Perfect Storms, Tribes and Social Miracles

The common definition of a “perfect storm” began as “a phenomenon where conditions are just right to produce an event of catastrophic proportion.” I’ve also heard “perfect storm” used frequently and, I think, appropriately in describing the lives of so many we serve at the Mission. 

Rarely can we point to one single circumstance that drives a family or an individual into profound need or homelessness. It’s more a matter of conditions piling on top of each other in a way that produces catastrophe in someone’s life.

For example, when Warren lost his wife to cancer some years ago, he turned inward and medicated his grief with alcohol. He ended up alienating his married children and grandchildren. He began showing up at work hung over and depressed, which led to him losing that job. Unable to find another job in a shrinking economy while he was on unemployment, he ended up homeless, alone, hungry and addicted.  Grief, alcoholism, broken relationships, an economy on the fritz and fading chances for employment. Smells like a storm, doesn’t it?

Jerry’s cardiologist is convinced that the stress of being laid off led directly to Jerry’s cardiac collapse a few months later. Jerry kept looking for work while he was recovering. He went into interviews looking well-dressed, but really haggard. Meanwhile his nest egg shrunk and then disappeared. His deteriorated health fed his deteriorating opportunity to work which further deteriorated his economic stability-- or should that be in another order? Maybe it’s all of the above, together, firing at random.

So what do you do when your neighbor is caught in storms like those? Convene the next meeting of experts and make the homeless and hungry the main topic? Write a politician and tell her to take care of the problem? Hope some rich family foundation or Donald Trump-type coughs up a huge check?

What if you could be part of a social miracle? 

In his book Lost Icons (T&T Clark 2000), Rowan Williams (yep, that one -- the Archbishop of Canterbury) comments on what historian John Bossy calls “the social miracle” of the medieval community and church -- charity resulting from “the extraordinary process by which sectional loyalties were from time to time interrupted and overcome by a sense of integration, of belonging to an entire social body extending far beyond one’s choice or one’s affiliations of interest and ‘natural’ loyalty” (Williams, p.54).  In other words, people made the choice to move beyond the tribalism of the Dark Ages into a greater community to benefit those in need. Bossy counts that as nothing short of a miracle. 

He’s probably right. Think about the tribes, each with their own biases, mores and folkways, in our modern culture. Tribes spring up over economic status. Tribes thrive on divisive politics. Tribes nurture differences of social position. Tribes watch with fear should someone invade a comfort zone within their territory. Asking tribes to move beyond their perceived boundaries of relation is tantamount to social heresy. If one’s boundaries don’t include those who have slipped into a different tribe of people struggling with alcoholism or poverty, it can be difficult to even see the need to offer a hand up to others.

But that hand up is necessary for those neighbors (there’s a community term), many of whom may never share our tastes in candidates, football teams, restaurants or radio stations, who find themselves in perfect storms.  Our neighbors need the extraordinary process that interrupts sectional loyalties and goes way past “natural” loyalties. They need someone, in fact a community of “someones,” to break tribal boundaries and offer a hand up out of the chaos of their perfect storms.

As the old Bruce Cockburn song says, they’re waiting for a miracle: the miracle that happens when our attention is fixed, even for a moment, on the fact that because we share the planet and our days with them, the hungry and homeless are somehow miraculously and wonderfully a part of each of us.

They need responses beyond tribes, elections, and platitudes. Our neighbors need the miracle and true synergy of community response, starting with the life jackets that will help them navigate their perfect storms -- food, clothing, education, options, housing, basic care.

Count this your invitation to be part of a social miracle right where you are.