Friendship as radical involvement in changing society

Yesterday between church services we drove out to the old house so that Jonathan could have band practice. Living in Cokato for a month and a half has already given me a new lens on my old habitat, and my scales of familiarity have dropped from my eyes so I saw with stabbing clarity what our visitors from more affluent neighborhoods have no doubt always privately noted. Peeling, battered, or boarded-up homes in scrubby trash-strewn yards, city scooters dumped on sidewalks. Unwell people. So much refuse and blight.

It all twists my heart with guilt that we left, even as I know we were mostly powerless to help things, and the little that we could do, we often didn’t. There stands our own house after all: a shabby, filthy shell in its weedy yellow yard littered with plastic and junk. Nevertheless, entering that cobwebby kitchen with its remnant dishes and stains, I felt a wistful swell as I cast my eyes around. It was quickly engulfed by weariness at the thought of all the cleaning and clearing and repairing that we need to do before we put it on the market and truly finalize what in many ways feels like our divorce from the North Minneapolis community.

And now I face the questions posed by Alice Walker in her criticism of an affluent family’s sincere attempt to invite a girl from a slum into their home for a few months: “What value has friendship that is content to see one comfortable part of the time? Indeed, is it friendship? What one yearns for (and must have if we are to share this earth as unashamed friends) is a Mallory family that is radically involved in changing society, not merely giving succor to its oppressed.”

And this: “One could share warmth with the Mallorys but one could really not depend on them in any radically meaningful way.”

That’s it, the crux of all our efforts to share our own small wealth with our Bryant Ave neighbors. After fourteen years, we still can’t “share the earth as unashamed friends” with the Trizells and Mishas and Isises and Anns and Sabrinas. We did content ourselves with seeing them comfortable only part of the time, and always at our own convenience. This diagnoses the vague sense of discomfort and, yes, shame, that we inevitably felt while trying to help.

The warmth and succor have value. Certainly they are far better than nothing at all! But they do not produce the unashamed friendship between equals which would be proof of a truly righteous arrangement.

Okay, but what does “radical involvement in changing society” actually entail for a family like ours?

We used to think we knew. We flung open our doors and pantries and bank accounts, and sincerely did not expect any recompense. Yet being radically available, as we strove to be for several years, did not appear to achieve any lasting goodness for the families we were seeking to befriend, and it left us scarred and guarded, in the graceless position of needing, for the health of us all, to walk back permissions and conditions that we had previously extended.

A critical facet of our North Minneapolis experience is that sharing our lives in this way was always a one-way street. This makes sense. We, with our abundance and security and wholeness, had not experienced the lack and insecurity and brokenness of needing to rely on strangers, or the rejection and humiliation that likely often attend that need. Were the tables turned, I imagine that I, too, would hold do-gooders at a distance.

But the friendship, the sharing of lives, needs to be mutual to be radical. My question for Alice Walker might be, “What friendship is possible where, while one accepts what warmth and succor are shared, one will not share one’s self? What value is such friendship? Indeed, is it friendship?”

My questions for myself are not easy either. “How can I, as someone in a position to help materially, signal my radical expectation of true friendship with someone who is struggling? Am I really ready to offer that?” and “Would I be able to risk such vulnerability, if I found myself in need of material aid from a stranger?”

True friendship requires trust and good faith on both sides. To depend on someone in any radically meaningful way requires wholeheartedly accepting care from others (in the belief that we are all intrinsically deserving) while we extend the gift of access to our whole selves. Because of this mutual access, both parties should be able to be at ease in their shared humanity and love for one another, despite whatever material and cultural imbalances persist. I think that is how we can share the earth as unashamed friends.

Heirloom

The market on the eastern slope surveys

A place in Minnesota that I love:

Looks past the barns, past where the tire swing sways,

And the farmhouse and the chapel stand above

Their bound where road and driveway gravels blend.

Evolving with the seasons since their birth,

Traditions kept with care, like precious seeds,

Take root, express afresh their ancient truth,

Adapted to their time’s peculiar needs.

Their secret wisdom: when and how to bend.

Here migrant hymns live on in the resettled church 

Where family transplants join their voice in song,

And antique photos their own features search,

Expressed anew and known here to belong.

In their small way, such kindred things transcend.

The windows hold and pass the light, within,

Without this heirloom place, day after day.

We too are held as we move out and in.

We too are changed by it and leave it changed 

When the fleet prismatic lights of our day end.

To Mom

Who would have thought, when years had passed, 

and you had left this world for good,

I'd find such comfort remembering

the way it felt to braid your hair.

To gather thick handfuls away from your nape,

smoothing down all the flyaways, 

then dividing the whole into three separate strands

to crisscross them into a simple plait.

All the while, Mom, your voice is purling

among the sounds of the dining room, 

and your hands are clasped on the table top

while family life flows around us two.

And even though I may not see your face

or really be thinking about you at all,

you are always the unsung focal point:

present, fully embodied, and - for the moment - at rest.

How My Children Play, 2022

(7 years) Our daughter loves to draw "photographs": mommas holding babies near stoves with cast iron skillets, huge smiling faces in sudsy bathtubs beside hooks of robes and towels, groups of beaming children vaulting into water parks. Their ages and relationships, hairstyles and fashion choices are chosen and announced with care. She devises hammocks and nests for her "pet" squirrel ornament, placing teacups of water tenderly beside him, then leaving him to rest while she dashes over to coax her live pet bird onto her wrist with his mirror and bell. 

(6 years) Our oldest son engrosses himself in origami folds, games of strategy and patterns, the infinite possibilities (negative numbers!) of a basic calculator he purchased at Goodwill.  He hunches over his allotted thirty minutes of Candy Crush, advancing through the levels with the volume blasting. When not gaming, he dons boxing gloves and dukes it out with his brother in the attic, or fires snowballs in the yard. 

(4 years) Our youngest stages battles between animal figures from his perch on the wooden built-ins that divide the living areas. The floorboards beneath are pock-marked with tiny dents from fallen good guys and bad guys. He zooms his styrofoam airplane ("Far-Flyer") across the room, or involves it in contests of speed and strength against numerous toy foes, or offers it a snack from the toy kitchen. He builds elaborate forts of pillows and blankets and furniture that never quite measure up to his lofty ambitions. 

(29 weeks) And all day and all night the child in my womb practices squirms and kicks, readying himself to enter these chaotic playscapes in his own right. 

What I Have Learned About Hospitality

Folding others into a welcoming space of genuine love and fellowship is the true hospitality to which I aspire. This cannot be achieved by sacrificing the very qualities of peace and order and attention that make such an atmosphere possible.  This means limiting choices that in the past, wishing to avoid seemingly arbitrary restrictions and refusals, I would permit others to make in our home: small choices that did no harm in their own right other than the cumulative damage of trending us away from discipline and harmony, toward pandemonium and conflict.

This lesson is hard-won, after a year of unstinted hospitality that left us depleted and scarred, and likely did less good to those we welcomed in than we would have hoped. 

Entering a new year, I am first revoking the standing consent that held too many doors open to our guests, thereby allowing chaos and predation to slink in alongside fellowship and compassion. Then I will work to restore a nourishing home atmosphere within my family. After this is reasonably established, I look forward to again flinging open the front door and welcoming. 

But this time I will vigilantly guard the homeostasis of what Sarah Vap calls our "family animal." And that homeostasis is preserved by foundational habits ( rules) of mind and body which encourage us towards virtue and health.  Hopefully I will be able to safeguard these habits with flexibility, warmth, and tact, which will prevent us from lapsing into rigid legalism.

Year's End in Minneapolis

 It was late afternoon of New Year's Eve 2021. I was pouring scalding hot cocoa into thermoses so we could prolong our planned sledding excursion despite the single digit cold, nagging the children into their snow gear. Jonathan, phone held up to his ear, motioned me to him and said in a low voice, "There is somebody hurt in the alley, don't let the kids outside. I will warm the car up." 

We didn't go sledding after all. A fifteen year old boy was killed that afternoon in our alley, his death the third homicide on the block in 2021. 

Yellow caution tape and flashing police cars barred the passage in and out of our drive. A red vehicle with deployed airbags was battered against a garage on one end of the alley, a lifeless body and a handful of bystanders and cops at the other. As we unbundled from our minivan, a woman's keening wail hung in the air for a long minute or two. Jonathan and I shared a wince and herded our crestfallen children into the backyard. 

We attempted to salvage the outing by starting a little fire in our yard, chatting with our neighbor over her fence, soaking up the scent of campfire and sipping the mugs of cocoa we'd packed while tiny snowflakes drifted in the failing daylight. 

The lights continued flickering blue and red against the neighbors' houses in the gloaming and long past nightfall. Bursts of automatic gunfire vied with fireworks deep into the night as the city turned into a new year.

So we find ourselves taking stock, the faces of our children and the faces of our neighbors cycling through our minds against the backdrop of gunshots, squealing tires, and neon lights.

Musings from Mount Moriah

You won't find this recorded in your birthday book your fourth year, though it was the biggest thing that happened to you. It was the week of Thanksgiving, ten days before your fifth birthday, that you finally said you were ready to tell us what was wrong. After a day of explosive rage. After you burst into tears in the hallway following yet another time out and wailed, "I feel sad!", first leaning into my bewildered embrace and then yanking away. After you kept demanding water, saying your tummy hurt, that you were so thirsty, punching whoever was within range of your little fist, unable to keep still. We were so proud that you found the courage to speak.

He was a daredevil nine-year-old who had been living with us for two and a half months. His nerf gun and football skills and cool kid mannerisms made your eyes shine. You couldn't wait for him to return home from school in the afternoon to play racecar games on his computer for you, or include you in a wild neighborhood game of catch, tag, or hide 'n seek. 

Your dad and I had begun to notice how your energy would increasingly surge into combativeness when he was around, how you veered between adoration and hostility in his presence. We supposed you were merely adopting his kinesics, imitating your turbulent hero. Hindsight is heartbreaking. 

The night we moved your abuser and his family out of our attic and into a hotel, you and your dad and little brother went upstairs to play good guys versus bad guys. You led the charge into their quarters, calling, "The most bad guys live in here!"

Aunt Emily tried some play therapy with you. She shared with us that in your pretend world your dad and I are superheroes who always know when something bad is happening. This was supposed to console us, and it did a little, but it also underscored my failure to realize that, in the small but numerous attention gaps that punctuated our home life, something very bad was happening to you. Even your superhero dad, who does 150 pushups five days a week, did not know you needed rescuing. 

Thanksgiving was the following day. Your Poppy and aunt with five of your cousins drove to our afflicted area of Minneapolis to visit. After dinner we decided on a trip to the nearest park.  It was bitter cold. Two underdressed kids, snickering unhappily, were stuffing a third child--mute and stiff--into a trashcan when we arrived. My niece told me she found vomit in the grass at the top of the hill. "I didn't touch it," she added. You fell hard from the top of the play equipment onto your back on the woodchips, sealing the end of a miserable outing. "Of course it had to be him, " your Dad shook his head, carrying you in his strong arms to the van.

But the fact is, my dear, you were better equipped to handle this than almost any child I could have picked at random in our neighborhood.  Better equipped than your abuser, who almost certainly was himself abused at a similarly tender age. Better equipped than the many other children within his circles, boys like him with absent or imprisoned fathers and working moms who barely manage to keep their children housed and fed. In a neighborhood of diseased family animals, ours was sleek and healthy, able to sustain this wound.

It was the beginning of Advent. For the first time I experienced how jarring and even offensive the lamppost wreathes and joymongering billboards could feel to a heart still venom-shocked by an evil thing. 

We marked your birthday with family members who understood that you were struggling with incoherent rage, who looked you kindly in the eye and played card games with you and made you feel seen and loved. You began to fall asleep every night wearing headphones, your birthday Walkman filling your mind with Jesus songs. 

We hung Christmas lights, set up the Jesse Tree with its felt ornaments. On the fourth day of Advent I found myself holding up the ram ornament and retelling to you and your siblings the story of Abraham's call to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah. My memory flashed back to the moment in Aldi several months before when I was bagging my groceries and asking God if I should invite this homeless family into my home. A shout rang out behind me, raising the hair on my forearms : "DO NOT neglect to show hospitality to the strangers!" I thought it was the voice of God directly answering my question, His mouthpiece a preaching weekday shopper with dreads and sunglasses. 

As I cast my mind back on that moment, my heart twisted with Abraham's bewilderment, for had not following that Voice meant laying our beloved firstborn son on the altar of our obedience? And yet in my bafflement I kept holding onto the soft symbol, telling the rest of the supernatural story. And there was your childish face, sticky with jam, sleep in your eyes, listening to how God so loved the world.

I have been reciting Psalm 103 constantly in my heart since you told us about it. At first, sick with doubt and anger, muttering the words inwardly as one desperate for warmth would rub two dry sticks together. And here is the miracle, my love: those dead words have sparked to life. They have kindled this burden of sorrow on the altar of my heart.  The fire is overwhelming the darkness of doubt and bathing in warmth the bone-ache of anguish. It sends praise incense wafting heavenward.

He heals all your diseases. Your rages are less frequent, happy moments are multiplying. You are reclaiming calm. When your helper inquires during a therapy session if you ever feel angry or sad, you say, beaming and flapping your hands in the air, "Right now I feel really happy." Oh, He renews my youth like the eagle's. 

Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannnot heal. 

Merry Christmas, my firstborn son, the son that I love. 

Happy New Year.

Yesterday was Mother's Day. It hasn't yet been two weeks since the evening that I did not know I was both pregnant and bleeding internally, hours away from an emergency surgery and the end of that inner flicker of life. Before the revelation and the crisis, Jonathan brought our kids to my bedside to wish me goodnight. They sang me original lullabies embellished with elements from the latest chapter of "Prince Caspian," then rode to bed on their dad's shoulders. 

In all the pain and confusion and the little death that followed, the memory of that rambunctious parting kept filling my mind, a heartening memento vivere.