Compass Readings Blog

You don’t need me to tell you that we live in a complex world. We work hard at establishing routines, patterns, and perspectives that help us manage the complexities, that give us some illusion of control. Until they don’t work...or you run into something that doesn’t fit, that demands you re-think everything. Volunteers at the Center sometimes find themselves and their assumptions about life challenged or at least further complicated by other realities.

A desk minister who volunteers on a weekly basis writes, Let me tell you about last Thursday.  As we opened the library, several of the guys said they missed me the previous week, and D - who does a lot of preaching about the coming judgment - told me that he was glad I was there because he got into trouble when I wasn't.  (I don't know.)  Then R(1) came in and told me about his girl friend who is pregnant and wanting to give up the baby to the state, but he wants custody.  He is a smart guy who was planning to go to CPCC in the fall; now he's going to be raising a child.   Then there was R(2) who was drunk and nearly out of control.  I should have gone across the street to get the police officer.

Then S. in her wheelchair was on the computer.  When I told her it was time to go she whispered to me that she had just had an accident and needed to go to bathroom.  My co-worker and one of the guys got her out of the building - no small feat without a ramp - and took her over to the other building to go to the bathroom and change - he never knew what had happened.  I had to mop up the floor before another person could use the computer. 

Oh, one other thing I forgot – R(1), the father-to-be, lost his job because his address was the Men’s Shelter and the boss said "he'd had problems with someone with that address before.

I'm not sure why I told you that whole tale except to say, this is no picnic in the park.  As you know, it is really sad, unfixable life…I’ll see you next week.

It’s not about fixing, as she well knows. It’s about being with people, honoring their reality with open hands and heart, about building relationships present-tense. Which makes the world much more complicated for problem-solving, results-oriented folks.

And, as one of our counselors discovered, the complex realities which challenged some of his assumptions about how life works also opened him to other realities. He writes,

Discovering diversity bias is one of the main perks of UMC !  A rite of passage of sort.  When we started Artworks I believed it would be a cute idea.  I then had to examine my presumption that artistic talent and poverty were mutually exclusive.  Yesterday, I noticed another such moment.  I was waiting in line at O'Hare and stood behind two women.  One had neon pink hair, and another wore a burkha and stood with her family. I felt more uneasy about the burkha than about the unnatural hair.  What could more natural ( or American) than expressing one's spiritual beliefs? I then read the message on her husband's T-shirt.  It said, "My name is considered a nation security risk - how's yours working for you?"   Incidentally the woman was summarily searched as she went through screening. I walked through without delay, albeit a little less righteous.

What if the assumptions and solutions that work in your world were shown to have limits? The rich man on his knees before Jesus, asking what he must do to “inherit” eternal life, was confronted with a reality for which he was not prepared: “Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come follow me.”(Mark 10.21-2) And he got up and walked away.

How much reality can you bear? How far are you willing to be stretched? The Center is a great place to find out.

One way to beat the heat is to dwell on something that captures your full attention. Our habits of attention run our lives. We are what we pay attention to.  Psychologists estimate we have sixty thousand to seventy thousand thoughts a day, 99 percent of which are more or less what we thought yesterday. As Mary Pipher notes, most of the time we are just phoning it in.

Here are some quotes that have gotten my full attention lately:

Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; caps and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, 0 Lord,
Creator, Hallowed one, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

Denise Levertov

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

Naomi Shihab Nye

The governor will give
Homeless people sleeping bags,
Let them stay the night

On windswept porticos
Outside his buildings
Instead of your doorstep.

I am talking to myself
With empty rooms
I cannot bear to live in.

Stuart Dischell

If the blood of injustice is economics, we must as Christians seek justice by coming up with means of redistributing goods and wealth to those in need. How well a ministry can begin the process of creating a stable economic base in the community determines the motivation of that ministry. Is it simply "charity?" Or is it really trying to develop people and to allow them to begin to determine their own destinies?  What we need is a change created by Jesus Christ in our institutional behavior equal to the change that can occur in the life of an individual.

John Perkins

People want a Jesus who makes things right for the world;

but Jesus wants US to make things right for the world.  

It is up to us, with the strength of the Spirit of Jesus…

Jean Vanier

Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas and that the decisions we make based on those opinions are sound and intelligent. However, in a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, scientists at the University of Michigan found “we often base our opinions on our beliefs… rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we choose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions.”

The researchers discovered that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not correcting misinformation; acting almost like an underpowered antibiotic, facts can actually make one’s attachment to misinformation even stronger. “The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead clinician on the Michigan study. The reaction — called “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

Nyhan and a colleague created an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). They inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction worked.

For the most part, the correction didn’t make any difference in the participants’ responses. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — the technical terms is salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

Even after President Obama released a copy of his original birth certificate, some people still doubted his US citizenship. And after Sarah Palin took flack for stating that Revere "warned the British" on that famous night, some of her supporters tried to change the facts on Revere's Wikipedia page. The revision was quickly removed, with Wikipedia citing "content not backed by reliable sources."

The same dynamic can function with religious beliefs. Holding up his Bible, another pastor once told me, “This is all that stands between me and chaos!” Another pastor described his worldview by drawing a large rectangle with his hands in the air, saying “This is what the Bible says.” Then he stepped into the box. Anything he didn’t consider Biblical was clearly outside the box and thus unacceptable.

Whole sets of beliefs and values can act as filters through which we regard – and judge - people who are poor or homeless. Economic beliefs (such as the Protestant work ethic or equal opportunity), beliefs about morality and personal responsibility, the assumption that actions are a product of choice, to name but a few, can be woven together into a cord of conviction about behavior that shapes our reactions to others…and can make us ignore or resist alternative ways of understanding. For example, what do the words “those people” conjure up? For many, it would be ‘different from me’ – and wrong or bad.

We try to be careful about language at the Center – we speak of “people who are homeless” rather than “the homeless”, for no one’s living situation adequately defines or identifies them as a human being. Our term for the folks we serve is “neighbor” which implies mutual relationship and a measure of accountability. And we encourage all who seek to serve here to an ongoing process of internal reflection on what they are bringing to the table internally – and what they are learning from the neighbors about a reality that is in many ways very different from their own.