Reflections on Amiel

“The stationary condition is the beginning of the end” – Henri Frederic Amiel.

A few months ago, this quote appeared in our house on the side of a magazine. Since then, I have seen it often and been pondering its meaning and relevance in my life. Perhaps it has provoked an inner stirring in me instantly because it’s the end of my year as a Jesuit Volunteer. I am preparing to leave Washington, to travel to Chicago, and to begin a new life in my work at Loyola University Chicago.

Does it strike me because I perhaps have done all the growing I can for this year? That is certainly not true, for I’ve often found most growth happens after the experience. It happens when we take our experience, and we translate it into tangible goals for our lifestyle. It happens because we reflect, we discuss with our closest friends and family, and we discern its meaning and impact on us.

When something becomes stationary, it is no longer migratory or changing. It has a fixed position, and it remains in the same spot.

Am I in a stationary condition now? Are things not changing, fixed in one spot? While I have no context for Amiel’s quote, I suspect it has struck a strong chord with me because I perhaps have felt my life become stationary over these past couple of months. We have established our routine as a house – we have figured out how to save money, how make our food budget stretch farther and farther each week, and have found ease in the comfortability of our relationships with one another. We know our faults and know the blessings that each of us bring to one another.

Looking broader into the values of JVC, I know that I’ve become quite stationary in my job, my understanding of simplicity, and my faith. Though I still love my work and could continue finding fulfillment in my interactions with clients and coworkers, it has become stationary. In terms of simple living, I no longer find myself challenging how I live, or how we as a community live. And, in my faith, I have come to a routine that seems easy and does not give much additional growth.

Perhaps this is the key word – growth. When something is stationary, it isn’t growing. But – that’s not the right way to look at my JVC experience. For I am still growing in relationships – relationships in my house, my work, and my broader D.C. community. And, I am grappling with inequality, with racism, with fear, with our common American values each day as I walk into Bread for the City. I am still challenged by my interactions.

I think Amiel’s quote has reemerged in my reflections because something did become stationary, despite some growth that I still may experience. And, in that stationary state, I think Amiel was signaling that the end is soon – that it will be soon time to allow my life to change. And it is true. I am essentially done with my work at Bread for the City. I am saying my goodbyes in D.C. and preparing myself for our closing retreat, and really, for a vacation to Washington State and a move to Chicago, where life will not be stationary.

But what I grapple with now is how to strike the balance between allowing oneself to continue to always grow, and yet become comfortable – to establish relationships and a sense of normalcy without falling into a completely stationary state.

Perhaps then, when we are really living, we never reach the stationary condition, but only get close. It is like a curve that begins dramatically and begins to have a smaller slope as time goes by. It is not a parabola – the growth never reaches a point of regression; rather, it continue to increase and grow, but its growth becomes slower and approaches a state of stationary condition.

Is that what has happened here? Have I found myself experience less and less growth, or rather growth that is lower as this year has happened?

Perhaps. Perhaps we aren’t capable of reaching a purely stationary condition? Perhaps because I value growth, I can get close but can’t reach it.

Perhaps that is why leaving is so painful. I am still growing in my interactions with my housemates. I still love going to work each day. I still feel a sense of connection to Washington, and to the clients at Bread for the City.

But perhaps because the growth has slowed, perhaps that’s my equivalent of a stationary condition. And as Amiel says, it’s a sign. It’s the beginning of the end.

Alas, it is true. The end is in sight. The end of this experience, and the beginning of my reflections into how to take this experience and make it forever part of my lifestyle.

The Audacity to See Our Society as "Raceless"

Even as a sociologist, I began the Jesuit Volunteer Corps believing that we had moved to a raceless society – one in which we all have the same opportunities, and one in which we have moved passed any sort of prejudice. And when confronting with statistics of the overwhelming numbers of minorities who are poor in America’s urban centers, I had the audacity to simply label this as economic inequality and forget that race could or should be incorporated into the analysis.

Could I fully blame myself? Yes and no. Coming from a predominately white area where I myself was a minority, it was easy to dismiss the fact that racism exists; after all, I am not white, and look at me – I have successfully used my talents and middle class-instilled work ethic and social compass to not only “succeed,” but actually obtain almost everything I had ever asked for – with slim to in some cases no adversity.

Coming to Washington has slowly eroded the fantasy I held to be true. Even as quickly as getting off the plane at National Airport, I noticed that the people in business attire are most generally white, and the people in service jobs are indefinitely black. But, sure I thought, this is tied to economic inequality, and it is not racial inequality, for that doesn’t exist.

I work in NW Washington in an office that is in a predominately and historically African American neighborhood. I live just north of our office and walk to work each day. Our location also lends itself to other Latino/Hispanic clients, and I notice the rare white client who walks into Bread for legal assistance. But still, through this, everything must be tied to economic inequality only, for we are now a raceless society.

Nevermind that in my attempts to pretend that we are raceless, I still watched (to my horror) that I had my own prejudices that surfaced. We can blame a list of relevant factors and sources of this prejudice, but the fact is that I held prejudices that I didn’t even know were there. Working at Bread for the City has challenged me daily, and has helped destroy the prejudices and replace them with relationships with real people.

Even heading to Southeast Washington, across the Anacostia, where the deepest poverty perpetuates itself overtly, I still continued to believe that all our problems are tied to economic inequality. I remember my first visit to our Anacostia location. The blatant absence of any sort of commercial establishments (minus the plentiful liquor and corner stores) coupled with the hopelessness in the tone of the buildings and the fact that only African Americans were present should have been a clear signal that we cannot continue to see a raceless society. Even travelling back across the river, commenting on the contrast to the luxury condo buildings and the omnipresent cupola of the United States Capitol, I failed to see what should have been so clear.

After many more conversations, more visits to SE, more daily walks through my neighborhood, a sociological observation at Landlord-Tenant Court, media coverage, and inner reflections, I believe I had my grand epiphany in early June. For what should have been obvious in my courses at Gonzaga now finally made sense. There is a reason in modern sociological theory that race, gender, and class are tied together, and not viewed only independently of one another.

In the context of race, it now clear to me that the term “racism” applies to institutions in society. Institutions are racist because they give power to the views of the majority at the expense (and disadvantage) of the minority. The power reinforces the majority while condemning the minority. The very foundations of who we are as Americans is dependent on this system of power. The majority power has used African Americans in an exploitative manner since their original days in this country. Freed from slavery, they began their new lives without any of the wealth many others had been able to accumulate through prosperity, inheritance, and the advantages of being white in a racist society. Naturally, African Americans stayed in poverty and entered a life of a new slavery – this time as sharecroppers. And finally, when escaping this new type of slavery, African Americans headed towards the city where they faced new types of racism and segregation. When wealthier Americans fled cities for the suburbs in the 50s, African Americans were left without sufficient wealth and thus found themselves in the center of decay and fleeting capital. Even when having sufficient wealth to move to the suburbs, African Americans faced racist policies written into law, preventing them from actually achieving the American Dream.

Today – the result is so easy to see that it’s abhorrent to think that it wasn’t clear on my first visit to our SE office, when such an image was so blatant. Lack of capital resulted in neighborhood decay. Dependency grew. Poverty concentrated deeper and deeper, due to policies in housing and in prejudice of individual Americans. Lack of jobs in the urban centers, the coming of drugs, the fall of the American family, terrible schools, lack of tax base to provide services, hopelessness and mental illnesses, conditions of squalor, deep segregation, and perhaps a forgotten symptom – the apathy and lack of concern by the dominant power and society, has led to the state we are in today.

I can no longer believe that we have moved to a raceless society.

As a sociologist, I am partly ashamed to say that it has taken me this long to recognize the strong impact of race and power in the United States. But perhaps – it sheds light to the packaging of our middle class values – it is easy for us to believe we are in a raceless society when we live lives of privilege, wealth accumulation, affluent neighborhoods, and higher quality schools. Even when we come from families who are in the lower middle class, we still can look to the working class, working poor, and underclass as people below us who we continue working to avoid becoming. Our values become reinforced in the successes we experience, and we continue believing the American dream is equal, just, and gives equal opportunity to all. Others must not be taking advantage of the opportunity.

Our values are reinforced when we hear the word diversity. We cringe because it has been a buzz word and we become upset that someone might be an equal candidate (or more upsetting, worse than us) and we will lose our opportunity because the policy is favoring the African American over us. It is a power struggle and we are afraid we will lose. We know that the other has been oppressed, but we tell him that it was in the past. We tell her that it is not our fault. We rebuke the other for trying to give us guilt for the sins of the past. After all, if you only work as hard as I, you too will be at the same place. For you see, we are a raceless society now, a society of equal opportunity. Nevermind the 300 years of advantage I have over you. That is over now. What is important is that we both work hard, and let’s be honest, I have worked harder than you. I deserve it more.

And so, this is how we continue to perpetuate the great myth in our society that we live in a raceless society, a society that now is colorblind, a society that sees everyone as equals, a society that judges by merit and skills, not by skin color and economic class.

For a long time, I believed this great American myth. But, alas, after this year in Washington, the lie has become exposed. I can longer believe that we live in a raceless society.

Yet – I am not left alienated, hopeless, and powerlessness. No – the revelation is like a bittersweet taste. The bitterness floods my mind, heart, and soul, tempting me to turn to hopelessness. But, the taste of hope is sweet, and some enters me and convinces me that there is still hope. We can still fight for policy that combats a racist society. We can still confront the prejudices we don’t even know we have, just as I have this year. We can still work together to break down this great American myth and work for our brothers and sisters who are disadvantaged at our experience.

We can do it together, and we will. For now that the myth has been revealed as a fallacy in both our society and in our hearts, we can move towards establishing what we know is just.

Experience vs. Lifestyle

In less than one month, I am boarding a plane back to Seattle for a short vacation before heading to Chicago. In many ways, it seems unreal to think the year has gone by so rapidly. And yet, as I look back on many reflections, many conversations, and many thoughts I have had this year, the year becomes a rich pool of experiences that have shaped my perspectives and helped me grow in my understanding of society and myself.

The word experience stands out to me, in part because of an ongoing conversation I have been having with my good friend Liz. Looking at her own service experience in Georgia, she asserts, “Jubilee has taught me that I am not looking for good experiences anymore; rather, I am looking for ways to live the lifestyle I am looking for. It is not enough to have independent good experiences – but rather, it is time to live the lifestyle I want to have.”

Experience – a particular instance of personally encountering or undergoing something; all that is perceived, understood, and remembered.

Lifestyle – the habits, attitudes, tastes, moral standards, economic level, etc… that together constitute the mode of living of an individual or group; a way of life or style of living that reflects the attitudes and values of a person or group.

The Jesuit Volunteer Corps has been a one-year experience. Working at Bread for the City has given me experience, and has been a certain type of experience – a type of radically opening my understanding of the United States, of stretching my perspectives on race, economic inequality, and injustice. It has been an experience of learning a richer version of accompaniment, one that is sustained through longer term relationships with our clients.

The Jesuit Volunteer Corps has been an experience of living in a community of other Jesuit Volunteers – a community where we are interdependent, where we share all the money we have. It has been an experience in joy and challenge, an experience of sacrificing and of reflecting on what is actually pertinent to who we are and what is periphery.

The Jesuit Volunteer Corps is an experience in simplicity – in attempting to live on a quantity of money closer to what our clients might live on. It is an experience of lessening what we have, because we as more privileged members of society can make the choice to do so. It is an experience of developing a consciousness of the ways we impact the world, and then trying to lessen that impact.

The Jesuit Volunteer Corps is an experience of living faith, of reflecting on how our faith compels us to act, to work for justice. In this, it is an experience of dissonance, both inside of us, and around us. This dissonance is a challenge that we reflect on – with it, we discern the differences in faith perspectives in our community, in our churches, and in our work. The experience challenges us to either confirm or condemn what we believe, to strengthen and nurture, or to break open and confront. Our faith is innately individual; the experience calls us to find the communal elements and to share that faith with one another. It is a challenge; it is not always fun and easy, but it is life-giving and sustaining.

So this is the experience – the one year experience of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. It is what I have perceived and understood from what I have encountered this year.

But as Liz points out, it is not enough to have these experiences in our lives. Liz and I are blessed enough to be able to point to many experiences that have been transformational. But what is the sum of these transformational experiences? Do we float to yet another transformational experience? Or do we take the sum of these experiences and make a lifestyle out of them?

Looking back on my year as a Jesuit Volunteer, I have been reflecting on how my experience as a JV will shape the lifestyle I would like to live. Perhaps easiest to describe is my pledge to incorporate aspects of simple living into my lifestyle. Challenged by the ideas of my community, my recollections of my childhood, and the experience as a whole, it seems much more practical to live a simple lifestyle. Of course, this year has forced me to reconsider and discern the purchases I make, and to truly consider need vs. want. But it has also made me reflect on what I am eating and the overall impact on the world I live in. Part of my lifestyle will continue to keep discerning what ways I want to live simply environmentally.

My experience compels me to want to continue to live a life where I am sharing my faith with others, and living with a sense of community. Returning to a previous reflection, I think the sense of community I take away is a community in which I feel invested – a community where I feel grounded and where I am in a circle of others who care about intentionality and who are committed to growth. Despite me not returning to a formal community setting, I know that I will continue to live this value in the relationship I share with my closest friends, and the ways I invest myself in my community, church, and city.

Finally, I cannot imagine my lifestyle without a commitment to social justice, and it is perhaps in this context that I see the others merge into one lifestyle. Working at Bread for the City has shown me the power of working for justice in a way that is life-giving and sustaining. I cannot imagine my understanding of the world, of inequality, and of humanity without taking into context my time here. I see my faith lived out in my connections with my clients and my understandings of the theories I learned in school, as well as my readings of the Gospel. I understand why it is important to live simply and to be intentional with money when I see the disparities between our clients and those living in Georgetown and Capitol Hill. I feel a sense of authenticity and purpose when I walk to work, and smile at the people I pass by in my neighborhood. It is the aggregate feeling of all of these that make me know that it is more important to work for justice than it is to be wealthy. I cannot imagine a lifestyle that is not working for justice and positive social change.

In many ways, the idea I have about my lifestyle is quite vague and needs continued reflection. But I suppose we can’t just have one idea of lifestyle. For if that is true, we become stagnant and begin to lose our sense of intentionality. I guess this is start as I continue to discern what my lifestyle will be like. I will re-evaluate, fill in those vague concepts, and continue to make sure that my lifestyle is reflecting that values I have experienced this year.

The Long Loneliness

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community” Dorothy Day

This quote, by Dorothy Day, has become a favorite for many Jesuit Volunteers. Jesuit Volunteers point to this quote as representative of the Jesuit Volunteer community experience. Rightly so, in many regards. In Dorothy Day’s book, The Long Loneliness¸ she talks about the formation of Catholic Worker homes for people to come to and experience community. Many Catholic Worker Houses around the country are now places of hospitality, and many foster the same sorts of community among their residents and guests that JVC aims to develop.

I think today’s American society knows this long loneliness Dorothy Day talks about in her book. Americans, I believe, in their state of hyper-individualism, often forget that we are interdependent, and consequently, often fall into a state of hopelessness, powerlessness, despair, and loneliness. I think this is manifested in the hyper materialism, and the complete focus American society has placed on the individual.

But is this Catholic Worker and Jesuit Volunteer concept of community practical, especially in a hyper-individualistic society?

Certainly, there are merits and blessings I have experienced living in community this year. Together, we live and work in the District, trying to work for social justice, live simply, and grow in our different spiritualities. It is a challenge and a blessing bound together in a common experience. We have shared all of our resources, shared our hearts, and our time with one another. We have experienced the challenge that comes with disagreements and disputes, and the joys that come with laughter and fond memories. We have voiced our struggles with our work, with the vast and deep-rooted social and economic injustice we see in our work and in our society. We have come to see each other as a community, as close friends travelling together on this part of our journey.

Our community experience is ending soon, and we will disperse onto our different paths. Though I think Dorothy Day is speaking about community in the context of experiences like JVC, I also think that community extends to a broader understanding than this. Taking from lessons learned from the blessings and challenges of this community experience, I envision living out the tenet of Community in many ways in my own lifestyle.

Dorothy Day says that the void of loneliness can be filled with love and community. I believe this community refers to the connections we make with one another in our lives. These connections are not just friendships of utility, as Aristotle would entitle them (friendships that give us what we need and in turn provide to others what they need), but true “good friendships,” friendships that are motivated out of love for the other, friendships that develop over time, friendships that encompass a mutual trust…

I believe in many ways, I have seen these friendships in the experience of community this year. I point to this type of friendships as the foundation of the Community I envision after JVC. I have seen these friendships develop with friends from high school, friends from Gonzaga, friends from Bread for the City, and friends from my Jesuit Volunteer house. Friendships that include sitting with a glass of wine or cup of coffee and enjoying a long conversation delving into our most inner hearts, desires, pains, and joys… friendships that are not contingent on what we can give one another, but are everlasting and from the heart… friendships that continue to give life, to nurture, and to encourage one another to become more authentic individuals.

Community happens in other ways too – I have experienced a sense of community in my work, in both the relationships with my coworkers and my clients. Working together each day, we have formed community in the way that we relate to one another, the way that we help each other grow, and the way that we strive to make the District a more just place for our clients.

I have experienced community this year in the relationships with other advocates I have met in the city. Working together on projects like the SE Preservation Project, the Fair Budget Coalition, IDA advocacy, and the Save Our Safety Net Campaign, I have shared my own passion with others who have the same vision, in hopes that together, our efforts will be magnified and more powerful. This collaboration has helped me feel as if DC is my community, the place I am settled, the place I feel a strong connection to. It is different than the Community I have experienced with my closest relationships, but it is has complemented the other relationships I have formed this year.

The sum of these relationships result in a feeling of community that creates connections with one another, helps us feel as if we are part of a community, fosters growth, and challenges us to become more authentically human. It is a sense of community made up of a variety of relationships, some reaching more intimately into who we are than others. I believe this community is innately sustainable outside of the Jesuit Volunteer experience or Catholic Worker lifestyle because it calls us to form relationships that cultivate self and communal growth. It is this growth, and this sense of community, that can cure the long loneliness that Dorothy Day speaks of.

Perhaps I won’t live in another JVC-type Community like I have this year, but I will live the value of community as I continue on with my life.

Questions and Faithfulness

Yesterday, in a meeting at the Department of Human Services, we discussed policy implementation and ideas for making the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program (HPRP) more effective and efficient. While it was interesting to sit through a meeting with city officials, and other non-profit providers from the city, my mind was racing with a collection of questions about the work we do here at Bread and across the City Government and NGO world:

How can you meet the level of need in the District of Columbia?

There is so much institutional racism that I never saw before this year. How can we help educate others and come up with solutions that begin to tackle this racism?

Is case management the answer? Why do some of us need case management while others do not?

How do we give people incentives to work? Incentives to stop relying on public assistance and move towards self sufficiency? Is self sufficiency only a concept for middle and upper classes?

Are we imposing our own ideas of success on others? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Can we make a program like HPRP actually help people reach their goals and become truly independent?

Does Social Work help? What does that help look like? Is Social Work helping us or is it helping the clients?

Why are so many people “disabled” in the District of Columbia? Are they all disabled? What helps some people work despite their pain and yet makes others want to stop working? How do people with their disabilities?

How do we show our wealthier members of society that these people aren’t just lazy, but that they are dependent because we’ve made them dependent?

How do we add job training and improve our education system so we don’t have so many people without any skills or work history?

How do we help people realize the skills gifts they’ve been given and encourage them to make some impact with those?

How can we meet the level of deep seated need for our poorest members of society?

Questions such as these and more spun through my head as I walked out of the meeting at DHS. Sitting in the meeting, I began to feel thoughts of hopelessness – can we really make an impact when the need is so great?

When I was in college, I realized that there is a state of American Hopelessness that persists in our society. In college, this was viewed towards the lens of middle and upperclass suburban adults who for whatever reason have become hyper-individualistic. And in some ways, I felt elements of hopelessness after I walked out of the meeting with DHS – with a need so great and such limited resources, is it truly possible to make an impact on others, to make some sort of positive social change?

I think this is another hopelessness that is occurring though. It is the hopelessness in many of the clients served by these programs. It is hopelessness that leads these clients to become dependent, to feel as if they cannot improve their lives and thus are trapped in their current situation. They are trapped because of both their hopelessness, and because of the structures of society that keep them trapped and hopeless. It is a cycle that is, for many of our clients, impossible to escape.

I would be a hypocrite, though, if I didn’t remember the words of Fr. Greg Boyle, when he quotes Mother Teresa. I will never forget, when asked how he is able to persevere through so much failure, his response: The key is to not measure in success, but in faithfulness.

Yes, Fr. Greg and Mother Teresa, you are right. It is true that we must measure in how faithful we are to our work, and how faithful we are to God. For this faithfulness will sustain us when we feel as if we are hopeless, as if the need is too great, and as if we are stuck not making any positive social change.

So then, remembering this thought, I take comfort in knowing that I have stayed faithful to my clients and to my work this year. It is my hope that as I continue to work here this next month, and head off to school after, that I will continue to see myself as a faithful servant. For me, as a task-minded, goal-oriented person, interacting with a system looking for quantifiable answers, it is sometimes hard not to get discouraged. But… when I change my perspective and look through the lens of faithfulness, suddenly success isn’t so hard to find.