The Sacred Neighborhood w/ Chris Nafis

In this episode of Breathe In Place, Montague Williams sits down with Pastor Chris Nafis of Living Water Church in San Diego’s East Village to explore what it means to be the church in neighborhoods deeply affected by homelessness. Moving beyond short-term service, Pastor Chris shares how living, worshiping, and sharing life alongside people on the margins transforms streets into sacred spaces. Together, they discuss how practicing presence, listening, and bearing witness can help us recognize God’s work in the places we often overlook.

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Transcript

Montague Williams (00:23):

Welcome back to Breathe In Place, a podcast about how pilgrimage can help young people find purpose, resilience, hope and meaning in a complex and confusing world. I'm your host, Montague Williams. The crisis of homelessness impacts the lives of many Americans today. For people with homes, this can be a confusing reality, often leading to people trying to come up with solutions without ever having relationship. Seeing this kind of human suffering on a daily basis can often feel overwhelming creating an impulse to ignore and treat that suffering as invisible. What does it mean to be the church in that reality? To move beyond a simple service project model and instead be the church in an embodied and continually present way in our neighborhoods to share life with people on the margins, to listen and to embrace God's work in streets. Most ignore and avoid. My guest today embodies this pastor Chris Nafis leads Living Water Church in San Diego's East Village, an area that the voice of San Diego says has San Diego's most visible, concentrated homeless population For more than a decade, Chris has lived and done church in the East Village, fostering a community that doesn't just serve people without housing, but worships, eats and shares life together.

(02:13):

In our conversation, we talk about what it means to be church in the neighborhood, to see streets as sacred places as holy ground, and to discover God's presence already dwelling there. Let's dive in.

Chris Nafis (02:27):

There's people that most of the time, a lot of folks will, they're essentially invisible. You look through them, you don't want to see or be seen by them because they might ask you for something and you kind of begin to see humans who are experiencing homelessness as a problem that you don't want to deal with on your walk. And so I would hope that people would begin to see the people and recognize the struggle that's there. Recognize the forces that push people into homelessness and begin to have some empathy and compassion.

Montague Williams (03:00):

Chris, you're a pastor here in San Diego, so tell our listeners a bit about who you are, what that means for you to be a pastor, your journey as a pastor.

Chris Nafis (03:10):

Yeah, pastor Living Water Church, which is in East Village, and for those who are not familiar with San Diego, we're at one of the epicenters of homelessness in the city. We planted this church coming up on 10 years ago out of some food outreach ministries that several churches were collaborating on and Point Loma Nazarene University was sending students down and building some relationships with folks who are experiencing poverty, whether that's street homelessness or folks that are in low income housing downtown. We got to know a lot of folks down there and our churches built out of this desire to overcome some of those social barriers between people who find themselves lacking resources and people who are more in middle class categories with the goal of getting past that charity dynamic of a group of people that have stuff come down and give stuff to people who don't, and learning how to be brothers and sisters in Christ together. And so that's kind of the ethos of our church making space, especially for those who are on the margins. And that's kind of my work is leading those people in their spiritual journey, building community, finding ways that we can serve together, learn to love one another well and worship together. Well,

Montague Williams (04:25):

No, a lot of our conversations on this podcast talk about very physical pilgrimages, but as you talk about your ministry life, I can't help but wonder how did you find yourself in this kind of ministry context doing this kind of work?

Chris Nafis (04:44):

Yeah, well, my own spiritual journey, especially as I came to study scripture and the tradition of Christian practice over millennia led me to a place where I felt this calling toward the margins of society and felt like I needed to be essentially following Jesus to the places where most people don't want to go, and to engage with people who feel that they're on the outskirts of things, that they're kept from mainstream resources, struggling, whatever that struggle might look like. I didn't really know where that was going to take me, but I started out my pastoral journey after seminary at a low, low-income neighborhood church in southeast San Diego that was more in a working poor kind of neighborhood and not so much in epicenter of homelessness neighborhood, but part of my work there was also this food ministry that our church and a couple other churches were putting together in downtown San Diego serving this meal on Tuesday nights.

(05:47):

We served a meal to a hundred, 125 people every Tuesday night, and it was only a couple miles from our church, but it just felt like miles away. If you've been in a dense city, you can see how neighborhoods just feel so different, but really got to know that place and those people and over time since this condo plant a congregation there. And so that's how I ended up there. And dealing with homelessness specifically wasn't necessarily my goal to get into that experience of poverty, but that's sort of where my journey took me and where I am now.

Montague Williams (06:26):

Chris, I want to explore that a little further. You use this term calling somewhere on your journey in ministry. You felt a calling to plant a congregation in East Village to engage the unhoused community there. People use that term quite a bit. People in ministry use that term. I use that term. Could you share with us what you mean by that? How did you sense a calling? What did that feel like, sound like? How did you discern that's what it was?

Chris Nafis (07:00):

Yeah, that's a good question. For me, it's a sense of being drawn towards something that I find difficult or I mean maybe even impossible to resist. It's not necessarily something that I would choose for myself off the bat. If I'm looking out for my own comfort wellbeing, the thing that sounds easiest or best or most fun or something like that, it's not necessarily the thing that I would choose, but there's this kind of sense of being compelled to give my life to this thing or give my time or give my energy. So I use that word calling for different things. I think the primary way that I use it is in my call to ministry in general, feeling this sense that God wants me to be giving my life to this kind of work, pastoral work, congregational work. And then I think that that sense of calling that is rooted in my vocational calling has been narrowed over time into the specific people and places that I work with now. So I dunno if that quite answers your question, but that's what I mean by it.

Montague Williams (08:04):

I've noticed that young people who are students here at this university sometimes find their way over at living water, and sometimes they find their way out of living water, but those who stick around at living water, they seem very committed. What is that about?

Chris Nafis (08:28):

I think our church is the kind of church that is different than other places, and there's a uniqueness in our community. I'm sure there's others like ours, we're not so special that no one can replicate or something like that. But I do think there's an experience that's hard to find around. So we've had people that are part of our church that have moved to different places and really struggled to find a church that felt like home, kind of missing the type of community, the kind of interaction and intersection of lives that happens in our midst where folks who are in the throes of street homelessness are really good friends and really learning to love and be in community with people who are in middle class type jobs and in those kinds of spaces and working every day in professional setting and then everything in between.

(09:28):

And being able to have those genuine relationships that cross those social barriers. It's really a special thing I think it doesn't happen everywhere and it doesn't happen by accident. It has to be kind of cultivated and doing that with a sense that this community, this is a way of expressing our faith together. It's rooted in this connection we have through Christ. And so I think having those things manifest in the community in this way is really, it's hard to get past it because there's something beautiful there that I think, again, it's hard to put words to it, but once you've experienced it, then you go to other places and the other places can sometimes feel a bit hollow or shallow, can feel like people are, because in so many places in our world, people are putting out a facade. They're trying to present themselves a certain way.

(10:24):

We all do it. It's a normal thing to do, probably doing it right now in this podcast. You want to present yourself a certain way for a certain audience. And I think what happens in our context is that so many people have, well, they've lost face as they say, they don't have a facade to keep anymore. They've reached this place of utter humility and brokenness. And so then there's a rawness to the experiences people have with one another in our midst that is hard to find, especially in middle class spaces like Point Loma. People still try to manipulate and people aren't always telling the truth, but there's a different way that people present themselves in that kind of space. And I think that there's a real draw for that in places like Point Loma where schools this tend to be, people are very image conscious. People are kind of finding themselves and trying to put on a lot of folks come to college, you're trying to reinvent yourself and you know what I mean? There's a lot of, not necessarily fakeness, but a little bit of fakeness

Montague Williams (11:32):

A little bit, yeah, it's some image that you think you have to fulfill.

(11:38):

Students try it on for a semester or two or three, but you have 18, 19 year olds who may come from a very different church context, very different neighborhood context. They find their way at Living Water, they encounter this kind of face-to-face with humanity in a new way. For many, it'd be a new way, a more honest way perhaps. Perhaps they encounter a church community that seems to live out something that they've heard about, but they never really knew that it could exist or what it would look like or feel like. What kinds of changes or commitments or questions have you seen come out of the lives of young people you've encountered as they've made their way to living water or toward commitment there or even on their way out?

Chris Nafis (12:35):

Yeah, I mean there's a lot of the similar growth that I had to learn along the way of just, I think people come in with a certain kind of ignorance, which is normal. That's just like, wouldn't you come into a new setting and a new space? There's a level of ignorance that's just to be expected, but it gets kind of broken down over time as you have experienced. So I think people come often with a romanticized vision of what maybe their engagement with poverty. So I think a lot of people have these ideals. We really want to work with the poor or a lot of folks, some of our students have participated in, for example, like homeless outreach ministries where students will go down and serve coffee and things to folks with a wagon and they'll have meaningful encounters with folks on the street. But there's another level to it because when, because there the folks on the street are actually putting on a front because they're being super nice and they're being super happy and they're getting something from some usually young, clean, attractive kids.

(13:37):

And there's a certain culture to that exchange. And what happens at our church is that eventually the guard comes down and you get a more real kind of encounter with folks. And so I think that can be surprising at first. I think there's something beautiful about it, but people come in maybe with a romanticized vision of what this community is going to look like, and then it gets hard. You sit by someone who really doesn't smell very good, and that seems like a small thing until you're there for an hour and a half and you're feeling uncomfortable because you don't know how clean this person is. And so some of that gets broken down and a lot of people will just leave at that point, but those who stay and kind of invest themselves find that there's another level to that relationship where you can actually begin to see people's actual weaknesses and their actual struggle.

(14:29):

And there's a vulnerability in both directions that happens that builds a meaningful relationship and love. I I also think that when people at our church, we're a small church, so when people come and participate in our church, they actually make a big difference in the community so they can see that this place is different because I'm here. I actually make a difference here. And I think that also is a really meaningful experience for folks, especially people who are young and just kind of finding their way in the world and to realize, no, my presence matters here and it doesn't change the entire church. I'm not taking over or something like that, but they miss me when I'm not here. And the people, there's this give and take of relationship that these folks, they want me to be a part of their life and I want them to be a part of my life. And there's that meaningful purpose. Yeah, exactly.

Montague Williams (15:19):

Purpose, belonging, and perhaps even for those who commit, I imagine some sort of identity with the community being one of the college students who commit and remain a part of the community.

Chris Nafis (15:35):

And I think a lot of folks that stick with us are in that space of wrestling with their vocation and discerning their way forward, and it's a meaningful place of crisis. So people talk about crises and crisis is really a transition time. And so in some ways having a place that's where crisis is always happening, where our folks are always in crisis in our church because people's lives are just kind of wrecked. I think there's something about the kind of a resonance between the crisis of finding your way as a young person, figuring out where you're going to serve, where you're going to live, what your life's going to look like, and being in a place where this crisis, things are always bubbling up, that there's a resonance. I think there too.

Montague Williams (16:21):

Do the participants in the community who don't necessarily live in the community, do they get to know the neighborhood?

Chris Nafis (16:30):

It depends on how much they get out of the church building. I think there's different ways to know a place. There's geographic knowledge of a place and where things are and where the topography of a place and where the hills are and where the dangerous places are and where the good places are. And I think not everybody gets to know East Village in that way. People that are coming in from living out, and a lot of our folks do not live in East Village because it's an interesting place. It's actually very expensive to live in East Village in housing, unless you're in low income housing, in which case it's very cheap, but you have to qualify or unless you're on the street, in which case you're not really paying. But there's different kind of costs to living that. So a lot of our folks that are not in those categories of low-income housing, experiencing homelessness, living in a shelter, those kinds of places, living in a car, a lot of our other folks, including myself, live outside of that neighborhood and come in. And I think people, you get to know some of the lay of the land just from known people that know it. We have a lot of people in our congregation that do live there and know it very well because they're on foot usually. I've thought a lot about

(17:50):

The way that so many of us primarily encounter our locations, our places through cars. And I started running a few years ago and I feel like since I've been running all over San Diego, I just know the city in such a different way being on foot all the time. And I think most of our congregants that are in low-income categories are either on buses or on foot. And if you're on a bus, you're on foot a lot because you got to get from bus stop to wherever you're going or trolley stop. And so we have people that have a intimate knowledge of the neighborhood. The neighborhood's always changing. And so that knowledge is always needs to be updated because depending on what the police are doing, how they're enforcing things, where the dealers have set up this week or there's been shelters that have popped up and tent type shelters that the city's put on that have popped up here and then they go away and then it pops up over here. And so there, there's a lot of things that change in our neighborhood. And so I guess to get back to your original question, I think there are some folks that are kind of commuting into the church space that will get to know the neighborhood in those ways. But I think we get to know the people and the struggles of the neighborhood

Montague Williams (18:58):

Okay

Chris Nafis (18:58):

In deeper ways because we share prayer requests and people will say, this happened to me over here. And we say, oh, this is the kind of thing that happens over here. Or, you know what I mean? There's a knowledge of the people in the place and I think we tend to separate people from place, but those things are very closely tied together.

(19:12):

Absolutely.

(19:13):

People who live in a place are a representation of that place. And so you get to know the people in some ways. You get to know the place.

Montague Williams (19:18):

So with that in mind, when you think about the place where you pastor the neighborhood around it or maybe even further extended, when you think about all the changes, what would you say are some significant sites or maybe even sacred places in the neighborhood? And you can think about it through the lens you just named that it's not just about the geography, also the people. But yeah,

Chris Nafis (19:42):

I mean, to be honest, I think our church has become that for a lot of people. It's interesting when you get into the church planting world, which is a weird world, I don't necessarily recommend that you go into, but when you do, there's a lot of people trying to create and explore alternative ways of doing church and being the church, which I think is a good thing. Generally people are doing house churches or meeting in interesting places. And one of the things that has been kind of surprising as I've gone through this process is to realize our church in some ways looks fairly traditional. We have a place that we rent these. It hasn't always been this way, but we have a place that we rent that's stable. It's kind of public space and people come in for services for both worship services and then the receive services.

(20:29):

And there's a way that our church, which is in some ways innovative, is actually very traditional because those traditions are built on experience of the community and meeting the needs of the community. And I think because of that, our church has become, there's a lot of people I think that would kind talk about our church as kind of their central place in the neighborhood. This is where I come to volunteer to help to find community, to find belonging, to eat and some nights to sleep and to worship. And so I think there have been people specifically who have told me this is the center of my world is

Montague Williams (21:09):

Wow

Chris Nafis (21:09):

Living Water church. In some ways that's true for me as the pastor of the church, I think our church has become a sacred place, but going around the neighborhood, there are just places for me at least personally, where I have specific memories of things that have happened, important moments. There's places where there's been really great tragedy. There are places where people have died that kind of stick with you, where remembering this incident or remembering seeing this person for the first time. There's places that, there's a place that used to be called God's Extended Hand. It's a couple blocks from our church. You can see it from our building that was a shelter and a food place, but it was really not a very good place. A lot of bad things happened in that place. It wasn't run very well, but it was a significant place. There's a mural on the outside that was a marker of the place, and city closed 'em down because of code violations.

(22:16):

They had tried to shut them down for many years though they put up some high rises across the street from it. And these were expensive luxury housing. They did not want this place to be there. And eventually it got pushed out, which is a mixed thing because it was a place where there was a lot of bad stuff that happened. People were exploited and people were taken advantage of. And people, there's violence that happened there and people would get sick. It's a dirty place, but it sat there empty for a long time, fenced in, but people would move in there. It caught on fire a bunch of times. In fact, the first time it caught on fire that I'm aware of, I was leading bible study and I could see it from where I was sitting. I could see the fire start in this huge flames, 30 foot flames, and then someone, it kept catching on fire, which I strongly suspect someone was setting that place on fire on purpose first.

(23:06):

You think someone's cooking meth in there and the flame got away or cooking food or whatever. But I think someone who probably had a traumatic experience there, my suspicion is that someone was setting that place on fire. Now it's an empty lot, I think because it kept getting set on fire. They raised it. They're going to build, eventually build something there, low income housing I think. But now it's an empty lot. And I think that place, every time I walked by that place, it just carries that whole history of those things. We had a church building that we rented before ours that is an old warehouse across from it as a park where we had our first gatherings. Those are significant places in my own journey, there's a place where under a tunnel tunnel, there's a freeway that cuts through our neighborhood that's kind of the border of the boundary of officially of our neighborhood five freeway. And there's tunnels where the streets go underneath it. And there was an incident that happened where someone turned out to be an older gentleman who was mixing meds with alcohol, probably lost control of his car and ran over a bunch of people who were sleeping in tents on the sidewalk, killed several, injured a lot more, had some memorial moments over there. And every time I go around that tunnel, you just think of these people, some of whom we knew not super well, but knew by face and the things that happened there.

(24:27):

I don't know. I can list a lot of places. I've been in this place for 10 years, spent a lot of my time

(24:32):

In this neighborhood. And as you walk through, you just kind of have these memories come up to you of things that have happened, people that you've met. There's a park where I had this encounter. I met three different people who would have a significant role in my life at the same time, at the same little event. It was a hot day. There was a cooling tent that someone had organized, like an organization that organized just to help people stay cool, get water, cool off. And I met Steph Johnson, who ended up starting Voices of our city choir out of our building, which has blown up and become big. They won America's Got Talent, golden buzzer, the Big Deal. I met her that day and showed her the space and offered her to, she told me her dream of starting the Squire. I said, well, you can do it here.

(25:21):

And that was that day. I also met this guy named Will, who would be really one of the core members of our church for a lot of years. He's since passed away, met him that day. I met Michael McConnell that day, who's big time homelessness advocate in San Diego. Does a lot of videos. He's had some really viral videos of police throwing people's stuff away and has had a really outsized role in advocating for folks on the street in San Diego and elsewhere. Met all three of them that day in the same place, in the same park,

Montague Williams (25:50):

Wow

Chris Nafis (25:50):

And just you go by that park. That's also the place where we had some of our first worship services. And you think this place is a meaningful place to me?

Montague Williams (25:57):

Yeah. I mean it sounds like place actually plays a very important role in your life. I mean, it sounds like there are these very significant points of turning on your own life journey that are tied to place and tied to people, tied to moments. But it also sounds like within your neighborhood itself, especially now as a runner, you see places with significant meaning on the regular. It's a part of your way of pastoring.

Chris Nafis (26:30):

It's part of my way of being, I think. So my wife also is deeply rooted in place. She started a cut flower farm. She used to be a nurse I mentioned earlier. She's since essentially retired from nursing to run this small business, growing cut flowers. And she grows in our yard. She grows in eight different neighbor's yards. And so we have this tie in our own neighborhood to literal ground that our sustenance as a family comes out of this ground. And so I think it's been partly through my interest in agrarian life, I guess even though we're urban agriculture and this sense of connection to the land that I've come to know that connection mostly intellectually through theology and study and a little bit through experience and now more through experience through the farm and the kind of really embodied theology that's kind of arisen in me both academically and then through experience in working with people in a very specific location for so long, I think that that connection to place has been really significant for me. Like I say, I think about it all the time. It's a big part of everything that I do is rooted in some connection to the place that I do it.

Montague Williams (27:52):

You work with young people through who come through, but most of your life is very intergenerational adults, families. I know sometimes there are even children in those tents. If someone walks through your neighborhood, what kinds of questions and discernment would you hope they eventually engage along the way?

Chris Nafis (28:15):

It depends a lot on who they are. I think there's people that know these types of communities, well, travelers, there's people that have been on the street in different places that come through and there's a certain way of knowing the neighborhood, learning where resources are, learning where kind of friendly faces are. I would hope that they would find their way to kind of safe encounters with people to people. There's a lot of different people doing different things in our neighborhood. A lot of them are not good things. People are trafficked in our neighborhood. There's heavy, heavy drug usage. There's a lot of severe mental health issues that kind of intermingle with those things. And so when people come through for the first time that are in that place of vulnerability, I'm hoping to help guide them to safe places that they can navigate the world and not end up victims of violence and not end up falling into circles of people that are going to tempt them or lead them into addiction or deeper into addiction, but to help them find the places that are where there are people doing redemptive work and people where they'll experience love instead of the harshness of street life.

(29:36):

So I think for folks that come through, a lot of folks that we meet for the first time are in that camp. They're either experiencing homelessness for the first time or they're new to town or they've been chased out of some other neighborhood and they end up downtown because a lot of services are there. And in some seasons there's been more freedom downtown. Right now, the enforcement action from the police is very strong, so it's really hard to be downtown if you're on the street right now. But still a lot of people are there. So a lot of people that come to our neighborhood for the first time are in that category. For people that are coming, without that sort of knowledge or experience of poverty and street life, I think what I'm hoping is that they'll have a new understanding of the issues surrounding homelessness, that they'll come to actually see the people who are struggling with the housing crisis that we're in in our state and our country, really in our city for sure, and begin to kind of see humans in the tents and on the sidewalks.

(30:36):

And even to recognize the humanity of people who maybe passed out from fentanyl use on the sidewalk. There's people that most of the time, a lot of folks will, they're essentially invisible. You look through them, you don't want to see or be seen by them because they might ask you for something. And there's people that you kind of begin to see humans who are experiencing homelessness as a problem that you don't want to deal with on your walk or as someone who is kind of blends into the background of the urban landscape, or in some ways people treat them sort of like pigeons. And so I would hope that people would begin to see the people and recognize the struggle that's there, recognize the forces that push people into homelessness and begin to have some empathy and compassion and begin to do that work of overcoming the social barriers, the assumptions, the false narratives around homelessness that keep people from one another and begin to engage and see that they also have a role as members of our community if they're from San Diego, in helping and in being a part of people finding their way out of homelessness and into more stable and safe situations if there's different people.

(32:05):

So I guess it depends a lot on what someone's coming, why are they here and who are they and what have their experiences been.

Montague Williams (32:11):

Now Chris, you recently went on a trip that may or may not be a pilgrimage. You went away for a little bit of time and came back to this neighborhood. Could you share a little bit about where you went and why you went there?

Chris Nafis (32:27):

Sure. I was a part of an organization or I participated in a program by an organization called Global Immersion. And it's a global peacemaking organization that's trying to train peacemakers to foster peace in their own setting in their community to empower folks who are already doing some work where they're doing kind of peace and justice type work to give them some more tools and to give them connection and network and to have this experience of an immersion in a place that has experienced violence. In our case, we went to Belfast Northern Ireland, which was one of the main places where during the troubles and the Irish struggles between people who wanted Northern Ireland to remain loyal to Britain politically than typically Protestant folks that were kind of a British heritage and people who were Irish and wanted Ireland, the island of Ireland to be united and to be for that space at the northern part of Ireland to become again a part of the Republic of Ireland generally Catholic.

(33:36):

And so there's religious and political and social and ethnic kind of conflict there that burgeoned into pretty extreme violence for many years, especially in the eighties and nineties. And so they've been in a healing process. They had an agreement in the late nineties that has brought a sense of peace, but there's still deep division in the community. There's walls all over Belfast and all over many of the cities in Northern Ireland that divide community from community, they call them peace walls because they were put up essentially to stop just street violence, people shooting each other, getting in fights with each other or even bombing each other to kind of divide these communities so they could feel safe to sleep at night because there was so much violence and sort of hatred and animosity for so many years. Now, some of that has dissipated, but those same walls keep these communities apart and have in some ways from the people we talked to, been a barrier to actual reconciliation and finding life together.

(34:42):

So we kind of stepped into this place with this history. We learned a lot about the history. We talked to people who've been engaged in peacemaking work there, and we walked along the walls, we visited places where some of the meeting peace significance meetings have happened, went to some of the neighborhoods where there's still a lot of animosity and kind of learned from the people there and got to see some of the things that we've read about and some of the stories that we've heard see like, oh, this happened here and actually be on the street there where that thing happened. So that's what we did. And that was in June of this year. And we came back and went back to work with this new knowledge of what that kind of violence and the aftermath of it. It's been 25 plus years since the official piece was made, but still, there's still this animosity there in that community and with a new understanding of what that path can look like with some reflection on our own country and context and how it feels like we may be kind of tracking to be on a similar path.

(35:55):

So that's what we did, and it was very good, really good trip.

Montague Williams (35:59):

Okay. It was really good trip. You say it sounds like you learned a lot. You touched ground in places you read about, but what made it good?

Chris Nafis (36:12):

That's a good question. A big part of what made it good was the people that I was traveling with, just an amazing group of peacemakers. The work that I do in East Village and the work of probably even how I've described it sounds very rosy and romantic and so good and beautiful and meaningful, and it is, but it's also really hard and it's exhausting and it feels very lonely a lot of times, especially as the leader of the community. And so being with having this intense experience alongside other people who are in similar spaces and doing similar work and are doing it for similar reasons was really meaningful to have those connections and to make those friends and to now feel like I have a network of people that I can lean on talk to that can be a part of discernment processes with me and gain wisdom from their experiences and which we got to do on the trip itself.

(37:10):

But then kind of coming back and feeling like I have this expanded network, so I'm not quite so alone in what I do. So that's part of it. And then I think just seeing this place getting out of your own place, I think a big part of it honestly, is just leaving where I am because I'm so enmeshed in the things that are going on here that it's hard to get enough space from it to have that perspective from a distance where you can kind of look not from the midst of the trees, but from outside of them. And you can see the forest to use a don't know cliched example I guess, but just getting some space and some time to reflect and invest in my own growth instead of just sort of going crisis to crisis in our community as we often do, was also a big part of it.

(38:00):

And then of course, the specific place that we went and the history and the culture, I mean some of the best moments, honestly, it had nothing to do with the, I don't know, maybe having nothing to do with violence is the wrong way to put it. There probably is some connection to the violence, but going to some of the pubs at night where there's live music and all these different places and just experiencing the culture of Belfast, I've never been to a place that had, you can walk from one pub to the next, a block over to the next, a block over, and there's just dozens of places that have really high quality live music and just festive atmosphere, people kind of mixing and just enjoying the culture of music. And some of it was traditional Irish kind of folk music. Some of it was a lot of pop music from the nineties and two thousands that people were playing. So, but just being a part of the life of that community was really just a beautiful experience.

Montague Williams (38:57):

It's interesting that you describe some of the goodness of this journey in similar ways to your description of your time at Bobo having that burger.

Chris Nafis (39:08):

Oh Interesting.

Montague Williams (39:09):

You said that you're going from crisis to crisis. It was good to have some space to step away some time where you can kind of reflect and not have to have all the noise going on. It's very interesting. And you said that it helped you not feel so alone. It's also interesting that at that moment you were glad to have a moment to be alone. Yeah, it's just very interesting the journey that you could track there if you want.

Chris Nafis (39:39):

That is interesting. And I do think a lot, looking back at my life, a lot of, I feel like this is probably true for a lot of people that have lived lives of intentionality and spiritual connection, that a lot of those significant moments happen when you do step away for a moment and you do get out of your place and have that space. And even if so Bobo, I was in the same city. I wasn't like stepping away to northern island, other side of the world, but just kind of stepping out of your normal routines and stuff, it opens up a new level of reflection and it creates space for a depth of spiritual experience that there often isn't in the routines and kind of the demands of regular life.

Montague Williams (40:21):

And it sounds like you experience a major aspect of pilgrimage, which is the development of community, the fact that you went on this journey with people who have some shared life experience, but different, I'm sure you shared stories together and as you encountered what you encountered in Northern Ireland and you made your own connections, you probably heard other people make their connections too. Yeah. And as you do that, you begin to see, wait a second, we have some life we can share together. And now you have that common experience, that formation of community is pretty, there are different elements of pilgrimage, core elements of pilgrimage, and that would be one of them, this sort of grounding community that would not have existed otherwise. Even people who do individual pilgrimages tend to find that in some way. But yeah, that's really interesting. Okay, so you are out there, this community is formed and you're back. You have this network. A major aspect of pilgrimage is that return home, not just the fact that you are returning home, but the way you return home and how this experience of being in this new place impacts your way of being home. And we heard a lot about the neighborhood and the communities that you inhabit regularly. Do you sense that your experience on this pilgrimage impacts your own sense of being home now?

Chris Nafis (42:03):

I mean, it definitely impacted coming home. I was full of energy and life and sort of this drive to find, in our case, I dunno how nitty gritty detailed to get here, but our church really responded to the pandemic. And by seriously leaning into services in our community, there was this dramatic need when the pandemic hit all the food dried up people. We didn't realize how big a part of the food network in East Village was just from these random drive-bys is what we call them. People or churches, organizations that will just drive up and they'll pop up for a minute, they'll serve a bunch of food and then they'll pack up and go home. Or even people that will just come, they had a party at their house, they have seven boxes of extra pizza. They'll drive up to the neighborhood, they'll open the trunk, they'll serve whoever.

(42:59):

So in our neighborhood, it turned out that was a pretty significant source of food actually for people. And when the pandemic hit let, all disappeared overnight. And at the same time in San Diego, they closed down all the parks. They cleared all the parks. And a lot of what happened was that a bunch of people came to our neighborhood from being out in public parks, which now the enforcement actions of the police sent them into our neighborhood. So we had twice as many people. We had no food. People were actually hungry, which was really kind of a new experience. So much food in East Village that people struggle from a lot of things, but usually you can find food if you need to. And we were encountering people that literally just hadn't eaten in a couple of days. And so partly due to that and just many of other similar needs, people no longer had places to charge their phones, which seems like not a big deal maybe, but it actually is.

(43:50):

If that is your connection to the outside world, your connection to services, if you're trying to go through programs and no one can find you, you can't make a phone call, you libraries, all closed, coffee shops all closed, all the places that people would normally charge their phones were inaccessible. So we started at a charging station, and so we expanded really heavily into this service oriented community. And part of what leaving helped me to kind reflect on was that that had created an imbalance in our community where we're doing so much to serve and we're not sort of finding the roots of the core mission of our churches, worship, community and service, all three of those things and service was by far, we were really off balance in that direction. And so came back with this fire, we're going to try to find more balance.

(44:37):

We're going to rethink how we do things and where are things that we can scale back now that the pandemic has mostly passed and the need isn't quite as acute as it was before. And where can we, you know what I mean? So the detail is not necessarily important, but just rethinking my own work and the significance of it. And then also thinking about the political climate that we're coming back into with new eyes, having a sense of, the real takeaway for me from that trip was I went in not really making the direct connection between the experience of Northern Ireland and it really affected the Republic of Ireland and England also and the United States, knowing there were some connections there, but not really making the direct connection to coming back feeling like we are at the beginning of this conflict and we are on a path into it if we don't kind of change our direction.

Montague Williams (45:27):

Wow

Chris Nafis (45:28):

There was some political violence that happened really quickly after we returned that confirmed those sort of suspicions. And it just feels you came back and the message we got from people in there who were kind of on the tail end trying to heal from their experience was like stay connected to people on the other side because those relationships matter. Even if you get separated by the conflict or whatever, that is going to be significant. So there were certain lessons I feel like I learned and came away thinking differently about our own divide and our own kind of culture here in the United States. And so both of those things, it was an energy for me in this experience that I expected to fade really quickly. Sometimes you come back from a mountaintop experience, it really didn't. It sustained for a long time. I'm now in a busy season, I'm getting a little tired, but I feel like I came back with this sort of drive to continue the work that we've started some wisdom and direction and where we need to go as a community, another, I'll use the word call again, but a call to more directly engage in peacemaking and healing and not necessarily to wash away the divisions and the issues that we're facing.

(46:47):

I think it kind of highlighted some of the dangers of this political moment and sort of the people in charge now and where that has potential to lead us. And so kind of a sense of we need to actually be firm in our commitment to justice and peace in our neighborhood, in our community, but also a call to not allow myself to fall into hatred of people who are on the other side of the divide. So I came back with all of this kind of reflection and stirred up and ready to go. So was, I don't know, I came back, you could ask people in my church and they'd be like, he came back alive again. I was kind of on the edge of burnout, I think again before, and came back energized and sort of ready to hit the ground running.

Montague Williams (47:31):

Do you remember any spiritual practices you engaged in while you were part of this pilgrimage?

Chris Nafis (47:36):

We had a lot. And it was just the way that we came into our sessions together. So we did a lot of education at a certain part of, some of it was in this immersion experience where we were touring Belfast, learning from people and kind of had that experience. And then another part was a formal peacemaking mediation training that we did. And during the training, we had all these sessions. It was a lot of work actually, but we had a way of entering into those times that was sort of some deep breathing and kind of moments of different kind of practices that we tried over the time. One of the women on the trip was a yoga instructor and offered yoga several mornings. And so participating in that with this new group of people was really cool. I don't feel like there was one consistent spiritual practice that we did all along the way, but part of the cool part of it was getting to experience a variety of spiritual practices that I haven't actually had, many of them I've tried before, but that aren't a regular part of my normal life, and getting a little taste of some new practices.

Montague Williams (48:43):

Tell me about one of those breathing practices.

Chris Nafis (48:45):

So the one, we did a lot of different ones, and I'm going to botch this description, but one of our leaders, her, this is kind of her thing, she's really good with this stuff. She's trained in a lot of this is the kind of somatic work that we've been working on in our trauma work in our church too, but in a different way. So she would leave, she would get up at a certain point when we're all gathered together, we'd be standing all in a circle sort to shoulder to shoulder in this big room, or we'd be sitting at first and she would invite us to stand up and she would invite us to close our eyes and take a really deep breath. And then she would ask us to imagine Jesus coming into the room as a Christian group and we're almost all Christians, but she would ask us to imagine Jesus coming to us and offering us a word of peace and offering us this presence of grace and love.

(49:42):

And she would ask us to envision him whatever felt comfortable for us, even coming in and embracing us and just having this sense of what would it mean to encounter Christ in this room right now, which is not for me, that's a little bit of a woo woo mystical thing to do. I don't do that kind of thing often. But participating it and being led by someone who this is a part of their spiritual life and practice, and just handing myself over to it and allowing myself to experience it was really good. It was just, was very soothing and relaxing and knowing that we're all kind of maybe feeling, not all feeling uncomfortable, but many of us, maybe this is a new kind of experience for us, but we're all kind of doing it together. We're all leaning into it and no one's being cynical and skeptical. We're all just like, yeah, we're going to do this together. And just having that vulnerability to experience that new practice together. And then she would ask us to take a deep breath and then we would sit down. That was one of 'em. But we did

Montague Williams (50:44):

Yeah

Chris Nafis (50:44):

Other things like that.

Montague Williams (50:46):

You now have an idea of what pilgrimage is. We didn't give you a definition, but you talked through some things. You talked about place, you talked about movement and travel. You've talked about spiritual practice in place. You've talked about the significance of people making place what it is. If you could take your family on a pilgrimage somewhere, where would you go and what would you do?

Chris Nafis (51:14):

That's such a hard question to answer because there's so many places that I would like to go, so many things that I would like to do, and then parsing out, do I want to go there? Because it's like it would be a cool place to go, and I want to see the sights and experience the things or be out of nature. I mean, there's part of me that wants to answer with a super nature type question. We love to be outdoors and go on a backpacking trip out into the wilderness. But I think if I'm thinking of the kind of pilgrimage that connects us to people and story, this may sound like a cheesy answer coming from a pastor, but I've never been to the holy land, to the place where so many of the stories of our scriptures were happened and were written down, and where that community was the one who kind of brought the history of our spiritual traditions.

(52:04):

And so visiting Israel, Palestine, middle East, that area, I think it'd be really interesting to visit kind of Galilee and the places where Jesus walked and where he was, he grew up, and some of the stories from the scriptures happened. And just being able to, as someone who's, I preach out of the Bible every week, I've given a whole lot of my life to reading and studying these stories and these places to be able to have an image of the geography of the place. Thinking about my, so one of the things that I've thought a lot about, I'm sorry, this is maybe a longer answer than you wanted, is I think I've kind of come to grieve the way that in our culture, we are so transient that we don't actually have, many of us, at least urban folks, don't have intergenerational roots where we are. And so there's places in scripture where there are many different people over thousands of years that have made this same journey here from here to here and come back. And I've thought about the lack of that. And as I've started running and experiencing San Diego on foot and come to know like, oh, there's a hill here. I didn't even realize. I just drove with my car. Car doesn't really notice the hill,

(53:28):

But when I'm running it, I notice I can feel this place in my calves. You know what I mean? And so to experience the places that I've spent so much of my imagination, so much of my intellectual time to be able to see distances like, oh, this is how far it is from Jericho to Jerusalem, or to think about the hills that are described in those texts or to visit, I mean, I don't know. I think there's a lot of places there where they're like, this is the well, or would this happen? And is it really, I don't know. But just to have that sense of, all right, I can envision this story and I can kind of tap into that history that was not repeated, but where these people live for so long and committed themselves to this land for so long, and now it's contested land, and there's multiple kind of people that have come out of that place with a sense of ownership and history. And its, I mean, even that would also be interesting to kind get to engage with that a little bit and to kind of see and learn a bit more about that conflict. But I think just kind of going back to some of the stories that have been meaningful for my life that have been a part of my spiritual journey, I think that's probably where I would go since I haven't been able to go there yet.

Montague Williams (54:43):

Chris, thank you so much for being a part of this podcast, for being a part of this conversation.

Chris Nafis (54:49):

Oh, for sure. Thanks for the invitation, and yeah, really grateful to come on here. This is fun to get to think and talk a little bit more about place

Montague Williams (54:58):

You've been listening to Breathe In Place, a podcast brought to you by the Pilgrimage Innovation Hub. This podcast is made possible by generous support from the Lilly Endowment Narrative production by Guimel Sibingo, Technical Production by Danny Martinez and Project Coordination and guest booking by Wanda Gailey, opening Music by Chaos. If you have any questions or comments about today's episode, we'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at pilgrimage@pointloma.edu or message us on Instagram at Pilgrimage Innovation Hub. I'm your host, Montague Williams. Thanks again for joining us. We'll see you next week.

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Operations Coordinator, The Pilgrimage Innovation Hub

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wgailey@pointloma.edu

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