Reflections

July 13, 2014

I am going to share about my personal experience of finding 8th Day, my initial thoughts and perceptions of the community, and why I choose to come back week after week. I’d also like to talk about  why I’ve gotten involved at the level that I have. Lastly, I’d like to share my hopes for the future of 8th Day (as well as my hopes for staying an active member of the community).

For those of you who know about my time in Syria preceding and leading up to the conflict, and how circumstances led to my premature removal from the community there, you’ll know how important it is to me to have the opportunity to make meaningful farewells. And even though I see this as a farewell-for-now, it means a great deal to me to share these reflections.

It seems hard to believe that it was only two years ago that Janae and I found ourselves attending worship in the Potters House for the first time. Our first day in the community was quite memorable: Jimmy greeted us at the door and prayed for us, David welcomed us and made us name tags (although, the utility of these tags was soon called into question, as we were perplexed to find no fewer than four people wearing Tom Brown’s name tag, but we were quick to move beyond that). I also managed to promptly disobey the instructions that were given preceding the communion. I was in line with the dippers, but immediately ate the bread that Victoria offered me. When she turned around with the cup I flushed with embarrassment and told her what happened. She simply said, “You want more bread?”

I came to 8th Day during one of the most confusing and broken periods of my life. To some, this may be a surprise, to others, less so. I was feeling a growing sense of loss over Syria, as well as a widening gap between what I am passionate about and what I was doing with my time. What I found when Janae and I walked into the Potters House one October morning was that 8th Day is a place where you can bring your disillusionment and questions, your frailty and vulnerability, and they will be embraced. 

There was a sense of authenticity in the room. Everyone seemed comfortable bringing what they had, and who they were, and nobody seemed to be trying to be something they were not. Instead of shunning the vulnerable, there seemed to be a spirit of embrace and acceptance, of accompaniment in the pain and frailty that we each feel.

There were many Sundays when I came to church just because I thought it was the right thing to do, and I didn’t particularly know why. I struggled to know whether or not my presence was making any contributions to the community. I knew I wasn’t alone, as Janae often expressed to me that she was likewise unsure what she had to offer the community. It came with a certain amount of guilt, especially as everyone around us seemed to be offering so much, and had been doing so for quite some time. We were both concerned that we weren’t pulling our weight. 

I knew it was the right place for me to be, but sometimes I wanted to show up in a cloak of invisibility. This selfish endeavor was made extremely difficult by the fact that Syria seemed to be constantly in the news, and I felt that I had become trapped as “the Syria guy.” It was an enormous amount of pressure (not to mention a constant state of grief). There were times when the pain and grief I felt for Syria became debilitating and I dreaded going to church because I didn’t want to face peoples’ questions. Even though I knew they were well-intended, and coming from a place of care, it was just too painful.  

Over time and after seeking help, I have been able to acknowledge that there is no escaping my connection to Syria, but it does not define who I am. It is a part of me--an important part of me, in the same way that a lost loved one remains with you long after they’re gone. I am learning to grieve without being defined by my grief. 

I am more comfortable with my role of carrying the burden of Syria to this community. And perhaps more importantly, as I look around each Sunday, I have been able to see myself as “the Syria guy” amongst many other “guys” and “gals,” and I am increasingly aware of one of the most profound beauties community has to offer: we all have different passions--each and every one of us. The great thing is not that we are all passionate about the same thing, but that we are all passionate people. Period. And as such, we all have the capacity to accompany each other in our pain, our passions, and our trials.

• Fair housing.
• Offender restoration.
• Recidivism.
• Anti-racism.
• Stop-and-frisk.
• Adult literacy.
• Unjust detention of immigrants.
• Torture survivors and human rights abuses.
• A massive typhoon in the Philippines.
• Protracted conflict in Latin America.

The list goes on, and you can hear it every Sunday during our period of lamentations.

This community has taught me not to be ashamed of the burden that I carry. It has also taught me that I do not need to carry all of the burdens mentioned above. For example, I believe in the goodness of renewable energy and that it is worth pursuing, but I can’t imagine myself getting as fired up about wind energy as Carol. I am grateful to Carol for her passion and willingness to speak up around this issue. I’m not saying that nothing is as important as Syria; on the contrary, I have been learning that the grief and passion I feel for Syria (or that Carol feels for stewardship) allows me and equips me to walk with the person next to me in their grief and their passion, and this, I believe, is where the power of community lies. Tom, Victoria, and Dotty demonstrated this to me by attending the event with the Syrian church leaders who visited last winter. While I know they also attended for their own interest, I felt profoundly supported and cared for by their accompaniment. That was a deeply tender moment for me.

As I mentioned earlier, the past couple of years have been a struggle for me. As time went by I was noticing a widening gap between where my passions lie and where I was dedicating my energy. Let me be clear, I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to work at Academy of Hope. Working alongside such a dedicated and passionate group of people was nothing short of inspirational. And to a certain extent, I did enjoy what I was doing there. But I’ve come to realize that there is a difference between being well-suited for a job, and being in a job that is well-suited for you. I believe that I was making helpful contributions to the efforts of Academy of Hope, and I was well-placed within the organization to be a compassionate listener for many. And I believe whole-heartedly in the mission of the organization, and that our efforts were having an impact. However, as important as it is, adult literacy is not the thing that keeps me up at night, and it is not what I am eager to read articles about. To put it simply, working at Academy of Hope is not my vocation. The more I recognized this, and the more time I spent at Academy of Hope, the greater the cognitive dissonance became, and with it, a sense that I was not living into my passions, and perhaps even betraying the gifts I feel I’ve been given. 

When I resigned from my position I was worried that informing my coworkers of my intent to study conflict transformation would sound as out-of-the-blue as announcing that I was leaving DC to study bacteria in Antarctica. I was relieved, and deeply moved, when a coworker affirmed my path by saying, “it is so obvious that this is what you should be doing.” I have received such affirmation from many of you in this community, which again confirms that I am heading in the right direction. 

As I prepare to move on to the next chapter of my journey, I do so with deep gratitude to the community at 8th Day, for your support, your encouragement, your challenges, and your commitment to putting your faith beyond words into actions. I consider myself a new arrival in the world of radical social justice, and I have found no shortage of role models for me here in this community. 

I understand that as I prepare to enter a new phase of my life, so does 8th Day, as well as the wider Church of the Saviour community. For the past several years I’ve been meditating on the idea of being a work in progress. I have come to believe that my objective is ever in front of me, that I have not arrived yet, nor will I until I meet Christ face to face. I am a work in progress. On a developmental level I don’t like the idea of settling for complacency, and on a spiritual level I believe the pursuit of Christ and of true Christian living is exactly that: a pursuit. There is still work to be done, both in me, and through me. I believe the same is true for the church, both universal, and for 8th Day specifically. We are a work in progress. This community has achieved many things together, and some of them no short of miraculous, but we cannot dig our heels into the ground and say we have arrived. There is still work to be done. 

Perhaps this theme can be illustrated most clearly by the words of K.C. Ptomey Jr., in a piece titled “The Waters of Discontinuity”

“God’s people are always, and ever, standing on the banks of the River Jordan. We are always, and ever, on the threshold of the coming of the kingdom, the coming of the governance of God. We are not there yet. We are on the way. It is a journey, not a destination. And therefore, we are ever living with discontinuity--leaving continuity, leaving security, behind in order to embrace what lies ahead. We, of course, give thanks for what has been. We did not arrive at the banks of the Jordan without a history, without leaders, without tradition. We value these and give thanks for them. We tell stories and celebrate what has been. It is how we prepare ourselves to face the future with hope and with joyful anticipation. With thanks for what has been and with faith in what, by the grace of God, is yet to be, we step off into the Jordan River. It’s deep and wide, but milk and honey’s on the other side.”

My hope, and my prayer, for the 8th Day community is that we will continue to listen to one another. There will be many questions to ask, such as, “How does 8th Day stay true to the spirit of its past, while preparing for its future?” but also “What does an outward expression look like in our mission groups when a lot of us are already giving ourselves to non-profits in the city?”

As for me personally, I also hope to stay engaged with the community, if only from afar. One suggestion that was offered is that perhaps I could make a regular contribution to the website, with a particular focus on justice and reconciliation. While I cannot guarantee the quality of these reflections, Mike Brown (who has gone through the graduate program I’ll be entering) assures me that I’ll not have a thought that goes unwritten while at EMU (Eastern Mennonite University). With all this in mind, I am choosing to recommit to the community today, with hope that we will make strides toward milk and honey together.