Wants and Wounds, Wishes and Wild Dreams: Observations on Our Deepest Longings

Lynette's eyes are the color of honey.
Her hair is as long as string.
Her skin is as smooth as a first born baby.
Her eyebrow thin as a stick.
Her smile is as bright as the big bright sun.

And then all that has divided us will merge
And then compassion will be wedded to power
And then softness will come to a world
that is harsh and unkind
And then both men and women will be gentle
And then both women and men will be strong
And then no person
will be subject to another's will
And then all will be rich and free and varied
And then the greed of some
will give way to the needs of many
And then all will share equally
in the earth's abundance
And then all will care
for the sick and the weak and the old
And then all will nourish the young
And then all will cherish life's creatures
And then all will live
in harmony with each other and the earth
And then everywhere
will be called Eden once again.



Programs Support Volunteering Immediate Needs Calendar Special Events Newsletter & Mailing List History Staff & Board Articles & Sermons Agencies & Links Home Page Donate online 1. Enter amount 2. Choose donation type 3. Click Donate Amount: General Donation Annual Campaign Christmas Campaign Children and Family Urban Ministries 1548 Eighth Street P.O. Box 41125 Des Moines, IA 50311 (515) 282-3242 Email info@cfum.org		Wants and Wounds, Wishes and Wild Dreams: Observations on Our Deepest Longings "Wants and Wounds, Wishes and Wild Dreams: Observations on Our Deepest Longings" Carmen Lampe Zeitler Des Moines Pastoral Counseling Center Annual Meeting February 4, 2005 A few years ago between Christmas and New Year's I was in Chicago to officiate at the wedding of my friend, Dan. On the day before the wedding he took me to breakfast at a place that is legendary in Evanston (a northern suburb of Chicago along the shore of Lake Michigan where Northwestern University is located). It's called simply, "Sarkis." Sarkis is a tiny free-standing building; inside there are four booths (two of which seat only two people) and maybe ten stools at a counter. It was, as I was told that it always is, packed with people. Sarkis runs the place, he is a man of average height, with a little paunch, thinning curly hair, and a round, welcoming face. He had known Dan and his brother, Terry, for some time. When we walked in, Sarkis came out from behind the counter, leaving whatever he was cooking on the grill. (He is famous for his omelets, the one I had was called "Disaster," Dan had "The Train Wreck".) He greeted Dan with the warmest of welcomes and a big bear hug. Dan introduced me as his friend and the minister who would officiate at his wedding the next day. Sarkis called me immediately by name, and continued to do so throughout the morning. He shook my hand enthusiastically and said, "I am a minister, too," the truth of which I did not doubt for a moment. As we ate our breakfast and talked I watched Sarkis greet person after person, young and old, affluent and down and out - Dan told me you could easily sit at the counter with an out-of-work dishwasher on one side and a millionaire on the other. Everyone Sarkis made welcome with hugs and kisses and the warmth most of us reserve for only those closest to us. At the same time he served up cholesterol-filled omelets, lamb sausage, hash browns, and buttered toast in abundance. It was a remarkable experience. When we got up to leave, Sarkis bustled over to say goodbye and bestow blessings. He pulled from various vases sitting around the room half a dozen fresh flowers, wrapped them in aluminum foil and gave them to me with a kiss and a hug and a "Happy New Year!" On Dan he wished a beautiful wedding, a long and happy marriage, and we were on our way with Sarkis' blessings, feeling all the dark and cold of a winter Chicago day slip away. I don't know all of Sarkis' story - I wish I did - but many years ago he came to this country from Greece. He landed in this little place on the corner of Central and Crawford in Evanston, Illinois. Dan's brother, Terry, a very wealthy man, offered on several occasions to set him up in downtown Chicago. Sarkis remained to minister in this place he has chosen, or that has chosen him. I have been in several churches within a couple of miles of Sarkis, I served and was ordained in one. Sadly, I never felt the welcome, saw the joy, sensed the honor given to each life, known the sheer hospitality that I felt and saw and sensed and knew in that morning at Sarkis. Sister Joan Chittister, to introduce the chapter entitled "Winter" in her book, In a High Spiritual Season, wrote, People need physical hospitality, spiritual hospitality, and psychological hospitality always. There must be always someone available to care for anyone and everyone in need. The winter cold reminds us to open our hearts always. Someone is waiting to get in. "...anyone and everyone in need", that pretty much covers us all, I would think. Although... we live in a culture rife with categories - those in need are the marginalized, or terms I like even less, the poor, the underprivileged; and those who are not in need are secure, privileged. What I have found in the work of Children and Family Urban Ministries - work that is among the marginalized, the poor, the underprivileged in the neighborhoods of the near north side of Des Moines - is that those categories define very limited aspects of persons' lives. They cover the economic, the material, the political aspects of one's life, but that is about it. And although those aspects, and the power arrangements that are largely responsible for creating them, have relentless impact on one's life, they do not begin to define all there is to anyone's life. Over and over and over again, in relationship with our neighbors on the near north side, it is clear that our deepest yearnings are one. The wants for which we yearn are simple regard, acceptance, recognition, a sense of belonging. The wounds we yearn to heal were created out of disregard, dismissal, indifference, a sense of isolation. Our wishes surely could be named beauty, insight, grace, delight. Our wildest dreams are for peace, certainly love, perhaps boldness, passion, to live a life with impact. When we first met Dorsey, a lanky, older man, he was a little scary. He was living in an abandoned house, came to our nightly community meal smelling of wood smoke, built barricades around his plate of cups and bowls, and odds and ends out of his pockets, would hardly speak. When we found out that he was a veteran and tried to connect him with services through the Veterans Administration he revealed some significant paranoia. But he kept showing up for meals, including the breakfast that is served throughout the week, for children. The children were curious about this odd man but mostly steered clear of him. Through Dorsey we found out that a child in the third grade could hardly read. (He was trying to get Calvin to read his driver's license, as a test, and discovered he couldn't read even the word "none" in the restrictions box.) As a result a volunteer began spending time with Calvin on a daily basis working on his reading. Other children began to gather around Dorsey to talk with him. One of his favorite topics was encouraging them to learn to read well. He had quit school in New Orleans as a boy and didn't learn to read until he was an adult. He sometimes read, even borrowed, the encyclopedias from the bookcase in the dining room. Dorsey's life is not one any of us would choose, he has lived in his car, with family and friends, in numerous apartments, he is homeless sometimes, he is hospitalized sometimes. He struggles equally with mental illness and the medications prescribed for it. We look forward to seeing him, receiving the kiss on the hand, the warm words that he offers these days. Over the years it has become clearer and clearer to us that we share with Dorsey the simple wants at the heart of his life: something of regard, acceptance, recognition, a sense of belonging. I met Samuel just this past Sunday, at a gathering of the three entities that share space at Trinity United Methodist Church: the congregation of that church, Children and Family Urban Ministries, and Comunidad de Fe Las Americas. Samuel is a part of the Las Americas community. He is from El Salvador. The first time we went around the circle he was determined to answer the first task assigned to the group - tell us about your family - in English. It was difficult, but he did it quite well. For the second task - tell something about your experience of faith - he relied on the translator to try to keep up with his response. I think, perhaps because my name is Carmen, he thought that I understood Spanish, because he looked at me throughout his long, animated answer. Iglesia and barrio, and a few other words with similar counterparts in English, were about the only words I understood. But through Samuel's gestures, facial expressions, and what I could catch from the translator, I heard his experience of a Church (big C) more connected to and concerned with the elite of the university in his town than with the struggling people of the barrio, a hurtful and defining experience for him. He came to an experience of faith only because he came in contact with a group of Christians who understood the connections among the economic and political and spiritual aspects of life. A keen observer of and a brave participant in life, Samuel bears our common wounds created out of disregard, dismissal, indifference, and a sense of isolation. Annette is an artist. Joseph is a poet. Halen is a playwright. DeLight has yet to show what she will be. Every one of ten-year-old Annette's bright, intricate drawings has an enormous cornered sun with long tentacle-like rays reaching out of the sky. For a while she was drawing herself, with me alongside. We had on gowns and crowns that would knock your socks off. I never looked so good. She mentions occasionally that her father will get out of jail when she is sixteen. She never mentions the man that her mother married last year, who turned out to be mean when he drank and after he lost his job he began to drink a lot. They are away from him now and safe. Josue took immediately to the challenge of writing poetry. A couple of weeks ago we began an experiment to try to get children interested in writing poetry. There was surprisingly little resistance, even enthusiasm, from students ranging in age from 5 to 13. Nine-year-old Josue wrote a poem for his cousin, Lynette. Lynette's eyes are the color of honey. Her hair is as long as string. Her skin is as smooth as a first born baby. Her eyebrow thin as a stick. Her smile is as bright as the big bright sun. Josue's cousins, Lynette among them, too often give him a bad time. His parents are still in Mexico, he and his little sister live with grandma, are looked after by aunts and uncles as well. He tries probably too hard to fit in with his cousins. And for whatever reason a pattern has emerged among the cousins, good-hearted children in our experience, of too often blaming Josue for things that happen, getting him in trouble. It is not a pattern one would think might inspire such poetry. Halen's response to the war in Iraq and the fears that he heard expressed by his friends was to write a play. In a reading group he had heard the story of the red king and the blue king, who wanted to go to war. The kings had wise wives who conspired to cut up their red and blue uniforms and make them both yellow overalls. When they and their armies all showed up in yellow overalls they couldn't tell one army from the other and decided instead to play games together all day. From that story, eight-year-old Halen wrote a fine play, "Yellow Overalls." Some days it seems that there are armies warring inside of Halen. He is an enormously gifted child: bright, creative, sensitive, caring, attentive. A few years ago he was sexually abused in a childcare provider's home. His single mom has connected him with counseling at several points along the way, but still he struggles with confusion and anger and fear played out in sometimes erratic behavior. We don't yet know what DeLight will be. She is just five and began kindergarten this year. She is one of those ageless souls you see sometimes in children. She quietly watches what is going on around her all the time. She enjoys her own company. She will ask directly if she needs or wants something. She mostly takes care of herself, seems to have a sense of herself that one couldn't have at five. DeLight is the sixth of seven children in her family. We have known all of her brothers and sister before her. One by one they have gone off to first this program, then that school as problems developed for them. Often we have of not understood the parenting approach of their mother, we have over the years had encounters with her that were not positive, but her children continue to come around. Every one of them is exceptional, DeLight is also remarkable. Daily in the lives of children like Annette and Josue and Halen and DeLight we are privileged to see played out, worked out over and over again, the wishes of us all for beauty and delight, insight and grace. On Tuesday of this week the children in the third grade at Moulton School across the street, performed their annual "Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." The songs are basically the same every year, they are great songs that third graders love to sing. And because every third grader who has gone through Moulton knows them, once in a while an impromptu rendition of "Wade in the Water" or "The Dream of Martin Luther King" will break out while kids are standing in line or jumping rope or working on an art project. Bobby Stinnett, the music teacher at Moulton, performs miracles every year. This year was no exception. It was inspiring to watch these third graders - tough guys like C.J. and Darrin and Tayvon, quiet ones like Sammy and Dallas and Summer, performers like Shanea and Reonda and Kaneesha, hangers back like Lanae and Matthew and Ebony - all, belting out lyrics like Free at last, free at last, Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last. The last song of the concert, accompanied by serious drummers, is always the Zulu song "Siyahamba," a song, legend has it, sung by children in Soweto, South Africa on the day of the massacre in that city. We are marching in the light of God, We are marching in the light of God, the lyrics say over and over again. On the faces and in the voices and spirits of those children on that stage every year at this time are the wild dreams of peace and love, boldness and passion, and a life lived with impact. Our deepest yearnings are one; our wants and wounds, wishes and wild dreams are one. Those deep yearnings can be met, I would be so bold to suggest, by sheer hospitality. The poet Nikki Giovanni in her poem Have Dinner With Me, written in response to the horror of September 11, wrote of the power of hospitality. The last lines go like this: Who went into the dark apartment... to tell the old lady sitting in the rocker... humming to herself... knowing... the news but not... wanting the news Who went in to say: Come and have dinner with me This is a time of neighbors This is a time of neighborhoods Somebody has to Feed the fish... Pet the dog... Call the cat Eat with the old folks Come... have dinner with me That is the kind of hospitality Sarkis practices, that Sister Joan Chittister describes - physical, spiritual, psychological hospitality that begins to put the world back together again. It is a radical hospitality that must include every aspect of our lives and our life together. It is a radical hospitality that calls us not only to sit down to dinner with one another, but to shake down the power arrangements that diminish one another. We gather on this winter night to acknowledge good work, to reflect on the rigor of that work - the work of being available to care for anyone and everyone in need, even us. We gather to name and celebrate the hospitality that lies at the heart of that work and those needs and our life together. I cannot seem to get away from Judy Chicago's piece, "The Dinner Party." It shows up and wants to be included on all kinds of occasions. Certainly it needs to be included tonight as a poignant prophetic portrait of hospitality. May it be our prayer in this winter night. And then all that has divided us will merge And then compassion will be wedded to power And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind And then both men and women will be gentle And then both women and men will be strong And then no person will be subject to another's will And then all will be rich and free and varied And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many And then all will share equally in the earth's abundance And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old And then all will nourish the young And then all will cherish life's creatures And then all will live in harmony with each other and the earth And then everywhere will be called Eden once again.