I have a rather unusual background. My father was an Irish immigrant and mom was raised in a rural part of central California – that’s not the unusual part.
My father worked for Chevron for thirty years, and mom was what they used to call a “homemaker.” That also is not unusual, at least for my generation (I was born in 1962.)
What is unusual, at least for white Americans, is where I was raised: in Richmond, California, in a neighborhood that was situated between two housing projects (the Kennedy Manor and the Easter Hill projects, for those who know the area.)
I will talk in a bit about some of the dark events that have shaped my life from that time and place: that is not the point of this post, though. The theme is actually a favorite passage of scripture, which I’ve also used in other posts on other topics:
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
I want to tell you what it was like for me in one of the poorer and more violent parts of this country, but I want you to remember:
A light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
I grew up watching television that had a mysterious lack, to my naive young eyes, of people that looked like my neighbors. Adam 12. Bewitched. Ed Sullivan. The Andy Williams Show. Or if they did appear, they were in either stereotypical roles like the Buffoon (Flip Wilson) or the Token (Mannix’s black secretary).
I was perplexed by this omission. Everyone I knew – friends, enemies, the fathers and mothers in the neighborhood – was black. My teachers were black (mostly). Virtually all of my classmates were black. We were Catholic, and went to Mass in Berkeley (at St. Joseph the Worker parish). There, there were a mix of ’60s Catholic radicals (think Dorothy Day), and recent Mexican immigrants.
Life in my neighborhood could be quite rough – rough enough to contribute a fair fraction to my suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, from some of the incidents there. I have many, many memories that are…not especially pleasant, let’s say. The barest sampling: When I was 9 years old, I was taken into a backyard and (I mean this absolutely literally) strapped to a picnic table and whipped until I screamed. I was “friends” with a couple of kids down the block, whose father was a boxer. I endured many absolutely savage beatings by his sons in their garage. Their dad got his licks in, too: he used to like to choke me until I almost lost consciousness, and then make me smile in spite of my terror. I was not the only member of my family who suffered in the neighborhood – all us kids did. My youngest brother, when he was about 4, was grabbed in an alley by some high-school-aged boys, and dangled screaming over a fence, on the other side of which was a German Shepard snarling and salivating.
Please, I beg you, do not look away.
Because The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
One morning before school when I was about 11, my father threw me across the room (I was not moving fast enough), and my head smacked the corner post of my bed. I bled for a good while, and then ran my head under the bathroom sink to wash the blood out of my hair, and went off to my sixth grade class. There, for one of the few times in my life, it got to be too much, and I suddenly wept in great gusting sobs. Some of my classmates laughed, but I realize now that by doing so they were running away from the pain we all shared, the pain that I was unable to keep myself from openly expressing.
The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
That afternoon, I walked across Richmond (there is a God…) to the police station. I’d watched Dragnet, so I knew the police would be interested in child abuse. So I marched in, and prepared to give a sober, just-the-facts-ma’am report in my best Jack Webb imitation. Behind the counter was a pretty police woman, and her smiling eyes fairly shone with warmth and kindness, eyes that said, “I’m here for you.” Jack Webb was suddenly forgotten, and she was confronted by a frightened, bewildered kid who was crying so hard he was unable to speak.
She took me into the back, and handed me off to a policewoman who worked with CPS (Child Protective Services) cases. The woman took my report, and afterward, when I mentioned that I liked Dragnet, she gave me a tour of the police station: introduced me to some of the other officers, took me by the watch commander’s desk, showed me the holding cells, etc.
Then, she took me by the criminal files, and showed me a few of them. “Here’s one. He was first arrested for burglary when he was 14, then…let’s see…stole a car when he was 16…now he’s waiting trial for Armed Robbery. Oh, and this other file…really sad…guy had a breaking and entering charge when he was just 13 – imagine that – and now he’s in San Quentin for manslaughter…”
I realize now that what she was doing was showing me in the most vivid way she could, “I know your life is hard, but don’t go this way. Don’t end up like these boys.” I got the message.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
I attend a Survivors of Urban Violence group, and have heard many stories similar to mine. A woman in the group I’ve mentioned in previous posts lost both of her grandchildren to murder. Despite, or maybe because of, the pain, she spends every free moment doing her best to mentor the kids in her neighborhood, working her tail off in diversion programs etc. Like me, she has refused to believe that murder, that hatred, that “an eye for an eye” is all we can expect in this world.
Hers is in many ways a lonely and thankless quest, and yet she works, even though her soul is all but crushed by grief. She works because she hopes, in spite of all the evidence that confronts her every day.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
My life could have gone in many directions, almost all of them bad. That it did not is evidence that there is a God, and as a result of a few people who lit the darkness, like the police women, like the camp counselors at the day camp I went to for urban kids, like the kindly, elderly neighbor lady next door who took me in sometimes and told me what a wonderful young man I was, and how she knew I would grow into someone really special. (I’m still working on that, Mrs. Pender. Just know that to this day I have a special place in my heart for old black ladies.)
There are deep wounds from the events I describe, and they still bleed a bit – but I survived. I joke occasionally that when (please God…) I get to heaven, God is going to have some explaining to do – but I did survive. I am here, and getting more whole by the day (though sometimes I wish life had a fast-forward button…).
And hear this: I forgive the ones who caused me pain. I love them unconditionally, I pray that they may find wholeness, despite their own darkness. They were in worse, much worse, pain than me.
My family moved out of the neighborhood when I was 14, to a town called Benicia, about 30 miles away. Benicia is about the closest thing to Mayberry that California offers: quaint, fairly rural (back then) and all the charms and hazards of small-town America.
A few years after that, I was doing the Stations of the Cross at a retreat. As I meditated on the stations, I felt something welling up from inside me, and was surprised to sense a presence with me: it was the One whose kindness I saw in the police woman’s eyes, and the One who prompted Mrs. Pender to show me kindness. He was telling me, as I prayed the Stations, that He had hurt very much too; that He had born most of the burden of the terrors of my childhood, and that He loved me more than I was capable of understanding. And I practically drowned in tears that day — of old, aching pain, but also gratitude. In those figures of kindness from my darkest days, in the smile of the police woman, in the kindness of Mrs. Pender, in the kind-hearted disabled kid down the block who used to show me tender care and kindness, it was really Him. It was Him Who saved me.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
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