Chelsea Boes: Reviving Old English custom 'Beating the Bounds' for helping those in need
I share my office in Biltmore Village with a lady named Amy, a courageous and compassionate mom who reads a lot of news. One of the most extraordinary things about Amy: While she surveys headlines, she cries out in pain. She always yells the same thing: “Jesus, help!”
Of course, when you share a room with someone, you start to adopt her habits.
This morning, for example, I walked 9,000 steps around the Corpening Memorial YMCA track while I read The New York Times. I read that an immigrant on the Mexico-American border is separated from her husband and can’t get back to him before the birth of her baby. "Gosh," I think. "That lady could be me." Next I read of families in Gaza who have no water to drink, not even salty water. A photo shows a little Palestinian boy at a funeral for relatives, his brown eyes glistening with tears. It takes my heart less than a moment to see the faces of my own children there in his place. Without realizing, I turn into Amy. A cry emerges as involuntary as a hiccup: “Jesus, help!”
“Jesus, help!” is a weird utterance to emit while alone at the YMCA. Though maybe it’s not as weird as what I want to say, perhaps to the elderly couple passing on my right: “Have you read the newspaper? What can we do?”
What can I do? Give the border lady my guest room? Let the Gazans share the water in my well? Boil the biggest pot of beans in the universe, load all the leaves into my table, borrow neighborhood chairs, and feed as many of these hungry people as I can? Not once, but for as long as it takes? And if I do these great sacrificial acts, which will still not be enough to fix these people’s complex problems, will I survive the effort?
Amy’s prayer is more than a straightforward request because she understands God to be more than a vending machine. It’s not just, “Fix everything, please,” though it is that. It’s also, “Why is everything busted?” and “Why am I so powerless?” All honest prayer is not merely an address of circumstance but a wrestling between our natures and God’s.
When I pray, I’m saying, “God, nothing makes me happier than when my children treat each other kindly. Do you feel that way about us? Are you broken when we kill each other? When will you make it stop? And meanwhile, what can I do?”
I answer this last question with a bit of fixed cultural parlance: “I cannot do everything, but I can do something.” That quote originated with 19th century American author Edward Everett Hale. It’s a reversal of the classic sentiment that began in "The Brothers Karamazov" then wound up in a Peanuts cartoon: “I love mankind. ... It’s people I can’t stand.” Individuals are the hardest to serve, Linus, but they’re also the only ones you can serve. One at a time.
All this reminds me of an idea I’ve just learned — the idea of “Beating the Bounds.” This old custom apparently began in English churches of old. They “beat the bounds” — that is, traced the borders of each parish on foot. Inside this confine, this celebration indicated, lies my work. Inside this physical space dwell the people I will serve, the needs I will meet, the hungry I will feed, the lonely I will visit, the homeless I will shelter.
I picked up this radical but old notion from a young woman named Bethany Hebbard, who is writing a book about radical hospitality. She suggests that each person draw a map of his or her circle of influence — house, yard, neighborhood, etc. When she was still single, she set aside her guest room. She said, “This is your room, God. Fill it.” Someone inside her bounds would need it. When eventually she married and her house filled with her own children, she acted on the same impulse with different means — greeting neighbors in the garden, cooking more dinner than her family required, and setting an extra plate for whatever needy person God would send.
I can’t feed the world. But maybe I can lay out the extra plate. I doubt a Gazan will come to dinner. Will someone broken in some other way appear instead? Someone in my bounds? I hope so.
Which is not to say I should forget the people outside my bounds. For them, I can still cry “Help!” No one is too far away for that.
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Chelsea Boes lives in Old Fort and works as editor of WORLDkids Magazine in Biltmore Village.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Boes: Showing hospitality, going extra mile, in circle of influence