Graffiti Pastor
Taylor Field as told to Eric Reed
July 1, 2002
People here call our church Graffiti. The official name is East Seventh Baptist Church, but we don't use the name much. The story goes that a group of college students from Alabama on a summer mission trip were bothered by the graffiti on the mission's storefront. So, they painted over it. The next day, the graffiti was back. They painted over it again, and again the graffiti returned.
This happened several times, until one person in the group said, "Why fight it? Jesus Christ can be a message written on the wall, too. Let's call the place Graffiti, and put our own message on the neighborhood."
So, they did. Bright, clean, colorful, jazzy.
One of the neighbors wrote in the corner: "The world is coming to a new beginning." Perhaps it was, but it was a long time coming.
When I moved into this neighborhood with my wife and two toddlers fifteen years ago, life was about one thing: survival. The drama included two characters: homelessness and drugs. Today, life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, at least in the blocks surrounding my church, is about hope.
My neighborhood looks a little like Sesame Street-gray stone-faced buildings with narrow stoops above concrete steps and sidewalks. But the people in my neighborhood are not Big Bird, Elmo, and Oscar the Grouch. Seventh Street is home to Big Jane, homeless Tommy, and Luis the pusher.
They live in cramped apartments, in abandoned buildings, and in the park across the street—until the police closed it down. They wage a constant battle with alcohol and hunger, drugs, addicts and drug lords, and rats.
Catholic social worker Dorothy Day worked here forty years, starting in the 1930s. Ministering to the poverty and addictions of the time, she said, "We need to practice the duty of delight." ...
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