as well have dipped our big toes into a pool of still water. We made some ripples for a little bit, but now that the church is gone, no one even remembers it was ever here. 

And I know they don't because I'm still here. I'm not wearing it as a badge of courage. I've tried to leave before and I'm getting ready to try again. But this time, something feels different. The last times I prayed that God might give me one more Five-Points spring. One more summer. Or Christmas. But this time, it really does feel like that time is getting short. I don't sense that we're moving to anything bigger or better, I just feel like the days of this experiment are drawing to a close. After eight years it's going to be culture shock all over again. How funny is that? Do you think it will be hard to adjust to the suburbs again? Are you proud of us?

Yesterday, one of our neighbors got drunk and felt chatty so we talked to him for a long time. He told us about when he took care of the tigers in the circus and how sometimes the elephants cry. He told us about his wife and her addictions and the mom who abandoned him and the eighteen months he slept on the roof of the old AA building off Highland. He told us what he knows about true love. And we just listened. I laughed because after eight years of this, all we can do is listen to the stories of the people in this neighborhood. Before we might have tried to find some "help" for our neighbor by following the painstakingly constructed process the church gave us to deal with "situations" like this. Now we just realize we come to this neighborhood like we come to the Eucharist—empty handed and full of hope. This neighborhood is where I learned how to give the gift of listening without feeling like I hadn't done my part. But we listened and we weren't afraid. We didn't feel bigger than him or more stable. We didn't feel like we were the ones bending down from the mountain to offer the words of God. We just felt like the neighbors of a drunk guy who wanted to talk.  Don't you think that's something? Progress even?

This neighborhood is the rock I broke myself against. And in that sense, the experiment didn't fail.

Can you understand how beautiful it is that God's plans shoot through the world like tentacles of light illuminating the world person by person. Our churches fail with the sad machinations of abandoned idealism or they explode and are destroyed with the brilliance of a star that's burning out. Either way, the highest hopes we can hold for them is that they'll provide us with some light. If only for a little while. Can you see from where you are that God's plan didn't fail? Can you see us and how we've grown? 

I heard one of the survivors of Jonestown say that you don't join a cult because you expect to commit suicide in the jungles of Guyana for no apparent reason. No, she said, you join a cult with people like you. Good people. People you like. And you join with the hope that you're gonna change the world. I think that's true. We came here because we had the hopes to change the world. God sent us here because he wanted the world to change us.  I'm learning that nothing is all good and nothing is all bad. It's ok to take what's valuable and throw the rest away. So, that's how I'm taking what you taught us. The good and the bad.  And I hope you don't mind.

I'll see you in the morning, my friend.


P.S. I totally should have taken that guy's money, don't you think?