Eyes Wide Open

I had eagerly anticipated our first meeting. I intentionally - and with great excitement - arranged and rearranged household/work/childcare responsibilities to create this time for collective discussion and individual thought. It is sometimes difficult to claim time for myself, and especially to claim time for something that is not activity-driven. I was not disappointed that I took this time...I was deeply touched with meeting people - some of whom I've known for years - and the "eyes wide open" sharing that occured last night.

My journey of faith: I am a cradle Episocopal, baptized at the Church of the Holy Trinity in West Chester, PA. Holy Trinity was established in 1835, and I always loved the physical space. I was born with a passion for history, and as a child, visited many historical places, including the churches where our founding fathers and mothers worshipped. (I continue this practice as an adult, every chance I get, with my daughter). My early childhood was spent in some very "high" churches, with white gloves, boys choirs, etc. When we moved from the East Coast to Southern California, we stopped attending church as regularly, but worshipped frequently at the old St. Paul's Cathedral in Los Angeles. I vividly remember attending midnight mass on Christmas there: that space was sacred, and it was a deeply felt loss when that structure was condemned after the Sylmar earthquake in 1971.

My father was also raised in the Anglican faith, and my daughter is at least a sixth-generation Episcopal. (Earlier family members were members of the Dutch Reformed and Catholic churches). My mother's family is Southern Baptist, but she became an Episcopal as a teenager when she married my father. When she and my father divorced sixteen years later, my mother remarried and coverted to Judaism. I learned a great deal about Judaism through Friday sabbaths, participation in Seders, etc. The small rural community we moved to did not have an Episcopal church, so I attended a community church. The attraction: a really super youth group focused around a music ministry. This was a tiny church; we worshipped with little liturgical structure in a low-slung building in a large multi-purpose room, sitting on folding chairs. I liked to visit other churches, often attending the Pentecostal church with my best friend's mother, or the Catholic church with a friend's family, and during summers, visiting Baptist churches in the South. In a very chaotic and dysfunctional family life, I learned a great deal about families (and church families) by being a spiritual nomad and observing. I learned that religion can support or oppress, give wing to spirit, or squash it entirely.

I connect to my church experience through liturgy and music. I have my own hymnal and Book of Common Prayer, and also serve as the steward for those that belonged to my father, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother. I have spent years reading the hymnal (the hymnal is a great reference document about church and cultural history, and through it one can chart all sorts of histories: British, American, the reformation, cultural history, etc.). I like to offer prayer in song; the Doxology was the first song I learned and the prayer I offer most often. We sang it every Sunday when I was a child; we don't sing it nearly enough now.

I returned to the Episcopal church as a young adult, and began attending St. Paul's sporadically in 1989. In 1991, I joined, and quickly became very active in the church, participating in the choir, on the Vestry and School Board, in the HIV/AIDS ministry, etc. I've also arranged flowers, taught Sunday School, organized the Posada, and prepared the Parish's newsletter, at various times during my tenure at the church. I worked with Fr. Kahler to develop and implement a Lay Leadership Institute at St. Paul's about 12 years ago that was very successful, and which I enjoyed tremendously. I also led a study group on simplicity. Our Daisy and Brownie Girl Scout troop met at St. Paul's before migrating across the street to Loma Vista School. I have also been a member of the Daughters of the King.

My daughter was baptized at the church in 1996. As my siblings and their children have not stayed in the Episcopal tradition, this was a very important event for my family, and we talked a lot about our childhood church experience. In the last few years, as my responsibilites outside the church have increased, I've focused my volunteer time here at St. Paul's on child-centered activities.

Becoming a parent has made me more anxious about the prospects and failures of Christianity in general. Sometimes, I think my eyes are too wide open. While I am a real optimist, I also can't help seeing where I myself fail - so, so often, many times daily - and where I wish society would have its eyes more wide open, more often. I worry most about our patterns of consumption, and the distribution of resources in our society. We don't recycle well - we throw away too much plastic, and more importantly, we throw away too many people.

Last night, a comment was made about the number of homeless reported in the County. My response was that the figure was very under-reported. Those of us who live in midtown Ventura, where our church is located, know this to be true. We only have to shop at Vons on Borchard/Thompson to see how the homeless population has swelled in the community in the last few years. The population has not only increased in size, but has migrated and become more visible community-wide. As the river bottom has been effectively cleared of its homeless population, many of these people have landed in midtown. They have formed small communities of their own; a number of them have become familiar to me. One man in particular, has carved out "employment" for himself by taking care of the shopping carts at Vons. He has clearly reached some sort of understanding with the management there; I don't know, but I suspect they provide him with food and other items he needs. I used to find him rather intimidating, but as he has felt a sense of purpose about corraling carts, I perceive him to be friendlier.

As I traverse midtown several times throughout the day, in car and on foot, I have become familiar with a number of the homeless or marginalized in our community (I'd say close to two dozen are recognizable to me now) and I am now familiar with their orbits through that part of town. I try to keep my eyes wide open to them, and part of my daily ritual is to offer a prayer for them as we pass. Some are clearly mentally ill, and I often lament the lack of resources available for them. (And Jim and Lou, I have never failed to think of your work with AMI, and how faithful and impactful your walk has been. Thank you for that grace, which I've observed and taken in for so many years).

A small group of people living in cars and rusted out RVs reside in a parking lot behind the Target shopping center on Main Street. They often leave the site early in the morning to avoid being rousted by the businesses there, but they find their way back. There are others who sleep in their vehicles in the alley behind Telegraph Road at Mills. A couple of the homeless men who used to frequent the Vons center have found employment holding the sandwich boards advertising the new liquor store on Main Street (near Sizzler). There is an older couple that spends part of the day (weekdays) on the corner of Borchard/Thompson with their shopping cart and sign, but they sometimes can be seen at Mills/Main (near Lowes) on the weekends. He is disabled.

There are many families at risk of homelessness in midtown, families with school-aged children overflowing the motels on Main Street and Thompson Boulevard, in the corridor bordered by Mills Road to the East and Kalorama to the West. These families crowd into motel rooms that were designed for the motoring tourist in the 1950s, when the Ventura Highway was a famous and well-traveled thoroughfare, before Highway 101 bisected our community.

Two weeks ago, I was asked by my daughter's teacher to pick up a student from her home to transport her to the school for a field trip to Catalina Island. This girl lives with several adults and three other children in a large motel room on Thompson Boulevard. They cannot afford a first and last months deposit to rent a home or apartment in Ventura, and this is the second motel they've lived in the last few months. There is no place to play, the garbage bins are overflowing, no school bus stops nearby (leading to frequent school absences), and many of the motel residents are adults who have fallen on hard times. Some are on probation, many are using drugs. It is an unsafe place for families with children to live, but where can they go?

These children attend our public schools, including Loma Vista Elementary, right across the street from St. Paul's. If you are a parent volunteer or a teacher with your eyes wide open, these children are easily recognized. They are the kids receiving their breakfast and lunch at school, are often wearing the same clothes, have frequent absences, and are often missing their homework. They are the children whose parents are unable to bring in the requisite treat to celebrate their birthday, who are unable to volunteer in the classroom, or extend an invitation to play at their home, who don't own a sleeping bag for a camping trip or overnight, and who will leap at an invitation to your house.

And, yes, this is true - these are the children who may be seen begging for money outside of Target. If your child has his or her eyes wide open, they will see this, ask you to stop the car, and get out and hug the friend. If you have your eyes wide open, you use this as a teachable moment about a variety of things. Among them: poverty is not an individual moral failing, but rather, a collective failure to be proper stewards of God's creation.

Could a church or community with its eyes wide open intentionally reach out to these people? Could a church in the right location - midtown, near the county hospital and the midtown bus transit center - make space available for nonprofits and social service agencies to provide services where their clientele now are?

Could a church and community with a larger vision utilize the former youth probation facility on Hillmont (with its meeting rooms, commercial kitchen, etc.) - and only a scant block from St. Paul's - to create a resource center for the homeless and marginalized in our community? Could a group take the former playground there - a fertile and empty lot, fenced, and now filling with weeds - and begin a community gardening effort to improve food security and provide a place to gather, engage in productive activity, build skills, and create community?

Could a church help the larger community see that the needs of our homeless and marginalized population can no longer be served through ministry/social service work on Ventura Avenue alone, be made to understand that the need has grown larger (lamentably) and that the population has diffused through the community to other places? Could a church with an incredible tradition of hospitality lead this effort and do this?