Amy and “As a Hen Gathers Her Chicks”
As a Hen Gathers Her Chicks
Jesus laments over Jerusalem: How often I wanted to gather your people together, just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you didn’t want that. (Mt 23:37; Lk 13:34 CEB)
This is one of my favorite Biblical images of the sheltering love that God has for God's people. And, as followers of Jesus, we, too, are called to provide shelter for God's people. What does that look like in this time and place?
You may know that St. Francis, through a contract with Baltimore County, is currently figuring out how to get millions of dollars in Emergency Rental Assistance released by the federal government to Maryland into the hands of those families who need it the most. The work is painstakingly slow, filled with bureaucratic twists and turns, and stressful. It can seem like there is nothing but St. Francis standing in between a family and safe housing. That's not true, of course; that's part of the scarcity thinking that God is always inviting us to leave behind as we embrace the abundance that God has given us and seek to live in obedience to God's law of love and justice.
To get a picture of what this work might be like for anxious staff and social work interns, and what many of us and our neighbors are going through as we wade through our own individual housing emergency, I invite you to read Matthew Desmond's book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Written in 2016 about the affordable housing crisis, it is a nonfiction book deeply relevant to our time and place - Baltimore County in the unfolding aftermath of the economic and public health crisis of COVID-19.
Lest you think this book is dry policy-ese - I assure you it is not. Through the immediate experience of eight families caught in the systemic logjam that is poverty, this is a deeply humane, deeply spiritual book. It is a book of human stories, stories that each of us can relate to. No matter what our individual choices may or may not be, we are each of us - renters, landlords, court officers, police, churches, non-profits - caught in this system where no one is a villain, no one is a hero, and the most vulnerable among us are hurt the most.
There is a helpful reading guide specifically for faith communities that Desmond provided with his book. It's just a few pages. You might want to read this if you can't read the book. I look forward to being in conversation with you about this work. You can find the reading guide by clicking here.
