The Constitution of MeFinal Project for M345 - 6, Community Service Seminar

Lynnda White, Spring 2011

IntroductionUpgrade Foundation is a not-for-profit federal agency providing subsidized housing for low- to middle- income families. Most Upgrade heads-of-household are young, black, unmarried, unemployed, undereducated females. Upgrade has partnered with a nearby Salvation Army facility to provide tutoring, Cub Scout, and 4H experiences to the neighborhood’s children. Quite unexpectedly the Salvation Army became unable to continue its work with the children, and I became the coordinator of a tutoring program that was something akin to a one-room schoolhouse. Up to twenty-two children from kindergarten through eighth grade attended, with only two adult volunteers available on any particular day. Our primary rules were:

Bring homework or read for half an hour before art work

“Please”; “Thank you”; “May I?”

Be respectful of each other

No name calling

No fighting

Speak with an inside voice

NotesI chose to create a scrapbook using excerpts from our assignments and combining photographs with the children’s artwork because it feels conducive to capturing the juxtaposition of familial relationship with the insidious nature of oppression.

Because the text, as it is incorporated into the scrapbook, may be difficult to read, I will insert easier to read text among the scrapbook pages.

Amazing as it may seem, much of the artwork included in this volume was abandoned by the children. Sometimes I would find it ripped and thrown into a garbage can. Sometimes they just didn’t want it; sometimes they came to the program a couple of times and didn’t return.

My intention is to honor the children and their creative endeavors.

Text Upgrade Foundation

Executive Director

“Let’s get some mentoring help for these

young women. It used to be that they

would get their lives together and move

on, but that isn’t happening anymore.”

“What people need around here is a little

more God in their lives.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with these

young people today.”

“Hey, I don’t control your passion.”

Upgrade Foundation’s Mission Statement

…to provide affordable housing and educational programs

“The students struggle to learn that it is still possible to work in creative solidarity with the

vulnerable across various lines of difference, even though there is no formulaic calculus for social

change or progressive religious work. This is a difficult and hard-earned lesson. In order to learn

this, students must pass through the often unsettling discovery that their ambitions are far

vaster than what it is possible for them to accomplish, to the even more disturbing sense that

their ideas about matters such as social change and justice are sometimes incompatible with the

needs of the communities they serve.”

Michael S. Hogue; After the Secular: Toward a Pragmatic Public Theology; pages 3-4.

In Upgrade Foundation territory, the majority of the family units are single head-of-

household, predominantly black, unmarried, undereducated, unemployed young women with

at least one child. Upgrade’s mission is to provide affordable housing and educational

programs. The irony of this mission statement is that as a federal and state funded program,

Upgrade Foundation has restrictions on the use of monies and properties and there are no

programs addressed specifically at meeting tenant needs that are not related to housing.

Budget cuts and loss of funding have virtually eliminated any aid through social agencies. In

addition, there is no staff person available to coordinated activities.

Except for Upgrade’s board of directors, only religious organizations provide client support for tenants. The board is

interested in recruiting some of the larger, traditionally white Christian churches to mentor or offer programming, but they

have been unsuccessful thus far.  

At the top of the list of religious organizations is the Salvation Army, which is only a few blocks from the neighborhood.

It operates--at no financial cost--tutoring, Cub Scouts, 4-H, and other activities for the children in the Upgrade

neighborhood).  Upgrade’s executive director has elicited an agreement from the current major in charge that the children

will not be asked to participate in religious ceremonies.  

St. Thomas Catholic Church came to Upgrade’s rescue last summer when it organized a

‘fun day’, recruited teenagers from Notre Dame High School to support the program, and

provided backpacks and school supplies for two hundred children.  (St. Thomas plans to

make this an annual event.)  At Christmas St. Thomas provided, unsolicited, a pickup

truck filled with gifts for people of all ages.  

Finding the HolyChildren are the hope and embodiment of the holy.  When I can’t find it at my site --the holy or any semblance of religious attitude or faith--I think of the children.  

Searching for hope, I often grasp for a mental image of some pearl that a child has gifted me.  Even the image of a pearl, conceived because some irritant has infected its host, is a homogeneous symbol of faith.  A smile, a hug, a “Thank you, Miss White.”—these are among the gems strung on the rosary of my recollection.  

It took one boy a week before he would speak if he had to say “Please” or “Thank you”.   From what brokenness did he have to escape so that he could send a prayer into the universe?  “Please.”  And to know that a prayer had been answered? “Thank you.”  

I see the brokenness of spirit in excessive acting out, refusal to bring homework to tutoring sessions, all manner of name-calling, and sensual preening.  As discouraging as such demeanor may be and as personal as

rejection may feel, remembering that the children at least come to activities is a clue to their tenuous hold on hope.  

Is their proclivity to worship sport and entertainment superstars shallow, or is it the way in which they can believe that people like

them can move out of the ghetto, can achieve excellence, can overcome?  

Perhaps this isn’t the religious worship to which we usually subscribe, yet prayer at the free throw line, appointing multicolor angels on a

purple Christmas tree, and crooning a descant over a pop culture song in worshipful ways take the children closer to purity of spirit than

most worship services can.   

Caressing the chalice pendant at my throat is a gesture that I have come to recognize as a

reassurance, a remonstration of harsh reality, a touch point for reminiscence.

I will never forget one particular wintry evening when the children scattered to their respective

homes.  One little voice started singing This Little Light of Mine, and others, scattered throughout

the neighborhood, joined in.  

For me, this poignant and starry serenade embodied the holy and hope for the children.

Charles H. Long’s definition of religion as partially beyond thought-- “experience, expression, motivations, intentions, behaviors, styles and rhythms”-- feels all encompassing to me and helps to legitimize religion as personal and equal in status whether or not it is

formalized and ‘received’ by the majority culture or practiced by pagans or pigmies.

The antipathy of such treatises as the Doctrine of Discovery denied the humanity of people who were not Christian because they, the conquerors, had no

capacity to be reverential of religious practices unfamiliar to themselves. A good lesson for our

modern times is to realize that we need to recognize and honor the “experience, expression, motivations, intentions, behaviors, styles and rhythms” of people

who are not like us, but who have their own systems of reverence.

At first, Sharon Welch’s description of religion as amoral is antithetical to my philosophy of religion, and at the same time, it answers many questions about why people

who are supposedly religious commit egregiously immoral acts. (At some point or another, each of us is

capable of doing something we know is wrong or inappropriate— from speeding to murder, and whatever is in between, but for now, the focus will be on community

or social malfeasance.)

Religion doesn’t render us moral beings. It provides a framework from which we can act in community for good or

for evil. Religionists of various stripes have propagated everything from slavery to genocide to misogyny, all couched as

tenets of their respective faiths. It helps to remember that religion itself is not at fault, somewhat in the vein of “Guns

don’t kill people; people do.”

Religion doesn’t make people moral; personal morality does.

The room was in utter chaos most of the time, but we managed to accomplish several important things. First of all,

every child eventually said, “Please, thank you, and may I?” It wasn’t easy. At first, some children would rather do

without than say “the magic words.” A typical exchange would go something like this:

Child: “How do I get a pencil around here?”

Me: “I don’t know. How do you get a pencil around here?”

Child: (annoyed glare)

Me: (persistent smile)

Child: “Oh, yeah. Can I get a pencil?”

Me: “I don’t know, can you?”

Child: (in exasperation) “May I have a pencil, PLEASE?)

It wasn’t long before I’d hear the children in corrective mode:

Child 1: “Give me one those crayons.”

Child 2: “You know you have to ask nicely and say please.”

Or:

Child1: “Can I get some more colored paper?”

Chorus of voices: “I don’t know. Can you?”

These may seem like small victories, but for children who were often not encouraged by parents or teachers to do their

best, these were steppingstones.

Interestingly, all the children wanted to make masks,

which had not been on the list of projects I had

envisioned. Perhaps any child with construction paper,

markers, and crayons would conclude that a mask would

be fun to make, however, I believe there is something

beyond wanting to have fun behind the mask making.

Was it primal? Did they need to hide their faces? Was it

shame, fear? Did they want to watch without being

detected? Did they want anonymity? Some masks were

macabre, some silly, some pretty, and they were all

creative clues to the minds of each child.

I wanted the children to have something solid to take with them after they left tutoring, so a volunteer and I came up with

the idea of having each child create a book (“The Constitution of Me”)about their goals and what was important to

them. Even five-year-old children have goals: to be good, to learn to read, to learn to tell time. One eighth-grade boy

said that his goal each day was to make it to the next day, and that he must be pretty good at it, because he’d made it

to twelve-and-a-half. In a world of insecurity and loss, he’d found a way to cope. By the way, this young man wants to

be an architect, a builder of solid steel structures, of skyscrapers and bridges—things of permanence. He’s bright and

articulate; here’s hoping he can make it through to his grand dreams one day at a time, even though there are

gargantuan obstacles in his way. We spoke with each child to make certain they knew what a constitution was. They

understood that it meant what guided or governed their lives—what was most important for them to be, to do, to

respect. Each child created pages enumerating their goals and things for which they were thankful; a coat-of-arms and

a few other creative projects graced the books.

The Constitution

of Me

Tutoring took place for about six weeks and ended prior to the Christmas break. The site

supervisor and I agreed that we should have an end-of-year celebration, inviting the parents and

the Upgrade Foundation board members. The “Constitution of Me” books turned out so

beautifully that we wanted to feature them in our celebration. For the program, I wrote a parody

of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas called the Constitution of Me, and many of the Upgrade

tutoring children practiced mostly non-religious carols and participated in the program. This was

the first time any of them had ever been in a public performance. My great disappointment was

that only two parents and the Upgrade board president, along with his ten-year-old daughter,

attended. My great joy was to see how this talented, belligerent, amusing, rowdy, brave bunch of

children came together and presented a program that would have made their parents proud—had

they been there.

Through this experience, I was touched by so many elements we had been studying. I admit

that sometimes it was hard to find the holy and the religious, but I definitely saw, felt, and

breathed the residue of oppression. It was all there, in children’s art and acting out, spite and

spirit: the brokenness within them, the agency, and myself; religion in the dedication of staff;

and expressions of hope from the children. While these episodes were often draining and

filled with frustration, they brought me full face with the truth of my choices: I choose this

difficult path. Beauty and peace didn’t lead me into ministry, but it is there amidst the trouble,

pain, and evil.

I choose this ministry.