If you have met me in person for more than five minutes, it probably won’t surprise you the type of guy I was in college. I was a “in the dorm common room at 3 am having a conversation that was simultaneously deep and ridiculous” guy. These late night topic spanned everything from formulating the perfect form of government to relating Christian religious experience to eating different types of cake.
One of these conversations we returned to frequently was something a friend of mine and I called “the window of suffering”, which is basically the idea that in our human experience we process tragic events in accordance to their geographic or relational distance from us. So, a factory fire in Bangladesh might be processed by our mind far less intensely than a car crash in our neighborhood. Even if the fire resulted in one hundred deaths and the car crash caused *only* serious injuries, how proximate it is to us matters.
As is the case with all brilliant discoveries made by 19 year olds, in reality, many, many, many philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists had already written widely and studied our so-called “window of suffering”, but just because the academics got there first doesn’t mean that the topic isn’t worth considering further.
After college, I put these concepts into practice. In September of 2009, I moved to the Brentwood neighborhood just north of downtown Jacksonville. It is a community that my preferred term for is “under-resourced”. In fact, it’s precisely because of proximity to the community that I have a preferred adjective for describing the neighborhood. So rather than say inner city or at-risk or poor or hood (though that last phrase doesn’t really carry any negative connotation for me any longer), I prefer under-resourced. My community is given less resources, capital, and benefits than other areas of our city or nation.
Living in the community is intentional to the work that I am seeking to do because it moves that “window of suffering” closer to me. There are injustices or disparities that only existed to me as theoretical for the first 23 years of my life, but for the last ten years have become more apparent as my friends and neighbors have experienced them. It changes you when someone to whom you are personally close is the one being harmed by these systems.
I’ve had friends be unlawfully detained by police officers when they did nothing wrong.
I’ve had neighbors fill up buckets of water at our house because they have no running water.
I’ve signed up kids for our after school program in the living room of houses where there’s a literal gap between the wall and the floor that allows you the look down to the dirt below and hear about how the landlord has stated “that’s your problem” to the renter.
I’ve had students remark about their middle school that “they don’t even try to teach us there” and know from hearing it enough times that it’s more-or-less an accurate indictment.
These are all statements that carry extra weight because they are proximate to my experience. They are real life for my neighbors, students, and friends. But, even in this explanation, I need to be crystal clear that my proximity is always relative and always evolving.
I understood this proximity to injustice on one level my first few years in the community, but it took a step up once I lived with someone from the community and got to hear their perspective all the more. It’s one thing to use #blacklivesmatter on Twitter, it is another to have your roomate tell you he’s glad he got his ID updated to your address so he’s less likely to be accused of breaking in.
This proximity took a greater step forward when I became a foster parent and heard and saw and lived so much more of the brokenness. I became deeply enmeshed in the brokenness of our child welfare system and deeper still, grew more closely aware of how our society in general creates and perpetuates these issues in the first place.
There’s a necessary caveat here though that proximity doesn’t make one a hero. In fact, for real relationship and real partnership to happen all vestiges of heroism from an outsider need to be rejected. Because, still, my proximity is limited and my level of empathy is capped. At the end of the day in all my experiences in Brentwood I’m experiencing them by choice. I can leave anytime I want. Not just that, I’m also experiencing them as a white, college-educated, property-owning male with a car and tons of social capital. These realities make my experience of proximity fundamentally different.
Here’s what I’m trying to reckon with however, it shouldn’t take privileged folks like me having to move to the hood to experience and care about life in these communities. It shouldn’t be the case that when loud voices declare my neighborhood to be akin to living in hell, that it falls on deaf ears. It shouldn’t be the case that people can attack the lives of my neighbors with hateful rhetoric and be happily endorsed by the religious community I made my home in for a decade. It shouldn’t be that life experiences are drastically different based on our zip codes. Nor should it be the case that in our city, folks can simply cross back over the bridge headed southward and pretend that everything on MLK Parkway is “not their problem”.
Proximity changes how we interact. It changes how we see the world. But, we, as a people, need to expand the boundaries of our care. We need to change what it means to be proximate in our lives and values. This statement is all the more true, if you claim the name of Christ as a Christian or a “little Christ”. If you believe that the kids in my neighborhood are made in God’s image, regardless of how geographically near you are, your God demands that you care about his Image in every community.
One of these conversations we returned to frequently was something a friend of mine and I called “the window of suffering”, which is basically the idea that in our human experience we process tragic events in accordance to their geographic or relational distance from us. So, a factory fire in Bangladesh might be processed by our mind far less intensely than a car crash in our neighborhood. Even if the fire resulted in one hundred deaths and the car crash caused *only* serious injuries, how proximate it is to us matters.
As is the case with all brilliant discoveries made by 19 year olds, in reality, many, many, many philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists had already written widely and studied our so-called “window of suffering”, but just because the academics got there first doesn’t mean that the topic isn’t worth considering further.
After college, I put these concepts into practice. In September of 2009, I moved to the Brentwood neighborhood just north of downtown Jacksonville. It is a community that my preferred term for is “under-resourced”. In fact, it’s precisely because of proximity to the community that I have a preferred adjective for describing the neighborhood. So rather than say inner city or at-risk or poor or hood (though that last phrase doesn’t really carry any negative connotation for me any longer), I prefer under-resourced. My community is given less resources, capital, and benefits than other areas of our city or nation.
Living in the community is intentional to the work that I am seeking to do because it moves that “window of suffering” closer to me. There are injustices or disparities that only existed to me as theoretical for the first 23 years of my life, but for the last ten years have become more apparent as my friends and neighbors have experienced them. It changes you when someone to whom you are personally close is the one being harmed by these systems.
I’ve had friends be unlawfully detained by police officers when they did nothing wrong.
I’ve had neighbors fill up buckets of water at our house because they have no running water.
I’ve signed up kids for our after school program in the living room of houses where there’s a literal gap between the wall and the floor that allows you the look down to the dirt below and hear about how the landlord has stated “that’s your problem” to the renter.
I’ve had students remark about their middle school that “they don’t even try to teach us there” and know from hearing it enough times that it’s more-or-less an accurate indictment.
These are all statements that carry extra weight because they are proximate to my experience. They are real life for my neighbors, students, and friends. But, even in this explanation, I need to be crystal clear that my proximity is always relative and always evolving.
I understood this proximity to injustice on one level my first few years in the community, but it took a step up once I lived with someone from the community and got to hear their perspective all the more. It’s one thing to use #blacklivesmatter on Twitter, it is another to have your roomate tell you he’s glad he got his ID updated to your address so he’s less likely to be accused of breaking in.
This proximity took a greater step forward when I became a foster parent and heard and saw and lived so much more of the brokenness. I became deeply enmeshed in the brokenness of our child welfare system and deeper still, grew more closely aware of how our society in general creates and perpetuates these issues in the first place.
There’s a necessary caveat here though that proximity doesn’t make one a hero. In fact, for real relationship and real partnership to happen all vestiges of heroism from an outsider need to be rejected. Because, still, my proximity is limited and my level of empathy is capped. At the end of the day in all my experiences in Brentwood I’m experiencing them by choice. I can leave anytime I want. Not just that, I’m also experiencing them as a white, college-educated, property-owning male with a car and tons of social capital. These realities make my experience of proximity fundamentally different.
Here’s what I’m trying to reckon with however, it shouldn’t take privileged folks like me having to move to the hood to experience and care about life in these communities. It shouldn’t be the case that when loud voices declare my neighborhood to be akin to living in hell, that it falls on deaf ears. It shouldn’t be the case that people can attack the lives of my neighbors with hateful rhetoric and be happily endorsed by the religious community I made my home in for a decade. It shouldn’t be that life experiences are drastically different based on our zip codes. Nor should it be the case that in our city, folks can simply cross back over the bridge headed southward and pretend that everything on MLK Parkway is “not their problem”.
Proximity changes how we interact. It changes how we see the world. But, we, as a people, need to expand the boundaries of our care. We need to change what it means to be proximate in our lives and values. This statement is all the more true, if you claim the name of Christ as a Christian or a “little Christ”. If you believe that the kids in my neighborhood are made in God’s image, regardless of how geographically near you are, your God demands that you care about his Image in every community.
In fact, He cares about how we use our possessive pronouns. If you are reading this and aren’t proximate to a community that regularly experiences injustice, ask yourself these questions:
- Who comes to mind when you think about the phrase “our community”?
- Who is or is not included in “my neighborhood”?
- Are their unconscious boundary lines for who is or isn’t part of “us"?
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King wrote, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
My admonition would be that we all need to care about the underserved communities in our city, but not just because it’s just or it’s right (which it is), and not just because our God of justice commands it (which He does), but because it impacts all of us. Jacksonville, Florida is not ok, if Brentwood is not ok. Mandarin is not ok, if Moncrief is not ok. Ponte Vedra Beach is not ok, if Old Arlington is not ok.
What happens to one of us, matters for all of us. It’s the evidence of the type of people we are becoming, it’s the evidence of they type of society we are becoming. And in the lives that we live and the investment of our prayer, resources, time, and care, we provide our answer to the question asked of Jesus two thousand years ago, “Who then is my neighbor?”
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