D. L. Mayfield - The Myth of the American Dream

TO MY NEIGHBORS

INTRODUCTION
THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

2 TIMOTHY 4:3-4

I AM ON A WALK IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD in January. The air is cold, the ground is wet, but the sun breaks out for a few moments. I see sidewalks on a side street and am struck by the green moss growing on them. It reminds me of old growth; the moss has been there for a long time, and it will remain until whatever it is affixed to crumbles into dust. Other things I see on my walk: a used diaper, a pile of orange-colored vomit, the father of my daughters schoolmate driving away in a small red car. Two For Sale signs on houses. Hot sauce packets scattered on the ground. Trees bare and stretching to the sky.

Yet the moss hums with a vibrancy, it clings and covers that which remains. My son calls it fairy carpet because I taught him to say this. I am working on seeing little bits of magic where I can. I teach my children, and they teach me, our sight lines going to such different places. Look up, look down. I am learning to look at the ground again, to marvel at the good and the bad equally. I am learning to let the place teach me. This is probably as zen as I will ever get: meditating on bright green moss on a cold January day. This is how I am paying attention today.

I used to prayer walk, bold as brass, longing to witness to others. Now I walk the streets that make up my underresourced, glorious neighborhood, and I try to lean into in the gift of being a witness to the good and the bad of the world, to articulating the reality of my neighbors, to Gods presence and Gods absence. I guess this means Ive undergone a conversion of sorts. I suppose this means I am probably trying to convert you too.

Heres the story of one of my many conversions: when I was young and convinced the world was mine to save, I started volunteering with Somali Bantu refugees. They had survived the worst the world had to offer only to come to my city and suffer in new and different ways. This shocked me, as it would shock most people who have been sheltered from the realities of the world. I tried to be strong, I tried not to flinch as every one of my most dearly held beliefs about the goodness of God and the goodness of my country wilted in front of me as I started to see life through the eyes of the refugees of the world.

One day I went into the apartment of a Somali Bantu family. There, on the counter, was a stack of bills. No one in the family could read in any language, and translators were few and far between. They asked me to read the bills, and I thumbed through the stack, the costs of the American Dream piling up in that apartment with just a few curtains hung up for decorations, a pot of stew bubbling on the stove. One of the envelopes contained a staggering sum, the cost of the plane rides from the refugee camp in Kenya to the United States for this family of six. The bill was for thousands of dollars.

I held it in my hands, my fingers burning. I hadnt realized that refugees have to pay back the very tickets that supposedly mark their lucky chance to become a part of the dream. What should I tell my new friends? That they were already in debt, already in a hole that I saw no clear path out of? Looking at the faces smiling expectantly back at me, I felt a great chasm grow in my chest as I realized how wide the gap was between how I wish the world was and how it actually was.

When I was young, it was so simple. I thought God was good. I thought God rewarded those who obeyed the rules. I thought my good news was accessible to everyone if only they had the ears to listen. I thought my country was a place where hard work was rewarded on a level playing field, no matter where you came from. Luckily, my life was complicated in beautiful ways that scraped at my very soul. I was plunged into a situation where I was confronted with my privilege and there was no way to wriggle out of it. Volunteering with, working with, and eventually living alongside people who had experienced forced migration help to shatter the unspoken norms I had built up in my mindwhat I call the myth of the American Dream, but which can also be called empire or dominant culture ideology.

I slowly realized I did not have a worldview or an ethical framework that accounted for realities different from my own. I was unable to solve the problems of my new friends with my correct doctrine, a Protestant work ethic, and the belief that I was at the tail end of a long line of people who had perfected the art of getting everything right about how to be a human. While the bills and stories and heartbreaks piled up in the lives of people around me, I had to recognize that there were larger forces at play that negatively affected people in my own city, country, and the worldand these systems seemed to harm people in particular who were not White, middle-class evangelicals like me.

This has not been an easy conversion, and I am still in the throes of it. White evangelicals like myself are uniquely unprepared to engage in issues from an institutional or systemic perspective.

If you had asked me what Jesus came to do, growing up the daughter of a pastor I would have said he came to die and pay the price for the sins of those who believe in him. A few years ago I realized something: that is not actually how Jesus defined his own life and work. Instead, Luke 4 tells us that when he wanted to announce his ministry, he went to the synagogue in his hometown and read a striking passage of Scripture. He went straight to the heart of the religiously upright, those who knew all the right answers and quoted their own wild prophets right back to them.

The book of Isaiah is chock full of indictments against the oppressive forces of its day, railing against what happens when the people of God forgot how to obey, how they started to ignore and forget the poor. So it is no surprise that Jesus used the book of Isaiah to lay the groundwork of his movement. And this is what he announced to that crowd:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release for the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lords favor. (Luke 4:18-19 NRSV)

Perhaps I had never paid attention to this passage because I had never been truly poor or in prison; I was neither blind nor very oppressed. But now, thanks to my relationships with refugees, I did know people who fit these categories, and I was desperate for a God who was good news for them. The more I read this passage, the more I studied who Jesus was drawn to and who was drawn to him, the more it became clear: this wasnt just Jesus announcing what he had come to do. This was Jesus providing a road map for where we would always find him at work in the world. And what did it mean that for most of my life I had been headed in the opposite direction?