Friday, June 08, 2007
Alley Walks
Some years ago Kathleen Norris wrote The Cloister Walk, an account of her year-long stay with the Benedictine monks in Minnesota. A surprise bestseller among secular readers, Norris’s book offered a safe glimpse into rural monastic life and prayer. “I was so worn out after the emotional roller coaster of Jeremiah Chapter 20,” she wrote, that “I walked to my apartment and went back to bed.”
Oh brother. Anybody can have a God moment if they get away from the job and the kids for a few weeks. But I wondered if Norris could have found the holy in urban life? To write a book on contemplative prayer for city people who can’t manage Norris’s year-long rural getaway. Instead of Cloister Walk, I’d call it Alley Walks. The book couldn’t be about getting away from difficulty. It’d have to be about entering it. Since it usually takes a crisis, not a woodsy retreat, to have a real spiritual awakening.
My inner city streets and alleys—Cottage Grove, Cushing, Scott, Lindsey, Allen, Van Buren—have seen crisis and contemplation: postwar boom, deterioration, demolition, renovation and revitalization. Addicts and art history majors, agile thieves and limping saints, gunshots on hot summer nights, silent snowfalls on Christmas eve, sex and celibacy, apocalypse and rebirth. It’s all here: Baghdad and Bethlehem, the sacred and the secular, the Alpha and the Omega. A seminary for the soul, right here in South Bend.
Is it dangerous? Of course it’s dangerous. Living without curtains on your eyes, and with the screen door of your heart missing, is always dangerous. Because strangers can get in. Into your heart.
There’s Doug: the no-shirt beer-bellied nipple-ringed Arkansas good old boy stomping out to the curb toward the new black kid with his head under the hood of a dead Cavalier. It’s blocking Doug’s pickup truck. “Hey!” Doug yells. The kid straightens up ready to fight, never flight. “You need any tools?” says Doug. The kid mumbles, “Yeah,” they do the street handshake and both are illuminated by a shaft of sunlight down through the amputated branches of an AEP-trimmed tree. Next door, Yvette and her sister raise ten kids in a section 8 with no car, no bank account and no vacuum cleaner. But man can she laugh and shout at the party on her porch every Friday night. And pick up litter with her kids the next day.
That’s the thing: despite all the scarcity, there can be an abundance of joy and peace in the inner city. People move slower, know how to relax and take a real Sabbath. They can sit, in silence, on the porch, and just observe life for hours. A basic spiritual discipline.
So we need to get the word out to the suburban white churches and the local black ones that send evangelists to our doorbells each year. That we’re okay. That they can leave the tracts at home and not be so anxious about our salvation. But if they want to learn something? About how to love your neighbor, find joy in scarcity, and just sit and breathe each moment as it comes, then they’ve come to the right place. Because near as I can tell, my neighbors already have a foot in the Kingdom.
Try an Alley Walk. It’s not a monastic wooded retreat. But an urban one…that could save your soul.
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April Lidinsky -- More essays by April
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About the series
Michiana Chronicles is a series of radio essays by Jonathan Nashel, Louise Collins, Joe Chaney, Jeanette Saddler Taylor, Jeff Nixa, April Lidinsky, and Ken Smith.
Michiana is the region of north-central Indiana and southern Michigan roughly centered on South Bend, Indiana.
Michiana Chronicles airs on Fridays at 7:35 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on WVPE (88.1 FM), the home of public radio in Elkhart / South Bend, Indiana.
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