The Bishop's Blog: For Gates of Hope

This is my message in the January 2012 pre-Convention issue of The VOICE, in English and Spanish.

“Living into Christ’s mission.” This is the theme of our upcoming Diocesan Convention. It echoes with ‘stepping out in audacious faith,’ which was last year’s theme. Both metaphors direct us out from the church and into the world. And while it is the case that much of our work at Convention will be taken up with the business of the church – electing people to various offices, hearing reports, voting on resolutions and on the diocesan budget, and celebrating various people and accomplishments – our challenge will be to keep our focus on Christ’s mission.

Somewhere along the line I discovered something that is common to all children: they learn how to survive. Jonathan Kozol describes the lives of several children who live in the South Bronx, and the ordinary resurrections which arise out of the love of their families and the extraordinary community of St. Ann's Episcopal Church in the South Bronx. Kozol describes many near-misses of death or tragedy for many of these kids, but their survival skills get them through.

In many ways the Christmas story is as much a story of survival as it is about birth.

Jonathan Kozol steps back from his relationship with kids at the afterschool at St. Ann's Episcopal Church in the South Bronx and tells a story from 1969 about his encounters with Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator who was teaching at Harvard. Freier also was a commited Christian.

Jonathan Kozol is an extraordinary observer. Mostly he observes children – their struggles, their triumphs and their ordinary resurrections. He also observes the priest, Mother Martha of St. Ann’s in the South Bronx. He observes Mother Martha responding to one crisis after another: “there is no distance. Everything is present. Almost everything is urgent” (page 257). He watches her hearing the cries of her people, and then wondering -- who does she cry to?