Beyond Ordinary and Proper

“There is something wrong with you,” she said, her face twisting in genuine disbelief and horror. “You are crazy.”

I laughed, but comments like these were starting to get to me. At work, I’ve been sharing more and more about what my life in the city is like. By this I mean telling the fun and juicy stories: nearly getting jumped, waking up to gunshots, living next to pedophiles & sex offenders, finding gas leaks and mice in the kitchen. I should have known that focusing on these more dramatic & exotic elements would surprise people, but I was unprepared for the responses. At first they were polite incredulity: “Oh, that’s . . . different.” “That’s noble of you.” “Wow, I could never do that.” “That’s interesting.”

Then, when it began looking like I intended to stay, the comments became forceful and sharp. “You’re just not right in the head.” “You need to get out of there. . . .  I am going to drag you out myself.” “You’re expendable.” “What’s wrong with you?”

The most hurtful of all these comments:

“The people there deserve it. Why should you live with them?”

I still struggle to answer this last question. Anyone who knows me knows that I am hypercritical when it comes to myself, and working through my motives and heart issues has been a difficult process. I have a vague sense of what I hope to gain through life in community, and I have seen my many biases and prejudices begin to change. But I still have trouble articulating exactly why I am here, even though I am more accustomed and deeply satisfied by this way of life. I used to think that simply sharing my stories would enable others to understand, so I started a blog to describe the experience. Here is one of my first entries on moving into the “inner city”:

…I went ahead and made one of the biggest, strangest, and unchar ­ac ­ter ­is ­ti ­cally bold changes of my life.  People  asked me if I was crazy, warned me about being  dramatic  or  unstable   and expressed  skepticism    curiosity   and  general  bewilderment  about my  decision   In  retrospect,   it was one of the best  decisions  I have ever made, since each day brings me a new story and hints that the life I once knew was not the life I was made for. It seems almost  natural  with each  passing  day I am here, to believe that this is the way we should all live, though I am  willing  to give it more time to see the truth in that.

What did I do? I moved from a nice,  single  apartment  near the  hospital  I work at and into a row house in the inner city where my patients live. I moved out of a fully  furnished  site with  laundry  and FIOS and easy access to every  modern  convenience into a shared house and a room like my  college  dorm except smaller,  without  air  conditioning, and with plenty of  cockroaches  and a gas leak that’s worse every time it rains. I moved away from  neighbors  I loved who were  fellow  physicians  in  training  and into a house on a block where the  neighbors  shrug and freely  confess  they deal drugs to “make ends meet”, hold  vigils  in my back  parking  lot for  gangsters  who were shot, and are crazy enough to try my home  cooking   I moved away from  everything  that was  comfortable  and safe into a world of rumors and  sensational  reputations and risk.

I thought I was going to write this blog to show off how  daring  and cavalier I am, but it really is just to share my daily  struggle  to  overcome  my fear of small things like the dark. I thought I was going to write about thugs and  hoodlums   but there are only  honest  people, funny  people   warm and tragic and open  hearted  people,  understandable  people  here. I thought I came here to embrace the  suffering  and the lost, but am  finding  that it was I who needed a home.

I hope you enjoy the  company  you find here.

Some people really listen to me and try to understand what is so beautiful and tragic about my neighborhood, about life in the city. Some have come out to visit and sit with my roommates and neighbors. In those moments and in them I have great hope and joy. And through them, I have come to realize that the hallmark of Christian and meaningful community is a willingness to become displaced:

It is  central  because in voluntary displacement, we cast off the illusion  of “having  it together” and thus begin to  experience  our true  condition   which is that we, like  everyone  else, are  pilgrims  on the way,  sinners  in need of grace. Through voluntary displacement, we  counteract  the  tendency  to become  settled  in a false  comfort  and to  forget  the  fundamentally  unsettled  position  that we share with all  people   Voluntary displacement  leads us to the  existential recognition  of our inner  brokenness  and thus brings us to a deeper  solidarity  with the  brokenness  of our  fellow  human beings . . .

In voluntary displacement  community  is formed,  deepened   and  strengthened   In voluntary displacement we  discover  each other as  members  of the same human  family  with whom we can share our joys and  sorrows. Each time we want to move back to what is  ordinary  and proper, each time we yearn to be  settled  and feel at home, we erect walls between  ourselves  and  others,  undermine  community, and reduce  compassion  to the soft part of an  essentially  competitive  life. —Henri Nouwen, Com ­pas ­sion

In what ways have you become displaced? How have you been moved away from something ordinary and proper, and how has this deepened your understanding of compassion and what it means to be a follower of Christ?