Dust Bowl Migrants

Remembering When Ben Said, "This Isn't My Stinkin' Community"

My roommate Ben went out walking, trying to get to know this strange old neighborhood that was now ours. He walked down 39th Street, steering clear of the projects across the road, and took a right near the Sweetland Market, scarcely two blocks from our little one-bedroom bungalow.

It was there that a young white police officer pulled his car up next to Ben. “What are you up to?” he asked as if he were simply making conversation.

“Going for a walk. I live over there,” Ben explained, pointing.

“Well,” the officer said, “this is a really dangerous part of town. You don’t need to be going for walks around here, ok?” It was clear in his voice that this was not just friendly advice.

“Ok. Thanks,” Ben replied thickly, more out of courtesy than gratitude. He turned back toward Kirkland Avenue, ignoring curious (or were they hostile?) stares from the loiterers at Sweetland, and thought, “This isn’t my stinkin’ community!” all the way back to the supposed safety of the house.

We understood the meaning of Ben’s words when he shared them at the next house meeting. We were five college students living in Alton Park, a neighborhood that had more than its fair share of problems: drugs, prostitution, thievery, promiscuity, deadbeat dads, and so on. In fact, if I remember correctly, it wasn’t too long after Ben’s warning that the police made a major drug bust at the Sweetland Market. On the face of it, our own communities – the people we grew up with and went to college with – were very different: white, middle class, respectable, as opposed to black, poor, crime-ridden. What had Lookout Mountain to do with Alton Park? It was a feeling many of us never really shook.

Now I’m married and living in a mountain village in Honduras. Last week, some hidden gunmen sprayed a round of bullets into a mixed group of people walking up the road. Among the victims were two children not yet teenagers. The boy died almost immediately, and the girl’s arm was so torn up that it had to be amputated.

The shooting was not totally random. A month or so ago a stranger was killed in Las Mangas, and the men involved in that are said to be targets. But the killed and wounded were so random that Las Mangas now lives in fear. Since it was after dark when the shooting occurred, daylight activities are pretty much the same, except that there are more of them: church services, Bible studies, and other evening meetings have been rescheduled for the afternoon. But at seven o’clock, people close gates, lock doors, shutter windows, and do not open until morning comes. During the day, people talk, sharing rumors, casting suspicion, and exclaiming at how dangerous their village has become.

When Ben said that Alton Park was not his stinking community, we laughed. We felt his exasperation, but it was funny to think of a cop warning Ben, of all people, to stay out of trouble. I thought of Ben’s words again as I reeled from the news of the shooting, this time without laughter. We were not witnesses to what happened, nor were we very close to the people involved, but we have known the fear, too. How easy it would be to kill us! If one had the desire, the means are readily at hand. How easily it could have been Kelly, a chance victim! It was only four doors up. Too, we saw how people were hurt, frightened, divided, and we shook our fists inwardly. How pointless! How stupid.

And I thought, This is not my community. In my community, people don’t take revenge into their own hands. Pointless murders don’t happen. People don’t even own AK-47s. They don’t deal drugs, or make threats, or rob girls from their parents’ homes. And I thought of how much better both of us would sleep if we were in our home in the States. The heaviness would leave us, and we would be left only with familiar problems, the problems of our community: mortgage payments, school districts, vocational questions, church involvement, George Bush, John Kerry, long distance plans, ice storms.

For church that Sunday we found ourselves at Eben-Ezer Baptist where the pastor lead us in reading what Jesus said to his disciples in Luke 6.

Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.
Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you, and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy! For indeed your reward is great in heaven, for in like manner their fathers did to the prophets.
But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full, for you shall hunger.
Woe to you who laugh no, for you shall mourn and weep.
Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so did their fathers to the false prophets.

The pastor explained the text in Spanish, so my mind drifted. I saw myself and the people of Las Mangas taking our respective places in Jesus’ blessings and woes. I was dismayed to find myself in the second category, those to whom Jesus calls out in compassion and regret, “How sorrowful! You who always run from suffering; you who seek only your own consolation now. You will not see my kingdom, and then you will know suffering.” For didn’t I ask (inside, where none could hear) to be far from this difficult situation? Didn’t I wish that my night’s sleep not be entangled with the people and problems from this community? “If you love only those who love you,” Jesus asks, “what credit is that to you?” (Luke 6:32)

Exuberant Angel, as Peter found him, on the ground with his bike between his legs as if he were still riding, blood streaming from his head. Long-suffering Maria, wife to a drinker and mother of many children. When asked, “How are you?” she wept. “I have lost a son. He would have been thirteen soon.” Her intoxicated husband, calling her crazy and in need of the hospital. Her grief laid bare before the world, her two-room house barely ten feet from the road, where she sat feeble and pained. “Blessed are you,” Jesus says, “for you shall laugh!”

At the end of all things in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Sauron and his Ring of Power destroyed and Aragorn restored to his kingship, Frodo and Sam wake up, bewildered to find themselves alive, and Gandalf alive, and everything as it should be.

“‘A great shadow has departed,’ said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then, as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from his bed.” (232)

The hobbits had known merriment before, at the pub in the Shire. But the laughter they knew at that moment was wider, and deeper, and more real, precisely because of the trials they had endured.

I can see Angel and Maria, laughing and dining impossibly with Jesus, and I know that their laughter is deep and their satisfaction real, because they have known much sorrow and hunger. And I can see that it is possible to share their joy – but only if I also share their suffering. Indeed, to the extent I exclude myself from sorrow anywhere it confronts me, I exclude myself from joy as well. The more I am merely satisfied with riches, food, laughter, praise right now, the less I will be able to rejoice at the coming of God’s kingdom. Such is the seed sown among thorns, choked by desire for life’s pleasures (Luke 9).

“At present,” the author of Hebrews wrote, “we do not see everything subject to him.” Indeed, no – there is so much that is deeply wrong that despair is a real temptation. “But,” he continues, “we see Jesus.” And that is enough to make the inescapable injustice of our world seem less cruel and pointless. At least the ugliness bore down in his life too. The author of Hebrews goes on to say that “it was fitting that God . . . should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering” (Hebrews 2:8-10). God’s servant was “a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering,” according to Isaiah (53:3).

Jesus did not promise anything less to his followers. “Remember the words I spoke to you,” he said, “‘No servant is greater than his master’” (John 15:20). In these days I do remember. I have already forsaken all other riches, satisfaction, laughter, acceptance, and all the sorrows that accompany these things. In their place comes the joy of poverty, hunger, weeping, and persecution – the joy of knowing Christ in his power and his sufferings (Phil. 3:10). And in that place where he has met so many of his people, I know that he will also meet me. And so I will not turn away from suffering.

I write all this as one who has known suffering only in small ways, or only in the lives of others. But what has been shown me in recent weeks has liberated me from the dread of suffering as life’s hopeless drudgery. Because Jesus, the captain of our faith, has blessed it.

Posted by tom at August 20, 2004 08:48 PM | TrackBack