When I was 4, on one of my first days in my new Berwyn neighborhood, a kid a couple of years older than me walked up while I was exploring an empty lot and punched me in the face. It didn’t turn into much of a fight, what with my Aunt Sue pulling up in her car, seeing what had occurred, and urging me to hit him back. And I did. And that was that. But the encounter slammed me early with the reality that life can hit you hard, even when you think something positive like a move with your family to a new house on a new block had just made things better.
What is it that keeps us thinking that life is going to keep getting better?
We encounter adversity and even evil in many forms. There’s the violence that can erupt in our neighborhoods. There’s war. There’s racism. There’s corruption in hallowed institutions. There’s the pandemic.
With all this darkness, where does the hope that things will get better come from? Back then, I could fall back on Dad, Mom, my siblings, uncles, aunts, grandparents, the Church and good people in the neighborhood. With their stable, caring presence bucking me up, and the resolutely hopeful, Christian story of calling, suffering and resurrection I had quietly internalized from the community, I carried a confident sense that even when things got rough, God had my back.
Little hurts from fights or injuries, or larger blows — physical or psychological — from exposure to crime, riots or the Vietnam War, landed on me over the years as I grew up in this imperfect but humbly hopeful place. I believed that through all the mess, God hung with us, healing, protecting and guiding us to grow personally and collectively into the people we were meant to be.
My belief in progress ebbed and flowed over the years. It hit a dark point in a stretch in high school when I couldn’t see where I was headed, or why I was under-performing.
There were hits I took in my career. In the late ’80s, although they recovered, our twin boys were born in crisis. They entered the world suffering. We suffered too. In recent years, a couple of people we cared about took their own lives.
Today, there’s Russia pummeling Ukraine, unleashing missile attacks on civilians, killing and maiming children. There’s the hateful energy driving political polarization. The Church, which provided a foundation for that community of support when I was a kid, strives to renew itself as many pews sit empty. Psychologists tell us that anxiety disorders are increasing.
There’s this growing, diffuse sense among many that more bad things are coming. So what is my foundation today for continuing to believe that life will get better?
It’s built on the old one, even though those parents, aunts and uncles are gone, and the Church is not what it was. That base still lives inside of me as a community of memory. Built upon that older, inner foundation are new layers of family, some of the same friends and siblings, now aging, and the struggling Church, all enriched by Oak Park’s many strengths and cultural assets.
My inner church works with the outer Church, guided by writers like Teilhard de Chardin and William Johnston, to refresh the Christian story that still steers my journey. I’m at a later stage of the journey. I’m getting old, but that basic, timeless story is not: it will eventually find renewal as the Church engages younger generations who are spiritually hungry, offer it new perspectives, and needed hope.
In the Kingdom of which Jesus spoke, it was often the weak who were truly the strong. When Aunt Sue drove up to help her 4-year-old nephew 65 years ago, she stayed in her car in part because she was crippled. She had been stricken by polio as a child, and never recovered the ability to walk normally. She even sat kind of crooked. She could drive, but it took a special effort to get in and out of the car.
Yet she was there for us as our “Aunti” for many years. On that day in 1958 by the empty lot on Clarence Avenue, and on many occasions after that, she had our backs. And God had hers.
Rich Kordesh grew up in Berwyn and is a longtime resident of Oak Park.