Archive for July, 2005

Parking Lot Rage

Tuesday, July 12th, 2005

I wanted to pull the rear bumper from her shiny SUV and smash it against her vehicle over and over and over again until it was impossible for her to drive it away. I wanted her to cry, be scared, and I don’t know what else. But I wanted to make an impact on her psyche as well as her car.

Ian and I had just come out of Kroger and were walking to our car through the parking lot. As is so often the case, Ian was drifting along a couple of feet behind me, probably imagining great feats of daring that he would later perform in the pool.

We were almost to our van when an SUV began to pull out of its spot. I realized immediately that we were directly in its path. I turned around to push Ian out of its way and made a loud, indiscriminate noise of warning. The SUV came to a sudden stop, narrowly missing both of us. When my heart began to pump again, we continued quickly on our way to the van.

As we walked, I looked to see who was driving the offending vehicle, hoping for an apology. Instead, a young, attractive woman with a couple of kids in her SUV spoke the words, “You need to keep a better watch on your kids.”

That did it. I looked at her with eyes wide open and screamed as a woman gone mad, “I was behind you, too! YOU are the one who needs to look where you’re going! You could have killed us both!” I was still yelling at her when her car rounded the corner out of the parking lot. I’m sure my face was either flushed or drained of all color, and my heart was pounding as if it was trying to release itself from my chest. I didn’t care who was listening or watching. I learned through three C-sections that dignity doesn’t matter where life and death are concerned.

Surely, this woman must be masquerading as a decent, responsible citizen in her lovely, well-kept body, with her lovely children and her lovely, new vehicle. Apparently, no one bothered teaching her about a lovely sense of responsibility and humility. Or perhaps she hadn’t cared to learn the lessons.

In the van, I sat breathing deeply and then turned to explain myself to Ian who was uncharacteristically quiet. (After all, it’s not everyday that his mom freaks out in a parking lot.) I told Ian that this lady had almost irrevocably taken away our health or lives and that she wasn’t even sorry about it. Then I launched into an informative lecture. “Driving…….. blah, blah, blah………. is a huge responsibility……..blah, blah…….. pedestrians……….blah, blah, blah……… always have the right of way……………blah, blah, blah……..” Silly, perhaps, but somehow, it made me feel a bit better. Ian even seemed a little interested.

On the way home, Ian rehearsed the parking lot scene aloud, probably hoping to get it down cold so he could tell Christian and Sophie with ease. More than likely he viewed the event as a little excitement in his day. But I hope that he remembers to watch for cars that don’t care if he’s behind them or not.

I suppose it was my mistake to trust so willingly in the caution and responsibility of others. I will be more careful in the future. But if it happens again, I can’t guarantee I won’t become a crazed woman once more. My life and the lives of those I love are too precious to let go with a milquetoast kind of response.

Perhaps I’ll keep a nail gun in the van to aim at the offender’s tires next time. Or maybe I’ll just call on Mr. Furious to save me.

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Urban Manna

Sunday, July 3rd, 2005

Urban Manna

We arrive around 3:30 at the red brick church on Saturday. We walk into the sanctuary and see 20 flats of various kinds of breads, bagels, english muffins, and donuts. It’s good stuff: Thomas’s, Brownberry, and others that I can’t remember. But 20 flats!!! We are overwhelmed at the amount and wonder how our family of five will pass out that much in an hour. We are grateful that our friend Dave picked it all up and make a mental note to request less next time.

We fill our bags with various items, and off we go. John sees Art right away. Art is an African-American man, probably in his early 50’s. He remembers us from the week before when John met him and introduced him around the church. Art is a close relative of Sheila, the realtor who originally showed us the church building. I am sad when he announces that he will be moving to another neighborhood soon because he is so open to friendship with us white folk. Nonetheless, we give him as many items as he wants and move on.

Lots of people are not home, but today we come equipped with scrap paper and a marker so that we can leave items with notes that say, “Enjoy. From the Red Brick Church on the corner.” I write out many of them and leave just a single item at doors where there is no answer, in case the occupants are on vacation and come home to the bread a week after it becomes an indistinguishable mass of fuzzy blueness.

We walk on and John sees Frank, who came to church last week and volunteered to do everything in our service. Frank is helping a friend move in. John gives Frank and his friends lots of baked items. That is when John gets pulled into a conversation with Curtis. Curtis obviously has an axe to grind because he immediately gives John a multi-page something-or-other that he put together on colored paper. He’s friendly enough, but I sense that his “axe” is some kind of strange thing that only needs the attention of one of us. I don’t stay to find out what it is. Time is relatively short, so the kids and I move on and knock on more doors. Occasionally we see someone getting out of a car and heading for a house, so we trot over and give them bread.

At the very end of the block before Mason Street I knock on a door. A woman comes to the door with a lavender head covering on her middle-aged head. She looks almost scared. I say to her, “Hi. I’m Linda from the Red Brick Church on the corner, and we’re passing out bread in the neighborhood.” She says, “I am Muslim.” as though this will immediately disqualify her from receiving any bread. Or perhaps the intended meaning is, “I’m Muslim, and you’re not going to convert me, if that is what you’re after.” I say to her, “It doesn’t matter. We just want to give bread to the people in this neighborhood.” After she explains that she would rather I give it to someone who needs it more, I let her know that we have so much that we don’t know what to do with it all. I tell her, “It really doesn’t matter what your religion is, we just want to give away this delicious bread to people who will enjoy it.” She finally agrees to take a loaf for herself and for the others that live in that half of the house, whom she really doesn’t know. She gives me a hint of a smile as I give her the bread, and she says, “That is what we believe, too.” I wish her a good day.

As we finally leave her house, I admit to myself that I am puzzled by this woman. Clearly, she is not of Middle Eastern or African-American descent. I wonder about her story, how she, a middle-aged white woman, came to faith in Allah. The slight upturn of the corners of her mouth encourages me to think that maybe someday I’ll be able to ask her and she will be eager to answer. But first, I’d like to know her name. It will come… in time.

We knock on more doors, and find so many more people gone. More notes, more single items left. Except at the places where there are more than one mailbox on the porch. The houses in this neighborhood are confusing. Some are single family residences, I think. But I am beginning to see that most have been turned into doubles, or duplexes, as I grew up calling them. And some of these halves have been divided into four separate living spaces. I’m not even sure if they can be referred to as apartments. They look so small, and some even appear to share a common living room. There is more to learn about this neighborhood in the coming weeks. John is still talking with Curtis.

The last person we find at home is Linda. She just lost her job and is about to start a new job in a couple of days. She is surprisingly friendly, after my Muslim friend, and tells me how glad she is for the bread because she just ran out. She says, “Normally I wouldn’t take it, but this time I could sure use it.” So I offer her many different items and let her know that we will likely have bread every week. She replies that she will cross bread off of her shopping list. I like Linda. She appears not to be afraid to meet the difficulties of losing a job, taking a job in a factory without ever having worked in one. She is positive and easy to like.

After we leave Linda’s house, I glance over at John again, and see that he is STILL talking to Curtis. I decide that he must feel the need to keep talking with Curtis. I send one of the kids over to fetch the church key from him so we can get back inside the church to get more bread for the couple of residences left. We leave notes and bread for each remaining place and arrive back at the church 20 minutes before church is scheduled to start.

The rest of the bread is placed on a long table out in front of the church with a huge sign that reads, “Free Food.” When our worship time is done, we discover that even though a lot of it has been taken, we still have about 10 flats of bread left over. Those of us who have freezers, take huge loads of it home. We thank God (and Dave) for the leftovers. But as we leave the church I can’t keep from wondering: Will this manna grow moldy before next week’s supply arrives? Then again, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Next week there will be more.

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The Image of Incest

Saturday, July 2nd, 2005

I recently read a treatise written by a brilliant young student about themes of incest in poetry and literature. Having reviewed many of the reactions to such literature, she boldly linked the Judeo-Christian values of patriarchy and absolute obedience to the perpetration of incest and the unwillingness to address the crime. As one who works in a helping field, I read it with eagerness and could assent to much of her writing from a psychological and sociological position. These values, when distorted and used by those who dearly desire power, do indeed allow abuses such as incest to be perpetrated and remain unaddressed. And as this student pointed out, violations go undiscovered or unchallenged because of a belief in the legitimate rule of the male perpetrator and that one must be obedient to male leadership. The false belief that “Good Christian people don’t do those kind of things” doesn’t help the victims (and perpetrators) of such crimes either. Cindy’s paper ends with a call for people to reaffirm the virtues commended in biblical scripture that pertain to caring for the weak and the needy. For truly victims of incest are those that need to be cared for and defended.

In April I was taking a crisis intervention course, and as part of an assignment I rode along with a police officer in a nearby city for a four hour period to observe people in crisis. I never expected to see what I did. I had pictured going with an officer to the scene of domestic abuse with woman and children in crisis, possibly needing medical intervention, and I’m not sure what else I expected, but I never expected what I saw.

It was a child porn bust. The suspect had tried to purchase a “little girl’s” (read police officer posing as a little girl) panties via the internet and delivered through the postal service. Police officers arrived at his door, and I watched from a distance as they used a padded battering ram to beat in the suspect’s door because he didn’t answer quickly enough. After a safe period of time, the officer I was with was able to determine that the situation was secure, and I was allowed to walk around the suspect’s house, not 15 feet away from the suspect.

As a former social worker, I have seen some pretty rough environments, and volunteering with the urban poor has made me privy to some even worse conditions than I saw as a social worker. But this place was the worst I had ever seen. I can’t say that I was shocked because I really think I’ve come to a place in my life where nothing can really shock me anymore. But it was bad.

When I walked into the house, the stench nearly knocked me backward. One of the officers on the site had gone outside to vomit minutes before. I was glad that I had seen and smelled disgusting houses before, otherwise it might have been me wasting groceries in the side yard. In the middle of the living room (although you could scarcely call it a living room with so much decay and filth present) was a mouse, squished flat and lying in bear-rug fashion, probably near petrification. There were cats everywhere and what looked to be a five pound bag of cat litter spilled in the doorway between the “living” room and the kitchen, not to mention enough animal excrement to fertilize a backyard garden. There were unspeakable quantities of trash everywhere, and it appeared that the water was turned off inside because the suspect and his brother were urinating in empty milk jugs and using dirty, stagnant water that had been left in a sink for a long time, by the looks of it. (We later found out that the water had not been turned off!) In the kitchen there was no refrigerator, so they subsisted on boxed and canned goods. In the backyard, trash lay everywhere, and a dog stood quietly in one part of the yard looking as though he were severely dehydrated. But, as if mocking the rest of the house and yard, there stood a state-of-the-art computer and a picture of a serene, glorified, but emasculated-looking Jesus in the downstairs bedroom.

How does a human being made in the image of God get to the place where such squalor becomes normal? How does one come to a belief that says, “I’m not worth anything more than this”? Is such extreme outer filth and chaos a reflection of the human being’s innermost feelings of worthlessness and turmoil?

There was turmoil inside my soul. I wanted to hate this man, who had probably ruined, or contributed to the ruin, of the lives of at least a few young children. After all, porn is so often associated with the behaviors. Yes, I was angry at this man and, at first, excited that the cops were going to put this guy away. I hoped they found enough evidence on his computer to put him away for a long time.

But yet, there was another part of me that found myself pitying this man who sat handcuffed on his own filthy sofa, head down, silent, and slumped as much as was possible with his hands forced behind his back. Somewhere, sometime, the image of God in this man had become even more perverted than it becomes in most human beings. Or perhaps he had so little hope that he no longer had the capability of seeing and uncovering the invaluable and eternal Image. Even more possible, perhaps he didn’t really know that he possessed it. Life must have taught him that he was not valuable or worthwhile. How else could anyone possibly explain the absolute filth?

And I suspect that it is much the same for both the victims and perpetrators of incest. For one, the Image slowly becomes distorted over time and covered over with emotional, psychic, and spiritual trash as the crime is perpetrated again and again on the victim. For the other, the perpetrator, the Image already distorted (possibly by having been a victim of incest himself) slips farther and farther into the hidden places of a tortured self where the only possible view of self includes the lowest and most profane stuff of life. One, the victim, the other, the offender, but both unable to get out from under the garbage heap to see the eternal image of God inscribed upon their souls. If they could but glimpse it, perhaps there would be hope for a life beyond the squalor and inner death.

For me, the experience remains thus: I understand why it was of the utmost importance that God remind us in scripture that we were made in His image, an image, eternal and valuable beyond our comprehension.

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