Rector's Blog: All The Things We Do Not See

At various times in my life, I have worked alongside and in service of people experiencing homelessness. And every time I do it there is a major period of adjustment at the beginning where I am shocked by how unmagical it all is. It is not just one brilliant lesson after another. It is not a series of moving moments. It is not a set of beautiful sermon illustrations about love. It’s hard and inconvenient. People are difficult anyway, and people who are in a state of constant, inescapable suffering and uncertainty are harder and more inconvenient. They are exhausted and exhausting. They are grateful except when they aren’t. You make a difference except when you don’t. They are strung out and sober, joyful and miserable, calm and chaotic. In other words, they are humans being human.

And, honestly, working with people who are experiencing homelessness is absolutely beautiful and holy. Just not in any of the ways you picture it from afar. The shattering of your assumptions is holy. The practical, mundane love of someone whose friendship does not give you social advantage, who makes you question everything about your culture and society and ideas of stability and sanity, is stunningly divine.

I used to know exactly what I thought about Israel and Palestine. I knew who was right and who was wrong, and I knew exactly what should be done for peace moving forward. A lot of Americans do. Then I actually went to the Holy Land. I met Palestinians. I met Israelis. And everyone with whom I spoke made sense to me. Even when they contradicted my notions, even when they contradicted each other, getting to know them and to see their lives all messy and intertwined and horrific and beautiful made them all make sense to me.

Our guides for that trip really wanted us to pick a side and engineered our experience in order to encourage such an outcome. But they made the mistake of giving us the time and freedom to talk to whoever we wanted. And when I did that, I fell in love with them all. One person I loved instantly – who is still a beloved friend – was a Palestinian Christian Israeli citizen. He is a living breathing conundrum of a person. He’s also a beacon of peace, hope, and love. To know him is to know grace and to question everything.

And the more I experienced of the Holy Land the more I understood - and the less I knew.

I never knew any Democrats growing up – not personally. I only knew they were ruining our country, trying to tear down the fabric of America, undermining our freedom, taxing and spending, and generally hating all the things that made us an exceptional beacon of hope in a weary world. I remember my next-door neighbor slapping a Clinton/Gore sticker on her car in 1992 and I remember being confused because she had seemed so nice. Maybe she was just misguided.

During that election cycle, my teacher at my private Christian school held a mock election. One student “voted” for Clinton. The rest of us “voted” for Bush. Which of course says more about all our parents than about any of our own political understandings. I remember when the lone Democrat raised her hand and outed herself. “How could she admit that?” I wondered. Then I remembered she was also the lone Presbyterian and God only knew what any of those people actually believed.

It was not until high school, and then more fully in college that I actually really fell in love with some genuine liberals and – worse! – progressives. And I learned some things about myself by seeing me through their eyes. When my college girlfriend found out that my family liked Ronald Reagan she was dumbfounded. She was not angry, mind you: She was confused. She had literally never met anyone who liked Reagan before and she was shocked that we actually existed outside of myth. Importantly, she did not immediately dump me.

Some of my beliefs stayed put, some shifted. But my notion of the Democrat as enemy or misguided bleeding heart was forever obliterated. More assumptions shattered. More certainty undermined. I knew less and less what I believed about these people. I was too busy loving them.

Perhaps the best way to maintain strong opinions about people is by not engaging with them. If we can just keep them at a distance, we will know exactly what we think about them. We will not have to question our knowledge. All the things we do not see will keep us safe.

Our lives are mostly set up to reinforce our assumptions and buttress our prejudices. We know what we know first and then create little worlds that support that knowledge. We try to keep the people and things that will make us understand more and know less as far out of sight as possible. Think for a moment about who is not in your neighborhood, who you do not see in your day-to-day life. How does that construct your understanding of what is normal, what is lovely, what is good? Think for a moment about whom your church is set up to serve. Who is left out of that vision? Whose presence would be too inconvenient to the way you understand your faith?

Our modern life is even set up to keep God at a safe distance. We are not encouraged to see God’s presence and hand in the world – even by many of our Christian siblings. Often we’d rather talk about what we believe about God than to actually get to know the God who is here right now, who is ever close at hand.

Maybe this is the real scandal of Jesus. His incarnation is what happens when God gets fed up with our long-held beliefs. Jesus is the unmagical, inconvenient, holy, complicated reality of God’s love. And we are invited not so much to believe the right things about Jesus as we are to actually interact with him, to get to know him, to allow the obliteration of our assumptions. This is the mysterious intimacy in which we understand more and know less. This is how we fall in love. With God. With each other. It begins with seeking out all the things we do not see. This is how we fall in love.