A G K Y R A

The part of Manhattan I live in is characterized by congregation. The people in my neighborhood are mostly white. They tend to be young, single, and educated, although there are plenty of married couples and small families as well. Opera singers, cellists, and other professional musicians have congregated here and are way over-represented compared to the general population. The neighborhood is clean and usually quiet.

Three blocks east it’s a different matter. That neighborhood is almost entirely Dominican and Puerto Rican, and as soon as you cross the street that everyone knows to mark the line between where the whites and the Dominicans live, the scene completely changes. It becomes filthy and loud. The filth is mainly due to litter. Many Dominicans, it seems, have no compunctions against throwing their trash on the street. I see it every day. That’s not the sole cause of the litter. The Dominican neighborhood is more crowded than the white neighborhood, and it gets more foot traffic since it surrounds the area’s main commercial streets, all of which means that the trash cans fill up quickly on the weekends, and the garbage that overflows onto the streets gets kicked or blown around. The main cause, though, seems to be people throwing trash on the ground. The neighborhood is loud because Dominicans love music (particularly bachata), and everyone seems to appreciate it if someone opens up a window and blasts bachata music onto the street below. The Dominicans also love to hang out together on the sidewalk. On a hot day, for example, the older men set up card tables on the sidewalk and pass the day from morning until late at night playing dominoes and listening to music.

My wife and I chose to live in the neighborhood we do in part because it’s clean and quiet. Apartments in the Dominican neighborhood cost a little less, but I’m very sensitive to noise. The Dominicans don’t mind trash blowing around, and they love to hear music all the time. At least that’s what I gather.

When I used to live in southern California, my church rented its facility to a Korean Presbyterian church that would meet after us in the late morning. When I first learned that, I remember wondering why we didn’t all meet together. Why should the whites and the Koreans segregate themselves? We are one in Christ, and we should reflect that by worshiping together as a single congregation. That got me thinking about how little groups would form within our congregation itself, not by race (we were mostly all white) but by age. After the Sunday service, three or four men in their 40s would talk to each other, coffee cups in hand, and several of the seniors would chat over crumb cake. The younger women would be over here, and the young men over there. We’re all brothers and sisters in Christ, so shouldn’t we mix it up a bit and all talk to each other? It’s not that we wouldn’t smile and greet each other, or exchange a few pleasant words, but just that I thought there should be a deeper level of interaction among Christians of different ages and backgrounds.

I matured some in my thinking since then and came to realize that we just are one in Christ, whether we’re engaging in small talk with each other after church or not. There are Christians in China that I will never meet in this life, but will visit and eat with when the earth is renewed. Unfortunately, I have never had a chance to talk to or worship with a Christian who was alive in the 18th century. But I expect to.

The whites and the Koreans who meet in the same building within one hour of each other are part of one universal church and share a common hope regardless of whether they worship as a single congregation. What’s more, I realized that the discomfort I felt, as a young man in his early 20s, when trying to break into a conversation among men in their late 50s was probably also felt by them. Why the discomfort? I didn’t know what to talk to them about, and they didn’t know what to talk to me about. The Koreans, too, preferred the company of other Koreans. They were more comfortable being around them because they had so much in common, and so the time they spent together was more relaxed and enjoyable for them. Isn’t that just what it is like at a party? At a good party, people are open to each other and mingle freely. But at some parties, people feel uncomfortable or unprepared to socialize, and they form little cliques of established friends. It’s nothing against the other people, just the natural affinity they already have for each other.

I write all this to point out what should be obvious: people freely and naturally associate with other people with whom they share things in common. Those commonalities are especially important to people who are in a foreign environment. That’s why, here in New York, my wife gets invitations to Virginia Tech football parties (she’s an alum), and why Belgians have their own expatriate club that meets every month, even if they don’t all live in a particular Belgian neighborhood.

The kind of congregating that happens naturally because people share something in common is good. This is inclusive congregation, and it’s at the heart of community and society. Exclusive congregation (or segregation) is bad if it harms others, as it does in places where members of one groups have animus for members of another group. In those cases, animus and segregation are symptoms of a spiritual disease.

If it be argued that we need more actual inclusive congregating (more actual diversity among our associates) rather than mere potential inclusiveness (willingness to accept and love all comers), I won’t argue the point except to say that it should be based on spiritual realities rather than a desire to rebalance one’s ethnic portfolio of friends. What I mean is what I said a moment ago, that commonalities are especially important to people who are in a foreign environment. If we Christians more and more think of ourselves as pilgrims on the way, we will more powerfully latch onto the ultimate common ground we share with other Christians as Christians, regardless of their or our ethnicity.

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