Misplaced Yearning

I feel like there are a lot of things I'm yearning for, and consequently I feel like I'm living in Proverbs 13:12 -- "Hope deferred makes the heart sick."  So I'm sitting in my apartment on my day off, typing out a blog post, because I know that there's value in giving thoughts a pace (a slowness, a patience and a peace, perhaps?) rather than letting them run as they please.

Deferred hope for serious things, like a world where people of different races at least listen to the struggles, the tears, and the pain of the others--and continue listening until they struggle, cry, and endure pain together on the road to racial reconciliation instead of race blindness.  Deferred hope for less serious things, like comfort for a certain person who's feeling all twisted up right now.  Deferred hope for personal things, like a somewhat stable vision of where I'm supposed to be going in this madness.  Deferred hope for everybody things, like justice for people harassed into homelessness by systematic injustice and inequitable access to resources and catching a tough break.

That verse has a second clause, though: "--but a longing fulfilled is the tree of life."  Honestly, I write this as a reminder to myself: Longings find their ultimate fulfillment in Jesus, who is the True Vine, the River of Life, the Firstborn over all Creation.  God, make me know that that is true; for now I repeat it in faith.  Eh, I'm still feeling sort of deferred at the moment, but this is a good reminder of Advent: "Behold, I am coming soon!" (Revelation 22:7).  Come, Lord Jesus, and let my ultimate longing be for you.  This deferral is making my heart sick.

Touch and Peace

Last week, my community members and I packed up and moved from our spacious and dusty convent to an apartment with strikingly large windows, and simple, lovely light streaming through those windows that I could call disproportionate but I'll instead term bountiful, because there is so much of it and yet it is just right.  It's lovely.

The convent where we had been living had been occupied by volunteers from my shelter for 16+ years. As you might imagine, it collected some fascinating artifacts from its various residents over that span.  One of my favorites was an inconspicuous typed sign taped to the back of one of the bathroom stalls: a "urine prayer" explaining and then offering a prayer to ask God to rid our minds and hearts of emotional and spiritual toxins at the same time as we rid our bodies of toxins in our urine. I wish I'd packed it and taken it with me.

In another stall, a different sign: "Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around." - Leo Buscaglia

It's... I don't know, it's maybe not true, and it's not really groundbreaking to me, and perhaps cliched--but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.  All those things, the touch, the smile, the kind word, the listening ear, the honest compliment, the smallest act of caring; they mean something. I suspect that there exist people whose lives have been changed by them, and I appreciate the encouragement to be gentle with people when it's easier to be self-absorbed to the point of gruffness (and it reminds me of that other cliched admonishment to "be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle").  All good and well!  But there's an emptiness to that singularity: "a," one.  What about the people who need the listening ear every week of years?  Or every night?  This number, I now think, must have been pulled from the air, but I remember in 9th grade health class being taught that people should receive five hugs per day for their optimum emotional health. (What?)  Then what of about those people who need more than "a touch" for their lives to be turned around?  Those whose trust and self-worth are built by daily acts of caring, by day-in and day-out affirmations of who they are and who they are called to be?  I don't think Buscaglia's quote means he is omitting these things--no zero-sum here!--but what about the long haul?

In another stall, still another sign: "Loneliness is the leprosy of modern society." - Mother Theresa.  Maybe it's because there aren't enough people doing enough small acts of kindness, but maybe it's because not enough small acts of kindness endure to become great and mundane acts of love.

Of all these things which "have the potential to turn a life around," the one I think about most often is touch.  I think about it because of all the things I have the freedom to do at  my job, working as I do with young people who find themselves homeless, this practice of touch is most perplexing. I smile, offer my listening ear, give genuine compliments when the occasion arises, do my utmost to speak kindly, and care as much as I am able.  But touch?

I've sat with residents who are distraught, having just found out they are pregnant while running from domestic violence and living in a shelter and dealing with serious mental health concerns, or having been diagnosed with an STI acquired while living at the shelter on the very day they were to return home to be reunited with their wife, or just being so overcome by the trauma and the pain of the abuse and exploitation and loss.  Sometimes I speak soothingly and sometimes we sit together in silence bearing witness to the sound of falling tears. And there have been times I've offered: Would you like a hug?  Sometimes they say yes and often they say no.

Yesterday there was a resident on my floor who was sick and so was allowed to stay in her room during the day rather than have the door locked.  In the middle of the day, however, some workers came to repair the smoke alarm in her room, and so I went to ask her to leave for 30 minutes (for liability reasons, mostly, to protect youth from possible misconduct by outside workers and to protect those workers from allegations thereof).  (Here I would like to make a side note regarding the absolute value of sleep to healthy human functioning and the relatively low value that institutions, including hospitals but most saliently homeless shelters, place on ensuring that humans can get that sleep: Sleep deprivation is a serious problem for people experiencing homelessness, as it only compounds other issues affecting their situation, and yet due to their homeless status losing sleep is part of a vicious cycle!  See this article for more.  Now, back to the main piece:)  Completely swathed in a blanket, the young woman did not respond as I called her name increasingly loudly.  So, identifying her elbow jutting angularly away from the thin form of her body, I did what I try to avoid doing when waking any residents up: I tapped her very gently.

Her body spasmed frightfully and she quite literally jerked into consciousness, her arms flailing and head erupting from under the covers with wide eyes as she gasped for breath.  I have rarely ever seen anyone so scared.  "Don't ever do that," she panted, eyes darting around the room and eventually identifying my face. "Don't ever do that again.  You are so lucky that I didn't hit you."  It was not a threat, but a helpful warning.  "I must have known somehow that staff was trying to wake me up.  I would have really attacked you."  I apologized: I'm sorry!  I really didn't mean to startle you.  I will not do it again.  Then I asked how I could wake her up in the future that would so she would not be so distressed: "Just scream." 

When I went through my single day of training, I was cautioned against touch.  I don't remember exactly what was said or how it was presented, but I remember being warned.  I'm glad I was--boundaries are important!--but I admit to not fully understanding either.  Certainly, even among my community members, I've learned that touch is not a panacea: one may receive an embrace as an act of comfort, and another as an intrusion.  That's true among residents, too, and I may also find myself in situations, as I did yesterday, where touch is a trigger. But there's an added dynamic when I'm at work, and that's the cloudy idea of "professionalism."

A book I'm reading called Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness mentioned this idea of professionalism in a way that pierced me.  It's by Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, the founder of the L'Arche communities.  Because the background is important, let me give a quick exposition of L'Arche: L'Arche is a collection of small communities where people who are variously differently-abled (what some would call disabled) live with those who are not.  They do so with a mission not to dichotomize as I just have.  Rather, they recognize themselves as one community where all members participate equally, if in different ways, because they are a community and not a group of care-givers living with a group of care-needers. Hauerwas argues that places like L'Arche are prophetic to the church because they provide a true vision of peace, which he defines as requiring slowness and a place.  He writes, "Peace creates time by its steadfast refusal to force the other to submit in the name of order" (2008:46).  War, on the other hand, particularly in an age of mass and social media, globalizes, accelerates, and "real-times" events of the world.  So peace is really about being personal, being present, and being patient: "For at the heart of L'Arche is patience, which is but another name for peace. ... L'Arche requires that those who do this important work learn that time is not a zero-sum game" (2008:47).

Later, Vanier notes, "Living in L'Arche I have learned that it is a revelation for people with disabilities if you say to them, 'There is meaning to your life.'"--and then, this is it!!--"We are not just doing good to them as professionals" (2008:63, emphasis added).

A resident once said to me, a few months ago, that she just wanted someone to care for her who was not paid to do so.  Her sentiment has since been echoed to me several times by other residents.  How to respond to that?  In some ways, I am not a professional: I'm a very recent college graduate, no Master's credentials, living off a collection of simple stipends and trying to figure out whether or not I can give residents who live at my shelter hugs. But there's no denying that I occupy a professional role.  I am not a friend per se, or a counselor, or someone who is free to use touch uncritically, or a fellow community member in the spirit of L'Arche.  I like to think that I care not because I am paid (in kind) to do so.  Yet it remains that I am paid to care, and I am doing good in a professional role.  This professionalism, this sense of having to do and having to document and having to audit and having to justify, can feel at times like war: generalizing, accelerating, real-timing.  There are times of intimate humanity too, but they don't always win out.

I'm working to figure out how I can create peace at my shelter, a place where there is so just so much.  Whether busyness or chaos or activity or anything else, there is much.  Maybe I as one person cannot create this peace, but I'm at least trying to figure out how I can work toward it.  I don't know how to do that while wearing my professional hat.  But I think asking these questions is a place to start, of looking to understand how to be in it for the long haul.  Two places I look for encouragement:

1) The encouragement of Heidi Baker, missionary to Mozambique: "Stop for the one."

2) The words of Paul writing to the Thessalonians, made richer when I think about what it may mean for God to be the God of Peace, that I've recently been meditating on: "May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it" (1 Thessalonians 5:23-24).

God, make me a peacemaker, that I may be called your child.