Typhoon: A tribute
Friday, February 1, 2008
Typhoon has ended. So says Christa’s recent blog entry. I haven’t been a leader at Typhoon for two over years. And there was that five month blip when I moved to Nashville.
But I loved Typhoon very much. For a few years it was part of my weekly routine, a large part of my reason for living; I agree with Christa, it helped define who I am. When people would ask to know something about me, I would tell them about Typhoon.
In my Equity and Diversity class, I cried when I spoke about the poverty some kids faced in South Oshawa. My professor, far from criticizing this display of emotion (for which, to be honest, I was immediately embarrassed) commended me for my compassion and said that we should feel emotion when speaking of these things... I always felt emotion for those kids.
I remember when I first wrote the song 280. I think I had reached a point where I realised that poverty was not something you can save someone from in a heroic act of Christian charity; you can only share in it. You can fight against the injustice that perpetuates it.
The Typhoon kids were my biggest fans. I remembered their sincere love of my music when I was caught in the pretty, plastic world of Nashvegas, where everyone was doing anything to get ahead. Remembering the Typhoon kids helped to ground me and remind me why I wrote music: to call things into question in protest and love. I never felt there was much room for that in Nashville. People wanted you to be religiously placated and properly conservative.
I remember when I was driving home from Typhoon and my tire burst. Gil drove past and saved me. The mechanic who fixed it said it had been slashed. My father said it would be alright. I should keep on going there. That was early on. My tires were never slashed again, but sometimes it felt like my heart was ripping apart from the things the kids faced.
I worked at the local drop-in centre for a year between high school and university. I loved the drop-in. All kinds of kids from Typhoon attended its programs and I unabashedly begged all the other kids from the drop-in to come to Typhoon. This was probably what some would refer to as “unprofessional”, seeing as I was explicitly inviting kids to come to a program put on by a religious organization, but my boss Jeff didn’t care. I loved that period in my life - there was an amazing cross pollination of my life and faith and work in a fluid way that felt as if it was all connected. It was all connected.
One of the most striking girls from the drop-in was Jenny. She was missing her two front teeth when I met her at the ripe old age of six. She had stringy blonde hair and blue eyes. The first day I worked with her we made princess crowns out of red cardboard paper and she made everyone listen to that song, “It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes”. It was hysterical seeing her dance around and lisp along to that ridiculous tune.
She would stay close to me when I worked at the drop-in. Sometimes She was timid and quiet but she could also be bubbly in a reserved way.
When it was winter I saw her race into the washroom before she left the drop-in centre. She came out with arms full of paper towel trailing behind her as she headed toward her winter boots. She began stuffing the towel into her boots in a rush to leave with her friends.
I went over to her and laughed lightly. I asked her what she was doing.
She turned a bright shade of embarrassed. I crouched down to be eye level with her.
“I have holes in my boots so I put the paper towel in so the water won’t soak my feet,” she admitted sheepishly.
I immediately stood up and looked away. I was afraid I would start to cry. The pain in my expression must have signalled my despair, so Jeff jumped in and promised Jenny we’d get her new winter boots. I hugged her. She liked the boots.
One day, I was seated in a chair when she sat down beside me. She looked particularly forlorn. She was starring hard at her toes. I asked her what was wrong.
She bit her upper lip with her bottom teeth and glanced at me quickly, as if to gage whether I meant it or not. She went back to starring at her toes. She sighed and lifted her head a little.
She leaned a little closer to me. “My family is poor,” she confessed in a whisper. I tried to hide the pain in my eyes, but she caught sight of it anyway.
“We didn’t have anything to eat this week,” she continued to whisper, as she mustered her courage.
I said nothing. I listened.
She swallowed as if she was thirsty. “My mom went to a church and they gave us bread and things to eat.”
She looked at me as her face brightened slightly.
She said in a matter-of-fact manner, “That’s where hungry people go to get fed.”
I hugged her. I felt as if I was sitting beside a guru. She was a toothless, unkempt, shy six year old girl who understood more about faith than many grown Christians I knew. She had innocently stumbled upon a profound analogy that would be seared into my soul at Typhoon. That was where we found our spiritual sustenance. Jenny started coming out to Typhoon later on.
When you think about it, there was nothing overly original about what we did at Typhoon. Christa worked her arse off to make it happen every week, faithfully and diligently, but all in all it was a classic kids program from start to finish.
We had three rules that were meant to keep the peace and bolster respect. No Yappin’, No Bashin’, No Trashin’. The regulars would rhyme these off with self-assurance. It was their turf.
We had snacks, played games and made crafts. Leaders would give short ten or fifteen minute talks. I loved giving the talk. These weren’t serious sermons with alter calls or commitment cards to fill out at the end. We just sat in front of a group of overwhelmingly hyperactive, attention deficit, behaviourally challenged, and even illiterate, junior highers and somehow miraculously held their attention for a brief moment in their lives each week.
I think they paid attention because we bothered to share our story with them and we invited them to do the same. This is what Jesus seemed to do over and over again in the Gospel, so it wasn’t a bad idea.
The kids got used to me being emotional. I would often just feel overcome with love for them when I sat down on the ledge to speak, their eyes and minds fixated on me. I sometimes felt helpless, as if nothing I could ever say would help break through the walls of defence and anger they had built up to protect themselves. Their faces wore hard expressions of contempt at times. They learned to let down their guard with us. They learned, over time, that we loved them. They grew, in time, to love us.
I never thought of Typhoon as church, which was helpful for me. But in retrospect, Typhoon was probably the most churchy thing I have ever been involved with, in the most Gospely, Jesusy sense of the word (as Anne Lamott would reckon). I remember one time Christa got all the kids sitting around three tables. The legs of the tables were tucked under and they were flat on the ground. We were sitting on the floor as if we were at a traditional Chinese restaurant ready to celebrate the Lords supper with dumplings and rice wine. Christa said something about belief, and a little girl raised her hand and declared, “I believe!”. Christa and I still laugh to this day about that moment and the beauty of a child responding in a way that comes so naturally without reservation. We broke the bread and drank the cup and the kids looked solemn at the story of Christ’s death.
I think the kids liked that night because they had very few rituals in their lives. We invited them to share in a tradition that meant so much to us.
We were all a little lost, leaders and kids together. I was trying to find my way out of the darkness of doctrine and they were contending with all the burdens of living in the worst part of town. No banks, one beer store. That sort of thing...
I guess we are all trying to find our way, still, to this day.
