Creating A Picture of Hope
Building Community
The mural on the wall was a fair representation of what the young people who accompanied me to St. Louis observed in the first couple of days that we were there. There was broken glass on the sidewalk. There was barbed wire on the top of some of the bigger homes. There were needles and condoms left strewn in alley ways. Many homes were boarded up and appeared to be abandoned. In addition to all the stark manifestations of urban decay, we were largely a white group amid an almost exclusively black community. Even for city kids from St. Paul, this was a bit of a culture shock. It was for me as well. We were on what church groups often call a “Mission Trip.” The intent is for young people to have a community building experience by traveling away from home to a place where they can do some type of service project.
Mission Trips are well intended. But I had for some time been troubled by them and for me this trip was the final one where I would take a group of middle-class young people to do a service project in a community largely comprised of low-income Black, Indigenous or People of Color. As I came to develop a growing awareness of the history and ongoing reality of racism, I realized that I did not have the gifts to help white young people escape the feeling of superiority that can come from being the ones who drop into a community of darker skinned people, offer a week’s worth of help and then return to our comfort. Nor could I adequately help young people understand the racism that led to this situation. No doubt there are pastors who have the gifts to traverse this difficult terrain without further reinforcing racial bias. I did not consider myself to be among them.
We were invited to this St. Louis Community by one of the historic settlement houses still providing community service to those in need, much like Neighborhood House in St. Paul. We worked on a Habitat for Humanity home. We helped an elderly woman clean and organize her home, which because of her disability had become overwhelming. In addition, our young people were invited to paint a mural in the upper floor of the settlement house; a space used by young people in the neighborhood. Fortunately, we had among us several young artists capable of this task.
The young people were given a free hand to create whatever type of mural they wished. In retrospect, I should have had them submit a design of what they wanted to do. Instead, they just began to paint. What came out was a fairly accurate portrayal of what they had been experiencing, drug paraphernalia, broken glass, barbed wire, and all. It is not the case that what they pictured in their mural was wrong, but is this what would be helpful for the young people who chose to spend regular time in this space? I made a decision which I do not regret. I asked the young people to do what they could to take what they had done and create a more hopeful image for the community. Initially there was resistance to change the work in which they had invested themselves, but they came to accept the importance of doing so. The needles, broken glass and numerous signs of decay and despair were replaced with flowers, rays of light, and green grass. This new mural represented the goodness in many of the people we met and their undiminished hope for their community.
A question everyone engaged in the life of a community, a country for that matter, must ask is “what do we see”? Is the picture we hold primarily one of deficit or do we have a picture of the assets, the potential that we have together? Often the picture of deficits tells a true story. We have problems that need addressing. But, can those problems, those challenges be addressed unless we have a hopeful picture in our minds and hearts for the type of community, the type of country we hope to see?
As we approach yet another election, I have returned to a book, I found helpful years ago, written by M. Scott Peck called “People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil.” Peck underscores the destructive and evil power that lies have when they become central to a person’s life or embedded in our common life. But Peck also argues, too strong a concentration on this evil of lies, seeing the darkness, and the deficit, can cause us to miss the hope so necessary if we are to thrive. For any community or nation to thrive, we need to be honest about the challenges, but above all we need a positive vision and picture of the world we hope to see.
