Further Reflections

Last Easter I watched the Passion of the Christ with some friends. It was, in some sense, an emotional experience. But that emotion gave me pause, although I was unsure why it felt uncomfortable at the time. Only recently, it occurred to me that this was because we see Christ actually crucified everyday and it evokes no emotion in us the way that the movie did.

The crucifixion of Christ was as much a sin of omission as it was murder. Imagine if every just man acted out to stop the greatest injustice in human history. Their individual decisions to instead live their own lives ensured Christ's crucifixion.

Every time we choose to live our own lives we crucify Christ through our indifference or desperate ignorance. I am sometimes astounded by the rash of perturbing statistics that accompany most cries for help from a place like Camden. It is not only depressing to see how apalling the numbers are but to see a place or people that you think you know reduced to such. When it come's to God's work, however, the important statistics are not, I think, the statistics of suffering, of violence or poverty rates, of broken families and SAT scores, of mental illness or suicides. Ever since the fall, mankind has suffered in this world. The important statistics are unprecedented: the extraordinary indications of a lifestyle that makes no sense in the context of our world and its history, the statistics that reflect the choosing of one's own life over God's vision for us. Without dwelling on guilt or blame, perhaps when we look for brokenness in the world, we should not concentrate on its symptoms but on the crucifixion of Christ that occurs daily at our own hands, through our omission. It is not enough to concentrate on the effects of sin, but on the sin itself and the sinners, ourselves.

This is not about guilt. Choosing to give of oneself to assuage guilt is still choosing to live one's own life; it is choosing something that enables one to continue living as blind to the crucifixion that we see before us.

Nor is this about efficacy. There were two men with much to lose who stood up for Jesus, who chose to deny the possibilities of their own lives for him. They did not prevent his death and suffering or its injustice. Often our choice to deny our will for God's will not stop or even reach the suffering in which we see the injustice of Christ's agony. But it is still one instance of the rejection of the sin itself. Every instance of self-denial for the sake of Jesus takes down one cross.
Ultimately, we should only go where God calls us, and only because he calls us, and His wisdom and goodness will take care of the rest.

There is No Suffering Here

Alongside its internship program, UrbanPromise runs something called UrbanPromise International Fellows, where interns come from all over the world to learn about and experience the UrbanPromise model of ministry in order to emulate at home. One of the UPI fellows recently admitted that she was struggling to see God's purpose for her in Camden. Thinking of what she had seen and experienced in the past, she explained, "there is no suffering here". The children she saw here, she told us, had everything in excess, and even so were ungrateful for what they had.

Now I think there are many things wrong with this. To begin with, the second statement is probably wrong. Just because fewer people starve to death or lack clothing or shelter, or, more likely, they are less visible, does not mean that it fails to occur in America. I also think American children are taught, from a young age, to hide what they do not have. Often what appears to be ingratitude may actually be desperate posturing for something that isn't actually there. Perhaps more importantly, suffering is nobody's prerogative. Suffering is in humans as much as situations, and all human beings have the capacity to suffer. One would not conversely go to a refugee camp and declare, "there is no joy here". And perhaps as poignant as we find joy in the midst of suffering is suffering in the midst of gladness devastating.

Nonetheless, that short, simple statement really rattled me. In all the time I've spent in Camden, it never occured to me that it would be possible to come here and to say such a thing. The issues that I see are so beyond my own experience that I have often wondered that we allow such conditions to persist. The idea that what I have always seen as incomprehensible suffering is no suffering at all to somebody else is staggering in its implication of suffering beyond what I even understood as suffering in this world.

The death of 5,000 people in the attacks on 9/11 shook and restructured the understanding which shaped our nation's policies at home and abroad. In these deaths we saw evil, we saw suffering that we could not but respond to. When Hurricane Katrina left almost 2,000 people dead and a city in ruins, we were indignant at the tragedy and the injustice of apathy or incompetence in our response. This is sorrow, this is injustice, this is suffering.

But in his foreward to Jeffrey Sachs' book, "The End of Poverty" Bono writes that 15,000 people die in Africa each day of preventable diseases. 15,000 people every day!* Realities like these provide the context for statements like, "there is no suffering here", not because they trivialize the suffering we see, but because the sheer magnitude of the suffering they represent is so overwhelming.

So what is my purpose in a place like Camden when the suffering it contains pales before the atrocities of the world elsewhere under a certain metric? Even in Camden I sometimes have doubts about my purpose in one of the more peaceful neighborhoods in the city. But I think the problem here is in the question. My purpose is understood as my meaning: how my presence might be the most meaningful to others. But this comes down to the pure pride of a gloryhound. One cannot love for the purposes of glory or achievement. To seek out greater suffering as worthy of my love is to seek out greater opportunity for my love to be appreciated, to be a greater hero. If I were truly to seek out suffering out of love, then I would be unaffected if God required my love in a more comfortable place; in any situation I would be able to love equally. Instead, personal pride or achievement masquerade as compassion.

*Assuming Africa has a population of roughly 1 billion people and the US around 300 million (and my math is correct), this rate is relatively equivalent to 4,500 Americans, or 1.6 million a year. Other studies suggest that 45,000 Americans actually die each year for lack of health insurance, which might be somewhat analogous to the statistic here. 45,000 a year, while also staggering, comes out to roughly 123 a day, or a little under 3% of 4,500. Of course, people are not statistics, and each of 45,000 preventable deaths is every bit the tragedy of each of 5.5 million.

Red Tape

One of the exciting opportunities that has presented itself this year is a mural project with the freshmen students at Woodrow Wilson High School, one of the two major public high schools in Camden. An UrbanPromise intern had very successfully completed a mural at the school in the past, and an administrator from the school had been in contact with UrbanPromise for some time about creating another one. Last week, myself and another intern went down to the school to see the school and the wall, and to discuss the project with the school, with the expectation of starting today and dedicating at least two days a week to this project. Upon arriving this morning, however, our contact informed us that, under the new adminstration, all projects had to be board-approved, a process that requires a minimum of eight to ten weeks. Even further, we are not even allowed contact with the students without board approval. While this makes sense, it is still frustrating, and there is nothing we can really do except for wait and hope that, after the wait, it actually does get approved. In the meantime, we are brainstorming ideas and identifying needs and potential partners to fill those needs, but it looks like I'll have to find another place for morning service work, at least until December.

Blessings,
Matt

Program Eve

I spent the weekend mostly preparing my classroom and lesson planning, and I still don't feel ready. Nonetheless, tomorrow is the long-awaited first day of after school program (ASP). I've chosen a pirate theme for the 3rd and 4th grade classroom with the catchprase "Books Ahoy!" and a giant pirate ship and sea monster on the wall. Tomorrow should be a fairly laid-back day with an opening program, snack and homework time, and lots of free time. We won't start teaching classes until Wednesday. Our director has suggested we take to heart the old teacher's adage, not to "smile until after Thanksgiving". I'm not sure I can do that, but I do get her point.
After program I'm going to a church with Has, a talented streetleader, to help him perform a song he wrote before a men's group where Bruce Main, the president of UrbanPromise, is speaking.

After almost two weeks of training and prepping and sitting through policy seminars, we finally get to actually do program! Here's praying it goes well.

Thanks to all,

Matt

More Preparations

Summer at UrbanPromise is a wild, busy, and very crowded two months of screaming excitement. Hundreds of freedom-crazed kids, dozens of enthusiastic streetleaders, and almost fifty interns ranging from dazed to berserk, swarm around campsites throughout the city of Camden, playing games, laughing through skits, stumbling through crafts and Bible lessons, and shrieking camp songs at astonishing volumes. It's a time of forced growth, necessary faith, physical exhaustion, emotional turbulence, fast friends, and glasses-fogging heat. Reflection is impossible until, waking up from your thirty-six hour nap that began the second you left Camden, you finally have the time to comprehend that something just happened.

By all accounts the year-long program is of a very different nature. I'm living and working at the East Camden site, in the Rosedale After School Program, where UrbanPromise began its afterschool ministry. It's the same site where I worked the past two summers, but instead of five interns we have two, and instead of eighty kids we have forty. During the summer kids would arrive before 8:00 and peer in through the doors as we were meeting before camp. With school in session, we pick up our kids from the local elementary schools just before 3:00. Instead of rotating through all the grades for the same lessons, I have my own class, varying the lessons between literacy, bible, and creativity activities. Our mornings are devoted to building community and volunteering locally, providing opportunities to move beyond the confines of the UrbanPromise "bubble" and experience other elements of the community than we do with our kids.

Program officially begins on Tuesday. We have a dry run on Monday and in the interim I'm planning lessons, coloring classroom decorations, and searching for worksheets pretty much nonstop. Along those lines, if anyone ever has any ideas for activities having to do with literacy, arts, math, science, or music, please let me know and I will more than likely give them a try.

Thanks to all my friends and supporters!

Blessings,
Matt

Ready for the Battle?

I arrived at the UrbanPromise headquarters on the eastern edge of Camden on Wednesday, September 9th, with my guitar and a Rubbermaid tub full of clothes, toiletries, and books. Eleven other interns trickled in over the next two days; we have fourteen ready to open program next week as I write this, and we expect to have a full twenty by the end of October. We spent the weekend on a spiritual retreat on a farm in the foothills of the Lehigh Valley, an odd contrast to the urban setting we will all learn to call home soon enough. We chatted, prayed for one another, transcribed our expectations, fears, and supplications for the year in letters to God, and ate unhealthy amounts of home-cooked food. And then we all crowded back into two white UrbanVans and crept back to the city invincible to catch what rest we could before a week of training sessions and preparations.

As you might know, I made a decision some time ago to postpone my senior year of college in favor of a year-long internship with UrbanPromise, a ministry in Camden, NJ with which I have been blessed to share my past two summers. The reasoning that preceded this decision was not particularly coherent, prudent, or, perhaps, sufficiently prayerful, but I am ready to proceed with much prayer and anticipation where God might lead me on (or from) the road that I have chosen. Hopefully as I continue to write this blog I will be able to articulate and explore not only the reasons I came here but also come to understand why I am here, why I continue to be here, and why I will be where I am to go.

A friend of mine from Georgetown suggested that this process of understanding is also one of seeking who I am in the eyes of God. And such a search is intimately concerned with the character of God and His relation to his subjects, his creation, to which I belong. This search, in fact, is at the core of much of what I see before me this year, and, as definitive in my thought processes, will also color this blog, insofar as it serves to record my reflections here.

As such, it is my hope not that this blog will simply provide a record of my activities as an UrbanPromise intern, but detail the questions I encounter along the way.

As always, thanks to my friends and supporters who would share in this with me.

Blessings,
Matt