On Praying Without Ceasing

Discover participant from Knoxville finds quiet.

Our biweekly staff meeting at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood has become a sort of Sabbath for me, especially during this summer.  It’s a time where we gather together, pray, study, encourage, and plan.  Even when it's somewhat stressful, it still allows me space to rest and pay more attention to God's work in my life.

This week was no exception, and it would appear that God was priming me for an upcoming lesson.  We had read a short story by Wendell Berry called “Pray Without Ceasing,” from his book Fidelity.  Without too much lead-in, this passage that fleshes out the title occurs several days after Thad up and shoots his best friend, Ben, in a moment of rage-filled despair, and directly before a scene of such awesome forgiveness, it actually causes me to tremble:

     "Well, Jackie," she said, lifting and canting her nose to bring her spectacles to bear upon him, "poor Ben has met his time."

     "Yes, mam," Jack said. "One of them things."

     "When your time comes you must go, by the hand of man or the stroke of God."

     "Yes, mam," Jack said. He was standing with his hands behind him, leaning back against the doorjamb.

     "It'll come by surprise," she said.  "It's a time appointed, but we'll not be notified.'

     Jack said he knew it.  He did know it.

     "So we must always be ready," she said. "Pray without ceasing."

     "Yes, mam."

     "Well, God bless Ben Feltner. He was a good man. God rest his soul."

     Jack stepped ahead of her to help her out the door and down the porch steps.

     "Why, thank you, Jackie," she said as she set foot at last on the walk.

    He stood and watched her going away, walking, it seemed to him, a tottering edge between eternity and time.

Not a typical Tuesday in the Sanctuary.

Two days later, during our closing reflection and worship with Christ Covenant Presbyterian from Knoxville, Tennessee, one of our participants, we’ll call her Adrienne, echoed this notion of “praying without ceasing.”  Adrienne marveled that it was possible to “pray about everything.  When we came upon someone living homelessly on the streets,” she said, “we prayed.  When we were deciding what we could do for and with a person, we prayed.   Before, and after, we said goodbye, we prayed.  When we arrived at our agency work-site for the day, we prayed that God might use us well.  Before dinner, we prayed for the hands that prepared the meal.”  Adrienne had only experienced “god” on Sundays, and it would appear that for the first time in her life, she felt God with every step she took last week.  The awestuck wonder in her face as she reflected upon this was as bright as any Gospel message I’ve ever heard.

New friends from Cincinnati at Union Rescue Mission

In the story, had Thad “prayed without ceasing,” maybe he would have felt a critical pause before pulling the trigger on his best friend.  In my life, were I to sincerely be praying without ceasing, I may not have said that very hurtful thing, may not have acted so selfishly, yet again.  Because what strikes me about this idea, is not that we should hide away in a solitary chamber and silently pray forever, out of the context of one another.  Considering, though, that prayer is essentially a dialogue that recognizes the real presence of God, what if we allowed prayer to be the foundation of our thought-lives, even as we go about our daily businesses?  Can we build an increased awareness of the presence of God?  Can we see the face of God all around us, all the time?  Can we feel God's calming hand upon our shoulder before we honk at the, let's face it, idiot who cut us off on the 101?   Of course we will falter and fail at this, but imagine, if you will, what Adrienne’s realization could imply in our everyday lives.  Can we imagine God’s presence when a homeless individual asks us directly for help?  Can we imagine God’s loving arms around us when we lose someone dear?  Can we imagine God’s watch when someone says, “if you just sign here, it’ll all be taken care of.  There’s no morality in business, just good and bad business.”  Can we imagine God’s joyful laughter when we break bread with former enemies and give breath to reconciliation and redemption, like Homeboy Industries does every single day?

I don’t know if I can do that all the time.  In fact, I know that on my own, I’ll probably forget to even try.  But I know how much richer and satisfying life becomes when I remember that God is near, loving me always, without ceasing, ever.

Dweller Kyle, Former Dweller Will, & Discern-er Edzel

Peace, Matthew

For more pictures of Christ Covenant Presbyterian from Knoxville, Tennessee and Northminster Presbyterian from Cincinnati, Ohio in action last week in LA, click here!

An Idea

You pass it off as a small thing, but it's anything but that. 

Yeast, too, is a "small thing," but it works its way 

through a whole batch of bread dough pretty fast. 

So get rid of this "yeast." - 1 Corinthians 5:6, The Message

Last Wednesday, two speakers from Homeboy Industries visited La Casa de la Comunidad.  These men shared their lives, both past and present, and how the compassion of Homeboy helped them to step away from the patterns of gang life in East Los Angeles.  At one point in the presentation, a very poignant line from Father Gregory Boyle's book, Tattoos on the Heart, was referenced: 

New Friends from Homeboy Industries meet our neighborhood.

"The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be lives out there that matter less than other lives."  


Indeed.  It's not only taken root, it's produced poisonous fruit.  It's infested our daily bread.  This idea allows us to walk around dirty homeless folks sleeping outside a 7-eleven with no more than a "what-a-lazy-wretch" sneer across our face.  This idea is the seed of the notion, "this side of the tracks, that side of the tracks."  This is the idea that allows slavery, inhumane treatment of prisoners, allows us to look at people as problems, issues, statistics in a world population explosion, and not, as we all were intended to be seen: as the image of God.

One of the Homeboys spoke quite eloquently about the internal damage an idea like this causes.  He said that he had no problem with people calling him a monster, a f*!&-up, a no-good menace to society.  He believed himself to be all those things.  But call him worthy of kindness, call him useful and helpful, call him beautiful even, well, his entire body rejected it, like an allergic reaction.  He said, at first, he would become so angry with a compliment that he would retaliate and work to regain the more comfortable status of being a "low-life."    The idea manifested in our sense of self, maintaining the lie that we can lose God's affection and can't hope of winning it back.  Or, more to the truth, can't believe that we never lost it in the first place.

Dwellers, Neighbors, and friends from Oasis came out.

What if being a "Christian" was, at the very core, simply about waging war with this idea?   I looked around that evening at all the faces listening, together, in kinship.  From different backgrounds, sure, but a gathering of people responding to the gritty truth of God's desire for restoration, as poured through these two former gang members.

I've been following the blog of an incoming Dweller, Ben Adam, who will arrive this fall.  This quote is part of a larger work of his on the politics of the Resurrection, but I found myself feeling the resonance of it during the Homeboys' talk: "The Jesus movement, unlike Marxism or the Cuban Revolution, did not seek to make a poor person into a rich monarch. It was a movement that believed G-d was bringing down the powerful and raising up the powerless so that they could meet in the middle as equals."  Meeting in the middle.  It's the heart of what we're attempting here in Hollywood.   God-willing, bridges of understanding, equality, and a kinship that only God could create, can continue to be built and nurtured.

I turned and looked at our current Dwellers.  I thought about some of the ideas they are starting to share, starting to blog about.  I'll leave you to ponder them, and I pray you are blessed in the thinking:

"God has called us to be present: to love His people as much as we possibly can, despite who they are or where they come from." - Alex

"I think that we all feel deficient, not just when standing in front of God but in many of our relationships, and that we all spend far too much time working to hide these deficiencies instead of handing them completely over to the One." - Robert

"Whether or not he stays does not detract from the fact that we cared enough to keep visiting him, find him help when he asked, and will continue to work with him, no matter the outcome of rehab.  He knows we care about him." - Alayna

"I started thinking about how many people are truly involved in this process of volunteerism.  This is not a one-man show.  If I had to list everyone involved in the process, I know that it would take up pages in very small font."  - Josh

"It's also hard for me to see what good a system is if it can only help some, but not all.  I even get angry that people have to be homeless or that there's such a thing as homelessness." - Brady

"Help [homeless people] feel not invisible as they have been walked [over] by so many people ignoring them.  We are all the same in Christ." - Kyle

May God meet you in your middle today.  Thanks for reading.  - Matthew

"He knocked tyrants off their high horses, pulled victims out of the mud."
- Luke 1:52, The Message

Reconsidering Success, by Alex

At Homeboy Industries during Dwell Orientation, 2010

God doesn’t care as much about the “job description” as much as the attitude towards the work. God has called us to be present; to love His people as much as we possibly can, despite who they are or where they come from.

I have been reading a book called Tattoos on the Heart by Father Gregory Boyle. It is an incredible book (I strongly recommend it for anyone). This book is a collection of stories told by a man who has devoted his life to loving people our population often declares unlovable. The tattooed, the drug addicts, the incarcerated, the gang members… he walks alongside them all as they struggle to find their way. Towards the end of the book is a chapter titled Success. I have pulled a brief excerpt from the beginning of the chapter.

…This work has taught me that God has greater comfort in inverting categories than I do. What is success and what is failure? What is good and what is bad? Setback or progress? Great Stock these days is placed in evidence based outcomes. People … want to know if what you do “works."

Salivating for success keeps you from being truly faithful, keeps you from seeing whoever’s sitting in front of you. Embracing a strategy and an approach you can believe in is sometimes the best you can do on any given day. If you surrender your need for results and outcomes, success becomes God’s business.

-Father Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart

Don’t worry mom. This doesn’t mean that I will surrender all plans for graduate school in favor of spending my days sitting on street corners. This simply means that I need to go through everyday focusing first on serving God and loving those around me as He would.

Everything is West of Here?

"But seek first God's kingdom and God's righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." Matthew 6:33- NIV

This week, the Dwellers and I went on a silent prayer walk down Hollywood Boulevard.  We started at the Kodak Theater, walked slowly eastward past desperate star-tour peddlers ("I ask for half of what all the people on that block charge"), windows with "surgically-augmented" dominatrix-clad mannequins, past wide-eyed tourists looking up at the lights, down at the stars.  

Upon reaching the famed Hollywood and Vine corner, one sidewalk-seller says to me, "everything you're looking for is west of here."  Of course, she assumed I was a tourist as I'm sure I looked rather aimless.  Indeed, I had no real agenda or direction, just observing, praying, listening.

After all, west of that intersection is the Chinese Theater, Michael Jackson's star, El Capitan.  There's Hollywood & Highland, the West Coast wanna-be Times Square. Slightly further is ground zero for the Oscar's, where miles of red carpet has rolled over the sidewalks and streets.  A bedazzling attraction, where love looks like paparazzi flashes and sounds like the chatter of entertainment reporters.  But is that everything I'm looking for?  

South of that intersection is Gregory Avenue, a street where everyone knows your name, home of our Dwellers, of la Casa de la Comunidad, a house that leans over to love you, even if you're a teenager who tries to prove yourself unlovable.  There's a tree down in that garden which sometimes produces lemons, sometimes limes (it's either grafting, or some cyclical miracle.) North of that intersection is the University of Montana, where 9 college kids decided to sacrifice vacation time and drive down as a Discover group, trekking through snowy mountains to meet and delight in the tales of homeless folks, walk in their shoes for a minute, make use of their hands for greeting and giving and open their hearts for listening and receiving.  (More photos here.)  East of that intersection is Homeboy Industries, where they hire gangsters & ex-cons to bake cookies and breads, run restaurants, run businesses, encourage their peers, stop bullets with jobs.

Tom and Josh make new friends at Union Rescue Mission on Skid Row. 

And east of that intersection is Hollywood Presbyterian Church, where we were headed. That's the spot that God had smacked me upside-the-head when I was seeking rock-star fame, treasure that fades and dims like flash bulbs, dies down like applause.  On this prayer walk, at this intersection, a familiar old crossroads feeling swells up.  I'm deeply involved in a new search as our home flirts with foreclosure and our nerves fray over discerning what's best for us and our 15-month-old baby girl.  I recognize that I've been grasping for security and stability in finances and real-estate.  I see how I'm spinning myself into something that can be, sadly, rather unlovable.  

Be still.  Seek first the Kingdom.  It's the same search this time as it was years ago.  Only the props are different.

Nothing like one of Emma's home-cooked meals after a long service day.  

We continued eastward.  I continue to wrestle my focus towards treasure that lasts.  I suspect it sounds something like out-of-town college guys laughing when a middle-school girl from the neighborhood schools them in HORSE.  I'm hoping it smells like warm chicken tostadas after a day sorting donated winter coats alongside formerly homeless folks for currently homeless children.  I know it looks like the smile from my daughter, from my wife, when I walk in the door after this long, hard day.

Thank God that we're designed to encourage and redirect one another, especially when we start losing our way  - Matthew

Meeting our new homeless friend RD, hearing about how social media is changing the dialogue on homelessness.  She tweets here: Lost Awareness

Every Day a New Adventure, by Alayna

It’s been a busy orientation week for us. Six of us live in this duplex on Gregory Avenue: Alex and I on the girls’ side and Brady, Josh, Kyle, and Robert on the boys’. We have begun crafting our house covenant, a contract we will all sign that outlines how we agree to live together and hold each other accountable as an intentional Christian community. We have spent some time evaluating the unique spiritual gifts each of us brings to the table. We are learning to value and use our individual strengths.

We have all participated in a morning of service together. We volunteered at Project Angel Food, an organization that prepares and delivers 1,600 meals every day, 365 days per year, for people with terminal illnesses.

We’ve had dinners with several of the past “Dwellers,” the people who have lived in this house on Gregory Avenue in the years before us. It’s been interesting to hear their stories and their advice, to see the lasting relationships that formed from their year here.

One of my favorite field trips from the week was Homeboy Industries and Homegirl Café. Homeboy Industries was started by a pastor who saw firsthand how gangs affected the young men and women and their families in his neighborhood—the violence, prison sentences, and deaths. He saw how difficult it was to get out of that lifestyle once a person was tattooed or had a record. So he began to give them an alternative, paying them out of his own pocket to work for him. I loved the tshirt that our former gang member/tour guide was wearing: “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.” Homeboy Industries has become the largest gang intervention program in the country; it includes Homeboy Bakery, Silkscreen, Maintenace, Merchandise, and Homegirl Café. They provide all sorts of classes, and they can even get their gang tattoos removed for free! I got goosebumps hearing about all the success stories that have come from that place—and it all started with just one man.

Yesterday, I practiced my route to work: bike one mile to the bus stop, put my bike on a rack on the front of the bus, ride 20 minutes, then bike the last couple blocks to my agency. I can already tell that I will have a lot of stories from riding public transportation every day.

So this is my life right now, still in the transition to starting our jobs and neighborhood ministry. It is such an encouragement to hear from home, comments on my first blog, emails and Facebook messages, texts. I’ve been busy so I haven’t gotten to respond to everything, but I just wanted you to know that I do appreciate it. Thank you all for that.

I can’t wait to begin working at my agency and in the neighborhood. More updates to come!

~Alayna