The Beauty of St Paul’s and Old Academic Towns

I began writing this a week or so ago but decided to keep it in the present tense …

As I sit writing this I am at the house of an elderly ex-resident that we look after as a house. His flat was broken into on New Years day and the door has still not been fixed so we have been keeping vigils at his house overnight. Thankfully, he just lives across the park from us so it isn’t quite as inconveniencing as it could be. We are watching Man U play Liverpool and Chelsea play Cheltenham on the tele. I think that I could like soccer if I watched it more often.

Yesterday, I serendipitously ended up down at St. Paul’s cathedral just as they were beginning an evensong so I decided to check it out. Sitting underneath the massive dome, I was enveloped in the choral reverberations. It was a beautiful service in a breathtaking church. I think that I will have to go down there more often.

Things in the community have been going pretty well lately. We are starting to become more of a well-oiled machine as a house and I feel as if we are beginning to make progress in some of the issues that our residents are working through both personally and in their relationships with each other. One of the ways that I get self-worth is through completing a job well. I find much satisfaction in seeing a plan come to completion or having an end product that I made or made happen. I need this completion to feel like I am being effective and suspect that this will always be one of my frustrations with the world of social work.

I have also had more of a chance to get involved with folks who use our drop-in center on a regular basis. That has been nice but tough as well because there always seems to be power struggles between certain individuals who have become entrenched in their way of how they view the center should be run and what their roles are. My gut reaction is usually to say something like, “Well, if you don’t like it just leave then....you’re not indispensable you know.” That is just ignoring the issue I think though. The real issue comes in the fact that these folks see things in black and white and not in gray. Gray is tough to deal with….I don’t like gray, it is too ambiguous, too undefined.

Skipping ahead to right now, this very second:

I will be going on the tea run in about 6 hours so I should really go to bed soon I think.

I went up to Cambridge to see a friend this past week and then we travelled down to Oxford for a day. It was so nice to hang with a friend from home and both of the cities are beautiful so it was a really good couple of days.

I got the same feeling walking through the courtyards of King’s College that I always would get when walking through the yard at Harvard. I think it is a sense that important things are happening around you. People who are going to make a large impact on the world are studying just beyond those ancient walls. In the case of Oxford and Cambridge it was compounded by the history that the universities are steeped in. Oxford and Cambridge were founded in the 12 and 13th centuries respectively and have such a rich history of people who went on to shape the way the world thinks about itself. Think John Locke, Charles Darwin, and Erasmus.

More blabberings to come. Hopefully sooner rather than later. :) I am tired now and my bed situated next to a radiator and a window with a draft is calling me by name. You can't beat the combination of an overactive radiator and the sometimes bitterly cold wind slipping under my window frame. It's great.

Peace, Chris

The New Year

2006?! Is it just me or does that seem like we are talking about the distant future instead of what it already two days in the past?

As tends to be my modus operandi, I spent the eve being late (yes folks, late) for meeting people while wandering down a road in central London with Gilly. When we finally caught up with them we had a happy 7 minutes past the new year celebration and watched the flashes of light that emanated from behind large buildings reminding us that we were missing the firework display down on the Thames.

Steping back a few days.....For Boxing Day (go ahead, ask me what Boxing day is, I can tell you) we had an open house of sorts and me and one of my housemates went out that morning to do streetwork and drum up business. We talked a bit with a couple of the regular fellas that sleep out on the stoops of a local church but beyond that only saw one guy. One of the guys that sleeps out at the church stopped by during the afternoon, which was great, but I always feel awkward when we have folks without accommodation come to the house because at the end of the night I have got a bed and they don't. This has actually been one of the hardest things for me to deal with in the Community because we have contact with a lot of people that are living on the streets and inevitably there are times when you part company to go home and they are already home.

A lot of folks, especially from central London, were indoors over the Christmas season at an annual event sponsored by an organization named Crisis. As a side note, apparently they provide a fantastic service, but I can't imagine that they could have chosen a worse or more demeaning name for themselves.....why not just call the organization, "Okay, let's point out the fact that I am homeless". I just think that it is a horrible name . This seems to happen all the time in the social service world. We (that is a general "we") cater to people's sense of charity through designing our promotional materials to reflect a glossy poor. I dare say that we cheapen the reality of poverty through our efforts to tap pocketbooks. Ah, but government funding cuts are inevitable so we have to diversify our funding sources..... Anyways, this is completely tangential but is something that I struggle with.

It was a good Christmas here at the house and I am glad that if I couldn't be with family or friends I could be with these folks. I don't want to flatter myself but I felt that it was important to be here over the holidays because that can be a very tough time for some folks. Even though we aren't family (and could never even pretend to be) I thought that it was important to recreate a family atmosphere as much as possible. This turned out pretty nicely for the most part as we had tree from central Wales, did a secret santa type deal, and had a gargantuan meal which was feasted on for days to come. It was nice to have a full (capacity and stomachs), happy household.

So that was the quick and dirty on the Christmas season. And that is kind of what it was, quick and dirty. It just seemed like a very hectic time but all things considered I think we did alright.

A friend from Boston said in an email a while back that I should make the focus of my next post, "things I've learned and light bulbs that have gone off in my head since I've been in London". This is quite a request to fill and I don't think that I will have a full grasp of all the things that I've learned until I step away, but as I write this I have just had a really good person to person conversation with one of the residents in my house. There is something about this specific person that can really single out the reality of a situation and put it into unexpected words. Gosh that sounds vague, but there is something very simplistic and childlike that reaches out and grabs me every once and again when we have a conversation. Please don't read this as condescending but I am often times reminded of how God promises to use the foolish things to shame the wise and use the weak to lead the strong.

Admist the frustration and mental exhaustion there are really good things and many lessons to be learned. Maybe I should start writing them down.