Until I was 14, I lived in Richmond, California. The city consists of The Flats — that portion west of Interstate 80 on the coastal plain next to San Francisco Bay, where the poorer people live — and The Hills, which overlook the flats. I lived in The Flats, so I can say from personal experience that Richmond - and the many other places in America like it - are beset by violence. Despair is a constant temptation when you are immersed in such a place.
And yet, while these are places filled with suffering, they are also filled with grace; not only the grace that sanctifies those who dwell there, but the grace waiting to sanctify those who live in more comfortable circumstances, but who have the courage to go and serve their brothers and sisters there.
These places also bring forth a saintly response to the ongoing crisis from the people who live there.
A few years ago, I met an elderly woman in a support group for survivors of violent crime. A year before, she had lost a grandson to murder, and almost exactly a year later she lost her remaining grandson in the same manner. He had bled out on almost the exactly same patch of street as his brother.
I held her hand as she wept for her lost grandchildren, as the pain came off her in waves. It was as if the skin of her face was floating on an ocean of tears. She had loved those two children with fierce, maternal love, and losing them was like living a nightmare.
But she took up the cross of her grief and reached out to the kids in the neighborhood, doing the best she could to prevent another mother’s or grandmother’s heart from breaking as hers had. She prayed, she worked and she filled her days with service. She is a saint.
I remember an older kid who lived a few houses down the block from me in Richmond. He had had polio, and had braces on his legs, and eventually he ended up in a wheelchair — but his heart was big and loving and more generous to me than I deserved. His immobility made him a keen observer of the goings-on in the neighborhood.
I remember sitting on his porch on summer afternoons while he shared his concern for a family across the way that had hit a rough patch; his excitement at the college prospects of the high school-aged boy of the family next door; and his musings over why Mean Mrs. Warner was such a bitter old lady — her late husband drank a lot, and she had put up with a lot from him. I don’t think my wheelchair-bound friend ever saw himself as a mentor; he just enjoyed my company, and I his. But I learned an immense amount from him about seeing without judging, and about taking whatever situation God puts you in and making the best of it.
There was Mr. Pender, a retired man who lived next door with his wife. His wife had had a stroke, but her heart as capable and tender as her body was weak. She had a sixth sense about when the streets were getting rough. She’d take me in and give me hot chocolate on rainy winter afternoons, making a point of telling me that she just knew I was going to grow into a very special young man.
From my neighborhood in Richmond you could see, about a mile away and on the other side of the freeway, The Hills and the comparatively lavish homes of middle- and upper-middle-class folks. To us, the people in those houses seemed to live on the other side of an unbridgeable divide. On those rare occasions when we ventured into those hills, we were greeted with cold stares and parents pulling their kids indoors. When I began middle school in The Hills, I was shocked by the attitudes of the kids in my school. My dear childhood friends and neighbors were dismissed as “Zulus,” and worse.
But those kids in The Hills were immeasurably poorer for not knowing the people I knew; they were deprived of the joy of being held by Mrs. Pender; they never sat on a porch and learned from a wise young boy who’d had polio.
The ongoing emergency in our poorer neighborhoods is our greatest moral scandal. With their grinding poverty and their unconsoled victims and relatives whose bodies and minds have been wounded by violence, Richmond and the many places like it stand as searing indictments of our greed and selfishness. The violence and the tattered social fabric of Richmond is a poignant expression of the outrage — more than that, the unutterable pain — of priceless children of God who have been told, with words and the bleeding wounds of a million injustices large and small, that they are People Who Don’t Matter.
If America is to be a truly great nation, we must realize our fundamental kinship with all who share our shores. I pray that one day, the God who made us all will break our hearts. On that day, we all will be reunited across the gulfs that divide us.
On that day, we will be so reconciled with one another that we will finally, truly and deeply recognize our brother- and sisterhood.
On that day, the sounds of joyous reunion will echo from the walls of our cities.
And on that day we will weep in one another’s arms, flooded with gratitude that our long separation from our brothers and sisters is finally, blessedly, at an end.