Neighborhood watch

Tonight I'm going to exegete neighborhood watch signs. That's right.

I pass neighborhood watch signs on my way to and from school every day, though I don't usually take much notice, because after all, they are neighborhood watch signs. But for whatever reason I noticed one yesterday. It had a nice picture of some houses and said something like "watching out for each other" or something.

I remember getting to ride around the neighborhood with Dad when I was little and he had neighborhood watch. It was fun because I wanted to catch people. It was like being a detective. The neighborhood watch signs in our neighborhood, as I recall, had a big eye on them.

So I noticed the nice houses and slogan on this sign in Druid Hills and thought about how it was a different conception about what neighborhood watch was supposed to be. Not a bad-guy-catching adventure symbolized by a big scary we're-watching-you eye, but a chance to take care of the people you live with in a small way.

Probably neighborhood watch in Druid Hills isn't any different than neighborhood watch in our little corner of Vienna. I bet kids still ride along hoping to catch the bad guys. But I like the shift in meaning. Sometimes nicer language can just serve to mask a lack of real change, but I believe the language and symbols we use to describe things really can and do affect how we think about them. Which, of course, applies to God, too--especially when it comes to inclusive language and masculine/feminine imagery, but really in any set of symbols we use to conjure up an image of the divine. And which applies to other people--whether, for example, we consider them "sinners" or "children of God." (That was in something I was reading recently too...She Who Is?)

So that's why God is like a neighborhood watch sign. You know you wish you had thought of it first.