A Blog to Read: Inside the Invisible World of the Homeless

As an AmeriCorps VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) Member, my job is to fight poverty through service and capacity building. For those of you who don’t know, the AmeriCorps program is the domestic version of the Peace Corps; volunteers serve our country for one year and take the same oath as military personnel.

My year of service has been very eye opening and humbling. But, I still find myself wanting to learn more about what I can do for those in poverty, those who are homelessness and those who find themselves in difficult situations. What I think helps with this process the most is to experience homelessness or poverty for one’s self (a VISTA earns less than $25 per day). So, to take advantage of the technology of the day and to help our blog readers increase their understanding too, I’ve included a link to a wonderful blog story which takes the reader through an urban minister’s perspective on homelessness as she spends one season living as a homeless woman. I find her story inspiring and helpful as First Central strives to serve our local community.

Arloa Sutter’s Blog: Reflections on faith and justice from an urban minister’s perspective
http://arloasutter.blogspot.com/2010/07/inside-invisible-world-of-homeless.html

Posted by Hanna W.

UCC Coalition Gathering Celebrates ONA's Silver Anniversary

The UCC celebrated the 25th anniversary of General Synod's passage of the Open and Affirming resolution urging full inclusion of LGBT persons into the life and leadership of the church, during the UCC's Coalition for LGBT Concerns Gathering, which was held on July 14-17, 2010 in San Diego, California. Nearly 140 participants gathered for the four day celebration and conference. During the conference, coalition presentations and breakout groups addressed the topics of disability ministries, expanding the network and impact of ONA churches, LGBT immigration issues and transgender inclusion among other themes. The culminating event of the Gathering was the San Diego Pride Parade held Saturday, July 17th on the streets of its Hillcrest neighborhood. Over 150,000 spectators watched the parade as floats, music performances, political activists, civic groups and churches showed their support for the LGBT community.

To read more on this wonderful event, please click on the following link: http://www.ucc.org/news/ucc-coalition-gathering.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+UnitedChurchOfChrist+%28United+Church+of+Christ%29&utm_content=Twitter

"Gentrification Kills"

One of the many benefits of being active on twitter is that you stumble upon many interesting blogs and articles.

I recently found this one on gentrification, a common phenomenon in mid-town Omaha. In the blog post, the author, Kierra Jackson, comes to understand gentrification as "a process in which progress disrespects what pre-existed. Gentrification screams profit over personality, new without adequate regard for the old, and in my neighborhood, white vs. black." She goes on to discuss the role of compassion, as it applies to gentrification, and taking care of your neighbor, which just so happens to go hand in hand with last week's sermon topic. I really enjoyed her perspective on this important city issue and I hope you take a few moments to read her short essay.

To read her full story, "Gentrification Kills: Confronted by the Writing on the Wall," please follow this link: http://blog.sojo.net/2010/07/14/gentrification-kills-confronted-by-the-writing-on-the-wall/

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In the Garden of Eden with a Snake

I've been trying to figure out the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, and I have to confess it makes no sense to me. There's no Biblical context, or metaphoric way, or analogical way, that this story makes sense. The Garden of Eden story makes sense as a creation myth and "what the heck we are doing here anyway?" story. The Garden of Eden story makes sense as a "conciousness" metaphor -- becoming aware of our mortality and our capacity for doing really crappy stuff to each other. Perhaps the Cain Abel story is simply an example of our capacity to murder each other for the most specious of reasons. Like the Smothers Brothers - "Mom always liked you best." But I think there should be more to it. The Garden of Eden story has more going for it -- Garden story sets the stage for us, though, in a metaphorically conceivable way, the creation of the universe and how we got here. So now we sit here in our blissful serenity Garden- between catastrophes of our own making or others'- wars, plagues, famines, genocide. Nuclear warheads pointed at each other. Biological weapons stored in "secure" facilities. Sure..... Global warming, the large Hadron collector, engineered viruses, giant solar storms -- any one of which could do us in. We sit here between asteroid collisions which have eliminated virtually all life on the planet numerous times. We sit here between ice ages and stifling deserts and inland seas. We blithely sit here virtually on top of supervolcanoes (Yellowstone National Park, Long Valley in California, Valles Caldera in its own National Preserve) and other not so super volcanoes - Naples, Mount Shasta. We turn these end-all-life-as-we-know-it sites into recreation areas and camp on them and roast marshmallows and sing songs..... Talk about whistling past the graveyard! We are miraculously/accidentally (it depends on your point of view more than anything as far as I can tell) created on a planet just far enough away, but not too far away, from the sun, so that the planet supports liquid water. There are no threatening gamma ray bursters that we know about in the immediate 200 light year radius of earth. Our sun won't fizzle out for another 5 billion years or so...... Stephen Hawking says we need to beware of mean aliens -- as if we could do anything about a species that could interstellar travel to visit us. Humanity seems to have become aware of itself only as recently as 1300 BCE (according to Jayne's theory of conciousness). So it's not that we've been sitting around for all that long contemplating our navels. If it weren't for the a slight imbalance of matter and anti-matter during the first trillionth of a second of our universe, none of this would matter because we wouldn't be here in the first place. Some say conciousness was achieved earlier (in 2001 A Space Odyssey a chimp like creature, named Cain perhaps, smashes another on the head, Abel perhaps)- but at best in the scheme of things, a 4 billion year old planet in a 14 billion old universe, it's like conciousness happened this morning at 10:30.... And even that's not universally accepted: quoting from a Huffington Post article, "As Marvin Minsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence expert, put it more crudely, "The brain is just a computer made of meat." Nobel Prize winning Francis Crick, British molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist, went further. In his subsequent book Of Molecules and Men, he wrote, "The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry" -- to analyze, in other words, the meat. And lest there be no doubt about where he stands, philosopher Dennett says, "We're all zombies. Nobody is conscious." So much for Descartes - "I think; therefore, I am." Even if we posit "conciousness" to ourselves, we get only a sliver of time to provide sense and meaning to each other --40 years maybe. We get a glimpse of our mortality just in the nick of time. We spend the first part of our lives oblivious to our own mortality, and the middle part fighting it, and the last few trying to avoid it and/or welcoming it..... We must have been created in order to create meaning, I think; or at least, that's what makes sense to me for the slice of time we are here. I may work on a Cain and Abel painting; or like I like to say, "When all else fails, I always say, paint a flower." Bud C.

What I learned in Santa Fe, NM

In mid June, my work sent me to the United Methodist Institute of Higher Education: Educating Moral Leaders in a World of Poverty (held in Santa Fe, NM) and although we are not Methodist, I think the lessons I learned from this conference can apply to our UCC work and to progressive Christians everywhere. Our first speaker was the Rev. Larry Ward, Adjunct Professor at Claremont Graduate University and Director of the Lotus Institute. His opening speech was inspiring and hopeful. It reminded us of the importance of our work to engage youth on important issues and to create social change. Rev. Ward also reminded us to take care of ourselves while doing this vital work.
Nuggets of Wisdom:

• Events that happen inside of us flow outside of us. The inside events impact the world more than the events outside of us.
• In Buddhism, there are three poisons. The three poisons are afflictions in the heart, mind and soul that create suffering. They are: 1.) Grasping or the tendency of attraction; aka: greed. The collateral damage of this affliction is poverty. 2.) Aversion or hatred. We must practice compassion and trust if we want to have an impact on poverty. 3.) Ignorance. Our nation today is very much dissociated with the larger community and we lack ownership of our community. It is too easy for individuals to be dissociated with those in poverty and therefore not take ownership for the issue or the solution.
• All the Earth belongs to all the people- sorrow, gifts and wisdom.
• Exposing our youth to the community and its issues is extremely important. Why? Because they will be able to apply learning objectives, practice self-healing, and have the opportunity to have a profound experience and make a profound impact.
• In Chinese, the word busy translates to “heart killing.” It is important to take time to reflect and stay focused on the here and now—the wonder of the moment.
  

The second speaker was John Hill, Director for Economic and Environmental Justice, General Board of Church and Society, the United Methodist Church. His speech placed an emphasis on the response of the faith community to poverty and was especially useful for our efforts to become a mission driven church.
Nuggets of Wisdom:

• We must equip the next generation to ask questions and challenge the status quo.
• Effective ministry is relational.
• If we want to start talking about poverty then we must stop attacking the poor (i.e. homes not handcuffs).
• The poor are NOT mission projects, but children of God, our brothers and sisters who have fallen on hard times. The scriptures demand and ask us to take care of our brothers and sisters. We are called to see the world through the eyes of the marginalized.
• It is time for the Church to be in relationship with those on the margin. It is time for face-to-face relationships. Churches must co-build ways out of poverty. We cannot be “drive-by social justice activists.”
  

Clearly, these speakers struck a chord with me, but I truly feel that their “nuggets of wisdom” are helpful in a time when it is so easy to suffer from the three poisons and forget to think about the world just outside our own door or even the church door.
Posted by the Hanna W.