Day Six - January 11th - Haight/Ashbury - "Exhaustion"

     Exhaustion has hit me, and/or maybe I'm following in the line of others and getting sick.  Either way, all I want to do is sleep.

     You might think I am exhausted from too few hours sleeping too many days on the floor of a storefront church with too much light and too much noise.   But you'd be wrong.

     Since I got my air-mattress and earplugs, along with my sleeping mask, I have slept quite well, thank you.

     I believe in at least three kinds of tiredness. There's the day to day sort when you stay up too late or get up too early.  Related to that is the physical tiredness that you get when you work physically for many hours.  Yes, I'm walking a lot but I don't think it's that either.

     The third is that deep down tiredness that sleep and rest barely mitigate. The type that takes a long time to go away.  That tiredness that makes you feel like a fine thread pulled tight, almost at the breaking point.  When your emotions and your brain, your heart-self and your mind-self, have been put to the limit for far too long.  This often happens when I study, uninterrupted for too many hours too many days in a row...I forget what the sun looks like, I get so absorbed I forget about friends and family and myself for a few days.

Whatever word you use, stretched, drained, dried out...that's where I am.

     I imagine being homeless is a lot like this.  Never having a permanent, comfortable spot.  Always worrying about your next meal, your next fix, whether your stuff will be safe, whether you'll be too cold tonight.  Only for me there's an end.  I am very blessed.

     What if this stretched feeling was my life, twenty-four / seven / three-sixty-five?

     What then?  Would I go crazy? Would I adapt? Would I become suicidal?

     I can't imagine being in a perpetual state of exhaustion.

     I pray anew for people living on the streets, people living in poverty.

Day Five - January 10th - Bayview - "What am I fighting?"

(Note- I just decided to post all of my reflections.  I have so few for week two that I should catch up pretty quickly.  I welcome your comments on any of these.)

     I can't think of anything worthwhile that started easily.  Anything that helped people, that had at its core the goal to accompany people, to find where they were and be there in some way...why does it seem that they all started out humbly and usually with a fight?
     Nina started out small and lonely and fought with people.  Or rather they fought with her.
     Glydes meal program started with church interns and drug dealers seeing a need and fighting to find a way to fill that need.
     The reformation started with the simple act of Luther nailing a list on a door.  This became quite a fight.

     In these and in so many other cases, once the movement takes on enough steam, gets enough and influential enough support, suddenly and ironically most of the opposition goes away and claims they were with you all along.

     This reflection is not meant as a history lesson.

     What keeps me separate?

     Maybe one thing is that I have to figure out what things I am fighting against inside me and why.  Yes, there are things that keep me safe and others around me.  Those things are worth fighting for.

     What I need to do is to look inside myself and figure out what things I am fighting that I am simply fighting for the purpose of keeping myself separate.  Those things could be the reformation moments of today and I just  might be missing out on the bandwagon if I resist too long or too much.  I would hate to be the one who fought against it all that time and then switched sides, pretending as if I had been there all along.

     When am I uncomfortable?  Those times I am uncomfortable, why?  What am I fighting against?  Is it to keep me safe or is it to erect another wall between me and someone else?

     What a world we would have if we all had the courage and endurance of Luther, of Momma Nina.

     Hunger would end.  Homelessness would end.  Yeah, there would be a lot of fights along the way, but eventually everyone would jump on board. As horrible and sad the world seems, I hope that sort of world is possible.

Day Four - January 9th - Chinatown - "Blinders"

         We all have blinders. Blinders are what racehorses wear so they can't see the horses next to them, only the horses ahead of them. That way they think they are missing something. A horse that could see next to itself could see that they are firmly in the middle of the pack, comforted, part of community, and they might slow down. Bad idea for a race horse. So they are trained to focus only on what's ahead, on the horses in front of them, on the race, on the finish line.

      I walked and walked, pushed past huge crowds of people, buying and selling vegetables and fruits I had never seen, I saw dried squid and octopus for sale.  Then I saw a wall. Everything changed. The crowd thinned, the street poles all had a red, white and green stripe, all the shop names had extra vowels.  I had wandered into little Italy. I had crossed over two blocks before and hadn't noticed. But everything had changed.  What else had I missed?

      I crossed the street and headed back into Chinatown.  This time I looked in directions I hadn't looked before.  I tried very hard to take off my blinders.  Mostly this meant I looked up.  Above the crowds.  To the many windows too close together, to the laundry airing in almost every one. How had I missed that?

      A bunkbed was shoved up against one window. Another served as storage of some sort. Many had drawn curtains. It could have been a palatial apartment or a tiny room. My blinders were only partway off.

      As I walked back, a woman stopped me.

      "Do you speak English?"  "Yes." I replied, smiling inwardly, though the thought occurred to me that saying the few words I knew in Korean as an answer and then walking off would be pretty funny.  She would have had no idea. She was looking for lunch. A few feet away were her family, picking through trinkets on a table.

      Strangely I identified more at that moment with the masses of Chinese crowding the sidewalks than these tourists.  And at 6'7" and very white, that's no easy task.

      I found a comfortable stoop outside a church and I sat. The Chinese United Methodist Church was my window on the world around me and I eased my blinders off a little more.

- A man stacked and packed cardboard into boxes.
- A stream of older women came into the church where I sat.
- The obvious tourists, mostly white, walk much more slowly than the others.
- The Chinese women almost always walked in pairs. Old women holding hands with and physically supporting older women down the street.

      I'd be willing to bet that there are many people who have never or rarely left Chinatown.   It is as much a slum, a ghetto, as it was when walls or fences separated this area from the rest of the city.  The walls still exist but are now much less obvious.

I met a friend.

      We walked together.  We tried to take our blinders off as we walked. We weren't very good at it.  At one point my friend asked if we wanted to sit on the sidewalk and lean against a building.  It was sunny and warm.

      We watched people pass by us for a long time.  Very few looked at us. Almost none made eye contact.  Did they forget to take their blinders off?

      I wonder how long it would have been that someone would have noticed me if I were hurt, but not asking for help? Maybe dying but properly staying quiet about it.  I wonder if I would have been noticed earlier or later if I was in dirty clothes.  Would they have come sooner to clean up the sidewalk I dirtied with my presence or would it have taken even longer because so many would have their blinders on?

      Just like my walls I like my blinders.   We all do.  I don't like looking at the poverty and sadness, the disease and dirt.  I don't.

      I wish I could say taking off my blinders was easy.  But it's not.  Because as one hand of mine moves to take them off of my eyes to see the world as it really is, my other hand pushes them right back on.

     It's subconscious but it is also conscious.

     Does everybody wear blinders, even the most oppressed, most downtrodden, most poor?
   
     I don't know.

     All I know for sure is that I do. I am ashamed of it but I have no intention of taking them off fully or permanently.

     I'm not that brave.

Day Three - January 8th - The Castro - "Where are you guys from?"

Hello again.  Its about day ten or so. This was my reflection from day three.

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Today I was struck by other-ness and lack of other-ness as much as anything ironically. And it all came from eating in a food kitchen.

On one hand, eating in a food kitchen is a great equalizer. There are people there who are homeless. There are people there who are not homeless. It is difficult with many of them to tell the difference. We are not homeless. At the same time, if we are to spend three weeks here, we need to take advantage of cheap or free meals. One commonality between us and everyone else there is that we are all hungry. In that case, we are all equal, no one any better or any worse than anyone else.  Some more privileged than others to be sure, but no better or worse. We come as people, just that, all of us broken and human and hungry. Hungry for lots of stuff, but mostly just food.

On the other hand, we stand out like sore thumbs. In one simple question, one innocent, kind, normal, everyday sort of question, that was revealed to me.  He asked, "Where are you guys from?"

Language is an interesting thing.  It always means just what it means. Most of the time it also means something else. Often contained within it are a myriad of questions and comments and statements.  Layers upon layers. To miss the underlying layers is sometimes to miss the point entirely.

Five simple words.  "Where are you guys from?" And we all hesitated to answer.  I hesitated because I recognized the many layers of that question.  The answer was simple but complex.

Berkeley.

But the question had other statements built in. Some of them I may have been manufacturing, but most of them I probably wasn't.

"Where are you guys from?"
You are together.
You are not from here.
You have not been here before.
Why are you here?
Why did you come to this place, today?
You are not the same as everyone else here.

Something was different. Was it because we came as a group of six? Was it because of something else?

"Where are you guys from?"

There were people better dressed than I was. There were people who were younger, more handsome, more clean shaven. I can't be sure, but I bet there were other people there for the first time, but we were set apart with one question, one innocent question, as being different.

"Where are you guys from?"

Berkeley.

And the follow up question was even more telling.

"From the theology school?"

It could have been the logo on my hoodie but I'm not so sure.  Maybe "baby pastor" is tattooed on our foreheads, only readable by managers of food kitchens, other pastors, and small woodland creatures. Or maybe we stood out in some other way.

The answer, like the question itself, could be very simple or could be even more complex than I am making it. How can I be totally trusted as one of the people if I stand out this much?  Do I even want to be?

He was the manager/owner of the property as he let on later. Does his compassion to run such a place give him the prescience to see through our masks?

We were insiders and equal.

"Where are you guys from?"

We were outsiders and separate.

Day Two - January 7th - The Fillmore - "Walls" (and an introduction)

Hi, I'm Dan Tisdel, one of the participants of this experience.  I am going to post a few of my reflections as I go. This first one was from Day Two.  If you are interesting in reading more than I post, I will post others.

Day Two - January 7th - The Fillmore

The walls that separate us might be physical and obvious. They might be actual walls, or the way Geary street divides the poor Fillmore area from the affluent, vibrant New Japan area.

Or it may be walls we cannot see. Walls of sneers and downturned eyes. Walls of language. Language barriers. Walls between people who have and who don't. Walls between people who work and who can't or don't. Walls of education.  Walls of family background.  Walls of skin color, walls of ethnicity.
Walls dividing good, healthy food from other, less accessible, less healthy options.

There are walls all around each of us. Its surprising we can see each other at all.

Our society is built on building walls between each other. It's a huge waste of time and energy. Enlightenment comes with the understanding of the need to break down walls. That is a lifelong process and at best it will have a limited effect.

Because though we often rail against them, part of us likes our walls. We feel safe behind our walls. Because being in relationship with people who are different is scary. And everyone is different in some way. So we build more walls, even when we think we are tearing other walls down.

There is an interesting phenomenon about neighborhoods.  The buildings take on their own personality. You know when you are in a different neighborhood even if you never saw anyone. Maybe it sounded different, or smelled different, but mostly it looks different. Neighborhoods are defined by different ways of being, different ways of living. Not necessarily better or worse, maybe its all small apartments and condos, maybe big houses with small yards, maybe small houses with wide open spaces, maybe the houses stretch vertically, maybe horizontally.

People are like houses. They clump together, none of them look alike, really. But somehow, they fit in the same neighborhood.  It would be strange to see an 80 story high rise next to a log cabin on an acre of land next to a line of row houses with their shared walls next to a trailer park next the White House next to public assisted housing.

These neighborhoods are divided as sure as if there were walls and barbed wire and check points between them.

People are divided the same way.

I know I am supposed to try to answer the question "Why?" here, but I can't even begin that process.

There are far too many walls.  Some of them I built myself. Others were built by people I didn't even know, before I was born. Some keep being built by others even though I ask them not to and knock them down. Like a three year old having a temper tantrum with his blocks. Actually a lot like that.

Week two begins...

Our eight brilliant seminarians are moving into their second week of street retreat and immersion.  They're following shelter hours at St. Paulus Lutheran church (7pm - 9am) and we're following Paolo Frere's model of reflection, action, reflection.

I imagine some of the seminarians will post some of their reflections here when they have a chance to get to a computer and type a bit. 

But for now, please keep them in your prayers.  Several have developed a cold and can use your support. 

Thanks for your interest in their journey. 

Megan

The Journey Begins for our 2014 Students

Today the students from PLTS began their three week street retreat in San Francisco as a part of the cross-culture training.  They are learning about how poverty may look different in different neighborhoods, about their own boundaries and ability to be present in the midst of poverty, mental health issues and addiction.

They begin their journey exploring San Francisco's tenderloin district and learning about poverty in the cities most well known district for homeless individuals.  For lunch we ate at Glide Memorial, a meal program begun by LGBT homeless youth and a seminary intern that has grown to national fame.  Who knows where their journey will lead.

Regardless, I hope they find light in even the deepest darkness. 

Please keep these students in your prayers throughout the week.  I'll post information about their journey each day if you'd like to follow along. 

And perhaps a student or two will chose to post some of their reflections.

Be well all!

Pastor Megan Rohrer