This being the second time I stayed (as in lived for a few days) at Imlay House I knew to bring my own ramp. Both entrances – the main one on 46th Street, and the back one from the preschool are stepped.
It’s so odd to be doing my thing and to hear someone else using my rickety old ramp. Although quite safe, my decade old heavy foldable ten foot ramp is bent at the hinges and dented in many places. It rattles as weight travels along it, so every toddler, parishioner or caretaker who used it announced the fact clearly. And there were many. This is no problem of course, but simply a curiousity to me. Why is it that mostly when “walkees” have a clear choice they choose a ramp, and if ramps are so much to be preferred, why don’t people build them by default instead of steps?
There must be forty doors in major transitional areas of First Pres – outside doors to the church, Imlay House, the offices, the preschool, and transitional doors from lobbies to main rooms to hallways to the next building, and the like. Of these doors I could only use five and none of them independently. On this second trip it became clear to me how this reality deeply effected how I actually end up relating to folks of the congregation.
Firstly, many of my interactions – and especially my first interaction with nearly everyone – is to get their assistance to open and hold a door. From the ushers who first direct me to a side door and then who insist on opening both sides even though I clearly need only the half that isn’t bolted shut, to the office clerk who finds me waiting outside Stewart Hall for a passerby to release the always locked door from the inside, most everyone is going to shape their relationship with me in terms of helping me get in or out of the space.
Secondly, I will just never go to or be seen in probably fifty percent of the spaces regularly used by parishioners – the stage, the second floor of Imlay, the pulpit, the choir area, and more I can only imagine since I cannot get even near!
How this limits what those good people imagine I am! I will never preach or cook for them, play with or teach their children, counsel with the Synod, provide strategic planning or pastoral counselling – all things I have done before but will not do with First Presbyterians of Savannah - not just because I am from Canada but also because they will not ask me to. Why not? No one ever SEES me in the spaces or these roles, or gets to talk with me much beyond door opening.
This reality was hitting me rather hard this time around. First Presbyterians have seen me often enough over several years that some greeted me as if they had been expecting me to show up anytime soon – like a distant cousin that they remembered had gone to school on another continent and were expecting could show up for spring break. I have a feeling that I’m almost at home there, that I actually could be home there sometime. Yet as close as I have gotten I feel that I also can’t get much closer. The doors cannot – literally cannot open – to me.
It made me wonder about and look at how good, hospitable, open hearted and minded folks could stay so so white in the midst of a world of an international port as Savannah is. Why isn’t Savannah as multicultural as St. John’s Newfoundland? Clearly there is another sort of door that the parishioners are busy managing, but somehow will never open to many of the other people in Savannah. Clearly the members of First Pres never have a chance to find out all the ways other people would love to contribute to their wonderful community. (to be cont'd)
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