Simon Fowler

rLiving Day 3: Knowing the poor (Directness)

With a few friends, I’ve run a Sunday class at church for the last 18 months called the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. We administer it but as far as possible we have the participants be the teachers (more like discussion facilitators with a simple handout as the basis of discussion) from their expertise or interest, to help us all think through the issues in the light of Scripture and then, hopefully, change how we live. But at least change how we think. So far we’ve touched on: Inequality ($$); Disabilities; Music; Myth of a Christian Nation; Giving and Generosity; Relationships and Social Capital; Suffering and Joy; Food; Healthcare (twice); Science and Faith; Inerrancy; Hermeneutics; Education (the “reading wars”), and today we started a series on “poverty”.

“It’s a lot easier to talk about poverty than to talk with someone who is poor.” (Mother Theresa)

“The great tragedy of the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.” (Shane Claiborne)

Relational Proximity Dimension #1 is “Directness”. My relationship with someone is better and healthier the less mediated it is. It can be mediated by technology or other people: these reduce our ability to communicate fully. It can also be mediated, even when face to face, by dishonesty and fakeness: there’s a real me and a real you, any fronts we put up reduces directness.

Our first question was whether anyone had experienced poverty personally, or had encountered ‘it’ anywhere. Among us was a man who’d been homeless for 11 years but apparently by choice. Several of us had encountered poverty in various places such as London (the homeless), inner-city Boston, El Salvador (people living on a garbage dump), Mexico (solvent-addicted street kids), and Paraguay (financially poor but with land, food, water and shelter and no sense of being poor themselves). Then in small groups we discussed causes.

What was immediately obvious was that ‘poor’ has relative and absolute meanings and that the experience of the poor varies enormously. This is why we need to know them, so that we can love them for who they are, as individuals and families. We also need to know them so that we actually do something.

If our (individual) relationship with the poor is mediated, it’s almost inevitable that we’ll fixate on ourselves (with guilt about our riches), we’ll be ignorant about the poor (romanticize them, pity them, judge them), and in the end we’ll do nothing except perhaps pay our indulgence through charity to salve our conscience. Directness – encounter relationships with actually people who are poor – seems to hold so much more promise in creating other-centeredness, compassion and respect, and appropriate action that empowers and liberates.

If you’d like to join the discussion next Sunday in downtown Boston, let me know.

rLiving Day 2: Love my neighbor (Multiplexity)

One reason my wife & I continue to rent and have failed to buy somewhere else is because we love our street so much it drains our enthusiasm for moving. We just love the way the pavement looks. And the lamp-posts are just fabulous!

The multi-neighbor yard sale we held today is one reason. This was our fourth and it was our most successful, financially: over $700 between five families! It was also the most gorgeous day for it, and we were all present, and all in great spirits! Even my guitar playing, as poor as it is, added a little something (I only know House of the Rising Sun, some 12-bar blues (E/A/B7) and I’m learning Walk the Line):

Photo: by my neighbor Andrew from his porch

I know some of my neighbors better than others. [I’m going to use fake names here, just because.] Adrienne and Keith over the road have two children similar ages to ours so we’ve gotten to them best over the last 6 years. Below them in the two-family house are Susan & Derek. Directly opposite are Gavin and Andrew, and their lodger Sarah. Below them are Maureen and her mom Margaret. These were all involved in the yard sale. Then next door and a few doors down are Rich, Andrea, John, Bill, Doreen.

Relational Proximity Dimension #3 is “Multiplexity”. My relationship with someone is better and healthier if I interact with them in two or three different contexts than if we only interact in one. This is, essentially, about my knowledge of the other person.

Arguably, I have the same directness with the latter group (Rich etc.) as with the former (Adrienne etc.); we encounter one another face to face and are on very friendly terms. And with them all we’ve talked about weather, jobs, backgrounds, the Red Sox, local history, family etc. But because we organized and ran a yard sale, my relationship with the individuals in the former group increased incomparably.

Imagine the richness of knowledge (savoir and connaître) added to our relationships by doing this one thing? Susan buys individual colored stickers for each family, sends copies of yard sale posters to us all, gets a cash till and a book to manage transactions. She’s also a master seller! Derek and I pretty much follow orders, but make wise-cracks while doing so! Gavin & Andrew provide coffee & muffins for everyone when we start at 6.30am; then burgers & hot-dogs at lunch. I provide cream-cheese on toast half way through the morning; then beers later. Gavin puts balloons up in the streets around. Keith charms the buyers with his smile and warmth and conversation. Derek gives us a kids bike that he was going to sell. Keith also fixes up his old, but meaningful, mountain-bike and wrestles over whether to sell it and for how much. I break out in a Johnny Cash. I could go on. And it did, until about 4pm.

That’s it. Just one more context of interaction I’m bursting with the fullness of the relationships. It’s highly unlikely I would have ‘known’ all of that just be talking over the fence or even having dinner together. And now, the “g’morning!”, the “how’s work?”, even if that’s all we do in passing for months, somehow means more and is treasured more because of this May 1st yard sale.

[This is also an example of Dimension #5: Commonality/Purpose. That we engaged in a common and agreed task – and all the trust that goes into accomplishing that, as evidenced above – probably better explains the enormous sense of fulfillment we had at the end, over and above simply getting to know each other better.]

rLiving Day 1: Tweeting to Speaking [Directness]

I follow 399 people on Twitter and I’m being followed by 366 (as of today). One followee/follower is @odguru, as I knew her for a few weeks. Then I clicked on her profile and found out that she’s Christy Pettit and that ‘od’ in odguru is Organizational Development (and ODscore is her company: Where social networking meets systems thinking). Along with a lot of other people, we crossed paths during a weekly tweet chat, #lrnchat, about all things learning. And today we spoke on the phone!

Our connection up until today was a few mutual retweets and responses during those weekly 90 minutes. Then Christy said something in a public tweet to me, right at the end of yesterday’s session that particularly piqued my interest. So I sent a DM (Direct Message) to her:

The subsequent phone call from Christy today changed, or maybe even created, a relationship.

Relational Proximity Dimension #1 is “Directness”. My relationship with someone is better and healthier the less mediated it is. It can be mediated by technology or other people: these reduce our ability to communicate fully. It can also be mediated, even when face to face, by dishonesty and fakeness: there’s a real me and a real you, any fronts we put up reduces directness.

Today my relationship with Christy grew significantly because we went from tweeting, and not very often at that, to speaking on the phone. The directness of voice-to-voice – hearing the multi-dimensionality of her voice, her tone, her enthusiasm – made her more of a person in my life than before. I’d say, in fact, that before today there was no relationship. I only knew a few of @odguru’s thoughts and ideas (140 char at a time). I knew from the content that she was very smart and experienced. And I appreciated when she RT’d or responded to my tweets. But now I can say I know Christy Pettit. A teeny bit, anyway. And I’m delighted to know her! We had a really interesting and engaging conversation:

Our relationship also increased in Multiplexity (Dimension #3, which is esentially is about knowledge) because we connected in a different context from #lrnchat, and talked about more than just the #lrnchat question.

This may all seem a little dry and even obvious, but think about any relationship you have, and how “direct” it is, then consider if the lack of directness explains the nature of the relationship, good or bad.

[Note: The context or purpose (Dimension #5) of a relationship will determine to what extent increased directness is necessary or desired. With the 399 people I’m following I can’t possibly, and don’t want, unmediated with them all! But even so, the growth of any ‘relationship’ is constrained to the degree it is mediated.]