February 1, 2015
Text: Philippians 2:1-8
Thank you for intro and thank you for having me. And I want to thank my friends and family who are here who are not regular attenders of 8th Day. You come from different faith backgrounds and no faith backgrounds, and I appreciate you being here.
I chose the reading for today outside of the lectionary because I really appreciate this concept of ‘letting the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.’ It’s one of the central concepts that Cynthia Bourgeault explores in this book I’ve really been enjoying. It’s called “The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind – a New Perspective on Christ and His Messages.”
One of the reasons why I’m reading the book is because I’m going through a sort of period of discernment lately. In the tumult of my last couple of years, I’ve experienced a pretty big shake up in when I thought I was doing with my life. This change in my life’s work that has kind of thrown me for a loop. I’ll explain.
From about 15 year ago up until recently, I was working in the affordable housing industry. Like so many of us in this community, I was drawn to the work of trying to alleviate poverty and racism. You could even say it was a calling, and it started at a pretty early age.
I come from a long line of politically active leftists. My parents come from blue-collar families; my mother’s father a member of the transit workers union in New York City. My father’s parents met working at the Singer Sewing Machine factory in Elizabeth, NJ. How my lefty, urban parents ended up raising my sister and me in Westminster, up in rural Carroll County, Maryland, is a long story that I won’t go into. But in case you don’t know, Westminster is the kind of place where the local politicians run on slogan, “Clean, Christian and Conservative,” and win by a landslide. It’s the kind of place where the leftists find each other quickly and stick close together.
I think I was about 5 years old when my parents took me to my first demonstration, in front of Congresswoman Beverly Byron’s office. We were protesting support for the Contras in Nicaragua. My sister Beth and I were babysat in church basements on dozens and dozens of occasions while our parents attended meetings of Bread for the World and the Nuclear Freeze movement. One of my favorite pictures of 10-year old me and 8-year old Beth was taken by our friend the newspaper photographer at the annual candle at a vigil in memory of the people of Hiroshima. My mother took on basically the entire medical establishment in town to stop the local hospital from sending women who were on Medicaid and in labor to deliver their babies in Baltimore, an hour away. She inadvertently made enemies of lots of the town’s doctors and the town’s influential elite who served on the hospital’s board. But once she recognized that injustice, she couldn’t help herself but try and change it. This is all to say that I was raised to care about social justice.
I was also raised in a somewhat financially precarious situation. My parents both had college degrees before Beth and I were born, but they had financial struggles, and then got divorced, which of course only makes the financial struggles worse. My mother, a writer turned librarian, worked hard to keep things going. And we were also very lucky to have a community that supported us when we needed it. We were part of a loose knit group of faith-based social justice activists, mostly from our own Catholic church, but we also had good friends who were Brethren and Baptist. My mother, my sister and I had lots of people looking out for us, driving us to school, supplementing our Christmas presents, even taking us on vacations, that kind of thing. And one winter, when the oil heating bill plus the rent were going to be too much for us to carry, we moved into the shelter called Resurrection Farm that was run by this group of friends, affiliated with our church. I was 12 years old at the time, and was unhappy about this transition, first and foremost because we had to give up our dog, Magoo.
A few months later, another friend in the same community, a distinguished lawyer in town named Jim Davis, co-signed a lease for an apartment for my mom and we moved out on our own again. We stayed involved with Resurrection Farm for another decade. My mother served terms on the board of directors, and we would spend every Friday night there for Bible study. And my passion for affordable housing was born.
As I grew older, I became aware of the stark contrast between Westminster and the cities about an hour and a half from us – Baltimore and Washington, DC. Our church had connections with inner-city parishes and we would occasionally go volunteer in some of the toughest neighborhoods in Baltimore. And, sometimes people from Baltimore or DC would end up living at Resurrection Farm. And I learned about the crack epidemic ravaging the inner cities. I got to know children who had been afraid to go to sleep at night because the violence in their neighborhoods would sometimes come into their own homes. I became friends with people who were dying of AIDS. In particular a man named Phil. In spite of the fact that I was a teenager and Phil was in his 50s, when we first met, he called me ma’am. I found this mortifying. This older African American man who had lived a long, hard life was calling goofy pimply-faced ME MA’AM? He’d grown up in the country, and he meant to be respectful and polite, but it sounded inappropriately deferential to me. It sounded like we were in Gone with the Wind or something, a reminder of the racism our lives were steeped in, and I didn’t want that reminder. I managed to convince Phil to please call me Maria, and over the course of several months, we spent a good number of hours sitting on the porch of the Farm talking, some about our lives, and some about his favorite books – he was a fan of Alex Haley’s Roots and the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Phil was the first person I ever knew who died of AIDS, and to this day, he’s the only African American person at whose funeral I’ve made remarks.
By the time I left for college, I understood the need for affordable housing, and those racial disparities were a big part of what drove that need. And I wanted to do something to correct those disparities.
During college, my commitments to social justice in housing took shape. I spent time organizing street homeless people for the Kensington Welfare Rights Union in Philadelphia. I helped resettle refugee claimants in Toronto. I rehabbed single-family homes for low-income families in Chester, PA. In grad school, I studied urban development and how to change the economic fate of neighborhoods. And when I came out of school, I got my first full time job in affordable housing.
I started out helping create programs that enriched the lives of people who lived in these low-income apartment buildings. I helped create community technology centers, and community gardens. I trained block watch volunteers in neighborhoods struggling with drug crime, and I funded after school programs and community organizers. I also became an expert in housing for people who have experienced homelessness – I helped to develop housing that’s affordable enough even for people with basically no money and that has social service supports to help people maintain their housing. It was incredibly rewarding work. I worked with people from all kinds of neighborhoods and walks of life, and was really proud of what we did together.
As my career advanced, I got more involved with the financing and development of the actual housing. I helped nonprofits to buy old buildings or lots to build on, design, permit, construct and rent up affordable apartment buildings. I did this first in New York City and then moved to this area and did it for Montgomery County, Maryland. This kind of work was fun for me. I got more involved in helping the actual real estate developments to happen. It turns out I enjoyed the math, the spreadsheets, and the analysis behind making recommendations about how to invest big amounts of money where.
Fast forward several more years: I was recruited to work for an affordable housing developer and to take care of the day-to-day flows of money for about 3,000 units of housing. For the first time in my career, I spent a lot of time on the ground at these apartment communities. And it kind of opened my eyes. Some of them were great and I met a lot of people who were doing ok for themselves. But in other instances, I saw some pretty bad behaviors – violence and drug use, in particular. And I saw other people who were unable to choose whether or not to live near violence and drug use. Because people’s rental subsidies were ties to our buildings, and the residents couldn’t move and take them with them, they were stuck. They couldn’t move toward job opportunities, either. And the reason for this isolation, making the rental subsidies tied to the housing, was that it was good for the developer, and for the banks. It was not what was good for the residents. And this was the first time I was realizing that.
Another thing that bothered me was that the developer I was working for got into some of these projects because the tenants had organized to own them themselves, and then needed the help of a developer. The company I was working for had promised the residents years ago that they would have a leadership role and an ownership stake in the properties. But I could easily see, because I knew about where all the money had come from and where it was going, that without coming up with millions and millions of dollars, the residents would never own or control those properties. Banks that hold the mortgages, who won’t turn them over to a bunch of tenants, will always control them. That’s not really how the industry works, regardless of what promises were made in the past. This opened my eyes to some big problems that I hadn’t seen before in over a decade in affordable housing. Around the time that I’m seeing these things, the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington rolls around.
I read some stories about what has changed in this country for African Americans since then. Realizing huge disparities are just as bad as they were 50 years ago. Maybe you guys remember these statistics coming out in August of 2013, regarding income, wealth, unemployment, and incarceration. These realizations hit me like a ton of bricks. What the hell were we doing? What had this industry accomplished, this industry full of people who want to right the wrongs of history, give disadvantaged people a leg up. I was part of an industry that, I thought, was fighting really hard to give back to people who were the victims of institutional racism: to provide a chance at stable housing, a chance to go to better schools, get better jobs, pull themselves up. But in spite of all that hard work, nothing had changed. I was stunned. This realization that 50 years after the March on Washington, African Americans are still so bad off economically, coupled with this miserable job in which I’m seeing these neighborhoods up-close-and-personal really for the first time in my career, I was kind of devastated. I have barely begun to describe to you how miserable I was at that job, but suffice it to say that I was dying to get out of that job. So I called up my old bosses and went back to my former employer, Fannie Mae, but in an entirely different capacity. I’ve been back there for a year now, and for the first time in 14 years I’m not working in affordable housing anymore. It feels like a big change for me – practically a change in my identity. But at the same time, I was so disheartened to see how broken the affordable housing was, and to see how little it had changed the plight of African Americans, that I was ready to back off of that identity to a degree.
What’s the responsibility of the African American people themselves? They are being given these chances to help themselves; aren’t they to blame for failing to take advantage of the land of opportunity?
Well, those questions should be asked. But I don’t know enough and at this point I don’t think it’s my place to take those questions very far. On the other hand, I recognize that the decks are not stacked evenly. My own family’s story is a great illustration of how uneven. My story is one of white privilege.
I told you my grandfathers had blue-collar jobs. Now they weren’t much to brag about, but that factory job and that union job were enough to allow my grandfathers to launch their offspring into the middle class. The jobs my grandfathers had probably were much harder to get for African American men of their generation.
Among the opportunities afforded to my sister and me, we were able to go to the local Catholic school on scholarships, partly augmented by the church pastor himself making the decision to forego partial payment. Would Fr. Joe have made the same decision if, instead of being faced with Beth, and me, he was faced with two little African American girls? Maybe he would have, or maybe he would have seen outsiders, or children who represent a much bigger problem than he thought he could address.
I told you that when I was a kid and my mom, sister and I were going through a particularly tough time, a friend co-signing a lease for a new apartment was critical to our being able to get back on our feet. Jim Davis was a remarkable man and I’m pretty sure he would have done the same for an African American friend in need. But how many African Americans have the chance to develop a long-term trusting relationship with a well-off lawyer?
And then let me ask you this: how many of you are surprised to learn that when I was a kid, my family ended up living in a homeless shelter for a little while? That right there – those expectations are a big part of white privilege. Everywhere we went, people treated us as though we were expected to be middle-class, that we deserved to be middle-class. I can tell you, those expectations made our lives easier. Do you see what I’m saying?
Now, when I look back on our family’s history, it’s not exactly guilt that I feel. I look back at my family in those years, and I wouldn’t begrudge little Maria and her mother and sister those chances that we got, those friendships, and all that support. But I am really sad about how difficult it seems to replicate those opportunities, particularly for people of color. And I’m really confused about what to do next. I don’t think I should give up on affordable housing. But what the heck are housing policy people like me supposed to do about entrenched inequality? It’s clear that things should be done differently and I have no idea how to get there or how I personally can contribute.
Which brings me to our scripture, and back to this book, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind a New Perspective on Christ and His Message. In talking with her about my search, my discernment, Carol Martin directed me to this great book. Her new perspective talks about how Jesus was not a prophet in traditional sense of warning people about something in an attempt to turn their hearts to God, and not a priest. While he was a learned person, he was not a priest. He had nothing to do with the religious hierarchy and he kept his distance from the religious rituals.
On the other hand, he was a wisdom teacher who came to transform the human consciousness. As I am, you can and must become. I am here to help, but you must do the work. The primary task of the Christian is not to believe in theological premises but to put on the mind of Christ.
I really like this idea. But what does it mean? “How do we put on the mind of Christ? How do we see through his eyes? How do we feel through his heart? How do we learn to respond to the world with that same wholeness and healing love?” That’s what Christianity is really about, writes Bourgeault. (p 29)
One concept that might reveal the mind of Christ to us is the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus mentions it over and over again, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to grasp. In fact it’s pretty mysterious: What is this Kingdom of Heaven? Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, 00meaning that it’s not in the future, it’s now. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you, says Jesus. Bourgeault suggests that “the Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness; it’s not a place you go to but a place you come from. It’s a whole new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that literally turns the world into a different place.” (p 30)
The Kingdom of Heaven is a different state of awareness in which there is no separation between God and us, or between humans and other humans. In this church every week, we pray a line from the Gospel of John that reiterates the same message. Jesus said, “I am the vine and you are the branches.” Jesus said, “Abide in me as I abide in you.” No separation between the human and the Divine.
Also no separation among humans. That’s another toughy, but Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Bourgeault points out that we often get this one wrong and think this says we should love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves. That then suggests that particularly if we don’t love ourselves very much then we are limited in how much love we can give to others. But, she says, it’s really “Love your neighbor as yourself – as a continuation of yourself. You are to see that your neighbor is you. There aren’t two beings, one seeking to better her life for herself at the expense of the other. There are two cells sharing in the same Life force. In that way, “laying down one’s life for a friend,” as Jesus did, is not a loss of one’s self but a vast expansion of it through love.
Jesus is inviting us to another level of consciousness, to understand that there’s no separation between us and the divine and no separation among humans. That’s intense, eh? It so happens that I think we have an example of that other level of consciousness within the struggles for racial justice in the US. I think Martin Luther King was one of the people who I think managed to get close to this level of consciousness.
“Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”
MLK understood that we humans have to get to another state of consciousness in order to achieve the just and fair society that we want. And that love is the differentiating factor. Love, in contrast to fear. Fear holds us back and cripples our ability to be open to seeing ourselves as one with one another, and with the rest of the world.
I found this quote of Martin Luther King’s particularly helpful in the context of the affordable housing industry: “We must rapidly begin to shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered”
But how does one create a person-based housing policy? I haven’t figured that out yet.
I have to see that my fate – my Life – is tied to the fates of those who are struggling, those who are disadvantaged, in order to move forward to achieve the Kingdom of Heaven. The fact is I grew up around people who knew this. That’s what Resurrection Farm was about, at its core. It was a place where people who came in the posture of receiving and people who came in the posture of giving and ended up sharing their lives and sharing responsibility for the community.
I know that our friend Jim Davis, the wealthy attorney, learned that as part of his own spiritual life. I knew that because we all prayed together on Friday nights at Resurrection Farm. And so he willingly took risks to help others, like co-signing an apartment lease for us.
Well, I can’t tie this up neatly. I stand before you a seeker.
Holding loosely to my ideas about housing policy, holding loosely to my career and my pride what I thought was my identity as a proud member of the affordable housing industry.
I ask that you pray for me and pray with me as I work through this search.
I’m reminded now that “Our struggle to find a place within a fearful and unjust world is treasured. God is here. God’s love will not let us go.”