Action
If you are responsible for everything, then you are responsible for nothing.
I have been a life-long church-goer. It is one of the tremendous gifts of my life. From a wooden pew I was taught that Jesus loves the whole world. It only makes sense then, that to be like Jesus I need to also love the whole world. I used to go to a church where the handsome and charismatic pastor would courageously proclaim, “We are bringing the whole gospel to the whole world”. The idea would echo in my soul. It inspired me. It inspired me, at least for a moment. But in the wake of his inspiration, came… well…nothing. A numbness. It was like the slogan, in all its grandeur, actually gave me permission to forget, or maybe permission to ignore. For a guy like me, my soul is simply too small to wrap itself around the whole world. Even a purpose as large as “Love Portland” is more than my mind can handle. A city like Portland is a divine-circus of communities, dreams, economic forces, injustices, cultures, policies, sorrows, histories and most importantly, stories. Just thinking about it all but crashes my spiritual operating system.
When I was fourteen year old, my youth-group took a field trip to the big city. We piled in church vans and headed to, and I am not making this up, the largest mall in Oregon (and I wonder why I continually fight a gospel of consumerism). It was on that trip, sitting with my clique in the mall’s food-court, that I first saw the MTV video, We are the World. All of our musical messiahs on one stage, arranged like a church choir, in a cathedral-studio, preaching with perfect harmony a message of global love. It was so defining, that after that first hearing I had memorized the sermon, “We are the World, We are the Children, We are the ones to make a brighter day so let’s start givin’.”
More than twenty years have passed. And while I can close my eyes even now and hear Bruce’s rasp, Cyndi’s strain, and Michael’s innocence, We Are The World’s limitless message now seems as unaccountable and shallow as the collective-fame that made it the top-grossing song of the 1980s. What about today? I am starting to hear a new song. It is a collaboration of Reality, my growing activism, and the Living Word. I accept that this song may never be completed, but each new stanza is laying a soundtrack for my family and our community of faith. This new song’s title is a moving target, but it goes something like: We are our Neighborhood or We are Malachi’s Grade School or We are Peninsula Park Community Center.
This is an ancient process. “What does it mean to be a neighbor?” If I am not careful, this eternal question can be as impotent as trying to love the “whole world”. My neighbor is not a concept or a platitude. My neighbor is a person. A real person with a real name: Alex, Niki, James, Don, Fritz…. And if I am not careful, loving those neighbors might just change everything. It will certainly change which questions I care most about. How will I spend my time? How will I choose my associations? Where I spend my money and how much will I live on. How will I advocate? How do I love those who are not “like” me? How do I utilize and preserve resources? How does my home become a center of community? What meetings do I attend? How do I consume?
I want to be a part of the stories of my time, be they found on my front-porch, in a dog park, at a neighborhood association meeting, in my kid’s cafeteria, at a political rally, or simply across the table from a beautiful soul who, apart from intention, I would never otherwise know.
To know (be it a person or a place) is to love, to love is to feel, to feel is to act, and to act is to take responsibility.
It is a village-conspiracy.
-Tony