The Deacon’s View:
How Quickly We Forget God’s Mandate
            (A Personal Confession)

Recently, because I was running late and couldn’t find my car key, I grabbed the valet key. When I arrived and was ready to lock the car, I froze as I stared at this key, which lacked the electronic lock button. It seemed a foreign, unknown object that didn’t fit into my world. Then I noticed that my car had a key lock in the door! (I had come to think these were a thing of the past). Later, I pondered about how quickly I had lost touch with something that had been an everyday reflex for over forty years.
    Within days, as I watched the coverage of the devastation of Katrina, something about the faces of those displaced (almost exclusively poor and black) nagged at me, but failed to register. In fact, if I had not reflected on the valet key incident I might have missed the significance of the faces.
    I grew up in St Louis, where the face of poverty was visible because so often it was black, different from me. In the ‘60s, in New Jersey, I served on the Community Council for Peaceful Race Relations; half the Council had black faces and names. A friend and I also started a school for illiterate adults, helping the parents of the children I taught in school to earn their high school equivalency certificates. Black faces of warm, wonderful people with great courage. When we moved to Los Angeles I worked as a Diocesan consultant with a black church in Watts, where I found a grittier, costlier faith than my own.
    Watching the ongoing footage of the Katrina disaster awakened me: I wasn’t just seeing the faces of poor, black Gulf Coast victims of a hurricane. I was also seeing the faces of the literally hundreds of people who had given meaning and focus to my life over the years, leading me in many ways to be the person I am today.
    Yet now I live where such faces are seldom seen. In our beautiful Cambria paradise we live separated from something essential in following Jesus: an acute awareness of the needy in our midst. There are many here in our own neighborhoods who are suffering from loneliness, poverty—yes, poverty—addictions, illness. But here the faces of these needy ones are not a lot different from our own. They don’t stand out.
    I know that I have grown much less aware of and responsive to the needy all around me. Yet we are called to be our brother’s (and sister’s) keepers. When Jesus told the disciples that the poor would be with them always, it was not a threat but a good-news promise, because human disciples need to be confronted always with the needs of others. Without this confrontation, all of us have the tendency to forget, to think instead of our own wants and comforts.
    Our Presiding Bishop, Frank Griswold, has called upon every member of our church to “reach out in prayer and tangible support.” I encourage all of us, for the health of our souls, to make this tangible outreach an ongoing spiritual discipline. This means giving over and over, not just to Katrina aid, but also weekly gifts of food for the hungry in our community, money to Habitat for Humanity so poorer families have a chance to live in our paradise, supporting C.A.R.E.S. because many caregivers in our town cannot afford, without some help, the usual $9 an hour charge for respite care for a loved one, and must quietly tough it out on their own.

Please:
“Through Christ let us continually offer to God the sacrifice of praise, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his Name. But do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” (B.C.P. p 376)
                 ~Gay Blundell, Deacon