The following report was written by Kathryn Gordon for the vigil held on January 14th.
It was cold, but that's not news. What was news to me was that my neighborhood came to the vigil, when all along I had been thinking the vigil should come to my neighborhood.
I live in north Philly, and have for three and a half years. It's a part of the city known as The Badlands, because of the very visible drug trade and the general level of lawlessness. The narrow broken streets long abandoned by city government, the crumbling factories, the dangerous and dangerously underfunded schools crumbling too, from the inside out. And the teens who leave, more often than not before they graduate, are like the unsafe factory walls, only instead of demolition the state remedy for them is prison, and instead of stray bricks to walk around on the sidewalks there are young men pitching crack or heroine, and young women selling what they have to sell in order to buy it.
All this comes to the vigil with me whenever I come, but this week it breathed and prayed and asked questions. This week my neighborhood came in the form of a woman and a man, a vigiler and a passersby (as they are sometimes called in these reports), a passerby become a questioner.
The woman was Roberta. She lives on the same street I do but two blocks down. Those two blocks make a lot of difference. She lived in that house all her life, and her immediate neighbors now — left, right and opposite — are doorless brick shells filling with garbage, glass and weeds. The kids call her crackhead, but she's not an addict. She doesn't even drink or smoke. But she seems strange to them, in the way Toni Morrison's Sula character seemed strange to her conservative Ohio town — strange, distracted, and tragic.
Roberta walks all over the city. An hour before the vigil I'm coming from Lehigh down Front Street when I see her coming toward me. It's an accident that I'm on this street right now — a delay and a mix-up, but maybe not. Roberta tells me she's walking to Roosevelt Boulevard and back for the second time that day, and would I come along?
I explain about the vigil and invite her, surprised when she says she'll come, surprised too at how I feel about her coming: relaxed and glad. I confess I used to be a little embarrassed to be seen with her, and nervous that she would "play" me for something, though she never did, despite having nothing, or, as they say, next to it.
So she came on the El with us and stood and prayed, making it three for a while and then when John Gallery came four. I know she prayed because she told me later she did. We needed it when an intoxicated man of fifty or so came up and engaged me in conversation. He was upset that we were praying, that we had any hope. It was all shit. God was all shit and this country was all shit. There was no God, how could there be with this country doing such evil in the world? "I am from Puerto Rico," he said proudly.
I knew it, and almost told him I lived in his neighborhood, or one much like it, but decided not to. If he couldn't sense that in my manner, in my distance from if not full relinquishment of my white privilege, then my years there had been for naught and I had no right to brag of them, though I do appear to brag of them now, don't I? Forgive me if that's so, if I seem to judge. Live your life where you are led to live it; stand your vigil where you are led to stand it (but surely a few more Friends might be lead to live a little nearer William Penn's patient gaze).
So I didn't say where I lived. I only listened and tried to be open, see his light through his pain, see the hope implied in his so persistently insisting that there was no God.
Dogs in the street get treated better than some people in this city, he said. I know, I said, I had seen it, and still I knew there was a God. How did I know? I feel it, like water pouring down on my head sometimes, the love. But the world! Because we don't listen, I said, a confession (how many missed chances to love, how many times avoiding Roberta because I didn't care to slow to her pace, untangle her talk); an accusation, because if he had been listening maybe he wouldn't have needed to be drinking, and he'd been drinking a good deal for a good many years now, and was deep in it.
I told him my name and reached to shake. "I'm not giving you my name!" he said, but still shook, already backing away, already disappearing into the city that treated some people worse than dogs, and the country that made so many Hispanic men afraid to reveal their names.
My neighborhood came to the vigil this week. It stood with Bryn Gweled and Chestnut Hill. It prayed. It asked questions. It tried to answer.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON THE
Independence Mall Vigil for PeacePlease join us at our weekly prayer vigils for peace in the world, held in front of the Liberty Bell on Market St. between 5th and 6th, every Sunday from 4 to 5 PM. For more information, contact cityquake@aol.com.
In our reports, participants share their experiences of the prayer vigils and explore beliefs related to their participation. Reports reflect the experience of each author and do not necessarily represent the beliefs or practice of all vigil participants. We welcome your responses, which are forwarded to the individual authors (when possible). We sometimes include part of a response in a future report, unless you ask us not to.
It is meaningful to us that you share in the vigils by reading these reports and in other ways, such as joining us in prayer.
Last modified: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 at 08:18 AM