- Learn. Visiting a residency and support home for at-risk youth to learn about their ministry and see their setup; visiting a Catholic university as well as a Newman Center at a state school to learn about how we can live our faith in college.
- Experience. We undertake an urban immersion exercise in which we imagine we're homeless and must walk a neighborhood to decide what to do to eat, sleep, warm up, and go to the bathroom; we stay over in the city, sleeping on the floor in safe but simple lodging.
- Serve. We assist with the setup and distribution at a food bank and pitch in as server/cleaners at a soup kitchen.
The whole trip attempts to expose students to organizations, experiences, and service sites that bring them close to life on the margins. After meeting these people face to face, talking with them for moments, and seeing their dispositions and context, it becomes harder to ignore the realities in our culture, and inspires the students to consider greater action. These trips are perhaps the most enjoyable part of my job. It combines a family road trip with the profundity of direct service as well as the impact of a well-informed and actively processed spiritual experience.
This past Monday, I was making final preparations and confirming all the details for our Tuesday-Wednesday trip. As I finished folding laundry and packing late at night, I got an email from a student who had gone on the last trip, linking me to a news story. On her trip, we had added a new site visit to a community center in a rough neighborhood on Chicago's south side where we learned about peace circles, reconciliation, and the intensity of neighborhood and gang boundaries and its ramifications.
On Monday afternoon, a teenage girl, upset with another girl over social media activity and a boy, shot and killed her rival. It has since emerged that she obtained the gun from her uncle, who willingly bus-ed to meet her and give her the gun. When she pointed to fire, the gun jammed. She gave it to her friends who quickly fixed the mechanisms. She took the gun back and successfully fired shots, wounding her rival, lethally, in the back and another girl in the arm. The shooting occurred about 5-6 blocks from the site we had planned to visit.
Instinctively, I wanted to go. This whole trip is about bringing students face-to-face with life on the margins and the people that society forces to live life like this. Here was a potent, real example of life, and what an impact the realness of this would have.
Then, thinking more slowly, and talking to smarter people than me (my fiancee and my brother), I realized that I couldn't bring 7 sons and daughters into this dangerous of a situation. Thinking back to our driving tour of the neighborhood, the threat of senseless violence and the starkness of gang and ethnic boundaries weighed heavy. Liability and safety concerns had to win out, so I called the chaplain at the community-reconciliation ministry center to tell him that we weren't coming.
I'll tell you - I love tensions. I enjoy when two competing forces have to be confronted and sorted out, when moderation, shades of grey, and compromise have to be found amid a culture that so often demands extremes. In this case, up-close solidarity butted heads with safety. Could the risk be taken that retribution, copy-cat violence, or follow-up gunfire wouldn't happen during our time in the neighborhood? Could we go into the area to try to learn about the realities of violence in these people's lives knowing that subsequent violence was likely to recur nearby?
As usual, the best answer was a both-and, not an either-or. Solidarity isn't checked at the door. We don't need to be up-close and personal in order to reflect and understand. Though such ostensible encounters are deeply impactful, in this case, we had to find a way to delve into it all from a safer distance. I hate the message that my decision sent, that stable people seeking to learn more about those we've marginalized chose to keep their distance. However, solidarity is not about proximity but about depth and magnitude of heart.
After a delightful Q&A and tour at the home for at-risk youth, we asked to stay in the cafeteria to talk together. After I recapped the story that prompted me to cancel our visit, we launched into a hearty conversation about the realities surrounding such events:
- Why do we react so severely to social media activity?
- What pushes someone to get a gun? Once you have one, you have already decided that you're ready to kill someone.
- Why do we assume that it's all males? This perpetrator is a female.
- Do we solve these problems with less guns or more guns?
- Why are we afraid to talk to someone before taking violent steps?
And so it went on for almost an hour. The kids wanted to go, but they couldn't. So they talked. Seven teenagers and their casually observing campus minister spending time in reflection in solidarity with the perpetrator, victims, families, and neighborhood. Practicality and safety forced us to keep our distance, but our hearts insisted that we confront the reality of that day. We couldn't visit the reconciliation center; we couldn't visit the site to leave flowers. But we could confront these issues, examine our thoughts and opinions, and learn from each other about how to face violence and opt for something better.
For a moment between our site-learning-visits and our shifts of service, we found solidarity through conversation. It's less than perfect; it's more challenging; it's a tall order for a sacramental people whose hearts respond to the visible symbols of invisible realities. But it was what we had in that moment, and God taught us something through it.
No comments:
Post a Comment