Total Mileage: 1,352
Song of the Day: “Amazing Grace” (Victor Wooten)
Book of the Day: Mark 11
Taking the L Train
After trying to get in a little more reading yesterday morning, I walked past the Curie High School to the Orange Line, and after fumbling a bit in my attempt to pay for a ticket (and overpaying by 75 cents in the process), made my way up to the train. This was a big step for me. Even though I’ve ridden the occasional monorail system in traveling around other cities, this was my first real experience with subway/elevated rail transit, and I felt like I was starting big with the famous Chicago L Train. The Pulaski Orange Line station has probably seen better days, and the atmosphere was fairly grimy with a good bit of litter and graffiti adorning the place. I climbed up the heavily spray-painted stairs to the platform and looked out over the shopping centers in the area. I also looked down at the tracks and observed signs cautioning me not to touch the third rail. Couldn't be that much worse than the electric fence at Heifer Project, right? Thankfully, the platform was crowded enough that I was not tempted to perform an experiment. After waiting on the platform for a few minutes, the silver train pulled in at a breakneck pace and screeched to a sudden halt. As the doors opened in front of me, I resisted the urge to form my mouth into a perfect circle and go, “Oooo.” I boarded the train with a handful of students from the Curie School, and as we took off from the station, I observed my surroundings.
There really wasn’t anything too spectacular about the train car itself. With the fluorescent lighting and the advertisements on the walls and the seating that was probably pretty comfortable back when it was first installed, it really felt pretty similar to riding a bus in the Triangle. The lone exception to this was that my seat was one of the ones facing backwards, so I spent much of the trip with my neck turned Linda Blair-style as I watched the downtown skyline loom closer. Well, actually, I would have watched the skyline loom closer had I not picked one of the foggiest days in recent record to make my way downtown. The people on the train car ran a pretty wide range. Black, white, and Latino were all present and in pretty equal numbers. Some on the train were nicely dressed. Others weren’t so nicely dressed. Some sat quietly and listened to iPods or read books, while others (particularly the two girls next to me) talked loudly over the humming and clicking of the train, occasionally on cell phones. In fact, when one of these two girls used the f-word quite loudly while on the phone (getting the attention of most of the train car), the other turned and apologized to me. This is normally the sort of situation where I would introduce myself as a future-minister just for a laugh, but I decided not to mess with them. Sitting directly behind me was a backpack-toting, thin, white man wearing a jacket, a hoodie, and sunglasses. He had the hood pulled down over his forehead, and the large lenses of the glasses obscured everything above the tip of his pointed nose. There was a slight smirk lingering across his lips, and my first thought was that he was on the lam, but then I realized that no one in hiding would go out of their way to look that conspicuously incognito-- seriously, he was borrowing a page from the Ted Kaczynski school of fashion. Also, he was just a little too well-groomed for that, looking like he had shaved just that morning. There was also just too much cockiness in his posture as he sat in a high-shouldered slouch, so I crafted a new story for him: after telling his wife that he had a business trip, this wealthy suburbanite parked his Mercedes out at Midway for a few days, donned what he considered to be “street clothes,” and now he’s on his way back into the city to meet up with a mistress. Yep, that theory made more sense. People-watching is fun.
Downtown
Since it was only just after 11:00, and I didn’t need to be out near LaSalle Street Church until just before 5, I decided to get off the Red Line at the Jackson station and take in the downtown loop for a bit. I got off my train to the sound of “Amazing Grace” and realized that there was a performer on the platform playing pipes to a taped accompaniment. I had to conserve my cash for my next subway ticket (since my pass would surely expire during my journey around downtown), but I snapped a few pictures of him anyway since it just seemed like such an odd performance space. Even though other commuters seemed annoyed to have someone taking pictures, the musician himself was very accommodating and maybe just a bit flattered; he never spoke to me directly but just smiled at me and kept on playing. Incidentally, Chicagoans being just a bit annoyed seems like a staple of downtown, but more on that later. I spent the next four and a half hours walking around and snapping pictures.
I walked up the steps out of the subway station and found myself immediately surrounded by tall buildings, congested streets, and harried pedestrians. I can’t really explain why, whether it’s due to my 6’ stature or the feeling of objectivity that comes from researching a community or what, but I felt almost like I was hovering ghost-like through the streets just a few inches over the heads of other pedestrians, strangely immune to my surroundings. It didn’t help that the vast majority of the Chicagoans I encountered did not return greetings or acknowledgements, and (as a lingering effect of an old Lenten discipline) I try to say hello to every person I encounter when walking around a city. This very one-way communication only added to my odd feeling of disconnectedness as I walked around town as a patrol cap-wearing, camera-flashing specter. In fact, in retrospect, the extent of my communication with people in downtown was when other tourists would ask me to take their pictures.
Of course, there’s also a certain amount of pride that enters into the heart when surrounded by big buildings in a big city, and I think the Chicago trek helped me understand a little more why it is that everyone is so crazy about New York City. I’ve never fully been able to wrap my mind around that, and when people talk to me about how great New York is, I often just put on a smile and try my hardest to suppress the small-town-Ohio/medium-city-Southern welling up within me. Walking around the streets of Chicago under the large skyscrapers helped me see that being in such a big place doesn’t necessarily make one feel like an ant, but it does give a different perspective. Also, it was nice not to worry about parking for a change, so I’ve decided that every city needs an L train, but I digress. Yes, there is a weird sort of euphoria around a busy city. Exploring the streets around the skyscrapers and seeing how well the designers had incorporated new establishments into the older buildings’ existing designs was a fun experience, and it definitely gave my inner architecture nerd a chance to shine. Also, I’m pretty sure there’s something Freudian at play in the feeling of awesomeness around tall buildings, but I’m perfectly comfortable leaving that subject unaddressed.
One of the most photographable places I visited in the area was Millennium Park, a later edition to Grand Park that is full of modern sculptures, including an oldschool Greek peristyle and fountain, a giant reflective bean, and . . . oh forget it. It’s easier if I just put in pictures. This stuff is way too hard to explain in words.
Chicago-Style Panhandling
I quickly observed that Chicago panhandlers are a very different breed from the Memphis/Triangle/Baltimore variety to which I’ve become so accustomed. For the most part, there were plenty of guys around shaking fastfood cups half-full of change, but I realized that trying to talk to all of them would quickly eat up my whole day and my whole wallet. Sitting on pretty much every street corner in downtown, these guys didn’t really harass people or present stories; they seemed totally content to sit back and accept money from passing pedestrians without much solicitation, which leads me to believe that panhandling in Chicago is a pretty profitable industry due to a fusion of generosity and ignorance. There was also a pretty unconventional grifting technique that a few people tried to use on me where an offer was extended to buy me something and promote a feeling of reciprocity. This happened when I was hanging out in the DePaul Barnes & Noble when a man offered to buy me a drink on his giftcard. I declined, and he departed, but within minutes, a store manager was approaching me to ask what the man had been accosting me about. “He offered to buy me a drink,” I told the manager in a confused tone, not really seeing what the problem was. The manager immediately took off in a huff in search of the man. That was weird.
This happened again when I was purchasing my Red Line ticket to head to LaSalle, and a man asked if I could spare some cash. When I explained that I could go back up top with him and buy him a meal, he declined and explained that he really just needed $10 to get home later and was just a few dollars short. (Incidentally, boarding any CTA train only costs $2.25 with 25 cents to make additional transfers, so unless there was a taxi somewhere in that commute, he would have to make 31 transfers to need that much, but I don’t think he knew that I knew that.) The confusing part of our exchange was when he offered to help me pay for my ticket and walked toward my vending machine with a dollar bill in his hand. I’m not sure why, but I sensed that there were strings attached, so I declined his assistance. I’ve learned to trust my gut on stuff like that, and Devin Goulding (my main contact at LaSalle) confirmed that there was something fishy about that pattern. Devin also gave me an interesting statistic: if every person in Chicago would give $5 a month to a charitable organization and cease all handouts to panhandlers, panhandling in the city could theoretically be completely phased out. With 80 million people in the metropolitan area, that’s 40 million dollars a month, and that’s more than enough to care for the city’s panhandlers, which would make the whole begging/manipulation dance unnecessary.
City-Planning
One of the sites in downtown Chicago where I spent the most time was in a permanent architecture exhibit right across from the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibit featured a model of Chicago, but what I found more interesting was the information on display about the planning of the city of Chicago, particularly their initiative to go green: the Chicago Climate Action Plan. They talked about trying to create neighborhoods with better utilization of power resources, more immediate access to public transit, more green space, etc. Their model communities looked great, but I have to admit that I found myself wondering, “Will everyone be able to afford living here? These sort of look like neighborhoods for higher income folks.” The exhibit also contained quite a bit of information on Hull House and their work in the New West Side, so it seems the designers of the exhibit were seeking to evoke a history of caring for recent immigrants and for the poor. I’m still researching websites trying to see how all this will fit together as the city continues the process of renewing and redesigning itself, and this has me thinking a good bit about the balance of involvement between church and government when addressing the needs of the poor and the shape of a city. I wish I had more time to address this issue, but my day wasn’t all about city planning. I also had a great experience at LaSalle Street.
LaSalle Street Church: Background
My pastor and friend Stephen Cook (currently serving as senior pastor at Second Baptist Church in Memphis) was the one who first told me about LaSalle Street. This past winter break, when I was talking to him about the idea of traveling across the country and looking at churches, Stephen helped me develop the concept further, and it was his idea to design a class around the trip. When talking about possible destinations, Stephen told me that I couldn’t pass up a chance to go to Chicago and visit LaSalle Street. Stephen explained that the church stands at the intersection of two incredibly different neighborhoods: the Gold Coast (a highly affluent district known for its lakefront mansions) and Cabrini-Green (perhaps Chicago’s most infamous housing projects). I would later learn from Devin at LaSalle that Cabrini-Green started as fairly nice subsidized housing, but as government housing programs started to give benefits more to broken families and people in rougher situations, the neighborhood began to decline. Throw in some riots and some gang activity, and you have a neighborhood situation not that unlike Sandtown in Baltimore. In fact, I’m starting to get the feeling that this pattern exists in urban areas all over the country, but I’m going to need to visit quite a few more places and do a lot more research before I officially sign onto that theory. Anyway, back before Cabrini-Green was torn down in 2002, the layout of the streets of Chicago prevented interaction between residents of the Gold Coast and Cabrini-Green. In fact, there was really only one point of intersection between the two neighborhoods: the sanctuary of the LaSalle Street Church, and they have been active in ministering to both communities and trying to reconcile them.
Similar to the set-up at New Song, LaSalle believes in launching independent partner ministries that operate out of their Cornerstone Center facilities (for the most part) but retain separate 501(c)(3) status. These partner ministries include:
Cornerstone Children’s Learning Center (CCLC)
A day care program operating out of the Cornerstone Center building, CCLC is “designed to be of such high quality that families of all income levels will be attracted to it -- and made affordable so that families of all income levels can use it.” CCLC is licensed to care for up to 140 children ages two through five and, through the use of scholarship programs and the assistance of the Lake Shore Preparatory School, the center seeks to foster not just an environment for safe play and education, but also a chance for reconciliation between children and parents in different income brackets.
Cabrini-Green Legal Aid Clinic (CGLA)
Founded in 1973 by one lawyer at LaSalle who witnessed the injustices occurring in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood due to lack of legal representation (or just sub-par legal representation), CGLA sought to assist members of the community facing housing disputes and criminal issues. Perhaps the most independent of the LaSalle-affiliated ministries, the clinic has grown substantially and moved to its own office space on Division Street. It now features three attorneys and an office staff, an after-school/summer program for teens (Future Lawyers of Chicago), and an internship program for law students. CGLA handles over 500 cases a year and does so with an annual budget of less than $300,000.
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| Cornerstone Center offices |
Cornerstone Counseling Center of Chicago (CCCOC)
Committed to Christian principles, to exemplary standards of professional and ethical conduct, and to showing compassion for those in need of emotional healing, CCCOC provides mental health assistance to underinsured and uninsured clients using a sliding fee scale made possible through grants, donations, and the assistance of volunteers. The CCCOC’s primary function is to provide psychotherapy, training, seminars, and assessments to individuals and groups at all income levels in their community, and they are also able to provide spiritual assistance when deemed appropriate and necessary. Started in 1971, the CCCOC prides itself on its holistic approach, regarding the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual as key aspects of every person’s wellbeing.
LaSalle Street Young Life
With the prevalence of gang activity and substance abuse around Cabrini-Green, LaSalle’s Young Life program provides area teens with Wednesday night meetings to provide a chance for fun and fellowship. Many of the teenagers involved in Young Life also take advantage of tutoring programs, Bible study small groups, and sports teams offered around these Wednesday night activities. The program also helps teenagers explore career and education options, and the biggest event of the year might be the annual week-long summer camp each August.
LaSalle Senior Center
Started in 1970, the LaSalle Senior Center seeks to offer assistance, activity, and companionship to isolated older adults living in the low-income areas in and around the Cabrini-Green site. Meeting in the Cornerstone Center, the Senior Center offers numerous activities for mobile senior adults including films, meals, field trips, exercise classes, Bible Studies, prayer circles, art and cooking classes, and other programs as well. The center also coordinates HELP (Homebound Elderly Program), which seeks to foster long-term relationships between specially-trained volunteers and homebound seniors through regular visitation, running errands, and assisting in other tasks with which homebound seniors might struggle. The Senior Center involves almost 200 senior adults and approximately 60 volunteers.
Breaking Bread
Because I got to participate in this program myself, I definitely have more information on it than on LaSalle’s other ministries. Breaking Bread is the most recent addition to the LaSalle Street family of ministries and technically still exists within the church itself rather than as its own independent agency. By definition, Breaking Bread is classified as a soup kitchen, meaning that it receives food from the Greater Chicago Food Depository to be prepared and served hot to its guests every Wednesday night. Devin (who acts both as LaSalle’s youth director and the coordinator of Breaking Bread) explained to our group of volunteers that the program is more than a simple soup kitchen; it is a hospitality ministry. For that reason, sitting with guests from the community and getting to know them is regarded as just as important as working in the kitchen and waiting tables. Every Wednesday night, Breaking Bread welcomes everyone into the dining room of the Cornerstone Center without questions about religious views or income level or any of that, and then everyone is served, with food being brought to the tables following a little time to relax and talk together (with an optional Bible Study described as “spiritual feeding”). There are no lines. Guests of Breaking Bread are waited on as they would be at a restaurant. Breaking Bread also provides its guests with access to a one-room clothes closet, a nurse practitioner, and rapid HIV testing provided by the Night Ministry. The program usually serves between 70 and 80 people, but on the night I attended, one of the volunteers counted up the tables and realized that we had over 100 present. I guess the word is getting out.
Exploring the Area
With about an hour and a half to kill before my meeting with Devin at the Cornerstone Center, I hopped on the Red Line and headed to Clark/Division. I got off at the station without really knowing what sort of neighborhood to expect. Upon walking up out of the subway, I found myself in a fairly commerce-heavy area with a series of stores and restaurants. There were a few high-rise apartment complexes here and there, but it wasn’t the skyscraper-laden landscape that the other areas of downtown had been. As I walked around, I observed a lot of nicer restaurants and businesses. I noticed a handful of buildings under construction, and even though the community definitely had its depressed elements, things felt pretty upscale overall. At one point, I walked past a ritzy apartment complex just up the street from the church and looked beyond a gate to see a Lexus SUV parked just inside. In fact, luxury apartments rested on either side of the church, but since I was on the Gold Coast side, this didn’t really surprise me. (Of course, it also didn’t surprise me that people were still kind of rude. In fact, I swear I saw a guy spit on a pigeon at one point. That sort of behavior is just unnecessary.)
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| Cabrini-Green |
What did surprise me was when I journeyed to the other side of the church and saw fairly similar surroundings. There were nicer restaurants, a new prep school (Walter Payton College Prep), and a spacious park. Sure, there were a few people walking around who looked a little warn out and down on their luck, and if I journeyed far enough away from the church to the north, I could still find a bit of lower-income housing and some lower-end businesses, but for the most part, the site of the old Cabrini-Green projects seemed to have been substantially gentrified. In fact, I noticed the ultimate indicator of a safe neighborhood: well-dressed women walking tiny dogs. It doesn’t get much safer than well-dressed women walking tiny dogs. When I asked Devin about all this, he confirmed that the neighborhood has indeed changed and now caters to a higher income bracket, but the church is still going to serve this neighborhood and the underprivileged in this community. In particular, the row houses that made up the northern end of Cabrini-Green are still standing, and they are still a hub of gang activity, so the work of LaSalle Street --particularly their Young Life program and youth ministry-- is as important as ever. Also, there are still quite a few homeless folks residing in the area, and LaSalle Street will continue to serve them and seek to integrate them into the life of the church. The neighborhood may be changing, but the needs are still there.
Breaking Bread
Devin was a wealth of information, not just about LaSalle Street, but also about the church I’ll be visiting in San Francisco (Glide Church). He even offered to put me in touch with some people there to give me insights into homeless ministry in their community and to the distinct shape that ministry takes in a community that is predominantly LGBT. That should be a really cool week, but I digress. I’ve already talked about most of the information Devin gave me in this post, but there was another concept he mentioned that I really like. He called it “turf time,” and the idea is that ministers and coordinators of non-profits should spend time walking around the neighborhood and getting to know people, building relationships, and making people aware of the resources the church provides. Devin keeps a small stack of cards with him with information on Breaking Bread that he gives out during turf time. Turf time is a good way to build awareness of the church and its ministries, but it also strikes me as a great way to stay connected to the world outside the church’s walls. I like it. I’m stealing it.
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| Breaking Bread promotional images |
We had a slight surplus of volunteers at Breaking Bread, so Devin allowed me to take a seat and get to know people. I sat down at a table with three homeless men, and we began the “spiritual feeding” portion of the evening. I had been told ahead of time that, in this portion, I was not to think of myself as a teacher of these men, but rather a facilitator and a learner myself, and given the depth of knowledge at that table, this was not a stretch. I don’t really feel comfortable using real names, so I’m going to call this guy Huey. Huey was an older black man who hid his thin frame in a large black coat and do-rag. From time to time, Huey donned a pair of large, rectangular reading glasses, and whenever he laughed, he revealed that only one of his upper teeth was still barely hanging on. Whenever he spoke really emphatically about something, a thin trail of saliva would shoot out of his mouth and land on the table, and it didn’t take long for one of the other men at the table to realize that we really needed to move the water pitcher out from in front of him. Huey was a bit hard to understand from time to time due to his slightly raspy voice being a bit on the quiet side, but I quickly discovered that he knew the Bible far more thoroughly than I did, as he had no problem quote scripture off the top of his head (and obscure scripture at that). When I asked Huey where he picked up such a deep knowledge of the Bible, he explained that he grew up in a religious household but that he didn’t really get to read through the whole thing until prison.
Right when we sat down, Huey picked up a Bible from the center of the table and began reading to us from Mark 11, where a crowd questions the source of Jesus’ authority. Huey lamented that people could see the miracles of Jesus and yet still deny his authority, and this quickly turned into one of the deepest theological conversations I have ever had. Faith, doubt, heaven, hell, universalism, other religions-- we covered it all in the hour or so between when the doors opened and when dinner was served. For the most part, I just sat back and observed as Huey and the two other men (both of whom were ex-military and one of whom was Muslim) debated about Jesus and about Christianity’s relationship with other faiths. Now, I’ve worked with homeless folks before, but somehow, I had never realized how much time for intellectual exploration joblessness and homelessness can give a person. Most of my clients at IFC were actively panhandling or seeking employment or just staying busy making the rounds between social service agencies, but these guys at the table had used their time to think, and I quickly realized that I was something of a lightweight compared to them. It was a cool experience to learn from them.
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| Cornerstone Center dining hall- location of Breaking Bread |
After dinner (chili and cornbread), I got a chance to help out in the clothing room, and this gave me more chances to talk to people, both guests and volunteers. Even though none of these conversations were quite at the level that Huey had facilitated, this was still a lot of fun, particularly as I got to talk more to Devin and one of the members of his youth group, David. David is taking a year off between high school and college to travel around the country and give free hugs while supporting himself through his business of making things out of duct tape. He gave me a brochure, and I think it’s only appropriate that I give his business a shout-out. Duct tape apparel, free hugs, and traveling the country to spread the love-- sounds like a sweet combo to me.
Last Thoughts on LaSalle/Breaking Bread
You know, I was going to try to do quite a bit of other stuff today. In particular, I want to go poke around Uptown at Laura-Allen’s suggestion (thanks again!), but I might have to save that for tomorrow. I’m glad that I got this chance to chill out today and meditate on LaSalle Street and the changing face of Chicago. Even though this has been a lot of writing today, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface, and there’s still a lot more reflection to be done. Like New Song, that church is just so active, and I’ll be curious to see how things develop there as the neighborhood becomes increasingly gentrified. My feeling is that, since their hearts are in the right place and they’ve got mad connections, perhaps LaSalle Street will be able to enforce a spirit of community-mindedness as the neighborhood’s average income increases, and maybe that church will be able to keep the community’s homeless population from going ignored as fancier housing and fancier businesses take root. I wish that everyone in the community could have conversations with homeless folks like the conversation I had with Huey-- a chance to be reminded that being on the street doesn’t make you subhuman and that some of the people on the street can put us to shame intellectually and spiritually. I think I’ll be revisiting that conversation a lot over the next few days.
Okay, time to grab some dinner, and budget be damned, there’s a pizza place over by Lawndale that I’ve just got to try.
Peace and Blessings,
Tom
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| Oh come on, it's a giant metallic bean. How could I not play around with taking pictures in it? |
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