Broken Dishes
This simple pattern is made up only of triangles. It showcases the beauty of the fabric you use. Because of its simplicity, it is also perfect for beginners. The pattern comes from the 1800’s, and can be seen in many modern quilts as well.
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Thomas Hargis
Methodist Pastor
Thomas Hargis is a local religious activist who helps build community programs and projects. His lack of sewing experience and religious background made this simple, triangle-based pattern perfect for his interview. We talked about politics, religion, food insecurity, and community during our conversation together.
Let's go ahead and get started. Why don't you start off by telling me your name and why you think I asked you to be here today.
So my name is Thomas Hargis. I am a pastor in the United Methodist tradition and we have a mutual acquaintance. So he and I have a lot in common with how we view the world. I'm guessing that those commonalities created a suggestive that I may be helpful to your project.
What commonalities do you guys share?
Well, I think that we both believe that the community has all the gifts, talents, and resources to solve all of its own problems. And that- I hate the word diversity because I think it's just so...
It's overused.
Thank you.
That sounds like a pitch you may have given before.
[Discussing the logistics of sewing the block]
I am deeply remembering my childhood as, my mother would sew and I had no desire to learn.
She never tried to teach you?
Oh, that was a different question. It's more of the young athletic boy who zero desire to learn.... But so there's a gentleman named Peter Block who is a resident of Cincinnati who I got to know through a course when I was in graduate school, a small university called Duke. So anyway, Peter Block, who ironically is Jewish, has many Christian themes about his writing. And I laugh at him. I said 'you are far more Christian than you are Jewish'. Part of it is the nature by which churches and money exist in a horrific relationship- in my opinion. The churches are some of the largest landholders, possessors of wealth, that don't benefit the community. So, a lot of money stays in New York, in stocks and in other investments, in things like Coca Cola. And while those things aren't necessarily by themselves problematic, (we can have a longer conversation about that), what is problematic to me is that when Granny Smith died and gave her money to the church, she didn't want that money going to Coca-Cola, which turns that into a 25% profit while the church gets 4%. The money was given to do the work of the church, or if you are the Christian persuasion, something that should carry the faith and its practices to fruition. That also means tithing and how money is donated and moved. And so anyway, so Peter block wrote this book called Community about Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati and how the community should function in his ideal. And that was one of his lines that 'the gift of a community that is a true community has all the gifts, talents, and resources to solve all of its own problems'. And it's true because there are so many folks that sit in pews and in synagogues or mosques on a Sunday that don't actualize their potential.
So when you say a community has the tools that it needs, what is your community to you? Is it the people who sit in a room with you every Sunday, is it with the people who live in your town? How would you categorize that?
Well your community by definition can be geographic as you know. I think you're talking about several different layers of community, just like you do family, right? So you have your immediate family, you have your extended family. But as we are experiencing here (to audibly date this), we're in the midst of a small crises with a coronavirus and people are genuinely worried about the health of themselves, but you are only as healthy as the lowest member of your community. So if the lowest member of your community is unable to stay healthy, the probability of you staying healthy becomes much more problematic.
So we're talking both about the coronavirus, eating, breathing, you know, keep on doing all that stuff, and a little bit more.
Well, the idea is that you can make an argument that the person who stays up the street that doesn't live in your neighborhood, quote unquote, isn't a member of your community until something happens. And now all of a sudden that member has a much bigger impact on you, involuntarily, than maybe we're comfortable with. That's why people have subdivisions and estates. I always get a kick out of the estates.
And they bring your food and you pay them off and you keep them alive. And your job is to protect them because they can't protect themselves and you create an opportunity for yourself but never give them the opportunity to have the same opportunities you have. We can go through red lining and all kinds of wonderful conversations about how we keep poor people poor- pawn shops, interest rates, debt, the myth of homeownership, all of those fun things. But the community does, in its either geographical or relationship to nature deal, have everything that it needs. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, especially in North America, churches bought into this myth that the government is responsible for taking care of the people. De Tocqueville was a French philosopher and writer who was awed and amazed at this American ideal where, and I'm paraphrasing here, 'these locals don't wait for the government to take over and to solve their problems. They band together in small groups and they go into a situation and solve the problem themselves at the local level, at the lowest level possible'. And these bands of groups he dubbed citizenry, which is very different than the European King, Queen, whatever, should solve our problems. It's very much in our nature to do good as locals. But somehow the church bought into this myth that the government's responsible for taking care of folks- by and large, you have exceptions obviously. Churches at one time, when people had health issues, they created these things called hospitals, which is why hospitals in our country are completely independent of government control, whereas in other countries, they're not. The hospice movement was created similarly. Ironically you can take this for pro or con, but the modern idea of restorative justice came from the penitentiary where one would go penitent to be reformed, which you can make an argument that that has been completely trashed over. But instead of going to jail as punishment, the idea was going to a penitentiary just to be penitent and to be reformed. So the idea of reformation and reforming somebody, was the goal of the penal system. At one time you can make lots of arguments over history that the Christian faith has not always done such a splendid job of leading in issues of morality. But, specifically in North America, somewhere along the lines, it lost its ability to function strongly as a guiding force. So, that's why I'm a wacko.
Do you think you're a wacko?
Oh, I am. I don't believe that things should be given away for free, which is antithetical to most churches, right? Cause the idea is generosity and giving away and things like that. Are you a Christian by chance?
I was raised Catholic.
Awesome. Well, so was I. So
They're always sharing. It's this constant sharing and living into a perfect balance. Ironically, we're doing triangles [in this quilt block pattern]. So in a community, if one party says to another party, 'hi, I'm giving you this for free', and the other party says, 'well, I don't want it for free. What do I have to offer you?' And the party that was giving the free thing essentially says, 'no, I want nothing back. I just want to give this to you'. What that person is basically saying is 'you have nothing of value to offer me in return'. And there's a few problems with that. One: arrogance. Two: there is always something that someone has a value- whether it's a skill, a story, an experience. So everyone has something to offer another member. So the idea of 'perpetual free' denies the fact that people have unique gifts, offerings, and the unexpected. Some would call that a miracle.
So downstairs you have a couple of piles of food and clothes that you're giving to people. Why don't you tell me what you're getting back from them?
So that requires relationship. We don't advertise 'free'. Someone usually comes in and goes, 'hi, let me tell you my story'. And usually we say, 'Hey, sounds like you need some food'. And the person usually goes, 'I could really use something to eat'. And if that's where the relationship stops, I think that's the problem point. We don't sell those things, but inevitably, 'Hey, would you mind coming and helping us paint next week?' 'I'd love to help you paint'. More often than not, people don't want something for free. People want to feel valued, people want to feel appreciated. People usually have skills. Good example, we run a transition house. The person next door used to be in childcare. They want to be involved in childcare. They had some struggles to where they couldn't on the medical side. The person said, 'Hey look, I want to help. I want to be able to do something'. And so we go, 'well what can you do and what are you good at?' I call it people's burning bushes. What is your burning bush? What are you super excited about and how can we throw gasoline on it? And more often than not, when somebody is standing in a soup line or whatever and no one asks, 'what is your burning bush? What are you gifted and skilled with?' And that's why we've been able to do so much around here. Just cause somebody's burning bush was gardening another person's burning bush was repairing old bicycles and giving them away. You'd be amazed at what you find out people who are 'homeless' or 'indigent' have to offer.
Do you believe in that concept indigence and uselessness?
No, I don't think anyone is useless. I just got finished coaching a basketball team full of autistic kids who were not accepted in other venues to be able to participate in sports. They'd never played organized ball before. So all we did was go, 'Hey, what are each of you good at? And how do we create an environment, an offense, a way to practice, a way to exist as a community to maximize what you're good at and let's hide what you're not'. So the players that couldn't dribble, guess what their job was to catch and shoot. Their job was not to dribble. Those who could dribble, had to know where to dribble, and that was their job. And so from a distance it looks like this harmonious dance. In reality it was lots of practice to find out what people's gifts are and to put them in a position to be most successful. So, no, I don't believe in that. Especially over the course of a lifetime. I think you can get to a point where you really need the community to take care of you more than maybe some others. You know, like a child needs the community to take care of it a lot more. But have you ever taken care of a child for five minutes? You know that the child's giving you a lot as well. The child is teaching you lots of things. Easiest one is patience.
Can you think of a useful lesson you've learned this week? From anyone? Doesn't have to be a kid.
I think I had a good reminder. Don't think I necessarily learned something, but it was a good reminder, which is just as important. A good teacher reminds you of what you already know. Someone had to deal with a very unfortunate person in their life and they called me because I'm the easiest person for them to vent to. Of course I listened. At the end of the call they were just like, 'Hey, you know, thanks for listening. You didn't need to solve the problem. I just needed somebody to talk to'. It's a good reminder for me because sometimes people who are at the tops of totem poles don't think that they need to hit the helper button or to call on someone and vent and such things. Till the day I die. I'll probably have a mentor.
Who's your mentor right now?
Oh, I've got multiple, and they're usually in different disciplines. I'm fascinated with social media and video and that type of a communication because it's just a form of communication. That's one thing that always has to happen. If you can't communicate with people, you're kind of in a tough situation. When your goal is to spread the good news- which at the end of the day is the goal of the church, to remind people of the good news in the midst of darkness -if we're not able to do that in a way that's effective or make an argument, I'm not doing a very good job. So yeah, this person makes lots of money on YouTube for making videos, and I said, 'Hey, I want you to show me your magic'. And so he's been showing me his magic for the last year. I find this fascinating. The quilting is very much a.... I don't know, physical demonstration of an exchange of gifts and value.
To me, a quilt can mean so many things because it's something that takes a very long time to do- just to complete an entire quilt. From every well versed, older quilter I talk to, when you point at one of their pieces of work and you say, 'Hey, that's, that's beautiful, I think that's a really amazing thing that you did' usually what they're going to tell you about is what was happening in their life while they were doing it and the people who helped them to make it. And it's not only a really awesome aesthetic piece of art, but it's also all of those other things.
It's a lived, manifested, shared experience.
Exactly. I think it's great that it seems you apply your philosophy or your beliefs to almost every part of your life.
Well let me ask you, why wouldn't you?
Well, I dunno. Some of the people I was raised with religiously definitely didn't do that.
Most people don't. To be fair. Which is why I'm a wacko.
You seem pretty proud of that label though.
Well, if the word wacko implies abnormal, no, I don't want to be normal because normal is [makes a grand gesture encompassing many things].
That's very true. One of my professors is a horticulturist and his neighbors got pretty mad when he bought a house and tore up his front lawn.
I had to move out of my neighborhood because they were not too thrilled.
Do you have a large garden at home too?
Yeah. So I am at year two and the first thing that you do is you have to grow the soil. If you grow the soil you can grow any plant you want. So I moved in the middle of the winter. Season one was about growing the soil. So now we cordoned off a huge back portion of my backyard. We haven't approached the front yard yet, because we want to get the backyard squared away first. But yes, we will be growing quite a bit. I grew in my basement during the winter. Which is just as fun. So how do you and Aaron [our mutual friend] have such things in common that he thought that I might be a good, interesting person to chat with?
I know Aaron through mutual friends. I'm good friends with his wife Jess. She's great. She also loves gardening. She's got a little garden in her kitchen. But I was talking to them about my project and I've just been talking to Aaron and Jess about the tumultuous time in my life that I've been going through. They are wonderful listeners. They're really good people and they thought that you might be interested in being part of this project.
Thank you for the invite.
Yeah, I'm glad that you could make the time. I know that some people, when they hear it's a thesis project or it's a capstone project, they get a little bit scared off, a little bit alienated or worried. You know, they think I'm asking them for something for nothing. I'm glad talking to you that you seem to not share that concern.
I think the experience is just as much a part of the whole thing. Which is why I first asked 'Hey, do you want to do a zoom call', which is usually the easiest way of communicating. Now, face to face is much better than just having a phone call. But this is an interesting theological, more than it is a philosophical, point. But you cannot have online communion. It doesn't work. You're sitting in a house all by yourself and you're watching it on TV and somebody says the magic Juju words. I grew up in new Orleans, so Juju is like this voodoo term, right? So they say the magic, Juju terms and it is what it is. But communion comes from community, which comes from the tactile breaking and handing that you don't actually serve yourself communion. Somebody has to serve it to you. So the very nature of doing this means you have to teach me and I have to participate. There is a bit of mutual sharing in this very unique project of yours. So yes, I find it heavily intriguing and definitely worth the experience.
I'm glad. Do you have any other particular topics that you would like to share with the community that will be hearing this?
I do find it fascinating- you're in architecture?
Industrial design.
Industrial design. I apologize. So what do you want to do when you grow up with this industrial design degree?
I went to college expecting to design products and go work at P&G, maybe make home goods, stuff like that. Then through my courses they offer you five work studies. So I have almost two years of actual work experience at this point. So many of the traditional industry jobs I had really hurt me. Like I didn't love them. They made me feel pretty bad. I never felt like I was actually adding anything to the world. It felt a lot like adding garbage to the world. So this project, if you talk to someone else at my school, is pretty out there. Pretty crazy. Cause I'm not really designing an object. Right? I'm not doing that thing that is what we're trying to produce in the world. But I think that I can take the considerations that you learn when you're designing an object, you know, thinking of people's needs, thinking of people's wants. Meeting people where they're at is a big part of the design process. That's what we call user centered design. And it's very important. We have lectures and classes and all sorts of things about it. And I think I can take those skills and apply them to something that I do care about and that I'm interested in doing. So when I graduate, I might work at a coffee shop and do more stuff like this. I'm not sure. I might teach. I just want to make sure that I'm not going to a job everyday where I think I'm subtracting more than I'm adding.
It's not quite a zero sum game but I understand your point.
No, it's not.
What I find fascinating about this is you've interviewed four people so far. And you're going to have a total of 29. That's a lot of people. I'm probably one of the only pastors you'll interview. So the scripture has this very simplistic yet complicated movement. It's called call and response. People cry up to God and go, 'my life sucks. Fix it'. And then God responds. Pharaoh, poverty, overreaching, government leaders, weapons, whatever you want to define as sin, (another long topic all to itself). But there's always a cry. There's always a cry of lament. And then the response should be the good news of what should answer that cry of lament. So if you're producing crap to just fill people's lives, to distract them from the thing that may or may not need solving, I would agree. I would find my soul dying in that place. And yet, why do I have a garden out front?
Are you asking me? You have a garden out front so that you can show something that you're doing.
It's because someone said they were hungry. So what do you do with someone who's hungry? Feed them right? Jesus's feeding of the 5,000 has this really great moment. My favorite image of Jesus is what I call face palm Jesus. And it's usually where Jesus is trying his best to explain something. People read it on a Sunday, it's like, 'and Jesus said, and Peter said...' Read it like a novel and read it in the emotional context of what's happening. And you can do that a lot better. I think it's great because they can choose to use one set of words and they use another, which implies some inflection. And Jesus is constantly frustrated, which is why face palm Jesus is great. I can hear him just teach and then go, ' ugh okay, let's try this again'.
You can almost see him just like throw the bread. Like it's not that hard. Just just go do this. And his act of doing it first demonstrated that it was okay for everyone else to do it. And you can make the argument that the real miracle that happened there was people became generous in their abundance. Instead of hoarding. 'We're out in the middle of the desert. I gotta protect what I have'. And then at the end they have way more than what they really needed because if people quit hoarding because someone's hungry, it's really not that complicated. You feed them. Someone needs childcare. What do you do? Just start a childcare center. Somebody needs housing. You just provide housing. Somebody needs bikes in the community. Somebody went, 'Hey, I want to fix bikes'. Ministry and helping people is not that hard. Product design. It's why people created apps. Somebody's going to cry and you'll hear cry of lament. And that is an incredibly useful thing to solve.
How do you decide what you're going to solve? Something you said was Jesus showed them that it's okay to do this. This is the way that you do this. I think a lot of people who have big hearts who care about what they see can get so overwhelmed by the amount of need that they see. So how do you decide what you're going to address?
You have to realize that you are never going to solve everything, every problem. Your question about 'who is your community' is an interesting one. Everyone has fears of how they function and live. We're very finite individuals. I used to be a ward of a federal prison. I had a very nice freaking bonus. It was so good. The job killed me because I wasn't really allowed to do nearly as much as I wanted it to do for the folks that I was attempting to serve. Keyword there on the 'attempting' to serve things, right? The more you want to dive in into the reality of how people live and function, you'll find out real quick that some of these are systematic problems that will never get resolved. The question is how can a small group of people all live together in a way that creates mutuality, but at the same time, genuine conversations about lament that 'this kills me and there's nothing I can do about it'? There's lots of things I would love to solve. I'd love to flip cars. We flip houses because housing is huge, but transportation is a huge thing. It's true that there are lots of things that I would love to do, but sometimes you do them as what's called a sign act in scripture. They don't really talk about it in Sunday school. Profits would normally do something that's so outlandish that it makes people stop. It's kind of like what comedians do. They make a joke that's so outlandish that you laugh at it until you leave the theater and then you hear that joke again in your mind. You go, 'there might be something to that joke that's a lot more than just the humor'. So they would pack their bags. One of them would pack his bags and he'd throw all of his luggage out in the middle of the street and he would just say, 'why don't we just move away? If we're not interested in living as a community, let's just pack it all up'. And then he would just flail himself on the streets. And sometimes you have to do something that, even if it fails, it's something that causes you to set a precedent that lets everyone else know that it's okay to be the second guy or the third guy. Do you know who the first search engine of the internet was? Wasn't Google. Alta Vista. Yahoo was second and Google was the third or fourth. It wasn't the first. And sometimes failure isn't what everyone else appears to make it seem. Some things are economically not advantageous, but they are precedent breaking. I don't think Tesla is the first electric car manufacturer.
They made it look pretty though.
Because Apple was the first one to make phones pretty, which gave a car maker permission.
Funny you bring that up. We say all the time, Apple is not a computer company. They're a design company. They are a design company that happens to make computers. Yeah. So why did you become a warden?
Um, the short version is, I got burned out with industrial church. I walked away and so somebody said, 'Hey, you seem like a nice person. You should teach life skills to inmates'. Their words. I said, 'fine, I'll do that for a little while'. And I did that and I worked part time on a Senator who was a nice guy and he was running for a high office and I decided to work in the field in North Carolina. And then that Senator eventually got elected president. He was a very nice guy, met him twice. Um, and it taught me a lot about building community and what the aspirations of hope could look like, even if it's not actualized. It's powerful just to name it and point to it, even if you can't get it done at the level that they wanted to get it. So yeah, somebody offered me a position to move up and become a warden where I can make a bigger and bigger difference until I hit a glass ceiling to where the machine loved their rules more than they love the actualization of doing something new and different. And if you want something new and different, you gotta kind of go and do it on your own because the risk is yours. But the reward is also much bigger. Institutions are risk adverse. So are corporations.
I think that's part of the frustration some people will have with it. I'm going to take some pictures. You look so serious.
That's one thing I hate about very serious designers is they want to convince you that users are stupid. The people who buy your products, they do not know what they need. They do not know what they like. They do not know what they want. You're gonna show them. I think that to an extent that can be true. Like you have to create a trend for it to exist and you have to show people the possibilities. You know, I want a faster horse, not a car. You have to fix that in a certain way. But I think it's very true that people know what they need and if you pay enough attention, they'll let you know.
True. Now they may not be able to communicate it. And I think that's maybe the differential. Back to the video thing. We have the largest supply of what people need than ever because we have Google. People are saying what they think they need. Now, what's the best mental health medication? That's what people say that they need. Sometimes you have to give them what they say they need to get them to a point where you can give them what they really need, which is you need some therapy. You need to work on this issue, not try to self medicate. So I think there is some truth in it that you have to get people there. I can talk to people about scripture, I can teach them to fix a car or flip a house. But if they're hungry, they don't give a care about whether or not a house is crooked or not. They're hungry. So
Most of them. I think that's very true. Thank you so much for meeting with me today.
Thank you for this experience.
So my name is Thomas Hargis. I am a pastor in the United Methodist tradition and we have a mutual acquaintance. So he and I have a lot in common with how we view the world. I'm guessing that those commonalities created a suggestive that I may be helpful to your project.
What commonalities do you guys share?
Well, I think that we both believe that the community has all the gifts, talents, and resources to solve all of its own problems. And that- I hate the word diversity because I think it's just so...
It's overused.
Thank you.
I THINK THE COMMUNITY, WHEN IT RECOGNIZES GIFTS, TALENTS, AND RESOURCES THAT IT NEEDS, SUDDENLY REALIZES THAT IT LIVES MUCH MORE IN ABUNDANCE THAN IT DOES IN SCARCITY.
That sounds like a pitch you may have given before.
[Discussing the logistics of sewing the block]
I am deeply remembering my childhood as, my mother would sew and I had no desire to learn.
She never tried to teach you?
Oh, that was a different question. It's more of the young athletic boy who zero desire to learn.... But so there's a gentleman named Peter Block who is a resident of Cincinnati who I got to know through a course when I was in graduate school, a small university called Duke. So anyway, Peter Block, who ironically is Jewish, has many Christian themes about his writing. And I laugh at him. I said 'you are far more Christian than you are Jewish'. Part of it is the nature by which churches and money exist in a horrific relationship- in my opinion. The churches are some of the largest landholders, possessors of wealth, that don't benefit the community. So, a lot of money stays in New York, in stocks and in other investments, in things like Coca Cola. And while those things aren't necessarily by themselves problematic, (we can have a longer conversation about that), what is problematic to me is that when Granny Smith died and gave her money to the church, she didn't want that money going to Coca-Cola, which turns that into a 25% profit while the church gets 4%. The money was given to do the work of the church, or if you are the Christian persuasion, something that should carry the faith and its practices to fruition. That also means tithing and how money is donated and moved. And so anyway, so Peter block wrote this book called Community about Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati and how the community should function in his ideal. And that was one of his lines that 'the gift of a community that is a true community has all the gifts, talents, and resources to solve all of its own problems'. And it's true because there are so many folks that sit in pews and in synagogues or mosques on a Sunday that don't actualize their potential.
So when you say a community has the tools that it needs, what is your community to you? Is it the people who sit in a room with you every Sunday, is it with the people who live in your town? How would you categorize that?
Well your community by definition can be geographic as you know. I think you're talking about several different layers of community, just like you do family, right? So you have your immediate family, you have your extended family. But as we are experiencing here (to audibly date this), we're in the midst of a small crises with a coronavirus and people are genuinely worried about the health of themselves, but you are only as healthy as the lowest member of your community. So if the lowest member of your community is unable to stay healthy, the probability of you staying healthy becomes much more problematic.
So we're talking both about the coronavirus, eating, breathing, you know, keep on doing all that stuff, and a little bit more.
Well, the idea is that you can make an argument that the person who stays up the street that doesn't live in your neighborhood, quote unquote, isn't a member of your community until something happens. And now all of a sudden that member has a much bigger impact on you, involuntarily, than maybe we're comfortable with. That's why people have subdivisions and estates. I always get a kick out of the estates.
EVERYBODY WANTS TO HAVE AN ESTATE WHERE WE DON'T SEE THE POOR PEOPLE WHO GROW OUR FOOD OUT IN THE DISTANCE. WE WANT TO HAVE A FRONT YARD, WHICH SIMULATES THE SPACE BETWEEN THE ARISTOCRACY, THE VERY RICH, WHO HAVE THE PLEBEIAN PEOPLE WAY OUT IN THE DISTANCE THAT YOU DON'T LITERALLY SMELL NOR SEE.
And they bring your food and you pay them off and you keep them alive. And your job is to protect them because they can't protect themselves and you create an opportunity for yourself but never give them the opportunity to have the same opportunities you have. We can go through red lining and all kinds of wonderful conversations about how we keep poor people poor- pawn shops, interest rates, debt, the myth of homeownership, all of those fun things. But the community does, in its either geographical or relationship to nature deal, have everything that it needs. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, especially in North America, churches bought into this myth that the government is responsible for taking care of the people. De Tocqueville was a French philosopher and writer who was awed and amazed at this American ideal where, and I'm paraphrasing here, 'these locals don't wait for the government to take over and to solve their problems. They band together in small groups and they go into a situation and solve the problem themselves at the local level, at the lowest level possible'. And these bands of groups he dubbed citizenry, which is very different than the European King, Queen, whatever, should solve our problems. It's very much in our nature to do good as locals. But somehow the church bought into this myth that the government's responsible for taking care of folks- by and large, you have exceptions obviously. Churches at one time, when people had health issues, they created these things called hospitals, which is why hospitals in our country are completely independent of government control, whereas in other countries, they're not. The hospice movement was created similarly. Ironically you can take this for pro or con, but the modern idea of restorative justice came from the penitentiary where one would go penitent to be reformed, which you can make an argument that that has been completely trashed over. But instead of going to jail as punishment, the idea was going to a penitentiary just to be penitent and to be reformed. So the idea of reformation and reforming somebody, was the goal of the penal system. At one time you can make lots of arguments over history that the Christian faith has not always done such a splendid job of leading in issues of morality. But, specifically in North America, somewhere along the lines, it lost its ability to function strongly as a guiding force. So, that's why I'm a wacko.
Do you think you're a wacko?
Oh, I am. I don't believe that things should be given away for free, which is antithetical to most churches, right? Cause the idea is generosity and giving away and things like that. Are you a Christian by chance?
I was raised Catholic.
Awesome. Well, so was I. So
THE IDEA OF THE TRINITY- FATHER, SON, HOLY SPIRIT- THEY'RE ALL EQUAL. BECAUSE THEY'RE EQUAL, ONE PARTY DOES NOT GIVE TO THE OTHER TWO. THERE'S A MUTUAL SHARING AND RECEPTION AND THERE'S THIS CONSTANT DANCE. IT'S CALLED THE PERICHORESIS. IT'S A LONG WORD, BUT THE IDEA IS THAT THERE IS THIS DANCE THAT HAPPENS WHERE IT ALL JUST KIND OF FLOWS. IT'S THE OPTIMAL MODEL OF COMMUNITY THAT EACH IS ALWAYS ON THE SAME MISSION.
They're always sharing. It's this constant sharing and living into a perfect balance. Ironically, we're doing triangles [in this quilt block pattern]. So in a community, if one party says to another party, 'hi, I'm giving you this for free', and the other party says, 'well, I don't want it for free. What do I have to offer you?' And the party that was giving the free thing essentially says, 'no, I want nothing back. I just want to give this to you'. What that person is basically saying is 'you have nothing of value to offer me in return'. And there's a few problems with that. One: arrogance. Two: there is always something that someone has a value- whether it's a skill, a story, an experience. So everyone has something to offer another member. So the idea of 'perpetual free' denies the fact that people have unique gifts, offerings, and the unexpected. Some would call that a miracle.
So downstairs you have a couple of piles of food and clothes that you're giving to people. Why don't you tell me what you're getting back from them?
So that requires relationship. We don't advertise 'free'. Someone usually comes in and goes, 'hi, let me tell you my story'. And usually we say, 'Hey, sounds like you need some food'. And the person usually goes, 'I could really use something to eat'. And if that's where the relationship stops, I think that's the problem point. We don't sell those things, but inevitably, 'Hey, would you mind coming and helping us paint next week?' 'I'd love to help you paint'. More often than not, people don't want something for free. People want to feel valued, people want to feel appreciated. People usually have skills. Good example, we run a transition house. The person next door used to be in childcare. They want to be involved in childcare. They had some struggles to where they couldn't on the medical side. The person said, 'Hey look, I want to help. I want to be able to do something'. And so we go, 'well what can you do and what are you good at?' I call it people's burning bushes. What is your burning bush? What are you super excited about and how can we throw gasoline on it? And more often than not, when somebody is standing in a soup line or whatever and no one asks, 'what is your burning bush? What are you gifted and skilled with?' And that's why we've been able to do so much around here. Just cause somebody's burning bush was gardening another person's burning bush was repairing old bicycles and giving them away. You'd be amazed at what you find out people who are 'homeless' or 'indigent' have to offer.
Do you believe in that concept indigence and uselessness?
No, I don't think anyone is useless. I just got finished coaching a basketball team full of autistic kids who were not accepted in other venues to be able to participate in sports. They'd never played organized ball before. So all we did was go, 'Hey, what are each of you good at? And how do we create an environment, an offense, a way to practice, a way to exist as a community to maximize what you're good at and let's hide what you're not'. So the players that couldn't dribble, guess what their job was to catch and shoot. Their job was not to dribble. Those who could dribble, had to know where to dribble, and that was their job. And so from a distance it looks like this harmonious dance. In reality it was lots of practice to find out what people's gifts are and to put them in a position to be most successful. So, no, I don't believe in that. Especially over the course of a lifetime. I think you can get to a point where you really need the community to take care of you more than maybe some others. You know, like a child needs the community to take care of it a lot more. But have you ever taken care of a child for five minutes? You know that the child's giving you a lot as well. The child is teaching you lots of things. Easiest one is patience.
Can you think of a useful lesson you've learned this week? From anyone? Doesn't have to be a kid.
I think I had a good reminder. Don't think I necessarily learned something, but it was a good reminder, which is just as important. A good teacher reminds you of what you already know. Someone had to deal with a very unfortunate person in their life and they called me because I'm the easiest person for them to vent to. Of course I listened. At the end of the call they were just like, 'Hey, you know, thanks for listening. You didn't need to solve the problem. I just needed somebody to talk to'. It's a good reminder for me because sometimes people who are at the tops of totem poles don't think that they need to hit the helper button or to call on someone and vent and such things. Till the day I die. I'll probably have a mentor.
Who's your mentor right now?
Oh, I've got multiple, and they're usually in different disciplines. I'm fascinated with social media and video and that type of a communication because it's just a form of communication. That's one thing that always has to happen. If you can't communicate with people, you're kind of in a tough situation. When your goal is to spread the good news- which at the end of the day is the goal of the church, to remind people of the good news in the midst of darkness -if we're not able to do that in a way that's effective or make an argument, I'm not doing a very good job. So yeah, this person makes lots of money on YouTube for making videos, and I said, 'Hey, I want you to show me your magic'. And so he's been showing me his magic for the last year. I find this fascinating. The quilting is very much a.... I don't know, physical demonstration of an exchange of gifts and value.
To me, a quilt can mean so many things because it's something that takes a very long time to do- just to complete an entire quilt. From every well versed, older quilter I talk to, when you point at one of their pieces of work and you say, 'Hey, that's, that's beautiful, I think that's a really amazing thing that you did' usually what they're going to tell you about is what was happening in their life while they were doing it and the people who helped them to make it. And it's not only a really awesome aesthetic piece of art, but it's also all of those other things.
It's a lived, manifested, shared experience.
Exactly. I think it's great that it seems you apply your philosophy or your beliefs to almost every part of your life.
Well let me ask you, why wouldn't you?
Well, I dunno. Some of the people I was raised with religiously definitely didn't do that.
Most people don't. To be fair. Which is why I'm a wacko.
You seem pretty proud of that label though.
Well, if the word wacko implies abnormal, no, I don't want to be normal because normal is [makes a grand gesture encompassing many things].
YOU HAVE TO BE A LITTLE BIT NUTTY TO TELL PEOPLE THAT YOU WANT TO TAKE UP ALL THE GRASS IN FRONT OF THE FRONT YARD AND PLANT CROPS INSTEAD OF GROWING GRASS. BECAUSE GRASS MEANS THAT YOU ARE TELLING THE COMMUNITY THAT THE COMMUNITY HAS ALL THE FOOD THAT THEY NEED, WHICH IS WHY YOU CAN GROW THIS AESTHETIC OUT FRONT.
That's very true. One of my professors is a horticulturist and his neighbors got pretty mad when he bought a house and tore up his front lawn.
I had to move out of my neighborhood because they were not too thrilled.
Do you have a large garden at home too?
Yeah. So I am at year two and the first thing that you do is you have to grow the soil. If you grow the soil you can grow any plant you want. So I moved in the middle of the winter. Season one was about growing the soil. So now we cordoned off a huge back portion of my backyard. We haven't approached the front yard yet, because we want to get the backyard squared away first. But yes, we will be growing quite a bit. I grew in my basement during the winter. Which is just as fun. So how do you and Aaron [our mutual friend] have such things in common that he thought that I might be a good, interesting person to chat with?
I know Aaron through mutual friends. I'm good friends with his wife Jess. She's great. She also loves gardening. She's got a little garden in her kitchen. But I was talking to them about my project and I've just been talking to Aaron and Jess about the tumultuous time in my life that I've been going through. They are wonderful listeners. They're really good people and they thought that you might be interested in being part of this project.
Thank you for the invite.
Yeah, I'm glad that you could make the time. I know that some people, when they hear it's a thesis project or it's a capstone project, they get a little bit scared off, a little bit alienated or worried. You know, they think I'm asking them for something for nothing. I'm glad talking to you that you seem to not share that concern.
I think the experience is just as much a part of the whole thing. Which is why I first asked 'Hey, do you want to do a zoom call', which is usually the easiest way of communicating. Now, face to face is much better than just having a phone call. But this is an interesting theological, more than it is a philosophical, point. But you cannot have online communion. It doesn't work. You're sitting in a house all by yourself and you're watching it on TV and somebody says the magic Juju words. I grew up in new Orleans, so Juju is like this voodoo term, right? So they say the magic, Juju terms and it is what it is. But communion comes from community, which comes from the tactile breaking and handing that you don't actually serve yourself communion. Somebody has to serve it to you. So the very nature of doing this means you have to teach me and I have to participate. There is a bit of mutual sharing in this very unique project of yours. So yes, I find it heavily intriguing and definitely worth the experience.
I'm glad. Do you have any other particular topics that you would like to share with the community that will be hearing this?
I do find it fascinating- you're in architecture?
Industrial design.
Industrial design. I apologize. So what do you want to do when you grow up with this industrial design degree?
I went to college expecting to design products and go work at P&G, maybe make home goods, stuff like that. Then through my courses they offer you five work studies. So I have almost two years of actual work experience at this point. So many of the traditional industry jobs I had really hurt me. Like I didn't love them. They made me feel pretty bad. I never felt like I was actually adding anything to the world. It felt a lot like adding garbage to the world. So this project, if you talk to someone else at my school, is pretty out there. Pretty crazy. Cause I'm not really designing an object. Right? I'm not doing that thing that is what we're trying to produce in the world. But I think that I can take the considerations that you learn when you're designing an object, you know, thinking of people's needs, thinking of people's wants. Meeting people where they're at is a big part of the design process. That's what we call user centered design. And it's very important. We have lectures and classes and all sorts of things about it. And I think I can take those skills and apply them to something that I do care about and that I'm interested in doing. So when I graduate, I might work at a coffee shop and do more stuff like this. I'm not sure. I might teach. I just want to make sure that I'm not going to a job everyday where I think I'm subtracting more than I'm adding.
It's not quite a zero sum game but I understand your point.
No, it's not.
What I find fascinating about this is you've interviewed four people so far. And you're going to have a total of 29. That's a lot of people. I'm probably one of the only pastors you'll interview. So the scripture has this very simplistic yet complicated movement. It's called call and response. People cry up to God and go, 'my life sucks. Fix it'. And then God responds. Pharaoh, poverty, overreaching, government leaders, weapons, whatever you want to define as sin, (another long topic all to itself). But there's always a cry. There's always a cry of lament. And then the response should be the good news of what should answer that cry of lament. So if you're producing crap to just fill people's lives, to distract them from the thing that may or may not need solving, I would agree. I would find my soul dying in that place. And yet, why do I have a garden out front?
Are you asking me? You have a garden out front so that you can show something that you're doing.
It's because someone said they were hungry. So what do you do with someone who's hungry? Feed them right? Jesus's feeding of the 5,000 has this really great moment. My favorite image of Jesus is what I call face palm Jesus. And it's usually where Jesus is trying his best to explain something. People read it on a Sunday, it's like, 'and Jesus said, and Peter said...' Read it like a novel and read it in the emotional context of what's happening. And you can do that a lot better. I think it's great because they can choose to use one set of words and they use another, which implies some inflection. And Jesus is constantly frustrated, which is why face palm Jesus is great. I can hear him just teach and then go, ' ugh okay, let's try this again'.
SO THERE'S THIS MOMENT WHERE PEOPLE ARE HUNGRY AND THEY'RE ON THE MOUNTAINSIDE AND THEY'RE AWAY FROM EVERYTHING. AND THEY RUN TO JESUS WITH THE CRY OF LAMENT AND THEY'RE LIKE, 'HEY, LOOK, THERE'S A LOT OF PEOPLE HERE. WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY. IT WOULD TAKE TOO MUCH MONEY. WE DON'T HAVE THE MONEY. WE CAN'T FEED THEM'. AND JESUS SIMPLY TURNS TO THEM AND SAYS, 'WELL JUST FEED THEM'. AND THEN THEY STAND BEWILDERED. AND THEN HE GRABS THE FIVE LOAVES AND TWO FISH FROM A BOY WHO THEY PREVIOUSLY SAID, 'WHAT GOOD ARE THESE THINGS WHEN WE HAVE SO MANY PEOPLE?' AND HE SIMPLY DOES THE MOST ELEMENTARY THING POSSIBLE. HE TAKES THE BREAD, HE BREAKS IT, AND HE JUST STARTS HANDING IT OUT.
You can almost see him just like throw the bread. Like it's not that hard. Just just go do this. And his act of doing it first demonstrated that it was okay for everyone else to do it. And you can make the argument that the real miracle that happened there was people became generous in their abundance. Instead of hoarding. 'We're out in the middle of the desert. I gotta protect what I have'. And then at the end they have way more than what they really needed because if people quit hoarding because someone's hungry, it's really not that complicated. You feed them. Someone needs childcare. What do you do? Just start a childcare center. Somebody needs housing. You just provide housing. Somebody needs bikes in the community. Somebody went, 'Hey, I want to fix bikes'. Ministry and helping people is not that hard. Product design. It's why people created apps. Somebody's going to cry and you'll hear cry of lament. And that is an incredibly useful thing to solve.
How do you decide what you're going to solve? Something you said was Jesus showed them that it's okay to do this. This is the way that you do this. I think a lot of people who have big hearts who care about what they see can get so overwhelmed by the amount of need that they see. So how do you decide what you're going to address?
You have to realize that you are never going to solve everything, every problem. Your question about 'who is your community' is an interesting one. Everyone has fears of how they function and live. We're very finite individuals. I used to be a ward of a federal prison. I had a very nice freaking bonus. It was so good. The job killed me because I wasn't really allowed to do nearly as much as I wanted it to do for the folks that I was attempting to serve. Keyword there on the 'attempting' to serve things, right? The more you want to dive in into the reality of how people live and function, you'll find out real quick that some of these are systematic problems that will never get resolved. The question is how can a small group of people all live together in a way that creates mutuality, but at the same time, genuine conversations about lament that 'this kills me and there's nothing I can do about it'? There's lots of things I would love to solve. I'd love to flip cars. We flip houses because housing is huge, but transportation is a huge thing. It's true that there are lots of things that I would love to do, but sometimes you do them as what's called a sign act in scripture. They don't really talk about it in Sunday school. Profits would normally do something that's so outlandish that it makes people stop. It's kind of like what comedians do. They make a joke that's so outlandish that you laugh at it until you leave the theater and then you hear that joke again in your mind. You go, 'there might be something to that joke that's a lot more than just the humor'. So they would pack their bags. One of them would pack his bags and he'd throw all of his luggage out in the middle of the street and he would just say, 'why don't we just move away? If we're not interested in living as a community, let's just pack it all up'. And then he would just flail himself on the streets. And sometimes you have to do something that, even if it fails, it's something that causes you to set a precedent that lets everyone else know that it's okay to be the second guy or the third guy. Do you know who the first search engine of the internet was? Wasn't Google. Alta Vista. Yahoo was second and Google was the third or fourth. It wasn't the first. And sometimes failure isn't what everyone else appears to make it seem. Some things are economically not advantageous, but they are precedent breaking. I don't think Tesla is the first electric car manufacturer.
They made it look pretty though.
Because Apple was the first one to make phones pretty, which gave a car maker permission.
Funny you bring that up. We say all the time, Apple is not a computer company. They're a design company. They are a design company that happens to make computers. Yeah. So why did you become a warden?
Um, the short version is, I got burned out with industrial church. I walked away and so somebody said, 'Hey, you seem like a nice person. You should teach life skills to inmates'. Their words. I said, 'fine, I'll do that for a little while'. And I did that and I worked part time on a Senator who was a nice guy and he was running for a high office and I decided to work in the field in North Carolina. And then that Senator eventually got elected president. He was a very nice guy, met him twice. Um, and it taught me a lot about building community and what the aspirations of hope could look like, even if it's not actualized. It's powerful just to name it and point to it, even if you can't get it done at the level that they wanted to get it. So yeah, somebody offered me a position to move up and become a warden where I can make a bigger and bigger difference until I hit a glass ceiling to where the machine loved their rules more than they love the actualization of doing something new and different. And if you want something new and different, you gotta kind of go and do it on your own because the risk is yours. But the reward is also much bigger. Institutions are risk adverse. So are corporations.
I think that's part of the frustration some people will have with it. I'm going to take some pictures. You look so serious.
THIS IS A SERIOUS THING! I WOULD EVEN ARGUE THIS IS A SACRED THING THAT HAPPENED. IT'S JUST BEAUTIFUL. AT THE END OF THE DAY, YOU WILL HAVE A PRODUCT THAT WAS INFORMED BY THE COMMUNITY. I WOULD SAY THAT'S A VERY BIBLICAL THING. SO WHOEVER APPROVED IT, I APPROVED. AND I THINK THIS IS DESIGN. I THINK GOOD DESIGN IS WHEN PEOPLE ARE ALREADY TELLING YOU WHAT THEY WANT. THEY JUST DON'T HAVE THE CAPACITY TO PUT IT TOGETHER.
That's one thing I hate about very serious designers is they want to convince you that users are stupid. The people who buy your products, they do not know what they need. They do not know what they like. They do not know what they want. You're gonna show them. I think that to an extent that can be true. Like you have to create a trend for it to exist and you have to show people the possibilities. You know, I want a faster horse, not a car. You have to fix that in a certain way. But I think it's very true that people know what they need and if you pay enough attention, they'll let you know.
True. Now they may not be able to communicate it. And I think that's maybe the differential. Back to the video thing. We have the largest supply of what people need than ever because we have Google. People are saying what they think they need. Now, what's the best mental health medication? That's what people say that they need. Sometimes you have to give them what they say they need to get them to a point where you can give them what they really need, which is you need some therapy. You need to work on this issue, not try to self medicate. So I think there is some truth in it that you have to get people there. I can talk to people about scripture, I can teach them to fix a car or flip a house. But if they're hungry, they don't give a care about whether or not a house is crooked or not. They're hungry. So
SOMETIMES YOU'VE GOT TO MEET PEOPLE'S NEEDS, MEET THEM WHERE THEY ARE TO BRING THEM TO SOMEPLACE ELSE. SO IT'S THE BALANCE. LIFE IS HORRIBLY ABOUT BALANCE AND INSTITUTIONS AND CORPORATIONS ARE PRETTY SET ON WHAT THEY LIKE TO DO. MOST OF THEM ANYWAY.
Most of them. I think that's very true. Thank you so much for meeting with me today.
Thank you for this experience.