Luke 16: 19-31 Right Here in Tulsa.

One morning, when you have nothing better to do, take your family out for a drive in Tulsa.  Beginning at 21^st Street, drive down Peoria Avenue.
My daughter and I took this trip last Wednesday.   First we rambled down the most artistic part of our city, filled with old and new money.  The houses are so breathtaking that they provide no doubt we are witnessing art  that people actually get to live in.   I can’t see myself living in these houses, not even in my dreams, because they are so far separated from my reality.  But I drive by them everyday and appreciate them the way I appreciate art in a museum: with a mixture of admiration and confusion, my eyes hungering for their beauty…

After rolling through Brookside, glancing at restaurants that are much too upscale and elegant for my rambunctious family to dine in, we encountered those proverbial train tracks that separate our city. I44.  The I44 overpass silently warns us by its frustrating, eternal construction and endless stoplights that we really ought to either turn back or get on the expressway- do anything but go forward. The traffic pause gives heed, “People have died on these roads you are about to travel.  People are shot and killed for no reason and with no warning. Stop. STOP!”

The businesses quietly turn from boutiques and outside eateries to payday loan operations and pawn shops.  Bars on windows ominously appear, adding to the quiet warning that this neighborhood is dangerous.  The large estates morph into cheap, neglected apartment complexes with broken windows and doorways boarded up with plywood.  There are no flowers or gardens.  Actually, there is no visual beauty at all that would provide relief to the experience of residing there.  There is one grocery store with a produce department compiled of bruised apples and rotten bananas swarming with fruit flies.  

The women we saw a mile back, click-clacking in high heeled shoes down the perfectly landscaped sidewalks and gabbing away on their iPhones, were replaced by somber-faced families aimlessly wandering or sitting on their stoops, waiting for some universal answer to explain their lives’ circumstances. 

Frivolity to hopelessness in less than three miles.        

How did it come to be that the wealthiest, most fashionable parts of our city and the most violent and dilapidated sections now lay side by side?  Do they see each other?  And perhaps the more important question is,  "Is this okay with Tulsa?  Is it okay with God?"  I don't believe God could have made a more obvious contrast.   It is literally the scene of Lazurus and the Rich Man right here in our city.   We can try to  convince ourselves that the socio-economic problems of drug use, prostitution and welfare led to these living conditions but after we have gone through our liteny of rhetoric, lets consider for a brief moment, the possibility that growing up in this kind of oppression and life-long failure causes such utter depression for which drugs and prostitution are respites for survival?  How long could any of us live in these circumstances before we succumbed?

Where are we, Christians?  Where are we, Catholics?  We are closing our eyes and hearts until 71st and Riverside gracefully relieve us of our responsibilty.  We can and should be here, on Peoria between 51st and 61st Street's,  loving those who will not love us in return.  Serving  those who have already given up their dignity, their safety, their financial security and credit ratings.  Let's begin our call from God in this neighborhood, at this time.