To Seek the Welfare of the City . . .
This past Saturday, our whole downtown cohort was taken on a 24hour immersion adventure in the city of Santa Barbara. Maybe you’re thinking of an infamous, amphibious duck boat tour where you survey the streets below from a respectable distance above while a person in a polo-shirt shouts points of interest into a fuzzy microphone. There was no duck tour or tourist points of interest. Just twelve of us with minds ready to learn and our sharp-as-a whip, gregarious, guide Rich from Uffizi.
The goal was to learn more about the city many of us had been calling ‘home’ since our freshman year. It was surprising how much we did not know about Santa Barbara. From the fact that State street divides the people in Santa Barbara by more than just geographical location to the the average cost of a home in Santa Barbara is 1.3 million —gritty reality was just beneath the surface.
But, we did not jump into these facts right away. The first thing we did was walk and observe. It felt like a strange way to think about changing our city. After all, the whole point of our program was to find societal problems and creatively disrupt environments to solve them. Yet, observation primes the mind to see differently. By looking, we started to see the concrete reality people lived in. By listening, we learned to ask better, simpler questions: How could this happen? Why would the city do this? Why?
Lower East Side. Lower West Side. The Mesa. Upper East Side. We walked through markets, past metal work shops, around breweries and amongst shoppers and tourists. Nothing about the adventure asked us to immediately jump into some kind of charity or activism work. The adventure only asked us to listen, learn, and look. At times, the atmosphere was heavy. At others it seemed contemplative. Perhaps this is what the real work of change actually looks like: seek first to understand.
The day closed with a time of vulnerability where we all took a ‘privilege walk’, and a time of community the next morning where we all spread out between various churches in Santa Barbara. A group of us attended New Covenant Church which met in a loft above CVS and Sur La Table on State Street. The atmosphere was unrehearsed, yet earnest. The attendance was light, but earnest. The words shared were simple and struck my heart. The feeling of family cut through the expectation of churchy formality.
While uncomfortable or indignant with everything we learned over the 24 hours, we stepped off the familiar streets made more concrete by the honest problems. To seek the welfare of a city we are called not to be the savior, but to seek the savior-less. We are called not to solve, but to serve. We are called not to just desire our own welfare, but the welfare of our city by loving its people and using privilege to make problems a possibility.
