The Neighborhood Writes Itself
The Neighborhood Writes Itself
Josh Seligman
It was during my first year of university that I was introduced to writing as a vocation. Pastor Eugene Peterson was visiting my campus for a public interview, and toward the end, when asked what advice he’d give to people considering becoming writers, he said, “Do it. We need all we can get. There’s never enough storytellers. There are a lot of people who want to write stories, but they don’t want to go through the discipline, the agony, the immersion in life it requires to tell the truth with all this. No, I think writing is one of the sacred callings.”
After I moved into the intern house where I would spend two years serving my local church, I began to write incessantly. It was my way of familiarizing myself with the new environment, mentally sketching a map of the nearby Catholic church whose morning bell-ringing wafted into my bedroom from the east and, just outside the house, of the stream of cars flowing in the opposite direction beneath concrete bridges toward the cluster of skyscrapers of downtown San Diego.
Writing was also my way of developing the skill and awareness of writing itself—often, in my free time, I would jot down metaphors or vivid sensory details of my surroundings, a technique I learned in a creative writing class at university. I thought of writing as a vocation, so I needed to keep my writing muscles fit.
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Peterson’s words had inspired me. I was one of those people considering becoming a writer, and he prompted me to ask the questions what does it mean for writing to be a vocation? How does that correspond with other Christian vocations? Might this be my calling? Such questions compelled me to study and practice writing at university and beyond. At the same time, I knew that my Christian faith called me to love my neighbor and serve people’s practical needs. I got involved in various ministries at my local church, and when I was invited to serve as an intern during my final year of university, I gratefully said yes: it seemed a way to deepen my participation there.
When I shared this news with someone who knew me well, though, they asked, “Will interning compete with your writing?” I decided that this internship might provide the “immersion in life” that Peterson had said was required to write well. In the end, I discovered that my work as an intern and my writing would not only complement each other but also reveal a deeper truth about vocation.
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In San Diego, the paved garden area behind the intern house I occupied slopes beneath a black metal gate into the parking lot of the adjoining church. I lived and served there with eight guys, some of them coming and going at different times, along with the church caretaker. Our responsibilities included hosting a weekly dinner and Bible study, helping out at Friday night community dinners, working with the youth and children’s groups, and making sure the intern house was clean—or at least clean enough.
The neighborhood I lived in was just a few miles from the San Diego Zoo, Balboa Park, the Hotel Del Coronado. Despite growing up in San Diego, I didn’t know that this neighborhood had even existed before attending church there. Some call it the inner-city; the majority of people live below the poverty line and speak English as a second language.
I soon realized that joy requires no translators. Every afternoon, the neighborhood was full of children running down sidewalks or riding home on skateboards after school. Among the happiest sounds I heard was the voice of our next-door neighbor, a four-year-old girl who would greet me with “Hi ‘Tchotch!’ (Her way of saying my name.) What are you doing? Can I have a flower?”
Although we interns were surrounded by children, it was through writing that I recognized their value more deeply than before. As poet Scott Cairns has said, writing a poem can help us discover truth. That semester, for one of my classes, I was assigned to write a sonnet. My sonnet ended up telling a story of the neighborhood children suffering from summer heat and praying for deliverance. Writing it revealed to me what I was learning subconsciously, that children were the heartbeat of the neighborhood and that God loved them deeply.
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I began to realize that my work as a ministry intern was balanced by my hidden activity as a writer: both collided and fed into each other. Not only did my responsibilities make their way into my writing, but writing was also a sanctuary where, in the silence of the small desk in the corner of my room, I could recharge and reflect truthfully on questions or challenges I had.
Cairns has also described writing as a space in which the writer can commune with God. I found this to be true. I wrote one poem, based on Psalm 23, as a prayer to accompany my 12-mile journeys by foot, bus, and trolley from my university on the coast to the intern house:
Even though I walk beside fast cars
and down dark streets in the rain,
You protect me.
Fear does not belong in the company of my thoughts.
You comfort me with the glow of the afternoon
dripping through shadows from windows above
the Fifth Avenue station,
with prism sparks off edges of glass
and the thrushes chewing white starfish petals
in the bushes.
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In addition to my personal writing, I found companionship in books such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The protagonist Alyosha is a monk who, along with fellow monks, serves the poor who visit them. When I read about Alyosha’s friendship with a group of youths, I realized that their town shared similarities with our neighborhood. One character in the book, a boy who once lay between railroad tracks as a train passed over him, reminded me of a brave ten-year-old boy who was slightly taller than a fire hydrant—but stronger, brighter, and always moving. I don’t remember ever seeing him walk. He was always on his skateboard, or running, or swaying, and sometimes he would greet me with “‘Sup Josh?” before disappearing somewhere down the road.
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At some point, one of my roommates and I started a writing group at the intern house. We welcomed fellow interns, friends, and the youth group. Every Tuesday night, we would do writing exercises and share any poems we had written over the past week. Through listening to each other’s work, we built trust and learned things about one another that we would not have learned otherwise.
Such relationship-building was also reflected in my writing. For the first time, I empathically wrote a poem from the perspective of one of my friends who frequently visited:
The intern house is not the cleanest house,
but it has a lot of furniture,
and that’s important for a Christian house
to have. The odd thing is, the furniture
doesn’t match: against one wall sit two
mint green upholster chairs, and by another
a maroon LA-Z-BOY, and below the windows
is a two-person dark sofa striped like Christmas.
That’s my favorite sofa. When I sit there,
I always laugh because of the zebra painting
across the wall. What’s funny, I think, is the zebras
face the same direction; they’re going somewhere,
together, but they’re meandering, sniffing
the smeared, muddy dead grass—and they’re portrayed
as if all the world depended on their going!
If I were in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
and I were drawn into the zebra painting,
I guess I’d also look for shelter there,
in the thin, crisp cluster of emerald trees and shade,
in such a world as this, where the background is blurred
and sloppy, but calls forth clarity, a focus
on the least important places and views;
in such a world as here, which doesn’t match
but invites you in and welcomes you, and grows
on you and in you, and you in it, like a roommate,
like a friend; like a house with lots of furniture.
Once, I found myself explaining to the writing group how we often use metaphors to describe something mysterious by means of something understandable. From the corner of the room, someone said something along these lines: “Jesus Christ must be the ultimate example of a metaphor because, through the Incarnation, God reveals to us the mystery of divinity through tangible humanity.” In other words, Jesus is a bridge between who we are and who we are called to become.
I didn’t recognize it at the time, but that conversation suggested a deep truth about vocation to me. If, as St. Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” then it seems our ultimate calling is becoming fully alive in Christ and sharing in his divinity. Perhaps such a transformation is even participation in Christ’s work of “[making] all things new,” as he says in the book of Revelation. This may be a way to understand monk Thomas Merton’s writing that the vocation of all Christians is to “enter deeply…into [their] part of restoring all things in Christ.”
Maybe, then, my internship and writing were avenues through which I could become more like Christ and, in the process, participate in his restoration of all things. This resembles the way Cairns defines vocation as “yet another way that God ministers to us, another way that God reveals his love for us.” Maybe God gave me those smaller vocations of interning and writing—and maybe God gives all of us a variety of smaller vocations, whether we are writers or not, whether we are married or not, whether we are ordained or lay, or whatever other situations in which we find ourselves—as gifts of varying significance to help us fulfill that greater vocation of becoming fully alive in Christ and thus embodying, to some degree, the new creation.
At the end of The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha gives a farewell speech to the boys he has befriended. During my own final gathering with the church youth group, I remembered Alyosha’s words:
You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. You hear a lot said about your education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.
Looking back, I believe those words resonate with my experience as an intern. The neighborhood, the life of the church, the people I lived and worked with, and the act of writing were all part of one glorious vocation through which I experienced and participated in the transforming love and salvation of God for the world.
Josh Seligman
Writer & Editor
Josh has been published in Plough and Premier Christianity and by Wild Goose Publishing. He is the founding editor of Foreshadow, a digital literary magazine and resource hub for people exploring or engaged in writing as a form of ministry. You can visit the magazine at foreshadowmagazine.com