State of the Streets

Thursday, July 14, we held an event in Westport, our second State of the Streets, where we invited members of our community to share their stories of struggle and hope. These were my opening remarks:

Welcome to State of the Streets!

So, why are we here? I’d say we are here for three reasons:

First, because we have been talking a lot about Jesus and the Jesus movement. We have been talking a lot of about how, two thousand years ago, Jesus began a movement among poor and homeless people. How he said he had come to bring liberation to the oppressed. How he gathered up the battered and burdened and he built a movement with them. How he told them they would save the world.

In the 21^st century, we sometimes think of Jesus like the pictures we see of him on the internet. But the Jesus of the gospels was a man who grew up poor in Galilee, in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. Who was friends with tax collectors and sex workers. Who was arrested himself, jailed, and eventually executed, giving his life, as he put it, “for his friends”. In other words, Jesus went through what many of us go through in poor communities.

Second, because movements begin with the telling of untold stories. Last time we held this event, people got up and told powerful stories. They talked about what it was like in this community to experience homelessness, to experience poverty, to struggle with the health care system, to be in jail, to be mistreated by police. Our stories are not usually heard. Too often, these stories are never told. It can be scary to speak up. But tonight, you are here to be heard.

All of you who are here to speak, all of you who have told your stories, all of you who struggle so hard to survive here in Grays Harbor, you are my heroes. I am honored to know you. We see your courage. We see your faith in the hard times. We see your longing for a better world. Thank you for telling your stories. Thank you for believing that another world is possible.

Third, because we want to talk from this place, at this time. We at Chaplains on the Harbor have been open here in Westport for a year and a half. We got permission to use this abandoned church building to open a community center and a worshiping center. In the last year and half, we have come together as a community. We have fed each other, and shared with each other, and learned to love each other. We haven’t done any of that perfectly. But we are learning. Here in Westport, we are taking a stand—in a little town in the middle of nowhere, we are trying to live the Jesus movement. 71% of our people are unemployed or out of the workforce—some of us retired, many of us just unable to find a job, many of us disabled. We are struggling to make ends meet, struggling to survive, and sometimes we are tired of it.

I want to say this and I want to say it loud and clear. What is happening in our communities is not ok. It is not ok for our disabled elders to sleep on the street. It is not ok that there are not enough jobs for our young people. It is not ok that people can barely survive and go hungry. It is not ok that there are immigration raids on our Latino brothers and sisters and families are split up. It is not ok that a young man I know was recently beat up by police and then, yesterday, when police came to arrest him, they threatened to sic dogs on him. This is not ok. It is not ok that we have the highest rate of juvenile detention for non-criminal offences in the country, here in GHC. It is not ok that we are living—in the richest country in the history of the world—we are living in dire poverty. This is a sin against God. It is not ok. 

And you—you who have come to speak, you who live with so much poverty and so much struggle—you can and you will save us. Your courage to tell your stories is a first step toward demanding real change. We really can dream of a better world. We really can come together—if we can find ways to come together as a community—to build a better Grays Harbor, a better nation, a better world. But we can only do it together. We can only do it if we listen to each other across all the lines that divide us—lines of race, lines of politics, lines of hatred, lines of language, lines of religion. Only if we learn to love each other—not in a sappy, emotional way, but in a way that protects each other and cares for each other.

I am so proud of all you. So proud to be your pastor. So proud to be part of this community. So proud to stand with you all today.

Liberation on the Harbor

"Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!"

170 years ago, Fredrick Douglas spoke those words on the 4^th of July. He spoke 10 years before the abolition of slavery, as a black man, to a group of women abolitionists in the north. He spoke during a time when about 15% of the American population was enslaved. He, a former slave himself, partnered with courageous people like Harriet Tubman and others to free his people.

This is a time of year in our nation where we talk a lot about freedom. When we quote the declaration of independence that says that all men are created equal and deserve life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

In the passage we just read, as Jesus spells out his mission, his work, as Jesus delivers his first sermon in his hometown, Jesus talks about liberation, about being free.

He came to…

Preach good news to the poor

The announce freedom to prisoners

To heal and restore sight to the blind

And to “set the oppressed free”, or as the version we read this morning says, “to set the burdened and the battered free.”

The words that strike me most, in my work in this place, is that last phrase. “To set the burdened and the battered free.” That of course was the dream of Fredrick Douglas when he set out to free his people. It is my dream too.

I see a lot of battered bodies and burdened hearts on the harbor. I too long for the liberation of our people.

And I think about what Jesus did. He gathered up the battered and burdened and he built a movement with them. He told them they would save the world. And he told the religious leaders and the upstanding citizens to join them, to accept their leadership. That was Jesus’ good news.

It was that movement that Jesus built that would inspire people like Fredrick Douglas years later. Perhaps that movement can still hold power now, for us, here on the harbor, here in Aberdeen.

Jesus is specific about what kind of freedom, what kind of liberation he brings. Freedom to prisoners, healing to the sick, liberation to the battered and broken. I think about the stories I hear here on the harbor every day—stories you know, stories you might live. I think about our own battered and broken people. Many of them have lost so much: family members, homes, jobs, health. We carry deep scars. We have lost children. We are in and out of jail or prison. We experience deep and constant trauma. So many of us are very young—did you know that 52% of Aberdeen is under 35?

A few months ago, we hosted an event here at Amazing Grace, offering people the chance to tell their stories. Because we believe that the building of movements begins with the telling of untold stories.

Your parish hall was packed to overflowing. We ate 80 lbs of fried chicken. And people started sharing their stories. They told about police beatings and jail stints, they told about losing children, they told about how hard it is to get jobs, they talked about daily assaults on their dignity, they talked about how hard it was to find social services, they talked about losing everything.

We clapped harder than we have ever clapped for the bravery of people telling their stories. We cried and we laughed.  In a community where nearly 50% of our people experience poverty and where almost 1500 are counted as homeless (in a rural county), this is the first time an event has been held like this. What struck me the most about this event was the amazing courage of the people I am privileged to serve and honored to know. They were my heroes—willing to tell hard stories out loud to those in power, willing to work for change at considerable risk to themselves. They dreamed of a movement. For a moment, we dreamed of freedom and liberation.

I see so much pain and trauma in this ministry, in this town, as so many of us have experienced, as people are cut off from access to basic needs and basic resources. But I also see such amazing courage. The battered and the broken, in the end, will inherit the earth as Jesus said. I see it in the courageous little family who are struggling for a decent wage job and home after piecing their life back together after baby came. I see it in the very young, very vulnerable woman trying to survive solitary confinement. I see it in a young street hustler who has lost everything and is still trying again to find a way out. I see it in the aging logger who tries to offer counseling to the young folks on the street. I see it in the elderly man who tried to offer safe haven for a young and vulnerable gay man.

There is a man in jail right now, looking forward in his life, dreaming of something new, not just for himself, but for his community. He dreams of creating jobs with a restaurant that would be open, not just for the town, but also for anyone who needed a meal. In the middle of great trauma, and so much struggle, there are dreams coming out of the jails Jesus says he came to open.

 In our community and church in Westport, aging surfers run the community garden and homeless kids cook meals for the whole community and we dream together of a better world. In the middle of a town where 71% of the adult population is either unemployed or out of the workforce, I watch people work to take care of each other. Learn to respect each other. Dream of a better world. Every Friday, we gather for our popular education program (the School of Hard Knocks) and we often skype with or exchange videos with poor people all over the country and the world—we talk with homeless organizers in Budapest and with Muslim communities in New York and homeless leaders in Salinas, CA. And we dream together.

I can’t shake off the feeling that this is the good news for the poor that Jesus is talking about. That this is what Jesus meant by building a movement of poor and desperate people, of bruised and battered people, so many years ago in Galilee.

That this is what it looks like in Aberdeen WA in 2016.

When I look over our room full of young people and elders, all struggling, all trying to survive, I think; “These people, these courageous, amazing people will save us. The church is not here to save them. They are here to save us.”

As we approach the 4^th, that holiday that we in the US talk so much about freedom and about liberty, I want to think about this liberation that Jesus brings. This good news for and by the poor. This liberation for the broken bodied and brokenhearted.

  And what it would mean for us, for the church, for us here and now in Aberdeen, to join that movement for liberation? What it would mean for us to sit at the feet of the folks brave enough to tell their stories here in your parish hall? What it would mean to have a movement for change led by the men and women who dream in jail cells that Jesus wants to open?

Nazareth was too afraid to do it. Too afraid perhaps of Rome, of Jesus, of the risk, of the possibility. Are we?

All This Talk About Guns

In all my years on social media, I have avoided, for the most part, speaking about guns. My Facebook page, for example, is strongly divided between my friends who are liberal and advocate frequently for stronger gun control measures and my working class family, neighbors, and friends who hunt, collect guns, and often carry them. There never seems to be a good time to talk about this divide in my life, never a good time to tell my part of this story. In the wake of so many tragedies, so much death, I just want to grieve. But I also have decided to tell this part of my story.

I grew up working class, in a predominantly white rural community, and I work in those communities now. I suppose a lot of people, looking into the place I grew up, would label us as gun toting, backwards rednecks.

I learned to handle weapons long before I learned to drive and it was a point of pride for me that I could handle rifles, handguns, bows, and bowie knives with ease. I was taught, like most working class kids, that guns were tools and were dangerous weapons. We used them for butchering animals on the farm, we used them to defend animals against wild dogs, we used them for hunting, and we learned to use them for self-defense.  We never waved them in the air, never pointed at anything we didn’t intend to shoot, and kept them safely stored and cleaned.

The world I grew up in was never safe, much like the world everywhere else. Living on the edge of the wilderness meant that wild animals were always a threat and once, I was trailed by a pair of cougars who had been hunting livestock in the valley. Violence was common. Some of it involved guns, like when a friend was stalked by her ex-boyfriend threatening to shoot her. Much of it did not—the neighbors kids getting sexually assaulted, neighboring men breaking into fistfights and feuds. I learned early and thoroughly that the world is not a safe place and that evil is real.

I never had the illusion that weapons kept me safe, particularly. They were simply tools that gave me an advantage in a world that was dangerous and sometimes very evil. To this day, I still own a gun and, as a single woman living alone, it makes me feel safer. Not safe. Just safer, depending on luck and skill.

Now, as a priest, as a pastor in a rural community, I struggle with how to talk about weapons. Everyone I know carries some kind of weapon--  all sorts of hunting blades or pocketknives, mace, machetes, occasionally guns. I ask people not to carry weapons openly in our spaces, but I also know that people need these tools—for putting up tents as much as for defense. Young women come to me and ask my advice about carrying weapons, because they know that the rate of sexual assault for women on the street is officially at 100%.  People (including many of these women) who are caught with guns and have a felony record spend years in prison. Those who advocate for stronger gun control laws rarely understand that the people who usually are convicted and imprisoned as a result of such legislation are not mass murderers—they are mostly poor, mostly desperate, disproportionately people of color trying to survive a bitter, deadly world.

Theologically, there are two points I think we don’t always consider.

First, even though I strongly believe in human capacity for goodness, even though I even lean Pelagian in my understanding of human nature, I am also aware of the tremendous human capacity for evil. The world is not, and never has been, safe for most people. And people living on the edge are especially aware of that. Fighting for survival in a capitalist society where there is not enough for everyone forces you to confront evil in a way that people living comfortably don’t always have to see. That evil is up close, in the person of your neighbor, and even your friend, who might be hungry enough to slice your tent and steal your food or angry enough at the world to fight you for your last cigarette or suffer from PTSD so badly that he thinks you are an enemy soldier. That evil is up close in the black market you are forced to participate in, where marketers battle for space and clients and resources. Your ability to defend yourself can mean life or death.

Evil is also structural. One of the ways that manifests is in who gets protected in our society. Our police and protection systems are meant, first and foremost, to protect property and its owners. If you do not own property, or are a threat to property, then your life is not necessarily protected. It may in fact be, and often is, targeted. With weapons and guns. In the hands of law enforcement. I’m not suggesting that AK-47s should be in the hands of private citizens, but I am wondering if they should be on our streets when police conduct a standoff in a rural neighborhood.

When I see blanket calls for more gun control, I wonder.

Do we intend to disarm law enforcement too, with 1,000 people shot by police last year, mostly young, mostly poor, disproportionally people of color, many mentally ill?

Do we intend to do something more to insure that people are not in constant competition for basic needs, which leads inevitably to intense interpersonal violence on the streets and in poor communities?

Do we intend to actually address the root causes of violence? Violence and death are always specific. The young man who went on a shooting spree in sororities in California targeted women because he felt women didn’t give him enough attention. The 49 people killed in a gay bar in Orlando were killed because they were queer and immigrant and brown and black. What do we plan to do about that kind of hate? Because all the laws in the world are not going to keep an assault rifle out of the hands of a private security worker who wants to kill a lot of people.

Sometimes, honestly, a call for gun control in our world feels like a cop out. I have no illusions that guns are going to save us from anything. I am not opposed to laws that regulate the sale of handguns or assault rifles. But I’m not sure that any of those measures would change the violence that I witness or the violence that we as a nation witness. I know for sure that these laws further criminalize poor people and fill our prisons.

There is harder work to do. People need access to enough, so they are not in constant competition for space and resources and black market cred. People need to be seen as human. Misogyny and racism and homophobia are real and deadly, folks. Law enforcement needs to be held accountable, especially for poor lives. Passing a few laws about guns is too easy. If we really want to stop violence, we need so much more.

Have We Turned Against Our Children?

“Setting our children free will make us safer, not less so… Raze the buildings, free the children, and begin anew.” Nell Bernstein

I spend a great deal of my ministry listening to the stories of young people--on the streets, in jails, in camps, and on street corners. When I listen to their stories and witness their courage, I always feel like they have the courage, the hope, the will, the vision to change our world. It is no secret young men and women have always formed the backbone of movements for change around the world. It also seems that they face the most repression and hatred.

While juvenile detention rates are falling in the US, they have not been falling in Grays Harbor County. This county in particular has been known for strict adherence to juvenile justice codes and one might say these policies left their mark on several generations of our children. Most of the crack down has been on status offenses (offenses that would not be punishable if the offender were an adult: truancy, drinking while underage, running away), giving Grays Harbor the dubious distinction of incarcerating the highest rate of child status offenders in the country. 

I remember, as a child, living in a rough neighborhood in central California. The couple next door would frequently lock their daughter, just a few years younger than myself, in her room or in a bathroom for extended periods of time as punishment, or simply as confinement when they left the house. As a 10 year old, what I remember most was her endless screaming and crying.  No one, but especially not a child, is designed to be locked alone in small places.

A practice well known to break adults, isolation is a widespread and common practice in our juvenile justice system. Recently, the juvenile facility in Junction City came under fire when family reported that their son was kept in solitary confinement for a week (a practice that many consider torture), leaving him suicidal and depressed. While the behavior of the parents in my childhood neighborhood was eventually reported and investigated as child abuse, the same behavior in a juvenile jail or prison has been considered not only legal but normative.

Nell Bernstein recently published an expose called Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison. She documents the beginnings of the juvenile justice system in the 18^th century “as a mechanism for gaining control over the children of the poor.” Relying on extensive interviews and data collection, she documents story after story of isolation and dehumanization and abuse. For example, 1 in 5 children reported sexual abuse at the hands of guards. For many children, the trauma is too great and, in some states, the recidivism rate for juvenile offenders was 80%. Bernstein argues that the very act of isolating and locking children up just when they most need relationship and love is in and of itself traumatizing and destructive.

Bernstein's documentation squares up with the stories I hear on the streets and in jails. Across the country, young people have told me about their experiences in juvie: getting their bones broken during arrest, spending so many months in solitary that it permanently affected their mental health, being told by judges and jailers over and over that they would never amount to anything, learning to defend themselves because they have no other choice, recognizing that as children they simply have no rights (legal or otherwise), spending more of their lives on the inside than out, losing hope in any possible future, losing faith, developing a consistent fear and hatred for authority. Many of these children have already endured significant trauma in their lives—they have been handed around in foster homes, they have been sexually and physically abused, they have lost significant numbers of family and friends, they have lived on the streets. Sometimes, juvie is the thing that breaks them.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl writes that “there will always be individuals and societies that turn against their children.” This is overwhelmingly evident on the streets of Grays Harbor.

In Grays Harbor, judges are quick to defend the extensive use of the juvenile justice system. We, and the system our society has created, seem to have forgotten that our children are our future. A community that victimizes them, jails them, beats them, leaves them living under bridges, and hands them from foster home to foster home, labeling them criminals, predators, and dangers to society will one day reap what we sow.

For me, on my end, I watch kids leave the system and enter early adulthood with few resources. As young adults, they often hustle on the street to survive and they continue to fill the jails on a regular basis, creating an endless cycle of street to jail or prison. 

I watch these young people, with a courage born of desperation and an indomitable will to survive no matter the odds, desperately fight for life in a world that does not seem to care if they live or die. And I wonder: why have we turned against our children? How can we possibly expect a bright future if our young people are relegated to the margins without any future or hope for something better? How do we listen to the voices of our children, of our future?