Looking down the Well

Well, it’s about time I wrote about Jacob’s Well, because it’s become a rather important part of my growth and learning here in Vancouver. Jacob’s Well defies definition in a lot of ways. It’s not a soup kitchen, although we do a lot of eating there. It’s not a shelter, although we hang out in the building a lot. It’s a place where I volunteer, but more accurately, it’s a community and a family I belong to. Words like “community” are over-used, but really, if ever there were a ministry that lived up to its mandate of being “relationally-driven rather than program-oriented”, it’s this one.

In case you haven’t heard about the Downtown Eastside, the neighborhood in Vancouver where the Jacob's Well storefront is located, let me fill you in on a few statistics (stolen from a talk I’ve Joyce Heron, the director of Jacob’s Well, give many times)… it’s the poorest postal code in North America. 16 000 people live in this 5-square block radius, mostly in SROs (single room occupancy), which are 10x10 foot rooms, usually in old converted hotels. The Jubilee is an SRO above Jacob’s Well, where 80 people share about 5 washrooms and 2 kitchens. Over half of the Downtown Eastside residents are mentally ill – this is 18% of all mentally ill people in BC, in one neighborhood. Out of the total 16 000 people, about 10 000 are drug users, and 5000 are needle users. 37% have AIDS, 67% are HIV positive, and 92% are Hepatitis C positive (also a terminal illness). This is the largest health pandemic in the Western world. By concentrating SROs and welfare systems in the Downtown Eastside and policing less aggressively there, the city is trying to contain it to one neighborhood. The Downtown Eastside is also a neighborhood with 84 non-profit organizations, of which a third are faith-based. You can get fed seven times a day, and more when Christians walk around at night passing out sandwiches.

So what do you bring to a place like this where people are already being fed and clothed and told the Gospel, but infection and addiction and death tolls are still rising? The idea at Jacob’s Well is that the method is as important as the message. The people at the Well see no biblical mandate to save or fix people – only to love them. As friendships develop between Downtown Eastside residents and volunteers at Jacob’s Well, as we live the everyday Christian life around them, and as we both serve and are served by them, God’s kingdom is announced in a powerful way. I feel privileged to have seen this in action, and to be continuing to learn what it means to follow Jesus’ example in being not a friend TO but a friend OF the poor.

In practical terms, this can look very different from day to day. Some volunteers help lead a worship service on Monday nights. Others join in Tuesday night community kitchen, when some of the 80 people who live above Jacob’s Well come down to buy food, prepare a meal, eat it and clean it up together. Wednesdays are usually days when volunteers tend the plots of land we’ve converted to community gardens. Thursdays and Fridays (I’m on the Friday team) are days when we visit friends in the hospital, deliver food to disabled members of the community, and open the storefront for coffee for whoever wanders in. We have a party every month. I have done many things on Friday afternoons, from cleaning bathrooms to baking muffins to playing guitar at the funeral of a man I’d never met, attended by five people.

There is much more I can and will eventually say about Jacob’s Well, but I wanted to post a copy of an article I wrote for their newsletter a couple of weeks ago. Visit http://www.jacobswell.ca if you want to learn more. Here’s the article:

Several months of volunteering at Jacob’s Well on Fridays have taught me to expect to be asked to do new things. Last week, as Joyce, Berto and I donned blue hospital gowns and latex gloves, preparing to enter a room in the intensive care unit at Vancouver General Hospital, I realized I was embarking on another unique experience.

Our friend Nicolai was in that windowed-in room, recovering from a back injury. When we walked in, I expected him to greet us right away, but all I heard was the electronic music of the many monitors attached to him. Then I saw the tube in his throat that robbed him of speech. Of all the people to lose their voice, I thought…

Nicolai’s voice scared me the first time I met him last year, when he wandered into Jacob’s Well, yelling loudly in his Eastern European accent. When he returned the next Friday, I remained wary of him. The other staff seemed relaxed around Nicolai, and asked him to play a song on his harmonica. He plucked it from his jacket pocket and obliged, and we clapped along. I noticed him repeating phrases he had spoken the previous week: “I’ll see you when I see you” and “So far so good,” among others. The last of my fears melted when he sang “Pretty Woman” with twinkling eyes and a mischievous smile. Later, I became a contestant in his favorite game: guessing the capital city of any European country he named. He had them all memorized. I did not. I failed miserably. (A tip in case Nicolai asks: the capital of his home country, Bulgaria, is Sofia.) As the weeks passed, I improved at the game, and gradually the voice I had feared became a voice I hoped to hear in the doorway.

But in that unfurnished and profoundly lonely hospital room, I barely recognized Nicolai. I had never seen him clean and shaven; his skin was a new colour. His old blazer and cane were hidden somewhere, replaced by a white gown. It made me uncomfortable to see this calloused, gruff man so vulnerable; I had a strange urge to cover him back up with his familiar stubble and dirty clothes.

Nicolai mouthed words to Joyce, the best lip-reader in the group, asking her to scratch his head. She did, with her latex-gloved hand. Sudden childhood memories surfaced; I recalled my father rubbing my head to help me fall asleep. At that moment, eyes closed and smiling, Nicolai seemed just as childlike as I had been. I couldn’t believe I had once feared this man. “Nicolai,” Joyce said, “they usually only let family members visit patients here. We told them we had become your family down at Jacob’s Well, and they let us see you.” Still rubbing his head, she told Berto and I how she and Nicolai had met at a bus stop, how he became part of the Jacob’s Well family. Nicolai interrupted often, mouthing out his own memories, visibly proud that his story was being shared.

Joyce suggested we sing, so we sang “Great is Thy Faithfulness” for Nicolai. As the familiar lyrics left my mouth in a shaky harmony, I wondered whether I would trust God’s faithfulness if I were in Nicolai’s place. Did Nicolai know God’s faithfulness? Would our visit communicate it to him? Would he understand our love?

We prayed together for God to bring him wholeness and peace. The room seemed less lonely and cold than when we had arrived, and Nicolai was calm as our visit ended. He told us not to worry about him. We assured him that we would, and that we’d keep praying. We said goodbye.

“I’ll see you when I see you,” he mouthed to us, with that familiar mischievous smile.

In defense of staying put

Permit me another entry in a similar vein to the last. Let me first tell you about the event that spurred this thought – another close encounter with the sea otters this morning. At the first sign of them, I was off my Rock, running to the water’s edge, my binoculars bouncing against my jacket. Three of them again – the same three? I realized what’s so eerie about them – every time they surface, they’re looking right at me. Seals turn their heads a lot, looking around in every direction, but the otters fixed me with their eyes, and seemed to express both an annoyance that I was there and a challenge or taunt for me to chase them. I followed them until they went under the bridge, and then, surprisingly, they sauntered out of the water onto the land under the bridge! I watched their silhouettes as they slunk around in the dark, secretly fearful that they’d run out and attack me. Then they slipped back into the water on the other side of the bridge, and I ran around to watch them for several more minutes. And get this – I did some research tonight, like the geek that I am, and I discovered that they are not sea otters! They are river otters, despite the fact that they hang out in the ocean. Sea otters live further out and rarely come on land, but river otters, which live in fresh and saltwater, spend 2/3 of their time on land. They can also hold their breath for eight minutes…

So for those of you I haven’t lost in my biological ravings, here’s the deep philosophical thought I’m getting to… part of me really doesn’t want to travel much. Part of me wants to stay put until I know a place. And how long does it take really know a place? Last year I sat on the same rock down at the beach just about every morning for seven months, which is about 210 days. This year I’ve returned the last 14 mornings, and in that short time I’ve seen three kinds of animals I didn’t see last year (including the river otters, and one tiny bird unfortunately called a bushtit… Chris has renamed them t-cups). The place I thought I knew is now surprising me again.

When will I know it? Every time I successfully make it down the steep and often slippery hill, I stand at the entrance to my “land” and survey it for a minute, forcing myself to notice the uniqueness of the scene every day. This place changes with the seasons, as the leaves change color and fall. I have never seen it in the summer. I saw it snow-covered only once. It looks different depending on the tide level. Sometimes I sit on the Rock and look out at a vast landscape of barnacle-covered rocks scattered with purple (ochre) starfish, and other mornings I have to jump on the Rock from behind because the ocean is covering the front of it, and all I see is water, and it slowly recedes as I sit there. The water holds the most secrets - I never know what will surface next - and it is also the biggest variable. Depending on the weather, it can be a gray, frothy mass or an expanse of still blue glass, or anything in between. The weather also changes the appearance of the mountains in the distance, and the strength of the wind affects how many seagulls are out and how many of the sailboat masts clink together.

I experience the place in a different way when I’m in a bad mood than when I’m afraid or when I’m at peace. I have yet to sit there for a long time with a friend. That would change things for sure. I have yet to bring a dog, like the majority of people who visit the beach. Maybe the dog would make me see it in a new way. And I have yet to sit there in the middle of the night. So I guess I don’t really know it. There is plenty left to sound the depths of, plenty of hidden parts to uncover and layers to peel back, things to experience there, things to delight in. Will God ever exhaust all ways of surprising me with joy there? And if I do ever really know it, will I get tired of it? Will I want to go somewhere new? Suddenly I feel like I’ve been talking about marriage…

And when do you own a place? When does it become yours? A lot of times I treat my Rock and surrounding area as my own. When people walk past me, I usually feel like I’m graciously allowing their passage through my territory, even though they don’t realize it’s mine. Why do I feel such a sense of ownership? It’s not a selfish ownership – I never lose the sense that it’s a gift to me, and a gift to be shared. But I get upset if there are beer bottles lying around. Sometimes I pick them up. And I feel that things I see were set up for my seeing. God speaks to me there. I guess I love it. I just remembered a passage in Brian McLaren’s book “A Generous Orthodoxy” that says it much more eloquently:

“I feel that I am carrying around this hilarious secret: that I actually own all things, that all things are mine – because I am Christ’s, and Christ is God’s, and God allows me to have things in the way that matters most. Not by having them in my legal possession (which has many downsides, including upkeep and taxes!) but by having them in my spiritual possession by gratefully seeing them, gratefully knowing and cherishing them. Those weren’t legally my goldfinches or my sycamore trees or my rocky-bottomed streams in the park that day, but did anyone on earth possess them as fully as me that day?”

Sometimes I’d rather think thoughts like this than study Hebrew, even though Hebrew can also be frustratingly beautiful. Which leads me to a closing quote by Bruce Cockburn (this one’s for you, Chris)…

“All these years of thinking ended up like this: in front of all this beauty, understanding nothing.”

Surprised by beauty

I wanted to post some pictures and thoughts that began in our post-wedding trip to Banff and Lake Louise. I realized something on our first day, when we took the gondola up the mountain: I have trouble taking pictures of - and even fully enjoying - things that have already been recognized by the general public as beautiful. If there’s already a postcard of it, I don’t feel like taking my own picture. On top of that mountain, I found myself lamenting that it was all so already-discovered.
It’s like beauty isn’t as beautiful unless you chance upon it, the way Daniel and I chanced upon this tree. I remembered Sophia’s story about the old church she found in the middle of nowhere, and the way Chris got excited every time an unannounced storm appeared on the horizon, and how Claire stopped by the side of the road to take pictures of cows. Part of the beauty of these things is that we were not prepared for them – they caught us by surprise and bowled us over.

I guess I’m not a fan of crowded, expected, publicized beauty. I want beauty new, just blossomed, fresh fallen. I want to be the one to find it and name it beautiful. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful – the boardwalks and stairs and gondolas were great, but they stole something, something private between my Creator and I. They stole that moment when hidden beauty is revealed and we delight in it together.
I heard a story about a scientist (I’ve tried for hours to figure out what his name was…) who was poring over his research on DNA, late into the night, trying to figure out something to do with DNA structure. After hours of thought, it suddenly came together in his head – he had discovered the secret and cracked the code! But instead of calling all of his scientist friends to share the news, he just sat there for the rest of the night. When his friends asked him why, he said, “For those hours, only my Creator and I knew this secret. I wanted to savor it with Him.” For the briefest of moments, after hearing this story, I wanted to go into research.

Until I realized I didn’t have to be in research to experience this. For example…the other day, early in the morning, I was down at my Rock alone, watching a few ducks and a goose splashing in the ocean. Then, in unison, they all calmly stepped onto shore and stood there. I felt like they knew something I didn’t. Full of anticipation, I looked out at the water, and sure enough, there were three heads poking out over the surface of the water. They looked like beaver heads, but beavers are freshwater animals…no…they were sea otters! The first ones I’d ever seen in the wild! I think I shouted something original like “Sea otters!” and took off running down the beach, chasing them along the shore. They dove and surfaced again, snorting water through their whiskers. I saw one catch a fish and eat it. They saw me – they seemed to look right at me and extend their necks far above the surface. I was in awe. At that moment, only God and I were enjoying those beautiful, playful animals.
Later that day, this group of leaves just popped out of a tree at me – all red and yellow, they seemed to be on fire, lit up with colour, like a signature. Again, I wanted to burst into song. These are my favorite moments – I’m sure they’re happening all the time, and I miss many because my eyes aren’t open wide enough. They’re why, whenever possible, I have my quiet time with God outdoors. I’d like to think He draws sea otters and leaves on fire towards me, placing them in my path, and then whispers, “Here, Beth. I want to share this with you – let you in on this secret. I want you to share my delight in this. My gift to you…”

Loren Wilkenson, my prof for “Christianity and Science,” read us a quote by E.O. Wilson, where he wishes God would take him to a new planet so he can spend years just discovering and exploring and being the best kind of scientist. I’m more optimistic. I don’t wish – I am confident – that this will be my experience when God makes the new heavens and new earth…I will spend eternity in endless discovery, with beauty always fresh and waiting, and hundreds upon thousands of secrets to be shared.