Best Game in Town: Interfaith

In early summer 2001, I walked into the ULM Catholic Student Center where a meeting was just getting underway. By the end of that meeting, I knew that I had found something of great value. It was a meeting of leaders of Northern and Central Louisiana Interfaith.

The first thing that got my attention that evening was the mix of people in the room. They were African American and white, Missionary Baptist and Episcopalian, Church of God in Christ and Lutheran, Ba’hai and Jewish, from the north side and the south side, teachers and janitors, businessmen and laborers, and although it was less immediately obvious, they were poor and middle class and relatively well-off. And they were there to work together for the good of the community.

Interfaith celebrates its 10th Birthday with a skit.

Of course, I did not yet understand how my own life would be affected, but I remember leaving the Catholic Student Center thinking, “this is the best thing happening in this community.” I have been involved with Interfaith ever since. We have had our ups and downs, successes and failures, and we are now in a time of rebuilding. But it has changed my life, it has changed the community, and I still think it is the best thing happening in this community.

Why? Of course I must mention some of our big successes, like getting the city and the school board to cooperate in closing a 12-foot deep drainage ditch that runs right along the edge of the playground of Madison James Foster Elementary School. Teachers had fished more than one kid out of the water during rainy seasons!

The city school system began a cycle of major remodeling projects, but mysteriously ran out of money when they got to the dreadfully inadequate, deteriorating gym at Carroll High School. We went to the school board and said, “That’s not acceptable,” and today Carroll has a new gym.

NOVA might well be our biggest accomplishment to date. NOVA is a workforce intermediary. It is employer driven. It locates living wage jobs with career tracks and benefits that are going begging in this community for lack of skilled applicants. Then NOVA, with the help of Interfaith, recruits motivated but underemployed people in the community, gets them in and through the training they need, and into the jobs employers have been unable to fill. Through NOVA, we are building the middle class of Ouachita Parish.

NOVA executive director Paul West speaks to an Interfaith assembly.

Just a few weeks ago, NOVA expanded into the Delta. NOVA, with the help of Interfaith, will conduct two graduation ceremonies this summer. The one for Delta graduates has not yet been scheduled. However, Ouachita Parish graduates will commence at St. Thomas’ Episcopal at 7 p.m. July 26. Come to hear how lives have been changed—not only those of individuals but of entire families!

But most important of all to me is the relationships I have found and cultivated through Interfaith. I am welcome at New Light Baptist Church and am on the board of directors of their community development organization. I am connected with people at Jesus the Good Shepherd Catholic Church, at Mt. Nebo Missionary Baptist Church, at Messiah Lutheran, at Lighthouse Church of God in Christ, and the list goes on.

My relationships through Interfaith are central to my rootedness in this community. They are what make “community” out of diversity for me.

Want to get involved? Interfaith needs organized money and organized people to do what it does. I’ll write more about that next month, but for now, see me if you’d like to help. And I will definitely need some folks to provide finger foods for the reception to follow the NOVA graduation!
                                     

Lesson from Fr. Brito

Note: This is fifth in a series about my visit with a group of U.S. deacons to the Dominican Republic in spring 2011.

In the most recent installment of the story of my “Latin Experience” in the Dominican Republic last spring, I gave an overview of the classroom instruction we received for the first couple days at the Bishop Kellog Conference Center in San Pedro de Macoris. This month I want to focus on just one of those classroom sessions, the one that spoke most powerfully to me.

The session called “A Social Analysis of the Latin American Family” was conducted by Fr. Napoleon Brito, Dean of Epiphany Cathedral in Santo Domingo. What impressed me so much about this presentation was that Fr. Brito had the courage to share with us—the outsiders from the U.S.—some of the problems of Latino culture.

Fr. Brito listens to Deacon Maureen Hagan's question.

Fr. Brito identified several phenomena that have powerfully influenced Latino families in various ways, such as the rural to urban transition, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the other pressures of modernism—all experienced by many societies, including our own. Thus the construction of affordable housing in urban areas has not kept pace with population growth, 80% of youth work to supplement inadequate family incomes instead of study, and consumer goods ranging from food to culture and media are unequally distributed.

In Latino society, however, these phenomena and their consequences interact with another cultural characteristic—machismo—in a way that produces especially negative outcomes. Machismo can be defined as exaggerated masculinity stressing attributes such as physical courage, virility, and aggressiveness. These attributes are typically expressed through domination of women.

The combination of poverty and machismo is lethal to families and thus highly disruptive of society as a whole. The consequences Fr. Brito enumerated include:

• A low rate of marriage and high rate of co-habitation.
• Men with two or three families who can barely support one.
• Alcoholism, sexual promiscuity and a general cultural emphasis on hedonism.
• Many children born to single mothers or into families in which the father is dividing time between more than one family and job.

 The Episcopal Church in the Dominican Republic is responding to the state of Latino families with a strong focus on family ministry in urban areas. These devastating challenges, Fr. Brito explained, can best be dealt with by strengthening families. And although “family values” often get cited but rarely defined in the U.S., the Church in the Dominican Republic has had to be much more purposeful in ministering to families holistically, especially by countering machismo and promoting the full-time presence of men in one family.

A mother and her sons walk the dirt streets of a poor barrio in San Pedro de Macoris, DR.

It is our natural tendency as humans to put on a good front, brag about our accomplishments and foreground the most enticing, enjoyable aspects of our culture. Likewise, it is our tendency to hide our shortcomings and unite to keep problems hidden from outsiders. I have heard these tendencies with startling clarity in our own political dialogue of late, when those who dare to admit that we as a society also have problems are labeled unpatriotic.

Fr. Brito’s talk was compelling and informative. But I was most impressed with the courage it took for him to speak to outsiders so openly and frankly. Latino culture has much to offer that is wonderful: spirit, color, music, warmth. But I particularly appreciate that our hosts trusted us enough to share their challenges with us as well. Would that we should be so humble.