Thanks to the work of a lot of people, there has been a development in the Jena Six case. According to a friend who is following it closely, the sentencing of Mychal Bell has been postponed to 9/20, and the FBI is going to Jena to investigate civil rights abuses! For those of us who have become somewhat cynical about these matters, that does not mean as much as it might. But at least the sentencing has been postponed.
There is still work to do; pressure on local authorities and church leaders needs to be maintained, even increased. Please contact anyone you know who can help bring this issue to light. The New York Times has yet to cover this story. One of you must know someone at the Times.
Deacon Ormonde Plater, who is in Louisiana, has written eloquently on the Jena Six. See http://oplater.blogspot.com/2007/07/jena-six.html.
I am also told by The Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Louisiana that the church leaders are aware of and looking into the situation. That’s good to hear. Please encourage them and offer your support.
This morning I read an article by a British atheist who described the Church of England as a dog mostly concerned with scratching its own fleas (which he named, by example, as gay marriage and women’s ordination). His point is that the church (and I include now the Episcopal Church) is too often only concerned with its internal affairs, many of which are not as important as the church makes them seem. Here is a matter of considerable concern to people of faith who believe that God is a God who asks us to do justice. In Jena, Louisiana, there are no Episcopal churches. All the more reason for us to be there.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Friday, July 27, 2007
The Case of the Jena Six
A friend of ours has told us about a case in Louisiana that is shocking and I hope some of you will look into. There is some urgency: on Monday a black high school student could be sentenced to decades in jail for . . . well, it’s not clear. What we do know is that some of he black students in Jena High School (Jena, Louisiana, central part of the state) sat under what is known there as the “white tree”—where the white students sit. That led to a fight and an seriously injured white student. The six black students are charged with attempted murder. Oh, I didn’t mention that the day after the black students sat under the white tree three nooses were found hanging from it.
Local officials call the nooses a prank. An all-white jury convicted 17-year-old Mychal Bell after a two-day “trial.” He will be sentenced on Monday.
To learn more go to: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/070307B.shtml
Also: www.demoncracynow.org
You can find an online petition at : www.petitiononline.com/aZ51CqmR/petition.html
For information on faith-based social justice groups you may want to contact, see http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=get_connected.directory (Sojourners). Actions are planned around the country.
There has not been much national coverage of this case (there are five other young black people yet to be tried), but some of us have tried to stir up interest.
Please do what you can to bring pressure to bear on the Louisiana officials involved. The Executive Director of the Louisiana Chapter of The American Civil Liberties Union calls the case one of obvious racial discrimination. The area, he says, is a racial powder keg. Does anyone know of Episcopal or other leaders in Central or other parts of Louisiana who can look into what’s happening?
Local officials call the nooses a prank. An all-white jury convicted 17-year-old Mychal Bell after a two-day “trial.” He will be sentenced on Monday.
To learn more go to: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/070307B.shtml
Also: www.demoncracynow.org
You can find an online petition at : www.petitiononline.com/aZ51CqmR/petition.html
For information on faith-based social justice groups you may want to contact, see http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=get_connected.directory (Sojourners). Actions are planned around the country.
There has not been much national coverage of this case (there are five other young black people yet to be tried), but some of us have tried to stir up interest.
Please do what you can to bring pressure to bear on the Louisiana officials involved. The Executive Director of the Louisiana Chapter of The American Civil Liberties Union calls the case one of obvious racial discrimination. The area, he says, is a racial powder keg. Does anyone know of Episcopal or other leaders in Central or other parts of Louisiana who can look into what’s happening?
Monday, July 23, 2007
Torture Is Us
Among the ways we are being “cooked by the culture” (the title of last week’s post) is our acceptance of torture as national policy. As Christians, of course, we are against it and in various public utterances have even called on the Bush administration to publicly renounce torture. The Executive Council of the Episcopal Church in March passed a resolution condemning the use of torture and “the practice of extraordinary rendition” and called upon the US government to comply with “The United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane and Degrading Treatment or Punishment”; the resolution also, somewhat astonishingly, stated: "That members of the Episcopal Church, including military chaplains, commit themselves to supporting U.S. military and civilian personnel who refuse to obey orders to practice torture or engage in extraordinary rendition or who face discipline for exposing such illegal conduct."
Good for the Episcopal Church. That is an exemplary commitment to support those who might engage in civil disobedience. It's the kind of action the church should be taking. I for one would like to know what has been done to implement this policy. Perhaps Bishop George Packard, the Bishop for Military Chaplains, or the Secretary of Executive Council, The Rev. Gregory Straub, could make a public statement of the church’s position, loudly and clearly, and tell us and the other religious leaders what we are doing to support those who refuse to engage in torture.
A group known as the Evangelicals for Human Rights has issued a statement on torture that I hope leaders of the Episcopal Church and other denominations will support. You can read it on the HRE website, www.evangelicalsforhumanrights.org, and take the time to sign the statement. I think it is particularly important for non-evangelicals to sign. The truth is that some of the evangelical organizations have been more active on social justice issues than the mainline denominations (as in, for example, Darfur). The HRE website also had a list of resources that are worth looking at (including a link to a sermon by Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge).
The statement from HRE is stronger and more grounded than the one from the Episcopal Church Executive Council. It concludes forcefully:
“The abominable acts of 9/11, along with the continuing threat of terrorist attacks, create profound security challenges. However, these challenges must be met within a moral and legal framework consistent with our values and laws, among which is a commitment to human rights that we as evangelicals share with many others. In this light, we renounce the resort to torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees, call for the extension of procedural protections and human rights to all detainees, seek clear government-wide embrace of the Geneva Conventions, including those articles banning torture and cruel treatment of prisoners, and urge the reversal of any U.S. government law, policy, or practice that violates the moral standards outlined in this declaration.”
I urge the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, as well as others in church leadership positions, to sign this statement. And to make it known that the church is in solidarity with evangelicals on this issue. And to make public its own actions to communicate our support to those in the military who might be forced to engage in torture.
And one more thing: could Bishop Packard tell us what the nature of that support is? Is it more than moral? More than prayer? Do we offer sanctuary? Legal defense?
We are cooked by the culture when we make statements for the sake of appearances and do nothing to back them up. I wonder what the Evangelicals for Human Rights plan to do now that they have expressed their opposition to the policies of the US government on torture. (How hard is it to be opposed?)
What is to be done? Who will lead?
Good for the Episcopal Church. That is an exemplary commitment to support those who might engage in civil disobedience. It's the kind of action the church should be taking. I for one would like to know what has been done to implement this policy. Perhaps Bishop George Packard, the Bishop for Military Chaplains, or the Secretary of Executive Council, The Rev. Gregory Straub, could make a public statement of the church’s position, loudly and clearly, and tell us and the other religious leaders what we are doing to support those who refuse to engage in torture.
A group known as the Evangelicals for Human Rights has issued a statement on torture that I hope leaders of the Episcopal Church and other denominations will support. You can read it on the HRE website, www.evangelicalsforhumanrights.org, and take the time to sign the statement. I think it is particularly important for non-evangelicals to sign. The truth is that some of the evangelical organizations have been more active on social justice issues than the mainline denominations (as in, for example, Darfur). The HRE website also had a list of resources that are worth looking at (including a link to a sermon by Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge).
The statement from HRE is stronger and more grounded than the one from the Episcopal Church Executive Council. It concludes forcefully:
“The abominable acts of 9/11, along with the continuing threat of terrorist attacks, create profound security challenges. However, these challenges must be met within a moral and legal framework consistent with our values and laws, among which is a commitment to human rights that we as evangelicals share with many others. In this light, we renounce the resort to torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees, call for the extension of procedural protections and human rights to all detainees, seek clear government-wide embrace of the Geneva Conventions, including those articles banning torture and cruel treatment of prisoners, and urge the reversal of any U.S. government law, policy, or practice that violates the moral standards outlined in this declaration.”
I urge the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, as well as others in church leadership positions, to sign this statement. And to make it known that the church is in solidarity with evangelicals on this issue. And to make public its own actions to communicate our support to those in the military who might be forced to engage in torture.
And one more thing: could Bishop Packard tell us what the nature of that support is? Is it more than moral? More than prayer? Do we offer sanctuary? Legal defense?
We are cooked by the culture when we make statements for the sake of appearances and do nothing to back them up. I wonder what the Evangelicals for Human Rights plan to do now that they have expressed their opposition to the policies of the US government on torture. (How hard is it to be opposed?)
What is to be done? Who will lead?
Monday, July 16, 2007
Cooked by the Culture
My daughter Ruth was born twenty-seven and a half years ago in Medellin, Colombia. My former wife and I adopted her just twenty-seven years ago next month. Yesterday, she flew to Medellin on her first trip to the city where she was born. When she was twelve, we went to the city of Cartagena on the Caribbean coast, but Medellin was too dangerous then. The drug cartel was in charge, and her city was at the heart of it. Yesterday's New York Times ran an article about how Medellin is now a place of optimism; the new mayor is trying to make it lively, attractive, safe. Ruth told me before she left that Medellin is now safer than Philadelphia, where she lives. There is still a guerilla war going on in Colombia; some parts of it are definitely dangerous. She knows that. But she plans to travel around the country she left so long ago, taking care but not shirking the realities of her own life. She will be there about a month, returning close to the time she came to this country as an infant.
When I was about her age, in 1973, I flew to Nicaragua to spend three weeks on an island at the southern end of Lake Nicaragua with a community of revolutionaries, artists, and writers led by the poet and Roman Catholic priest Ernesto Cardenal. I was twenty-nine and at a moment of transition in my own life, leaving one job and city for another publishing position in another city, but at the same time unsure I wanted to continue to be a publisher. I was writing poetry and publishing it. I was going to Solentiname, the island community in Nicaragua, because I was publishing a book of Cardenal's poems in English and he had invited me to come. In those days, I was alienated from the church and still six years from my return to it, through the Episcopal Church. It is probable that my experience with the Solentiname community helped move me toward that return.
Many suggest that liberation theology was born at Solentiname, and while I was there I witnessed the teaching of Marxist-Christian theology on the porch of the main house on the island. Peasants paddled dug-out canoes from the surrounding smaller islands on Saturdays to participate in the discussions. They were learning about their own oppression under the Anastasio Somoza regime. Eventually, these teachings would influence the church throughout Latin America and help to fuel the rebellion a few years later that overthrew Samoza. Many of the young people I met in 1973 were among the first killed in one of the first battles. The community at Solentiname was wiped out by the Nicaraguan national guard.
I was helped on my way to Cardenal's community by Sandinistas, although at the time I did not know what that meant. While I was there, the government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by the CIA; we heard the news on Radio Havana one night and we all got drunk with sorrow. I remember lying in a small motorboat looking up at the incredible stars and thinking about how courageous all of these people were, living under tyranny and risking their lives. And then I threw up.
Liberation theology still makes sense to me, perhaps even more so now in North America, in the West, than it did then in Nicaragua. The conditions we face now, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the indifference of the institutional church, are like those that generated a socially conscious Christianity in the seventies. The authoritarian church is ascendant, not only the Roman Catholic Church, and the emergence of a global corporate fascism is all too obvious. We are not teaching ourselves to rebel but rather to acquiesce. Like the famous fable of the frog placed in a pot of cold water that slowly heats to boiling, we are being cooked by a culture of lies and fairy tales.
And most of us are content to lie in the warming water (breathing the warming air), imagining that we are in a spa instead of a cauldron.
I am glad that my daughter is going to Latin America where the stakes are still visibly high. She will see the favelas on the hillsides where tens of thousands live in abject poverty even in the renewing city of Medellin. Urban renewal is usually built on the backs of the poor. She will see the poverty that begat her; she will meet the people who like her have no control over the future, the difference being they knew they lack control. What I hope is that she will return with some fury in her blood.
I felt some of that fury when I came back from Nicaragua, although it didn't last. It was like what motivated me and others in the 1960s to refuse to approve of the War in Vietnam. But we had grown tired. We had to go back to work. I went back to work. And now here we are in the warm waters of our lives believing that we are safe, that God loves us, that our prayers for peace are all it will take to ensure our daily bread and safe retirement to someplace wonderful. Some might say that the government that overthrew Samosa was also corrupt--and they would be right. The Sandinistas lost their moral compass; even Ernesto became for a time a poet apparatchik. But the effort to make the change was worth it, even so. The mistake is to assume that a failure to make permanent change excuses us from attempting to make any change.
As for me, I am going to try to climb out of the pot. I am not sure yet what that means, but I don't intend to stay here treading water.
When I was about her age, in 1973, I flew to Nicaragua to spend three weeks on an island at the southern end of Lake Nicaragua with a community of revolutionaries, artists, and writers led by the poet and Roman Catholic priest Ernesto Cardenal. I was twenty-nine and at a moment of transition in my own life, leaving one job and city for another publishing position in another city, but at the same time unsure I wanted to continue to be a publisher. I was writing poetry and publishing it. I was going to Solentiname, the island community in Nicaragua, because I was publishing a book of Cardenal's poems in English and he had invited me to come. In those days, I was alienated from the church and still six years from my return to it, through the Episcopal Church. It is probable that my experience with the Solentiname community helped move me toward that return.
Many suggest that liberation theology was born at Solentiname, and while I was there I witnessed the teaching of Marxist-Christian theology on the porch of the main house on the island. Peasants paddled dug-out canoes from the surrounding smaller islands on Saturdays to participate in the discussions. They were learning about their own oppression under the Anastasio Somoza regime. Eventually, these teachings would influence the church throughout Latin America and help to fuel the rebellion a few years later that overthrew Samoza. Many of the young people I met in 1973 were among the first killed in one of the first battles. The community at Solentiname was wiped out by the Nicaraguan national guard.
I was helped on my way to Cardenal's community by Sandinistas, although at the time I did not know what that meant. While I was there, the government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by the CIA; we heard the news on Radio Havana one night and we all got drunk with sorrow. I remember lying in a small motorboat looking up at the incredible stars and thinking about how courageous all of these people were, living under tyranny and risking their lives. And then I threw up.
Liberation theology still makes sense to me, perhaps even more so now in North America, in the West, than it did then in Nicaragua. The conditions we face now, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the indifference of the institutional church, are like those that generated a socially conscious Christianity in the seventies. The authoritarian church is ascendant, not only the Roman Catholic Church, and the emergence of a global corporate fascism is all too obvious. We are not teaching ourselves to rebel but rather to acquiesce. Like the famous fable of the frog placed in a pot of cold water that slowly heats to boiling, we are being cooked by a culture of lies and fairy tales.
And most of us are content to lie in the warming water (breathing the warming air), imagining that we are in a spa instead of a cauldron.
I am glad that my daughter is going to Latin America where the stakes are still visibly high. She will see the favelas on the hillsides where tens of thousands live in abject poverty even in the renewing city of Medellin. Urban renewal is usually built on the backs of the poor. She will see the poverty that begat her; she will meet the people who like her have no control over the future, the difference being they knew they lack control. What I hope is that she will return with some fury in her blood.
I felt some of that fury when I came back from Nicaragua, although it didn't last. It was like what motivated me and others in the 1960s to refuse to approve of the War in Vietnam. But we had grown tired. We had to go back to work. I went back to work. And now here we are in the warm waters of our lives believing that we are safe, that God loves us, that our prayers for peace are all it will take to ensure our daily bread and safe retirement to someplace wonderful. Some might say that the government that overthrew Samosa was also corrupt--and they would be right. The Sandinistas lost their moral compass; even Ernesto became for a time a poet apparatchik. But the effort to make the change was worth it, even so. The mistake is to assume that a failure to make permanent change excuses us from attempting to make any change.
As for me, I am going to try to climb out of the pot. I am not sure yet what that means, but I don't intend to stay here treading water.
Monday, July 9, 2007
A Kairos Moment
The present reminds me of the Nixon administration and the years leading to the end of the war in Vietnam and the president's resignation. I am sure I am not alone in having this sense of deja vu (and those of you who follow the New York Times Magazine are reminded weekly of this connection to our past in Megan Kelso's "Watergate Sue"). It is all depressingly familiar. This morning I was reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in connection with a new book I am writing, and was forcefully reminded of how irrelevant the institutional church is in today's crisis. Our religious leaders have very little to say to us as the war drags on, as people are losing their homes and their lives, as so many suffer from the lack of compassion in our government: no, make that our own lack of compassion. The rich get richer and we just don't care very much as long as we get our share.
Last week I went to an Episcopal Church here in Portland and was shocked to read and hear in the written Prayers of the People a petition that for "patience with those who incite war." What? Is that all we have to say? It is oh so familiar. The congregation was large, wealthy, prominent. Being patient is easy when you have both money and power.
Bonhoeffer was far from patient. As we know, he was part of a plot to assassinate Hitler, and that led to his arrest and execution. Whether he was right to participate in such a plot is another question. He came to that point as part of his work against the regime that was killing Jews; Bonhoeffer himself returned to Germany from the United States to be part of the opposition when he could have stayed safely away, writing perhaps from Union Theological Seminary. He did not. He helped to found the confessing church that was in opposition to the established church, the one that collaborated with the Nazis.
The church today--almost in every incarnation--is a collaborator with the present government, part of the wealth and war machine that keeps the United States and its people in chains. We go along because as Christians we are no longer powerful enough to speak out, nor confident enough to risk our tax exemption, nor brave enough to risk outraging the those who profit from the current situation (or are so beaten down by it that they no longer know how to resist).
Near the end of his life, Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter from prison about what he called religionless Christianity. I have long been intrigued by what he has to say here (the letter was written in April 1944 when I was one-month old). Bonhoeffer writes:
"What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience--and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as 'religious' do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by 'religion.'"
He goes on to talk about how Christianity itself was historically conditioned and "a transient form of human self-expression." The time he describes, the mid-1940s near the end of the war, was not unlike our own, nor unlike the late 60s and early 70s. These were and are critical times for Christians. We are in our passivity confirming what Bonhoeffer was saying: "the western form of Christianity was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion."
What we have not discovered is the answer to Bonhoeffer's next question: "If religion is only a garment of Christianity--and even this garment has looked very different at different times--then what is a religionless Christianity?"
The question is, in fact, how do we transform ourselves from a passive people bound in the obsolete form of religion to a vibrant spiritual presence in a suffering world? It is clear to me right now that we don't know how to do it. All we can do is repeat the same old tired phrases and meaningless prayers.
Ironically, the state of religionless Christianity right now is most visible in the Christian religion itself. It is a religion without meaning. But the end of religion is a good thing, when the religion in question is no longer representative of the divine ground of being nor a passageway into that place of wholeness once promised by the church. You can't get there from here.
But this is also a Kairos moment if there ever was one. It is a time in which we can take action and change our way of living and being. During Lent I suggested that we give up church for Lent; I suspect nobody followed my lead. And I am certainly not going to suggest that people walk out of church. I know they won't. But I do wonder what we are doing in church. Why are we there? Who cares?
We went to a church yesterday not in the Episcopal tradition. The pastor spoke about the need to pay attention to what matters, to be organized in such a way that the mundane details of getting along do not mask what we really need to be doing. As an aside, he suggested that the present government administration might take some time off to reflect on what it's doing. It was a gentle antidote to "patience with those who incite war." I also wondered as I heard him whether the same might apply to the church today.
Time to ask ourselves: What are we doing? How will our actions be judged by the future? Where is our Dietrich Bonhoeffer in prison calling us to discipleship? As we religionless Christians go willingly to execution, who will come after us?
Just to be clear, I am not suggesting we revive religion. I am suggesting we give it up altogether and start over, that we accept religionless faith as a fact and figure out what a new Christianity looks like.
Last week I went to an Episcopal Church here in Portland and was shocked to read and hear in the written Prayers of the People a petition that for "patience with those who incite war." What? Is that all we have to say? It is oh so familiar. The congregation was large, wealthy, prominent. Being patient is easy when you have both money and power.
Bonhoeffer was far from patient. As we know, he was part of a plot to assassinate Hitler, and that led to his arrest and execution. Whether he was right to participate in such a plot is another question. He came to that point as part of his work against the regime that was killing Jews; Bonhoeffer himself returned to Germany from the United States to be part of the opposition when he could have stayed safely away, writing perhaps from Union Theological Seminary. He did not. He helped to found the confessing church that was in opposition to the established church, the one that collaborated with the Nazis.
The church today--almost in every incarnation--is a collaborator with the present government, part of the wealth and war machine that keeps the United States and its people in chains. We go along because as Christians we are no longer powerful enough to speak out, nor confident enough to risk our tax exemption, nor brave enough to risk outraging the those who profit from the current situation (or are so beaten down by it that they no longer know how to resist).
Near the end of his life, Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter from prison about what he called religionless Christianity. I have long been intrigued by what he has to say here (the letter was written in April 1944 when I was one-month old). Bonhoeffer writes:
"What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience--and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as 'religious' do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by 'religion.'"
He goes on to talk about how Christianity itself was historically conditioned and "a transient form of human self-expression." The time he describes, the mid-1940s near the end of the war, was not unlike our own, nor unlike the late 60s and early 70s. These were and are critical times for Christians. We are in our passivity confirming what Bonhoeffer was saying: "the western form of Christianity was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion."
What we have not discovered is the answer to Bonhoeffer's next question: "If religion is only a garment of Christianity--and even this garment has looked very different at different times--then what is a religionless Christianity?"
The question is, in fact, how do we transform ourselves from a passive people bound in the obsolete form of religion to a vibrant spiritual presence in a suffering world? It is clear to me right now that we don't know how to do it. All we can do is repeat the same old tired phrases and meaningless prayers.
Ironically, the state of religionless Christianity right now is most visible in the Christian religion itself. It is a religion without meaning. But the end of religion is a good thing, when the religion in question is no longer representative of the divine ground of being nor a passageway into that place of wholeness once promised by the church. You can't get there from here.
But this is also a Kairos moment if there ever was one. It is a time in which we can take action and change our way of living and being. During Lent I suggested that we give up church for Lent; I suspect nobody followed my lead. And I am certainly not going to suggest that people walk out of church. I know they won't. But I do wonder what we are doing in church. Why are we there? Who cares?
We went to a church yesterday not in the Episcopal tradition. The pastor spoke about the need to pay attention to what matters, to be organized in such a way that the mundane details of getting along do not mask what we really need to be doing. As an aside, he suggested that the present government administration might take some time off to reflect on what it's doing. It was a gentle antidote to "patience with those who incite war." I also wondered as I heard him whether the same might apply to the church today.
Time to ask ourselves: What are we doing? How will our actions be judged by the future? Where is our Dietrich Bonhoeffer in prison calling us to discipleship? As we religionless Christians go willingly to execution, who will come after us?
Just to be clear, I am not suggesting we revive religion. I am suggesting we give it up altogether and start over, that we accept religionless faith as a fact and figure out what a new Christianity looks like.
Monday, July 2, 2007
Sick on the Bus
The Number 17 Bus stops a block away from our apartment in downtown Portland and goes thirteen miles out to Sauvie Island, which is a rural paradise in the Columbia River. You can pick your own berries there. I rode my bicycle out to Sauvie Island Saturday morning but was not quite up to another ten miles around the island itself. The ride out was along an industrial area, not exactly beautiful, but I could have taken the bus and just cruised the island. Portland buses have bicycle racks on the front. Portland buses are amazing.
We can ride the 17 to Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, where we went to church yesterday morning. It is located in the northwest section of the city, near the Pearl District, where the arts are concentrated.
We caught the bus at about 9:25. I asked the driver the nearest stop to 19th and Glisan (pronounced Gleeson) and she smiled, "19th and Glisan." "Close enough," I said. The bus drivers here are incredibly friendly and helpful. A few stops along, she turned and said to an elderly man seated behind her and said, "This is your stop." But it the ride became even more remarkable.
Soon after we turned on Glisan, somewhere around 13th Avenue, we stopped at a light. A homeless man--or at least he looked homeless, and not at all well--had gotten on a stop before. He had that grizzled look of a hard life, a crusty white beard, sunken cheeks, pants gathered at his waist with a long belt. He shuffled as he walked. There were not many people on the bus. He sat somewhere behind us. At the light, he scuttled to the front and spoke to the driver.
"You have to be sick?" she asked. "Ok, go out. I'll wait."
The man got off the bus and threw up on the dirt at the base of a tree. He came back and thanked the driver.
"That's ok," she said. "Let me know if you have to be sick again."
He started back to his seat but, before the bus began moving, returned quickly.
"You have to be sick again," the driver asked. He nodded. She opened the door. He got out, doubled over. You could see that he was holding vomit to avoid throwing up on the bus. He spewed a yellowish liquid at the base of the tree and returned to the bus, which had been standing at a green light, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief.
The driver said, "Ok now?"
"Yeah."
"Medication?"
"Yeah."
"Ok. Let me know if you have to be sick again. I'll stop. We'll wait for you. And thanks for not getting sick on the bus. I appreciate that."
We all did.
This was definitely not New York City or perhaps any other city in the country. The man was considerate of the rest of us. When he vomited, it was not on the sidewalk. The driver was concerned for his well being and acted on that concern. No one in the bus got upset at having to sit through two lights while a homeless man was sick.
We went on to church, but we both felt that we had already been there. On the bus.
We can ride the 17 to Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, where we went to church yesterday morning. It is located in the northwest section of the city, near the Pearl District, where the arts are concentrated.
We caught the bus at about 9:25. I asked the driver the nearest stop to 19th and Glisan (pronounced Gleeson) and she smiled, "19th and Glisan." "Close enough," I said. The bus drivers here are incredibly friendly and helpful. A few stops along, she turned and said to an elderly man seated behind her and said, "This is your stop." But it the ride became even more remarkable.
Soon after we turned on Glisan, somewhere around 13th Avenue, we stopped at a light. A homeless man--or at least he looked homeless, and not at all well--had gotten on a stop before. He had that grizzled look of a hard life, a crusty white beard, sunken cheeks, pants gathered at his waist with a long belt. He shuffled as he walked. There were not many people on the bus. He sat somewhere behind us. At the light, he scuttled to the front and spoke to the driver.
"You have to be sick?" she asked. "Ok, go out. I'll wait."
The man got off the bus and threw up on the dirt at the base of a tree. He came back and thanked the driver.
"That's ok," she said. "Let me know if you have to be sick again."
He started back to his seat but, before the bus began moving, returned quickly.
"You have to be sick again," the driver asked. He nodded. She opened the door. He got out, doubled over. You could see that he was holding vomit to avoid throwing up on the bus. He spewed a yellowish liquid at the base of the tree and returned to the bus, which had been standing at a green light, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief.
The driver said, "Ok now?"
"Yeah."
"Medication?"
"Yeah."
"Ok. Let me know if you have to be sick again. I'll stop. We'll wait for you. And thanks for not getting sick on the bus. I appreciate that."
We all did.
This was definitely not New York City or perhaps any other city in the country. The man was considerate of the rest of us. When he vomited, it was not on the sidewalk. The driver was concerned for his well being and acted on that concern. No one in the bus got upset at having to sit through two lights while a homeless man was sick.
We went on to church, but we both felt that we had already been there. On the bus.
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