Southwood is the story of people living in a residence motel in an affluent, resort area of California. It’s also the story of the people from the community who volunteer at the motel, about how those two groups interact, how they mirror some aspects of first-century Palestine, and what all this has to do with a man who was killed way back when for suggesting we should all treat each other nicely.
The story of Southwood Motel is intertwined with the story of one man’s dream to build a magical and most delightful place on Earth, and to place this wonder in the middle of some fields in a little town called Anaheim, in Southern California. Anaheim is about 150 years old, originally settled by German immigrants who named it, heim, German for “home,” and tacked on “Ana” in a nod to their Spanish-speaking neighbors in Santa Ana, and to acknowledge the nearby Santa Ana River. With the founding of what is probably the best-known theme park on the planet, the fortunes of tiny Anaheim were changed forever. For one thing, it stimulated other area theme parks, and a booming tourist industry. Anaheim is now among the largest cities in the United States, in one of the most affluent counties in the United States: Orange County, California.
The man with the plan for bringing ultimate delight to sleepy little Anaheim wasn’t the only one who showed up in Anaheim packing dreams. Dozens of little Mom-and-Pop motels sprang up around the theme park, taking advantage of the financial churn provided by tourism. It was the 1950s, and dozens of subdivisions full of pastel, fairy-tale-styled houses sprang up, too. Things were good until bigger dreamers, packing bigger dreams, started showing up in Anaheim a decade or two later, also hoping to take advantage of the tourism dollars: large hotel chains easily bought up property in prime locations, close to the theme parks. Closer to the theme parks than independently owned motels like the Southwood Motel.
The Southwood Motel is a large motel, with over 100 rooms. Like many motels that sprang up in the golden era, four decades later it’s a victim of affluence: slightly shabby, its 10′ x 10′ rooms, each equipped with a tiny galley kitchen, are no longer attractive to tourists; instead, it houses parolees, sex offenders, and the despairing. People who cannot get housing anywhere else. Many of them with children. The Southwood is a tenement, West-Coast style.
Parolees and sex offenders come to the Southwood because their parole officers place them there. For everybody else, the route is more of a spiral, of the downward variety. People evicted from better digs, jobless, poor and new in town, kicked out of some other living situation, or otherwise down on their luck end up filtering through the various levels of living spaces in Orange County, washed up like driftwood on the shore, at the Southwood.
Not far from the Southwood is a tiny Lutheran church. Lutheran churches aren’t as popular lately as they once were. Their more introverted style of Christianity has trouble competing with the dozen or so nondenominational, fundamentalist Christian style megachurches in Orange County. The congregation is small. Lutherans aren’t door-knockers or Bible-thumpers; they don’t fit into the image most people have nowadays in their minds when they hear the word, “Christian.” Lutherans tell people about Jesus mainly by showing them what Jesus was like and trying to do what Jesus would have done.
Jesus would be spending Saturdays at the Southwood. So, a group of several Lutheran churches in Orange County do just that.
Orange County is interesting in that it’s made up of a very dichotomized population. There are the affluent, the very affluent, the obscenely affluent; they are the subjects of movies and television programs centered in Orange County. Receiving far less publicity are the poor, the very poor, and the despairing; these people may have jobs in the tourist or service industry, neither of which pay well, or they work in agriculture, or they can’t get work at all. This sort of dichotomy exists in a lot of places in the world. It existed in first-century Palestine. A lot of people in first-century Palestine weren’t content with this dichotomy, but one person in particular was extremely skilled at stirring up those at the bottom of the system and at challenging those in power. This person, a Jewish mystic who shared God’s passion for justice and mercy, ended up dying for his own dream: the dream that we could create a kingdom of God, full of God’s justice, love, and mercy, on earth.
Some say that long-ago Jewish mystic didn’t really die, or, to be more specific, that he didn’t stay dead, and that God resurrected him. His dream isn’t dead, either. It’s resurrected every Saturday morning at the Southwood Motel.
Twenty centuries later, in the land of dreams, as they say, “Oh…it’s on.”
No comments:
Post a Comment