As a member of Sojourners Community, I make my home in Southern Columbia Heights—a place in which it's all too easy to miss seeing the beauty and courage that lie alongside the suffering of low-income families. I see people crowded, pushed one against the other. Children are often afraid, preoccupied with fears of violence. I feel a wave of despair each time another ambulance screams past my bedroom window on its way to the hospital.
Our neighbors struggle to make ends meet, and we are trying to stand with them. But gradually my faith has worn thinner and thinner. All the old expressions of praise and faith no longer seem to hold much meaning.
Yet into the midst of this hopelessness has come a weekly hour when an entirely different side of the neighborhood comes before me. On Monday evenings a few of us from Sojourners gather with some of our neighbors at our neighborhood ministry center. We sing and pray a little, but most of all we study scripture together. We have finished the book of James and now are on the Sermon on the Mount. We look into God's word and try to open ourselves to the hard but good things it says to us.
We listen and we talk. We ponder love, forgiveness, hypocrisy, hate and violence, money, and especially faith. The faith of these friends has been there for a long time, seemingly from generation to generation: grandmother to grandchild, mother to daughter, and friend to friend. It has endured through countless tragedies that I can never fully understand.
Shyly these occasions for faith are shared: a son in prison, a brother's death behind the wheel while under the influence of alcohol, a grandson in the military stationed in Beirut, and the praise and thankfulness upon his return.
In these friends I sense the solace of long, voluble, verbal prayer—down on your knees for hours. I sense their joy in going to church and praising God, in giving God all they've got. Beyond that, I feel their continuing gratefulness day after day for life: "My bed was not my coolin' board, the walls of my room were not the walls of my grave—thank God, another morning."
These are not empty words. They have been forged from years of hurt and loss. I'm powerfully reminded that our God is a God of love and understanding, a God who answers prayer.
We sing some old hymns to a joyful gospel beat. The uplifting faith rings out and touches a deep chord in me. Years ago when I was in college, I spent a lot of time singing and praying with my black friends, many of whom came from the Pentecostal tradition. I learned to love black gospel and developed my own style, my own amalgamation of their music and mine.
Over the years my worship changed. It became quieter and more intellectual. Some childlike abandon died. Now I'm coming full circle, returning to the black gospel that once fed me. My friends here in Southern Columbia Heights help me, challenging me to return to that early faith and trust, to return to the joy in which you can dance around the room, rejoicing freely in the love of Jesus.
Sometimes we sing "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms."
Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarm
Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.
The words describe our total dependence on a God who wants to hold and carry us as a mother. In this world, and in this neighborhood, I need to trust that God. Thanks to my friends, I'm drawn more and more to do just that.
Patty Burkhardt had lived in Southern Columbia Heights for seven years and worked as medical technologist in a Washington-area hospital when this article appeared.
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