Some personal news: Christ is risen!<\/p>\n
Holy Thursday<\/strong>: I avoided the Triduum services at my home parish, the Cathedral, for the reason I talked about here<\/a>. (Though I was at the Easter Vigil.) Instead, with some friends I attended a Solemn Mass of the Lord\u2019s Supper at a nearby church. It was one of many churches around the District where rapid demographic transformation<\/em> (she said carefully) has left the parish with mostly-black elders and mostly-white newcomers. So the ushers were black, the music included spirituals, and dinner in the parish hall afterward was soul food, but the large majority of the congregation were white.<\/p>\n As we headed out of the church to go down the outside steps into the parish hall, we stopped to look in wonder at the full moon, low and perfect, blurring just a little at the edges in the soft spring air.<\/p>\n Good Friday<\/strong>: I was scared off of Stations of the Cross by scattered showers, though I note Amy Welborn took the far more Catholic approach of resigning herself to rain. Check out her photos and notes from the Triduum celebrations of Birmingham, AL\u2019s Latino and Melkite communities<\/a>.<\/p>\n I went back to the church from yesterday for the Liturgy of the Lord\u2019s Passion and we sang \u201cWere You There?\u201d This is one of the hymns I really love. In a way, at least for someone like me, the most poignant word in it is \u201csometimes.\u201d Sometimes<\/em>, it causes me to tremble\u2013only sometimes, only in the rare times when I can live within what I know to be real. It\u2019s a spiritual, first sung by people who had to snatch time, beauty, faith whenever they could, in whatever way they were allowed by the Christians who held them in slavery. But so too is the \u201csometimes\u201d when we, in the chaos of our pleasures, amid distractions, suddenly remember the death of Jesus for our sins, and this truth pierces through the haze of laughter, and the veil of forgetting is torn in two. It\u2019s a song for a country of chain gangs and juke joints.<\/p>\n This<\/a> is a really good, short reflection on Malchus, the slave of the high priest, and why it\u2019s important that Peter cuts off his<\/em> ear (and Jesus heals it) rather than somebody else\u2019s.<\/p>\n After the liturgy I was doing the thing where you\u2019re fasting all day for Good Friday so you stay up late to break your fast right at midnight. I ended up spending several hours going through this collection<\/a> of photos taken mostly in Northwest\/downtown DC in the mid-\u201980s through mid- \u201990s. These were the years when our homicide rate was soaring and our population was plummeting. This is a city in rough shape\u2013and these are not photos from the \u201cghetto\u201d (I don\u2019t think any of them are from east of the river). If you lived or worked here you saw these places, or places in worse condition, every day. The boarded-up shops, the big palm leaves growing up through the shattered windows of the burnt-out buildings, the unevenly-painted business phone numbers and peeling paint and broken pavement.<\/p>\n The beautiful low skyline, all those houses so short it\u2019s like they\u2019re kneeling in the presence of the great sky. Nowadays downtown all the buildings push the limits of the height ordinance. Which I can\u2019t fault, the city desperately needs housing. But the sky is a little smaller now.<\/p>\n Those blocks you\u2019d see with the one remaining building, the last tooth in the old fighter\u2019s mouth. Can\u2019t remember the last time I saw that. All the neon\u2013get a neon sign today, it\u2019s a saxophone solo for your business!<\/p>\n Michael Horsley took photos of a city where poor people could afford to live. As soon as it looked nicer, that got harder.<\/p>\n On Holy Thursday or thereabouts a report<\/a> came out showing that DC is the most intensely-gentrified city in the country; and the city where gentrification has displaced the greatest number of black residents. You can argue about what this means. In many ways Hyattsville in 2019 is a lot nicer than Petworth in 1990! For sure it\u2019s safer, and I\u2019ve heard not getting killed is a priority for many families. So how bad is \u201cdisplacement\u201d really, you might ask.<\/p>\n Well, a couple thoughts. I recently read Derek Hyra\u2019s Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City<\/em>. That\u2019s a flawed book but it does some good solid work in a lot of areas (including untangling the complexity of the District\u2019s reliance on government\/contractor jobs, and the rise of DC jobs in global finance). Hyra talks about the role city government and churches have played in helping people stay in their homes as their neighborhoods got rich and white around them. But he notes that even people who stayed lost political power: a say in what happens in their neighborhood. Their voices and votes were diluted in the flood of new population\u2013a new population with very different culture and priorities. Dog parks, not basketball courts or church parking. (The church-parking conflicts are exacerbated, I bet, because so many of the congregants were priced out to Maryland. Go past any historically-black church in Northwest on a Sunday morning and look at the license plates.)<\/p>\n And when your community moves piecemeal, you lose a lot more of it than the numbers might indicate. The bonds loosen. Even if half the old neighborhood could stay (and it\u2019s never half), you lose more than half the common knowledge, culture, obligations, care.<\/p>\n I found that gentrification-study news via Greater Greater Washington, where the Horsley photos were also linked<\/a>. And commenters were basically like, \u201cWow, DC was a disaster then. I\u2019m so glad things are better now.\u201d I too am glad we have more snowplows<\/a> and fewer drive-bys! But GGW is a policy blog and I can\u2019t help but feel that if you didn\u2019t love the District in her years of abandonment you surely shouldn\u2019t be making policy for her now. The best view of the District\u2019s new life is probably sunnier than mine: I\u2019m basically all \u201cIt\u2019s like Pet Sematary<\/em>, but for your hometown.\u201d But in a weird way the city makes me think of this Mountain Goats song<\/a>, which I just discovered. You\u2019ve brought me everything I need and yet notice how I don\u2019t seem to leave my house at all anymore?<\/p>\n Holy Saturday<\/strong>: I spent most of this day baking Easter cookies and listening to different versions of \u201cWere You There?\u201d Here are some favorites: The Peguero Sisters<\/a>; Three Mo\u2019 Tenors<\/a>; Johnny Cash and the Carter Family<\/a> (with soloist Anita Carter); Willie Nelson<\/a>. Bayard Rustin, the gay pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement, did a \u201clife of Christ in spirituals<\/a>\u201d cycle; all of it is beautiful, and it includes a short rendition of \u201cWere You There?\u201d in the Crucifixion section.<\/p>\n And Diamanda Galas<\/a> will make you certain that you are in fact there. Or that she is.<\/p>\n