Taking it to the Streets

January 18, 2010

Certainly different crowds on the Sunday and Monday of the weekend we honor the memory of Martin Luther King. The crowds as different as Sunday’s miserable windy-pouring down rain was from Monday’s dry out and eventual sunshine.

The weather however, did not keep down the crowd at all at the massive cathedral of Sts Peter and Paul where 13 priests were made monsignors. There were near as many people standing as were sitting in the chock-full pews.



Monday’s crowd, a Martin Luther King Day event where we walked from 20th and Cecil B Moore for about a mile to the massive Girard College, was a lot smaller. Particularly when a large portion of the crowd got up and left in the middle of the event. And they missed some very powerful and inspiring speakers. I bought a CD from a young gentleman who really got the place a rockin…quite a few others did the same thing.

‘God is good’, ‘we need change’ ‘when I say doctor, you say King’ were some of the chants we shouted out during the walk. And many of the speakers touched on the same theme that it was the God in us and in Dr King that is/was behind the changing and the progress and the effort and the dream. One guy mimicked King and quoted the whole

“I have a dream” speech. And most of the speakers grew up on the mean streets of North Philadelphia and had seen valleys deep and deeper before turning their lives around and making it to whatever mountaintop they’d achieved thus far. Several speakers railed against the ‘make babies and run’ syndrome that has torn apart the traditional family in the black and poor neighborhoods. As sign up sheets for volunteer opportunities were passed around several speakers spoke of being either part of the solution or of the problem. One speaker stressed to change the outside we need to change our insides first.

One thing the Sunday program did have over the Monday one was brevity. The speeches were fewer and even with the psalm reading/singing the entire event took less than an hour. And the absolutely sumptuous reception afterwards at the Sheraton that our pastor and his priest friend combined to put together must have cost a bundle. And I do not think church money went to pay for it either. That difference to the few folk who got donuts and coffee in the basement of the Girard College chapel before the speeches was probably the most glaring difference between the two events.

The guy from whom I bought the CD mentioned how some of the clergy of King’s time complained when he called for a march or a boycott on Easter Sunday – and that they wanted to be in church that day. My man had the people chanting ‘bring the church into the streets’ as he belted out his rap rift. I guess if there is any criticism of the Catholic Church it is that it does not make it to the streets enough…that for the vast majority of the people it is one hour each Sunday and then on with your life. You don’t see too many clipboards being passed or getting filled up in a lot of Sunday morning (or Saturday evening) services. Sad thing was there weren’t all that many getting filled up at the King event either.

Taking the churches into the street. I think of the St Francis Inn where the homeless of Kensington get a meal each day. On one of those real bitter day a week or so ago, driving down Kensington Ave, a guy I know who’s connected to a smaller church called ‘Rock of Faith’ was dishing out food right up at Somerset and Kensington where the drugs are as much a part of the landscape as is the roar of the Frankford El.

Most of the walkers were from a recovery program called ODAAT…but as the recovery rate in the 12-step rooms gets smaller and smaller, I wondered how many of these ‘one day at a time’ ers will eventually fall back into their respective valleys. I wondered how many babies had gotten made by the guy and the gal smooching in the row in front of me. When you have very little a warm body can brighten up your day a bundle. Alas the hook-up is so prevalent in those rooms of recovery it is often referred to as the 13th step. The dilution of the spiritual message, of the Higher Power reach out to the hand of the other, for sure is the major reason for the vast recovery rate drop off. People frequently don’t do the steps anymore; they read them and talk about them and engage in the same selfish behaviors and wonder why they fall. My feelings about how much ‘in the streets’ good could transpire if even a small percentage of those folks filling the cathedral worked the 12 steps, was tempered the next day by my realization of how poor is the example of many of the people in the 12-step fellowships. Why engage in something that doesn’t work anymore?


But as the priests and deacons and bishops and even a couple of cardinals, procession-ed by after the ceremony, I did a good job of suppressing my cynicism and distaste for the and pomp and circumstance of it all and was grateful for these men who gave their lives to God and to truly lost souls like me who found some pretty open minds and some genuine care when I came back through those church doors near 18 years ago. My valley had been a deep one and the insistence of my recovery program that I’d need a Higher Power in my life if I wanted to escape, nudged me along. Riding the waves of the New Age spirituality served me well in those early days, but repeatedly crashing on the jagged rocks of relapse convinced me I needed more effort in my spiritual quest. By the time I cleared the relapses some 9+ years ago I’d taken the ‘sort of’ off my Catholic professing as I was no longer embarrassed to admit I was back in the fold.

“We Shall Overcome” a portion of the crowd began singing that as we neared Girard College. One of the speakers talked about how in 1964 MLK himself had held a rally outside the big walls and the locked iron gate of the segregated ‘white’s only’ school.

But I also could not help but think of the ‘men only’ restriction on the ceremony of the night before.

A few years back men, women, blacks, whites, Christians, Muslims, Jews and whoever sang that song together at the Christian/Catholic stop of our annual Interfaith Peace Walk. Today was the beginning of the week of prayer for Christian Unity.

God is good. If only we can tear down the walls that keep us from God and from each other…