Profound Thoughts From Tony Kriz...

If you are responsible for everything then you are responsible for nothing.

I have been a life-long church-goer. It is one of the tremendous gifts of my life. From a wooden pew I was taught that Jesus loves the whole world. It only makes sense then, since everybody wants to be like Jesus, that I need to also love the whole world. I used to go to a church where the handsome and charismatic pastor would courageously proclaim, “We are bringing the whole gospel to the whole world”. The idea would echo in my soul. It inspired me. It inspired me, at least for a moment. But in the wake of his inspiration, came… well…nothing. A numbness. It was like the slogan, in all its grandeur, actually gave me permission to forget, or maybe permission to ignore. For a guy like me, my soul is simply too small to wrap itself around the whole world. I am indebted to religious leaders who delegate the world out in consideration of my limited soul-space. But even a goal like, “Love Portland,” is more than my mind can handle. A city like Portland is a divine-circus of communities, dreams, economic forces, injustices, cultures, policies, sorrows, histories and most importantly stories. Just thinking about it all but crashes my spiritual operating system.

I remember taking a youth-group field trip to the big city. We piled in church vans and headed to, and I am not making this up, the largest mall in Oregon (and I wonder why I continually fight a gospel of consumerism). It was on that trip, sitting with my clique in the food-court, that I first saw the MTV video, We are the World. All of our musical messiahs on one stage, arranged like a church choir, in a cathedral-studio, preaching with perfect harmony of message, messenger and method. After only one hearing I had memorized the sermon, “We are the World, We are the Children, We are the ones to make a brighter day so let’s start livin’.”

More than twenty years have passed. And while I can still ‘hear” Bruce’s rasp, Cyndi’s strain, and Michael’s innocence, We Are The World’s limitless message now seems as unaccountable and shallow as the collective-fame that made it the top-grossing song of the 1980s. It seems that reality, my growing activism, and the Living Word are collaborating on a new song. I am sensing that this song may never be completed, but each new stanza is laying a soundtrack for my family and our community of faith. The song’s title is a moving target, but it goes something like: We are our Neighborhood or We are Malachi’s Grade School or We are Peninsula Park Community Center.

This is an ancient process. “What does it mean to be a neighbor?” I know that if I am not careful, this eternal question could exist as impotent as trying to love the “whole world”. My neighbor is not a concept or a platitude. My neighbor is a person. A real person with a real name: Alex, Niki, James, Don, Hans…. And if I am not careful defining that love might just question everything. How will I spend my time? How will I choose my associations? Where will I spend my money and how much will I live on? How will I advocate? How do I love those who are not “like” me? How do I utilize and preserve resources? How does my home become a center of community? What meetings do I attend? How do I consume?

I want to be a part of the stories of my time, be they found on a front-porch, in a dog park, at a neighborhood association meeting, in my kid’s cafeteria, at a political rally, or simply across the table from a beautiful someone who, apart from intention, I would never otherwise know.

To know (be it a person or a place) is to love, to love is to feel, to feel is to act, and to act is to take responsibility.

A village-conspiracy. (from Tony Kriz)