meditation on an empty lot
call it an open concept plan
There is an open lot that I pass most days on my way to Mass. It is on Leland and Sheridan, where Leland ends at a small cul-de-sac in front of the high school’s football practice fields. There are a few benches circling around the cul-de-sac that are fairly nice places to sit on, so the spot is known as the Drinking Spot, named for when James and I would split a beer together and sit there last year when the weather was nice.
A few lots down from the Drinking Spot is an empty lot. It’s got fairly level, well-groomed grass that isn’t as weed-run as you’d imagine. The grass is lush and inviting. Indigo and periwinkle morning glories curl around the chain link fence blocking off the yard from the street.
It’s a lot that doesn’t look—as so many do—abandoned or vacant or the site of some unspeakable disaster. It looks surprisingly idyllic.
The more you walk around the city looking for them, the more you will notice empty lots. And the more you look for them, the more you will see we live in abundance. We live in an abundance of materials to work with and of potential for the good they could become.
I have been thinking recently about how little we understand how to inhabit forgiveness or hope. We may understand the words and general concepts, but not how to live them out, or feel them interiorly, or apply them in our lives.
A recent reflection on forgiveness I read ended with a bon mot about how “it’s important to be on good terms with everyone because we are going to share eternity with them.”
Now, first of all, that’s just not possible. Secondly, that’s not what eschatological unity means. Thirdly, being on “good terms” is a two-way street. And all you can do is clean your own side of the street, you know?
So (let’s carry this further), if you realize that your neighbor is dumping garbage on your side of the street, it doesn’t help you to ignore that fact and pretend that the neighbor is not dumping garbage on your side of the street for the sake of being on “good terms.” Peace is an active creative effort, not ignoring what is wrong. Being a peace-keeper doesn’t mean living in delusion for the sake of feeling good about everyone and everyone feeling good about you. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you solve all your beef. A core belief I learned at the tender age of 20 is that some beef is up to God to solve.
What you do with the fact that your neighbor is a garbage dumper is the question. Here’s where mercy, forgiveness, and Christian charity may (and perhaps should) inform your actions and feelings toward this trashy neighbor. But your response does not change the fact that your neighbor ought not to be a garbage dumper and no one is helped by them continuing to be so, least of all, probably them.
I imagine that eschatological unity will necessitate them ceasing to be a dumper of garbage. But putting the psychological cop-out of an afterlife aside, any attempt to enjoy some kind of mutually clean street in the here and now this side of heaven—a completely attainable possibility that many people enjoy—would also demand some kind of change of heart from them.
Mercy over justice, a line from the letter of James, is what we hope for from God. So if we hope to receive it, we have to extend it.
I’m not entirely sure what mercy over justice means practically, experientially, in a garbage-dumping world. And I’m not sure I trust people who claim they know.
But I do know that it is essential to not become a garbage dumper yourself. Just because garbage has been dumped on your sidewalk does not give you the right to dump garbage on theirs. Trash for trash makes the whole work stink. And that may be what many people mean by justice, but that’s not even what a Christian means.
Mercy over justice means being curious. Why is the garbage dumper dumping? Often the garbage dumping happens because they are suffering some kind of lack—a vulnerability or embarrassment—right? Their slumlord landlord canceled garbage pickup for the building or their dumpster was stolen or insert other reason here. Understanding why builds empathy, and that's nice. But it doesn’t excuse the fact that we all may be suffering some kind of dumpster deficiency and yet many of us choose not to make our garbage others’ problems. It’s dangerous to psychoanalyze a garbage dumper, because sometimes you get pulled into their darkness instead of just living in the light. At the end of the day, it’s healthier to be a street sweeper who is understanding but lives firmly in reality. We all have garbage, you say, and mine stays on my side of the street. Yours doesn’t have to cross the median, and yet, here it is. That stinks.
I think sometimes we live in a world populated by so many garbage dumpers and so many sidewalk owners rolling over and taking it we forget we have an imagination that allows us creative ways to respond to garbage dumping. Forgiveness frees us from the garbage logic, and allows us to respond from the deepest wells of our existence, the part of our heart where we find ourselves, where the binding and loosing takes place.
And that’s where hope comes in: the greatest virtue of God, Peguy says. Hope makes itself felt in a million little invitations. In the Gospel, we see the hope of God as Jesus asks people over and over, ceaselessly, constantly, faithfully, to come be with him. And so many turn away sad. He is left with just 12 Apostles—the constant friends (only three of them clearly rank as his best friends, and even those guys are kind of a bust). And, let’s be honest, they really aren’t the cream of the crop. Only one of them (by his own account) didn’t leave Jesus as he was being put to death. These guys are hardly the starting line-up by the standards of the world.
And yet, the hope of God invites all. Even garbage dumpers, even the weak, even the unideal. We are all invited, constantly, because God has infinite hope.
Many in the Gospels turn away, saddened. It would even seem like most of Jesus’ invitations are declined. Most of the invited—like ourselves— find that there are other, more pressing concerns. Part of that is a structural problem, yes? The economic world is ordered in such a way that everything is more important than God. God is for free time. We are so busy trying to earn our rent, buy groceries, get our kids through schools, pay off loans. God, thank you for the invitation, but you see what I am dealing with, right?
This is the everyday. But the real world—reality that we so often ignore—is just waiting for the invitation of God. And if we can silence the chaos of the everyday, we may just save our souls. Today is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation. How can I say to God “tomorrow?”
Hope says today can be different. That we have the ability and potential (we live in abundance) to make the present different and usher in a different future. It is not rank optimism that the garbage dumpers will magically cease or that the system that upholds and supports and enables garbage dumping will be dismantled over night. But it says that there is no need to endure dumped garbage or garbage dumpers, that their time is limited and we need only two or three guests who RSVPed yes to God’s invitation to make somthing different, something untouched by refuse. Timshel: the way is open. Things can be different.
When they see this in the young, people call this fervor for conversion the liberality of youth. But it is the enthusiasm of the saints. The saints are the children who usher in the kingdom of heaven, because, to little children, the everyday is still far off and each day offers a new world.
Look at what those 12 unideal Apostles, set afire and filled with hope, become. They become love.
So maybe this green lot of morning glories will turn into just another set of cheap, modern condos. But maybe it will be different. The way is open.