Letter to the church: Stop singing louder
North State Voices: Letter to the church: Stop singing louder
By Joanna O’Hanlon
An open letter to the Christian church:
I heard a story recently about a church in Europe during the Holocaust. The church was situated right in front of the railroad tracks. They would meet for Sunday services and the parishioners could hear screams as the trains chugged closer, approaching their house of worship. They were the screams of human beings being lugged like cattle to the camps — to their deaths.
So the congregation would sing louder to drown out their screams.
I heard this story at a conference tied to an outreach opportunity on a recent Saturday in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco — a place known for being home to many who are down and out. Local legend says the Tenderloin even gets its name from the corruption that pervaded the area back when the police’s blind eye to what was happening there could be bought with a choice piece of meat. Now it is “home” to most of the city’s homeless.
In the closing conference session, a local pastor and nationally acclaimed Christian author, Francis Chan, related the above story of the church on the railroad tracks.
He told the simple truth that once he saw the lives of the people living on and around the streets of the Tenderloin, he couldn’t handle the idea of just singing louder, so he stayed there and is doing something about it.
Unfortunately, much of the Christian church still has the habit of ignoring the injustice of the world. In fact, we often use religious things to excuse or make up for our complacency.
The problem in the church is our love of comfort. It drives us to choose to remain ignorant because it’s easier on our minds, our lives, our time, our wallets.
I’ve done it more than I can stomach. You may have, too.
But more than anyone, Christians are very clearly called to care about social injustice. The Jesus of the gospels was not one to ignore oppression. He called injustice out. He cared about the cast-outs, the dropouts, and the not-good-enoughs. If I know anything about the God of the Bible, it’s that he cares about people. All people. Deliberate ignorance has to stop.
Why do people dislike the church? Because when victims of injustice scream for help, we have historically stayed inside and drowned them out with our hypocritical melodies.
The next day after the conference in the Tenderloin, I was sitting in church in Granite Bay, and a pastor was speaking from the pulpit about an organization that fights against sex trafficking in Asia. He was saying, “They are pulling girls out of brothels and liberating them and rehabilitating them. But do you know how young some of these girls are when they are first trafficked? As young as 4 years old.”
As he said that last part, the woman sitting next to me closed her eyes tightly, made a foul face and plugged her ears. She waited until he was done talking before she tentatively opened one eye, saw that he was through, and then unplugged her ears, letting her face return to a relaxed smile.
Maybe, like Mrs. Bennett in “Pride and Prejudice,” the harsh truth was just too much for her nerves.
But maybe if she had listened, that vomit-inducing, heart-wrenching truth about 4-year-olds being sold and raped repeatedly would’ve been too much to ignore. Maybe she would’ve been disturbed as some of us were for the rest of the day. She would’ve thought about it that night as she tucked her daughter into bed. Maybe it would’ve been enough to spur her to do something about it.
But because she plugged her ears, when the next song was played, she just smiled, and she sang loudly.
To those who have been the victims of injustice while the people of God did nothing, my heart breaks for you, and so does the heart of God. There is no excuse. To those in the church, let’s write a new story of the church where we are willing to abandon comfort for the sake of people, because people matter to God, and they should matter to us.
Joanna O’Hanlon is an adventurer and story-teller. She tries to be honest about the ugly and hard parts of life, and the beautiful parts too. This blog is one of the places she shares her thoughts and stories. Other places are
instagram: jrolicious twitter: jrohanlon
storyofjoblog@gmail.com
August Column: Choosing to Celebrate
North State Voices: Choosing to Celebrate
By Joanna O’Hanlon
Posted: 08/07/2013
Today is my 24th birthday. I ended up in the ER on my last birthday. Fortunately I had already gotten to eat my dessert. Unfortunately, I threw it back up in the examination room.
Thankfully it was nothing too serious – an ocular migraine – something I had never experienced before, but not very worrisome. It had been my loss of vision and my unresponsive pupils that had made my family decide I should go in.
However, it was that migraine that started my having migraines everyday for months. It’s something I still deal with a year later. My 23rd birthday has become tainted in my mind as the first entry in my headache diary.
As my 24th birthday approaches, I’m tentative. I don’t really want to celebrate. Life is good, yet hard right now. It would be easier to just let it slip by unnoticed. I’d rather just declare this year of headaches and heartaches “over and done.” But to do so would be to disregard the fact that I have so much in life to be grateful for – that’s what birthdays are about – celebrating life. Sometimes it’s hard to celebrate though.
When my older sister passed away, the timing was really terrible. That seems an insensitive thing to say. I suppose it is. But really, it feels like it couldn’t have been a worse time in her life or in the year.
She died three days after her birthday. We still had the leftovers from her family birthday dinner in the refrigerator when we returned home from the hospital, our family suddenly smaller by one. The leftovers of celebration were an assault on our grief.
My dad’s birthday was two days after the funeral. My brother-in-law’s was not even a week after that and my brother’s a couple weeks following. In the first three months of our grief and loss, we had been through one major holiday and everyone’s birthdays except mine.
We were left with the bitter feeling of loss lingering on our heads, not wanting to celebrate life because we did not want to be alive like that.
Each holiday was an obstacle that we had to find a new way to hurdle over. The things that used to be cause for celebration seemed like salt in the wound reminding us that our traditions were missing a member, that life was not sweet at the moment, that celebration is not something that always comes naturally.
It’s not that people or holidays were not worth celebrating. It’s just that it took so much strength and discipline to climb out of our grief and to choose to celebrate what is good when so much seemed broken and painful.
In time, we found that there is healing to be found in choosing joy, in choosing to participate in the discipline of celebration. We came to believe that it is not a denial of the pain, just an acknowledgement of the good that still exists.
I’ve had many times when I simply don’t feel like celebrating. But I think that cheapens the fullness of life. To only celebrate when I feel like it, to only mourn when I feel like it, to only be kind when I feel like it, to only love when I feel like it – these are the rhythms of life and I have decided to play along with the melody, practicing each in it’s own time, and recognizing that I may need to play two notes together.
I can be in a season of mourning and rebuilding at the same time. I can be in a season of desert and drought and still celebrate the breath in my lungs. I can be in a season of loss, and still celebrate all that I’ve found along the way.
It is not easy. It is a discipline. But the discipline of celebration itself helps to bring me back to life again. I believe life is always worth celebrating.
And in the midst of life being hard, I intend to choose to celebrate what is good.
Joanna O’Hanlon is an adventurer and story-teller. She tries to be honest about the ugly and hard parts of life, and the beautiful parts too. This blog is one of the places she shares her thoughts and stories. Other places are
instagram: jrolicious twitter: jrohanlon
storyofjoblog@gmail.com
North State Voices: Travelling Through Italy and Crashing Cars
North State Voices: Travelling Through Italy and Crashing Cars
By Joanna O’Hanlon
Posted: 07/11/2013 12:03:05 AM PDT
We were sitting on a bench in a Swiss train station one evening, about to leave for what we would soon call “Kate and Jo’s Italy Adventure.”
Kate was my crazy college roommate. She had dyed, jet-black hair, and a weird sense of humor, and she was one of my first college friends I had made in San Diego.
We had been co-adventurers our whole friendship. We had already climbed many buildings, broken into many hotel hot tubs, swam in public fountains, had hours-long lunches in the cafeteria. We’d done the typical freshman experience of college together and we got along great. Then when I went abroad for a year, she ended up joining me my second semester. 
The train was coming soon and we sat anxious for another grand adventure to begin.
And then she began talking about how grateful she was for our friendship. My heart echoed hers.
“I don’t know your philosophy on best friends, because I know you already have one,” she said as she broached the subject somewhat timidly — an unusual thing for Kate. “But if you think you can be best friends with more than one person, can we be best friends?”
That’s when I knew we already were. We had had a lot of fun up until that point, and a lot of hard and real conversations, but I can remember that evening in the train station, and I knew that was the moment Kate was committing to being my friend through it all. Since then, she truly has.
Last July, nearly three years after our train station talk, Kate and I were heading home from a friend’s wedding in San Diego together, prepared to drive through the night to get back in time for Kate to work the next day. We had only been on the road about two hours before we found ourselves entering an intersection at 50 mph at the same time as a truck entered it. We hit them at full speed.
There was the deafening roar of shattering glass and crumpling metal, and then a silence. As I came to, I remember turning to look at the passenger seat, terrified of what I would find there.
But I found a living, conscious Kate looking back at me with shocked and terrified eyes. That was before I yelled at her to get out of the car because the smoke filling it had me concerned we would blow up like in the movies. Maybe not my brightest moment.
On the ambulance ride, with us both being treated for injuries, as the shock started to wear off and the pain started to set in, I recall crying and simultaneously laughing. We were making fun of ourselves and the situation, and bonding even in the disaster of the moment.
And this year, when tragedy struck again in my own life, I called Kate. She sobbed with me over the phone. I called her the next day and said I needed her to come be with me. She arrived mere hours later. She didn’t have the right words. She was just there. And that is what I needed her to be — there.
There when it is fun. There when it is an adventure. There when it is painful yet funny. And there, in the pit of grief. In my most unlovable moments. My most unmemorable moments. My most brilliant moments. Kate has said, and has proven, that she’ll be there.
In life I have known some fair-weather friends. That’s just in our human nature to be there when things are good and to fade out when they’re not.
But then there are those friends like Kate, and others — who when everything blows up, when your life crumbles, when it feels like you’re Chicken Little and the sky is falling — show up and stay with you. And, like all-weather tents, you don’t know if they’ll really hold up until the storm comes.
These all-weather friends are not typical, but they are gifts. I am humbled that some have dared to weather the storm with me — again and again.
Joanna O’Hanlon is an Oroville resident and columnist for North State Voices, which appears once a month at orovillemr.com. She can be reached at jrohanlon@gmail.com.
June Column: North State Voices: Tears sometimes can be tears of hope
North State Voices: Tears sometimes can be tears of hope
By Joanna O’Hanlon
Posted: 06/13/2013 01:44:23 AM PDT
Her name was Rosemary, but we called her Miss Rose.
We were sitting on what was left of her back porch, wearing Tyvek suits. We were marinating in the day’s spent energy from sweat-filled hours of shoveling thick silt and mud out of her hurricane-damaged home near New Orleans. And as we shoveled, we had been fishing through, searching for possessions and making three piles — “possibly salvageable,” “not salvageable but possibly sentimental” and “trash.”
Even the trash pile was full of possessions that once made up a life.
Miss Rose was one of the 275,000 people whose homes were ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. When our church team came to participate in relief work seven months later, we all fell in love with the sweet, frail yet strong-hearted, 88-year-old widow.
Like ignorant tourists going into the Holy of Holies, we were unaware of the sacred space we were about to enter — unaware of how intimate a thing it is to gut out someone’s home with shovels and wheelbarrows.
“They wanted to do something kind for me,” Miss Rose began her story about the mud-caked play-jewelry in her hand, a gift from her children many years before. One of us had just pulled it from a block of mud. It was a broken, multi-colored pop-bead necklace.
“My children and I always went Christmas shopping on my birthday. But, you know, they were children, so they never got anything for my husband or I,” she said.
She continued, telling the story of how her boys had conspired to get her a gift and asked her if they could shop alone. They had come back, their faces proudly beaming, to present her with the very dime-store necklace she now held in her hand.
We also learned that one of those sons had since passed away. The love and the pain of remembering this moment all brimmed at the edges of her misty blue eyes as she clenched the muddy plastic.
We had almost just thrown it in the trash pile. I believe it did end up there, but before it did, it was a temporary portal for Miss Rose to recall the sweetness of her young sons one more time after decades of holding on to this priceless dime-store jewelry.
Through the sorting of her ruined possessions, Miss Rose shared her life with us.
One day in the week, upon arriving at the house, we had to wait for a dump truck that was slowly moving along the street, picking up the piles of debris that people had begun to place in front of the houses. Most of us were excited by this because we had needed our “trash” pile cleared for a few days and we’d been told it could take weeks to be cleared. We were stripping the house bare, and we needed room for the rest of the debris.
But one woman on our trip — a woman who has children and grandchildren of her own, and knows what it takes to build a life — did not participate in our excitement. “I can’t imagine how hard it must be to see your whole life scooped into a dump truck,” she said softly. “I can’t imagine how painful …”
That was the dichotomy of our week with Miss Rose — it’s the dichotomy of all who have to grieve a loss and move on. There is such pain and sadness in remembering things past and having to let go. I can’t imagine seeing my life tossed mechanically into a dump truck. But to rebuild requires the removal of debris.
While I saw many tears fall from Miss Rose’s eyes throughout the week, at the end, when her house was completely gutted, with only bare studs and power-washed concrete flooring left, there were tears in her eyes as she smiled and hugged each of us. I believe some were tears of sadness, some of grace, and some, I am certain, were tears of hope.
For those in the areas that have been affected recently by tornadoes, this is my prayer. That their tears of loss will become intermingled with tears of hope for rebuilding.
Joanna O’Hanlon is an Oroville resident and columnist for North State Voices, which appears each month on www.orovillemr.com
North State Voices: Israel sings the song of good news
North State Voices: Israel sings the song of good news
By Joanna O’Hanlon
Posted: 05/16/2013 01:59:02 AM PDT
The streets seemed safe in Israel, even at night.
While we were there last month, my mother and I walked everywhere — even in the old city of Jerusalem — and while sometimes we got lost, both Palestinians and Jews were warm, friendly and helpful to us.
We drove through areas of Israel where the store fronts were written in alternating languages — one in Arabic, two in Hebrew, two more in Arabic, and so on. The interspersing of the people groups in some areas is undeniable.
From an outsider’s perspective, there seems to be peace in Israel. And by all means, it is safe.
Photo Courtesy of Kathy Sergio
Safety and peace, however, are not the only longings burning within the hearts of the Holy Land residents. It’s a land where compromise is the price of peace. All sides are still aware of the lack of their ideal.
Belonging to the land and in the land is the song of their souls.
The last century of the land’s history has been muddied by politics, peace treaties, declarations and statements — by the drawing and redrawing of boundaries, by the rebel attacks (from both sides), by the proposals of compromise which have been rejected, by the tearing down and building of walls, of communities and of nations.
What’s left is a comparatively new independent state called Israel which consists of a majority of Jews, some Palestinians and a few others. Within that independent state are territories governed by the Palestinian Authority — the land of which is still within Israel, but is settled and governed by a majority of Palestinians.
The Palestinians in the Palestinian Authority territories technically live in Israel, but their passports (and freedoms) belong not to a nation, but to a territory.
“Confused yet?” asked our tour guide, Bruce, a Jewish Boston native who immigrated to Israel 40 years ago. “Good. Then we’re all on the same page. Confused.”
Everyone knows this isn’t the final solution, but it’s the solution for today, and for tomorrow probably, too.
Aside from the people groups, there is the division of the religious groups, also. The old city in Jerusalem is divided into the Jewish Quarter, the Muslim Quarter, The Armenian Quarter and the Christian Quarter. Even the holy sites of the Christian faith are divided among varying sects. This sort of shared custody of the holy sites is appropriately termed “Status Quo.”
Photo Courtesy of Kathy Sergio
But as I walked up a steep, cobblestone road in the Jewish Quarter, a young boy wearing his yarmulke and his side curls held the hand of his toddler-aged sister as they struggled up the slick hill through the rain. They were laughing, smiling and speaking softly to each other in Hebrew.
As I ate shawarma in the Muslim Quarter, the owner of the hole-in-the-wall restaurant talked excitedly about how he is moving to a bigger location soon because business has been good.
In Bethlehem, a Christian Palestinian merchant spoke about how he had been born a Christian, but had lived a horrible life. His eyes moistened with grace and hope as he spoke the words, “I am a Christian again now. Christ still takes me, even though I have been so bad a person.”
And women from our tour laughed loudly with that care-free American way that we sometimes have as we got on the bus one afternoon.
“It’s good to hear the laughs,” Bruce said from the front microphone on the bus. “After all, that’s what the gospel is all about. You know what the word gospel means? It means good news.”
Bruce mentioned that when he was younger, he wanted to start a newspaper that printed only good news. His friends talked him out of it, saying no one would read it.
But Bruce’s newspaper idea says something important about him and the rest of Israel — that in the midst of the uncertainty of life in the land, and the temporary solutions that lend peace for today, all the people in the land are thirsty for good news — both spiritually for eternity, and practically for today.
The song of good news may not be the loudest song burning in the hearts of all Israelis and Palestinians, but it may just be the one that gets them through today, and probably tomorrow, too.
Joanna O’Hanlon is an Oroville resident and columnist for North State Voices, which appears each month on www.orovillemr.com
North State Voices: When I gave up, someone gave me help
North State Voices: When I gave up, someone gave me help
By Joanna O’Hanlon
Posted: 04/18/2013 12:00:00 AM PDT
“Branches!”
Throughout our church team’s 10-day journey in Haiti, this became Rodney’s catchphrase. We were traveling in an open-top cargo truck through rugged “roadways” on the Haitian island of La Gonave. The dirt trails were rough enough to give the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland a run for its money.
The way was lined with trees with thick, low-hanging boughs. We were sitting atop all of our cargo, putting us in the direct line of fire to be hit, or knocked right over, by these limbs. Rodney became a necessity for our team, as he perched himself up and loudly warned when branches were coming.
Many of us started the trip emotionally and physically drained. Because of an unexpected medical trauma of a dear friend, the week prior to our trip had been spent in uncertainty and prayer, not knowing if she would live.
Little sleep and emotional exhaustion had landed me a bad head and chest cold before we even left. Then we started our trip on a red-eye flight.
The entire journey was long and arduous. On the way there we were focused and excited for our upcoming interaction with the community. So when Rodney yelled “Branches!” it felt like an adventure.
Our journey on the way back was a different story for me, though. Because a rainstorm had rolled through the area and made the roads nearly impassable, we left with 20 minutes’ notice. We were told at 11:30 p.m. that the truck had arrived (hours later than expected) and that we needed to go then while the rain had stalled or we may not be able to leave for days.
After a week of stress, sickness, emotional turmoil and having worked from dawn until late every night doing physical labor, tears of exhaustion rolled down my cheek when the men yelled to us that we needed to pack up and go right away. I didn’t think I could make it.
We drove through the dark night in the same truck. The roads were slick with mud, which made for more jolting and sliding, sometimes nearing the steep edges of the hills.
The night was a blur of jostling, breaking down, falling down and then eventually, my energy evaporated, and I just gave up.
At that point, I was sitting atop an overturned five-gallon bucket, and leaning my weight against a stack of buckets next to me. I was in a constant daze-state, falling asleep in the 15 to 30 seconds between every bump.
Rodney, the only one with real energy left, was standing at my side, holding on to the exoskeleton-frame of the truck and looking forward into the dark, still yelling his warnings.
And then a thick, solid arm of a tree seemed to pick me specifically, and in my unaware daze, I felt a “crack!” across my head as I was knocked off the bucket.
I eventually climbed back up, hardly sure of what had happened. For the rest of the ride, though, I slowly realized that with every call of “Branches!” someone was throwing their body over mine, protecting me.
It wasn’t until a few days later that I realized it was Rodney who had shielded me. When I thanked him, he simply said he saw me get hit by that last branch and felt so bad that he just did what he had to after that.
I was the most exhausted and weak I’ve ever been, and he stepped in to protect me at his own expense.
I’ve had a few experiences like this — where I was too weak, too broken, too confused, too wounded, too tired to help myself — and someone like Rodney stepped in to help me when I was too weak to even know what I needed.
I am deeply touched by these people. Their short-term actions have left long-term gratefulness in my heart. They have inspired me and shown me that sometimes people aren’t able to ask for the help they need, and hope comes when we offer that help anyway.
I know it won’t always be comfortable, but then again, neither is getting hit by branches.
Joanna O’Hanlon is an Oroville resident and columnist for North State Voices, which appears each month on www.orovillemr.com
March Column: Heads bleed a lot, and other sibling lessons
North State Voices: Heads bleed a lot, and other sibling lessons
By JOANNA O’HANLON
Chico Enterprise-Record
Posted: 03/21/2013 12:00:00 AM PDT
When I was a kid, whenever we drove together as a family, my brother and sister and I were all in the back seat, for better or worse.
I was the youngest, so I always had to sit in the middle — sometimes serving as a buffer between the siblings, sometimes serving as an instigator to all.
I came to love being close to my siblings, though. When we finally bought a van, I rode home in it in the far-back seat all by myself, and I didn’t like it because I felt so far from everyone.
As the youngest, I’ve never known life without siblings. Many of my personality traits seem to be directly linked to my place in our family. Because Julie (six years my senior) and Jason (three years my senior) were good older siblings, I came through life feeling loved and included — something I know not every child feels.
Once when we were home alone together, I recall discussing whether pepper really makes people sneeze like cartoons suggested. We decided to conduct an experiment to find out. Julie (a teenager at the time) and I emptied pepper from the shaker into our palms. Jason, though curious, decided that watching would be sufficient.
Julie and I tried to smell the pepper, but it’s more accurate to say we snorted it. It was a mistake. We screeched in pain and shock, pushing Jason out of the way so we could get to the kitchen sink, where we greedily took turns using the spray faucet to wash out our nostrils to try to stop the burning sensation. Jason was dying of laughter as he watched, and we screeched in pain and laughter, too.
I still sometimes do absurd things in the name of curiosity. Jason still watches and takes pictures claiming he “knows better.”
One evening when I was 2 years old, Jason was pulling Julie and me around in our little Red Flyer wagon, running as fast as he could. We were all giggling with little-kid glee, but upon rounding one of the corners of the “racetrack,” our speed was too great, the turn was too sharp, and Julie and I tumbled out of the wagon.
I fell right on my head, and blood started to leak out of my blonde hair, covering it, my clothes and everything in crimson.
It sufficiently terrified my poor dad, who carried me inside — his 2-year-old baby — bloody and crying. Luckily, the fall just cut my scalp, and no major damage was done. I remember it being painful, but I don’t recall the incident ever keeping me from wagons or any other playing adventure in the future.
That’s one thing I learned from (and with) my siblings: To play hard means sometimes getting hurt, and that’s OK. That, and heads bleed a lot.
I recall my brother sending me back inside when I was 2 to put shoes on before he would let me jump off the swings or jump out of the tree. The way my parents and siblings treated me made me feel protected, but never stifled from adventure.
I’m grateful to both my siblings for the ways our childhood adventures together shaped me into the woman I am now. They found roles for me to fill in their individual lives and hobbies, and they let me discover myself and rooted me on in my own life and ventures.
Julie passed away when I was 14, so I was only a kid while I knew her. She taught Jason and I many things, and her life continues to shape who I am, but I’m sorry she isn’t still living the sibling story with us.
Jason and I still carry on the sibling bond: supporting each other, bickering sometimes, having fun together, and just being together.
We know it’s good to be together. As Deborah Joy Corey writes in her novel, “Losing Eddie”: “We are not all of us, but we are what’s left.”
Joanna O’Hanlon is an Oroville resident and columnist for North State Voices, which appears each month on www.orovillemr.com
February Column: Reaching out to homeless softens hearts
photo from google images and AP photos
North State Voices: Reaching out to homeless softens hearts
By JOANNA O’HANLON
Posted: 02/21/2013 12:16:43 AM PST
He observes my extended hand, waiting to be shaken, and he slowly extends his own. He has been on the streets a while. I can tell by his hands.
They’re calloused, dry. They’re painted by dirt that’s been baked into the pores, filling the cracks in his palms like mortar. They’re the rough hands of a farmer, a welder, or of a homeless man on the streets of San Francisco. If you washed them, they wouldn’t come clean.
This man tells me his name is Chador. We exchange a few more friendly comments, and then my friend and I bid him goodnight, and we walk to the car, on to the next part of our evening in the city.
I can’t help but feel that a holy moment has just taken place. It hovers like a mist among our heads, and as we walk down the street away from the man, it thins, and then wisps away. The moment has passed, and it’s another ordinary night.
As I was in San Francisco earlier this month, I was reminded that it was there that I first interacted with people on the street. I was almost 16, and I’d been to the city a couple of times — only spending time in the touristy areas by the bay. That time, though, I was a part of an inner-city cultural immersion team through a Christian organization called Center for Student Ministries.
We spent our time in soup kitchens, food banks and on the streets.
The experience taught me how to do more than offer food or a couple of bucks to those in need — it taught me how to relate to them, and in that, how to value them.
The first man I met in San Francisco that week told me his name was Turquoise. He had come to San Francisco several years prior on a business trip and he never left. He’d been living on the street since then. After being in the business world for over a decade, Turquoise burned out, and while life on the streets was uncertain and hard, he felt freer there.
His hands were the first street-hands that I noticed — worn hands belonging to a worn man. Since then, I always notice their hands.
I have learned some of the most real things I know about being human from people I’ve met on the streets.
They are people who know desperation and loss, who are clothed in regret, who know that life is too hard to take sometimes. People who are used to being ignored. People who rely on the scarce mercy of others to fill their stomachs or quench their alcoholic thirst. People who are prisoners to their addictions that numb the pain, to their avoidance of those they’ve hurt, to their wounds that disable them.
They are people who know what it is to band together, who know the grace to be found in leftovers or a $5 bill, who know that their previous choices weren’t worth whatever they were hoping to gain. People who know how to share, how to give, how to persevere. People who continue to hope in the face of despair.
They are people who know that when they have nothing else, their lives still tell a story for those that will listen.
The simplest and most important thing I’ve learned from these men and women, though, is that people matter.
Whether they’re homeless or homed, rude or polite, sane or insane — people matter. What I’ve come to see is that whether I can offer help or not, I can always stop, look them in the eye, shake their hand, tell my name and ask theirs. If they’re willing, I can hear a bit of their corner of the story of what it means to be human.
San Francisco’s people taught me that and I’ve taken it with me wherever I go. I’ve seen again and again that when my clean, unscathed hand reaches out and grasps the hand of someone “homeless” or “in need,” while our hands have as much contrast as our lives, there is a holy transaction that takes place when I, or anyone, stops to appreciate the value of another human being. I think these holy moments make me more human, too.
Joanna O’Hanlon is an Oroville resident and columnist for North State Voices, which appears each month on www.orovillemr.com
January Column: When it comes, everything changes
By Joanna O’Hanlonchicoer.com
Posted: 01/24/2013 12:03:31 AM PST
Sometimes it comes in a phone call. Sometimes it comes with a knock at the door. Sometimes a doctor delivers it. Sometimes it assaults us. But inevitably, in all of our lives, it comes.
The first time it really came to me in a big way, it came in a phone call.
“Hi Chris,” my mom said as she answered the call from my brother-in-law, excusing herself from the booth at the Carl’s Jr. I watched her through the window with advertisements obstructing my view, but I could see enough to see the color drain from her face and to know, this was it.
That was the first call that changed everything. From that point at about 1 p.m. Saturday until 8:07 the following morning, everything was a timeless blur — an unending car ride, pacing the halls of the hospital, friends and family coming in with hugs and good-intentioned yet false promises. And finally the beep beep beep of the heart monitor went flat, and my older sister was gone. Instead of her fiery, passionate self, a bloated, lifeless body remained.
And nothing’s ever been the same.
Pain, suffering, sickness, death, divorce, disaster. In novels, we call it conflict. In life, though, I don’t know what to call it, because it’s less a literary tactic and more a sinking feeling, a vomiting urge, an overwhelming thought that, “This changes everything.”
Some people are lucky enough to go through much of their adult lives without it ever coming. Others are so familiar with this “conflict” in their lives that they become experts at expecting the unexpected, always guarding themselves.
As I’ve lived in a few different places since graduating high school here in Oroville, and as I’ve met people from all over the world, from my very unscientific assessment, it seems as though Oroville has more than its fair share of conflict in the lives of its residents. I don’t know if it’s because of our socio-economic standing. Or because it’s a small enough town that we just happen to hear about everyone’s bad news. Or maybe it’s just an unexplainable phenomenon that hovers over our town like a dark cloud. But in any case, it seems like “It” is the one thing Orovillians know best.
I’ve been told that in some of the slums of India, babies aren’t given names until they’ve lived to be at least a year old, simply because the likelihood of infant death is so high and it’s emotionally easier to not get attached to an unnamed child.
After my sister’s death, it seemed like people I knew were dropping like flies. I seemed to adopt a similar mentality to those of the mothers in Indian slums — don’t let yourself get too close, and it won’t hurt as much when the bad news comes.
But that’s not true. It still comes, and it still hurts. It can still change everything. I think Oroville has come to learn this, too.
What I love about our town is that when it comes, even though it seems to come so often here, we are still a community. It just takes one look at Table Mountain and noticing that the Oroville “O” is a different letter to know that our town has lost someone new and that we grieve together. Like Italians hang their laundry out of their windows for all to see, we hang our pain on mountain sides, off overpasses, in roadside crosses and colored ribbons on trees.
We may be experts in receiving bad news that breaks us, but at least we’re broken together.
Joanna O’Hanlon is an Oroville resident and columnist for North State Voices, which appears each month on Orovillemr.com
Dear 2013
Dear 2013,
Tell me:
What will you bring me this year?
Will you bring more disasters? More economic and political tensions? More hunger and thirst, not for righteousness, but for basic necessities?
Will you bring peace? New leaders, new followers, new systems? Will you bring new treaties and new wars? New massacres? Will you bring the end of some massacres? Will this be the year you finally deliver up Joseph Kony? Or will this be the year you introduce locals or the world to another one like him?
Will you bring me new hope, new relationships, new ventures? Will you bring the end of things I love? Will you bring the end to things I withstand? Will you end or prolong the waiting? Will you bring new opportunities? Will you bring growth? Will you bring heartache? Will this be the year that you shatter my world in a moment (again), or will you bring me to life? Will you bring new spaces, new faces? Or will you bring me back to people and places I have missed? Will you bring new births? Will you bring new families?
Will you bring the best of times or the worst of times?
And more importantly, will you be bringing more, or taking more away this year?
What will you bring me?
I’ll tell you what I will bring to you.
I will bring all of me for 12 months, no less and no more. I will be present.
I will bring you love – whom I will love I do not entirely know, but I will bring love to the table this year. Loving my neighbors, my friends, my family, the man on the curb and the woman on the street. The child in the store who won’t stop crying, or the mother who lives downstairs. I will bring love.
I will bring you joy – I will not only find joy in things, but I will create it, breathing life into it. This year, I will find, live, and give Joy.
I will bring hard work. I will work hard for important things.
I will bring risk-seizing decisions and actions. I will not back down because of fear. I will leap and stride into new and intimidating things.
I will bring discomfort. I promise to inflict all those whom I can with a righteous indignation for the ways things are and the fact that they were not meant to be this way. I will not let it rest. I will not slip silently into the schemes of comfort. I will bring as much justice and awareness as I can.
I will bring friendship. I don’t know if you will also bring it, but I will be a friend to people… Some who are easy to befriend and others who are not.
I will bring imagination. I will invent and create and imagine the ways things could be.
And on that note, I will bring action. I will not be idle. Imagination, love, faith, good intentions, these are nothing without action. So I will act.
I will bring failure, to be sure. I hope to be attempting things that are too big for me at which I will fail. I hope to be trying enough that failure is inevitable sometimes.
I will bring adventure. No matter how they start or end, I will seek them out, invent them, and invite others along on the journey.
I will bring kindness. In reality I will bring selfishness, but I will try to keep it at bay. I will bring laughter. I will bring arguments (as I hate that I do), but I will also bring resolution. I will bring commitment. I will bring authenticity. I will bring an open heart that is willing to be changed and filled. I will bring not nearly enough, but it will be all that I can give.
And I will bring faith – faith that no matter what you bring, that I will either live on, or I won’t, but that either way, somehow, God is still good.
There it is. I don’t know whether you’ll be a partner or an adversary in my life’s story. I hope you will be kind to me in what your bring. But even if you’re not, I’ll try to bring my best, all the same.
Sincerely,
Jo from 2012