Grateful For Those Who Open The Door

Back in 2009, in my very first post, I wrote about opening doors: to the world, to pain, to community. The jumping off point was a favorite quote from I Heard the Owl Call My Name, a beautiful, small novel by Margaret Craven. The novel is about a terminally ill young priest serving a Native village on a coastal inlet in the Canadian Northwest. There is only one other white person there, the government-hired teacher who doesn't want to be there. After the priest is killed in a landslide, the villagers wait for his body to be found and returned for burial:

The village was waiting and listening, and it was the children who heard first the canoes coming up the river, and they ran down the main path calling “They come now. They bring him now.”

In his tiny house the teacher heard the running footfalls on the path to the riverbank, and he went quickly to the door and could not open it. To join the others was to care, and to care was to live and to suffer.

I recently had an unsettling conversation with a very close friend who, while not dismissive of my activities, made it clear that she had not been and would never be involved in her own community. There were lots of reasons why, some of them personal that demanded much of her, but the foundation was simply "I'm not putting myself out."

She could not begin to open the door.

Me?  I open the door every chance I get.

Thursday just past two coworkers and I had a lengthy discussion about some of the juveniles with whom we work. Many of our kids have backstories that are sobering, to say the least. After we finished talking about two in particular and the hurdles facing them, there was a long silence. Then I said, "I love this job and it breaks my heart over and over." The other two agreed.

We're all door openers—those two colleagues and I—along with other coworkers. As our court administrator has observed, none of us are doing this work for the money. My friends and colleagues at Legal Clinic likewise are door openers. So are all the people in this community who give time and themselves to our community, be it with the Symphony, our Farmers Market, food pantries, and other such projects. We do this work because when we hear those footfalls on the path, we go quickly to the door and open it wide to join the others.

I'm grateful for the door openers.