It’s Greek to Me

This Monday I visited the annual Valley Greek Festival, held at St. Nicholas’ Greek Orthodox Church in Northridge. Even though I’ve lived in the area for most of my life, I’ve never been to this fair, and since I didn’t have plans until the evening, I dropped by to grab some lunch and to hear their church choir. The festival lasted for all 3 days of Memorial Day weekend, but there were still hundreds of people on Monday afternoon. I started with the church tour, and listened to the young priest describe not only the church’s art and architecture, but also Orthodox worship.

Outside, tents were all around selling Greek food, pastries, alcohol, and crafts. The food and live music were great, but the thing that stood out to me, haunted me in fact, was the dance. Being a dancer myself, I was delighted that the dance floor was the geographic center of the outside activities. I’ve seen all kinds of dances, but the Greeks are unique in that they seem to always dance in lines, everyone holding hands, weaving in and out of serpentine swirls with certain set patterns of footwork. There was a group of adolescents in the center, dancing around a flagpole, who were particularly fun to watch. It was refreshing to watch young men who were unafraid to dance, adding their own athletic touches and improvisations, dancing in these lines with their friends, guys and girls alike. Around them were chains of people of different ages, Greeks and others who have either studied the dances or just decided to jump in and pick them up as they went along. Among them all, the haunting, kinetic refrain of the dances themselves were saying, “Life is not to be lived alone, but together.”

This church’s openness to others, their comfort with their cultural self-identity, their celebration of faith, food, and drink, family, music, and dance in an intergenerational expression follows Craig Van Gelder’s model of the missional church (and Norma Cook Everist’s work, The Church As Learning Community), and this impresses me. But as I reflected on the event, and certain expressions I saw of how things “are supposed to be,” I also found myself asking painful, personal, “Why, God?” questions when I compared what I experienced there with my own cultural environment, one that I never seemed to fully fit in growing up. I asked God why He chose to make me a dancer and yet place me in a culture where guys supposedly don’t do that. I ask Him why I wasn’t raised in a family that went to church, where a whole support network of people could have embraced me—the family of God. I told Him I sometimes wonder if it’s too late for me to find some of the connections and experiences I truly long for, and that I’m angry that He sometimes seems to be so slow and forgetful towards me. I wasn’t expecting any of this to come from attending this event, but visible expressions of the Kingdom can do that to you.

Theologian Walter Brueggemann described the Church as being in exile. If the Church’s desire is to be one-and-the-same with the mainstream culture, I guess you could describe our current status like that. But after reflecting on this congregation’s festival and my interactions with it, I believe that in our American context, it is primarily individuals who are exiled from one another.

Wandering With Saint Julian

This last weekend, as part of an annual urban ministry event with the young adults of my church, I co-led a team that served at a mission on LA's "Skid Row," a district where thousands of homeless people congregate at different times of the day. It's home to several missions, flop houses, drug dealers, cops, and do-gooders. We were in the last category. Though part of our day was spent at a well-run rehab and service center, helping serve lunch and dinner, during the first part of our morning we split up into groups of three. Ours walked the blocks from around 5th St. and San Julian to Los Angeles Ave. and back, seeking people to engage with conversation and offers of prayer.

At first, we were all a bit reluctant to engage these strangers, much like we would avoid any other fellow Angelino, but as we returned towards the mission we felt the burden strongly enough to finally take some initiative and crack the ice. We approached one female sitting on a blanket, basically saying hello and asking her if she wanted prayer for anything, to which she simply nodded her head "no." A cop car pulled up and told her she had to get up and move on, to which she quite lucidly said, "OK; I'll move." We realized that the cops there don't like people loitering around the areas with businesses, but would also later discover that they didn't do much to crack down on the frequent drug sales along San Julian. We spoke with William, who was selling scented oils, who told us he was a Christian who served at a nearby church and is now 3 years sober and recently married. We prayed with him that God would continue to do what He's been doing in his life, and asked William to pray for us. After his prayer, we seemed to have no problem engaging with the folks along San Julian.



William was sitting in front of a mini park, surrounded by high bars so people couldn't sleep there at night, where CoCo was waiting for the workers to finish hosing off the benches beneath the two gazebos trimmed with icicle lights that are ironically and teasingly barred off during the hours when they are turned on. A rather morbidly-painted angel was posing in the back corner, one of those strewn about Los Angeles, painted by different artists for the "A Community of Angels Sculptural Project." This ugly one seemed to be the leftover they couldn't find a better place for. The rather nice micro-park seemed to me to be almost a piece of art itself, a theater for city council members to display to visiting dignitaries to prove they are "revitalizing" Skid Row rather than something that actually revitalizes the residents of Skid Row, though it does offer a bit of respite during daylight hours.

As we continued to walk along the narrow street we met Cecil, a sweet man from Georgia with a bump above his left eye from when he fell two nights before while drunk driving his wheelchair; Jay, a buff dude who is currently taking classes in Santa Monica to be a personal trainer; Chocolate, who told us the factor keeping her on the streets is her drug addiction, as she sat 15 feet away from a crack sale and across the street from a recovery center; William, who, after asking us to look away while he shot himself up, quoted to us more Bible verses about the promise of salvation than most seminarians are able to, and with whom we had a lively conversation about poetry.

At another street corner there is a Set Free church, with a wall mural of a gate with part of Matthew 16:18 written on it: "And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." These brothers and sisters are indeed sitting at the city gates, a traditional gathering place. They are at the surreal fulcrum point where the gates of hell abut the gates of heaven. Most of these residents are cohabiting in-between both, gambling to see which angel will take them in further: an angel of light, or one posing as such. Addiction and Freedom. Light and Darkness. Love and Murder. Community and Fear. Poison and Pleasure. Life and Death. Simulacrum and Safety.

According to artist J. Michael Walker (who has explored the juxtaposition of saints and their namesake streets in his "All the Saints of the City of Angels" show), San Julian is the patron saint of wanderers. Skid Row sees multitudes of wanderers, most of whom don't last long; some are afflicted, some return to help those still stuck in its grasp. It is a distressing journey to fellowship with Saint Julian, knowing that "the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it." (Matt. 7:13) At the same time, I know that our Lord Himself was a wanderer, without a home to call His own. (Matt. 8:20)

I was left to wonder: ultimately, which gate will our Saturday friends enter? Which gate will we enter? The residents of Skid Row live our lives, just writ much larger, where the pixels of our struggles--visceral and metaphysical--are enlarged beyond any crafty concealment, confronting us face-to-face. Perhaps this painful revelation itself is the blessing of St. Julian.