When Hope Unborn Had Died

"When Hope Unborn Had Died. . . !"

It should be clear to the most casual observer among us that I am neither a social scientist nor a political analyst. I am neither an academic theorist nor a social philosopher by any stretch of the imagination. I make no apology for the fact that I am who I am. I work in the African-American community that some would call a "ghetto." I am a part of a social "net" that delivers services to the hungry and the hopeless. While I am a protector and an educator of children at the same time I teach adults how to read and write. I am counselor for families; the message I bring offers stability for homes. I am a provider of housing. For many, I am the charitable source of financial last resort. My purpose is to be the source of psychological liberation and spiritual freedom. I am the spokesman for many. I bless babies when they are born; I tenderly put to rest those whose time on earth has come to an end. Collectively, my institution controls more land and real property than any other institution operative in the inner city or controlled by minorities in this country. My institution is ignored by some, tolerated by many, misunderstood by others, and exploited by too many. My institution is quite literally the soil in which the "grass roots" grow. I am a Baptist preacher!

In many respects, I represent the problem that has drawn you to this place of conference. Ours is a church with historic roots within our community. As an institution the Metropolitan Church, whom I am honored to serve as Pastor, is now in its 134^th year of service in the nation’s capitol. Situated in Shaw, we are a part of the fabric of the African American community while at the same time we are organically and systemically related to the civic and political life that surrounds us. Our church is located in a community that is marked by gentrification, the return to the inner city by those who for so long have abandoned it but who now seek to regulate and control it.

There are several points of conflict that may be of interest to your gathering. First, our church is bursting at the seams. We have grown primarily because of the broad range of human services that the church provides. For some, we represent a perpetual parking problem. There would be no parking problem, however, were it not for the fact that exigencies of human need run so broad and deep. Narcotics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, the Metropolitan/Delta Adult Literacy Council, our G.E.D. program, food distribution, and the Metropolitan Day School are but the tip of over 60 various ministries of the church designed to impact the community around us and the lives of those who come within our walls. Metropolitan has been challenged to respond to the needs of other human service agencies around us and, consequently, in the last two years has given over $400,000 in philanthropic and in-kind support to our constituent community. Yet, we find ourselves in a position where we cannot expand our site. Even though we have purchased adjacent property for the purpose of providing housing and community social service space, it is now restricted in its use by the imposition of the Greater Fourteenth Street Historic Preservation District. Without collaboration, we have been instructed in effect that we can own it but we cannot control it.

In many respects, I represent the problem that has drawn you to this conference. Our church has recently leased a facility formerly used as an educational site for Howard University that will now become the home of the Metropolitan Day School, an educational opportunity for children from kindergarten through the eighth grade. The expansion of our ministry into the northeast quadrant of the city, however, has not been greeted by the enthusiasm of all the local residents. This new school, say some, will occasion loitering and littering, excessive traffic and noise, and while the community remained content to host an unused building for several years, it now believes that the planned $1 million renovation for the building will deflate local property values. Our efforts at collaboration and conciliation have failed. We are now spending money fees for legal services that would better serve the educational needs of our children. There are neighbors for the school who insist that education is fine but as far as this school is concerned, you must not put it "in my backyard."

In many respects, I represent the problem that has drawn you to this conference. While my description of the conflict is too brief, the necessity for bridging this gap within our community is nonetheless urgent and real. There are questions before us that cannot be evaded or avoided?

What is community and how does one create it?
Who is entitled to have a vision of community and how does one share it?
How shall we still the hostility of those who fear control of their community being wrested from them?
When shall we learn how to speak to each other at times other than those marked by crisis and conflict?
Does a collaboration of ideas also require a collaboration of resources?
How can an entire community be included in a decision making process?
Does such a broad-based inclusion ever become too cumbersome or counter-productive?
Who is able to bring to the table the art of compromise? Is it possible that those who seek compromise truly seek a balancing of interests or is it really but a cynical means to achieve my own selfish ends under the cloak of humanitarianism?
Are there limits to collaboration?
When will we ever learn what it really means to be neighbors?

The questions are not rhetorical. They are urgent and critical. Let me speak to these issues briefly and, in the end, let us collectively seek in our sharing a word of help and hope.

These are critical times for our community. As a practicing clergyman, these are critical times for the church. We come to the close of the twentieth century and see within our culture a shifting of the burden of social responsibility to the churches. The Black church in America was born of a vast schedule of needs that a nation committed to slavery could not or would not address. Those needs were spiritual in the first instance but they were also physical, social, psychological and economic. They were the same needs we recognize today as necessary to reasonably dignified human existence. Since the Black church was the only institution available to African Americans it was, by necessity, "all things to all people." The Black churches gave spiritual refuge and reassurance, but they also spawned the first black banks, savings and loans, burial societies, insurance companies, schools, colleges, and homes for the aged as support services to the spiritual needs of their people.

Historically, the mission of the African American church has been to deal creatively with the lives and circumstances of the persons it was designed to serve. Step in any African American church and the theme for the Sunday will revolve around issues of children having children, the Black male as an endangered species, disproportionate incarceration of Black youth, homelessness, substance abuse, AIDS, unemployment, and a plethora of social ills the church is programmatically structured to address.

Let us not come to this conference without a candid assessment of what is afoot here. We are today a gathering of housing specialists, service providers, governmental advocates, developers, realtors, community activists, and all the rest who have been drawn together with a common agenda to deal with the social pathologies which confront us all. We are here in an attempt to deal with what E. J. Dionne, Jr., calls "modernity’s discontents and dislocations." The political, economic and justice problems which are the fabric of this nation are a consequence of a long and tortured history of racial and ethnic discrimination. We are where we are because of injustice that emanates from the courts of this land. We are where we are because government failed to address the issue of red lining in the black ghetto. Government has had its hand in the denial of equal educational and entrepreneurial opportunity. The federal government has a "damned spot" on its hand, a reminder of illicit drugs and semi-automatic weapons that it has permitted by benign neglect to flood our community.

I make this commentary knowing full well what is at stake here is not the work of government but of the society that the government represents. Government is the instrument through which the social will is represented; it is the instrument of the people. Government may well shift its workload but the society can never shift the responsibility that it has for the least among us.

We must address these issues of community and collaboration because we cannot ignore the continuing consequences if we do not. There are certain realities we cannot escape:

The public is increasingly skeptical of the federal government’s capacity to run large programs. President William Clinton has informed the nation that "the era of big government is over."
In the future the government will have a more modest role in safeguarding the economic security of Americans. Local governments will have a greater burden but fewer resources.
Classrooms in our cities are overcrowded.
Tuition at many state and community colleges is rising faster than inflation.
Vocational and technical education is often obsolete or woefully inadequate.

Add to this the fact that, according to Robert B. Reich, U. S. Secretary of Labor in 1996, by one estimate, merely to return to the level of inequality at the end of the 1970s would require an additional yearly public investment in the skills of the bottom half of our workforce of approximately $60 billion.

And what does all of this mean to housing specialists, service providers, governmental advocates, developers, realtors, community activists, and all the rest who have gathered here today? It means that our problems are real, and urgent, and inescapable. It means our communities will be damned and destroyed if we cannot move beyond the minutiae which divides us, if we cannot move beyond what Dr. James Forbes calls the "circling the wagons" mindset, or what Dr. Jeremiah Wright calls the "ain’t nobody right but us" mindset, or beyond what I call the "my way or no way" mindset to see the larger reality of human need that is before us. The conflict that is apparent in so many communities across our nation is reflect of the reality that we do not like to be disrupted from our various "comfort zones" and asked to accommodate changes that we never imagined would be expected or required.

Let’s be honest here. Many who have gathered in this room have not done so for altruistic or humanitarian purposes. There is money to be made in the redevelopment of communities. There is money to be made in development and housing and in the delivery of human services. The goal of your coming in this hour, however, must be to find a way to bring hope to our communities and to the people who live within them. You must be the ones who help neighbors see beyond their fences to the broader needs of the neighborhood. You must be the ones who help our communities look beyond selfish local interests to the interests of the greater good. You must be the ones who assist in the interpretation of the vision of those of us who seek to provide elder care, and housing for those with distinctive abilities, and housing for those who seek a community of recovery, and a whole range of other human services. You must be the ones who help others to see in churches not adversaries but allies. You must be the agents who encourage continually imaginative and creative initiatives to address and solve the persistent dilemmas of our communities. You must be the source of continuous instruction that moves us beyond individual empowerment to collective and cooperative work toward the common good. You must be the ones who help us move beyond conflict to clearer vision and, in so doing, move us closer to hope.

I have often wondered how collaboration really works. It seems such an otherworldly, even ephemeral concept. It sounds good, but its difficult to find and even harder to achieve. I wonder how collaboration works.

Do not forget that I am a regularly ordained Baptist preacher. I pondered this question and looked to my own spiritual and biblical experience. When I thought of the issue of collaboration my mind wandered to a time centuries before Christ, to a land marked only by dry bones. The prophet Ezekiel, some of you may recall, was invited to a community that had failed to collaborate. The consequence of this failure was, as you know, a valley of the slain, a valley of bones that were dry, and very dry.

What Ezekiel faced then and what we face now was a community that failed to communicate. Ezekiel stood silent in a national cemetery with bones that spoke more eloquently in their death than their mouths spoke in the days of their living.

And there were no graves. When the conflict was over there were not enough living to bury the dead. There were not graves – only bones piled one upon the other littering the landscape with the leftovers of human warfare.

Is this our end? Shall we come to such a pitiable state? Shall we, because of our failure to collaborate, find our bones taken apart and left as a monument to the insanity of our age? Shall we, because of our own selfish interests, become more interested in sites than in the lives that can be saved by what occurs in the places of our choosing? Shall we content ourselves to live without progress, without achievement and so live our lives with no coherent purpose, meaning or control? Shall we compromise our existence to extinction by our constant effort to grasp the "brass ring" and, in so doing, fail to grasp and value each other?

I hear a wind blowing. From the north, south, east and west. I hear a wind blowing. It is a wind that speaks loudly of the union of logic with priorities, a union which respects the needs of stakeholders, a union which will not forsake quality for quantity and that refuses to see control and investment as competing forces for right. I hear a wind blowing that will not trust technology to take away or eradicate the necessity for human beings to live together, to work together, to play together and grow together. I hear a wind blowing that will not ignore or misread the importance of cultural expectations or step over the right of a people to determine for themselves the future in which they will live. I hear a wind that requires all of us to learn from each other (even if our learning means an end that is not of our choosing) and to grow in our understanding of the values and mores which make us who we are. I hear a wind blowing and it has the sound of hope.

Some years ago I was introduced to a painting by a man named Watt. His painting seemed, at first, a study in contradiction primarily because the title given to the painting seemed in conflict with the scene which the canvas depicted. The painting is entitled Hope. Hope shows a woman playing a harp while seated on top of the world. Her posture would appear at first glance to be all right. What more enviable position could any of us ever hope to be in than being on top of the world with everything and everybody dancing to our music. Look closer, however, and there you will see the illusion of power gives way to the reality of pain. The world on which this woman sits, our world, is torn by war, destroyed by hate, decimated by despair, and devastated by distrust. By any artistic evaluation, the painting shows a work on the brink of destruction and, at the same time he titled the painting, Hope.

Look closer still for the harpist is sitting in rags, her clothes tattered as though she herself had been a victim of some great war. When you look closely, you see a bandage on her head with blood beginning to seep through. Scars and cuts are visible on her face, arms and legs, and the harp on which she is playing has all but one of its strings torn, ripped out and dangling down. Even her instrument has been damaged by what she has been through and she is more the classic example of quiet despair than anything else and yet, at the same time, the artist dared to entitle this painting, Hope.

If, however, when you look at this painting, all you see is despair and desperation, it is because you have only seen the horizontal dimensions and relationships, only how the woman was hooked up with the world on which she sat. Look more closely still and you will see that there is also a vertical relationship. When you look at this painting you will see the war, the hunger, and the distrust but don’t forget to look just above her head. There above the head of the woman will be some small notes of music moving playfully and joyfully toward heaven. The meaning here is that in spite of being involved in a world devastated by destruction and decimated by disease,

in spite of being in a world where famine and greed are uneasy bed partners,

in spite of being in a world where nuclear nightmare draws closer with every second;

in spite of being on a ticking time bomb with her clothes in rags, her body scared, bruised and bleeding, and her harp all but destroyed except for that one string that was left,

the woman still had the ability to hope.

These are days when for all our failure to communicate and collaborate, you have come perhaps with only one string left, but you have come here with the ability to hope.

God of our weary years

God of our silent tears

Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;

Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet

Come to the place for which our fathers sighed.

We have come over a place that with tears has been watered

We have come treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

Out of the gloomy past, till now we come at last

Where the bright gleam of our bright star is cast!

The Keynote Address delivered for the Campaign for New Community: A National Dialogue on Collaborating for Successful Siting of Housing and Service Programs, November 12, 1998 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Crystal City, Virginia, by H. Beecher Hicks, Jr., Senior Minister of Metropolitan Baptist Church of Washington, D. C. All Rights Reserved.Ó