The Welfare of the City: Sister Margaret (or: The First Time I Walked Away from Poverty)

I recently told you I want to start writing about poverty and race, two topics I care deeply about, but find incredibly difficult to write about with honesty and integrity. The more I experience and learn about racism and poverty, the less sure I am about solutions to these tragedies, until I find myself positively paralyzed. I’m pretty sure, right now anyway, that all I have is my own story. Unlike everything you have been taught about good stories, this one doesn’t have a clear beginning and middle and end. I’m sure some sort of structure or theme will emerge in this series, which I am calling “The Welfare of the City” (from Jeremiah 29), but I sure don’t know what it is. Still, Sr. Margaret McKenna seems like as good a place to begin as any.

I’m pretty sure the first time I met Sr. Margaret was in a program at my church called Urban Disciples. This was way, way back, in the late 90’s or early aughts, shortly after I joined Old First, having gotten involved there through volunteering with Julie at our homeless shelter. A group of us decided to get together once a week and explore what it meant to be urban disciples. To be Christians called to serve those living on the margins in the city, and in turn to be served by them. Few know about this better than Sr. Margaret, and so we had her come talk to us, and we went to visit her at New Jerusalem, the recovery community she helped found in North Philly.

But my first really clear memory of Sr. Margaret is on a Sunday morning, when she joined us at Old First for worship once. I believe we were recognizing our partners in service, the sites where we send rural and suburban youth groups who come through our work camp program to learn about and do service in the city. At any rate, what I remember so clearly is that it was Reformation Sunday, and I thought it was such a hoot that Sr. Margaret sang A Mighty Fortress Is Our God -- by Martin Luther himself -- with such pleasure and gusto!

Sr. Margaret is a Medical Mission Sister and the founder and passionate spiritual leader of New Jerusalem Laura, a beloved community of men and women seeking recovery for themselves and for the world. To hear Sr. Margaret tell it, she never meant to start anything at all when she moved to an abandoned house in one of the most brutal ghettos in Philly. She just wanted to get away, to be a hermit, to live a simple and prayerful life like the desert mothers and fathers she hoped to emulate. But the thing about Sr. Margaret is that she just loves people. She loves to touch them and laugh with them and hear their stories. And she’s got this infectious zest for life, and this totally disarming charm. It’s probably a cliché to describe an elderly nun as having twinkling eyes, but she does, really – twinkling and mischievous!

She also has a searing intellect (B.A., English, Chestnut Hill College; M.A., Liturgy, Notre Dame; Ph.D., Christian Origins and Religious Thought, University of Pennsylvania); wide-ranging experience (she has been a director of novices, university professor, writer, art director, and peace activist); and broad, broad vision. It’s a compelling combination, let me tell you. So it’s no surprise that the whole hermit thing didn’t really work out for her.

Instead, Sr. Margaret took a look around her new neighborhood in North Philly and said, “Hmm, it seems that addiction is at the heart of a lot of the problems I see facing this community.” She got to know the Reverend Henry Wells, who was working with addicts through his program One Day at a Time (ODAAT), and out of their work together, organically, New Jerusalem was born.

Among the founding principles of New Jerusalem is that people are sick with addiction and the violence it spawns because our world is sick with addiction and the violence it spawns. So to heal ourselves we also have to heal the world, and likewise, to heal the world, we also have to heal ourselves. New Jerusalem is not just a place that serves addicts who want to get clean, but a place where addicts can serve the world to help it get clean as well. As Sister Margaret describes the mission of New Jerusalem:

The program of New Jerusalem Laura is one of holistic recovery: we seek to integrate the physical, psychological, spiritual, political, and social dimensions of recovery in our daily lives. We are committed to work toward healing and justice for and with the impoverished people of North Philadelphia, with whom we live and work in community and reciprocity. We are not so much a service institution, as a community of people helping ourselves and our neighborhood to recover. Recovery is about the radical change from death to life, from darkness to light, from self-will to God’s will. It involves the mystery of conversion and the aspiration to fullness of life in God. It requires risk and mutual support and the sharing of practical spirituality and wisdom. God must be the sole principle of this new way of life, this reordering of chaos. (from the website)

Spiritual formation is at the heart of recovery work at New Jerusalem, and one of the requirements, at least in the first year of residence in the community, is to attend daily Bible study with Sr. Margaret.

***

A couple of years ago at my twentieth college reunion, a classmate whom I hadn’t seen since graduation looked at me and said, “typewriters and babies!” I stared back, blankly. “That’s what you used to say you were going to have on your commune,” said Robert, “typewriters and babies, remember?” I didn’t really, but I was thrilled to be reminded. I guess it’s been a long time that I’ve been fascinated with living intentionally and in community. Though I bet Sr. Margaret would say she is living unintentionally in community, or rather, organically in community -- unintentionally enough that good intention doesn’t get in the way of community happening, organically. That’s one of the most important things I’ve learned from Sr. Margaret, that community will happen if we let it. And it’s kind of true that my life now does feel a little bit like living in a commune – with typewriters and babies no less! But when Micah was little, I wanted something more. I wanted very intentionally to be part of a community like New Jerusalem, which I found so powerfully compelling. But with a first grade daughter and a new baby son, it was hard to imagine how I could really get involved. Bible study seemed like a good place to start.

New Jerusalem is now a pretty wide-ranging community of residences that have been reclaimed and renovated from the abandoned rubble of North Philly. But the heart of New Jerusalem is a pair of small, modest row houses. One is the abandoned house Sr. Margaret originally bought for her hermitage, and the second is the one they bought next door. Along the way, the interior wall was torn down between, so the community house is a funny sort of mish-mash of two kitchens, two staircases, and one big living space. Upstairs is a maze of small offices, bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a small prayer room. Every thing has a scrappy, handy-man-special sort of look to it, with pergo floors and a mish-mash of used furniture; found art of the religious-inspirational variety; political posters of the peace-and-welfare-rights variety; bookcases made of boards and bricks and full of dusty, wide-ranging titles that almost certainly include Ghandi, King, Merton and Day; two kitchens full of mis-matched dishes and cheap, processed food; and doors and windows that are totally out of plumb. There are lots of plants, many hanging from macramé plant holders right out of the seventies; crucifixes hang on several walls; the old piano is never in tune; and a communal, avacado-green phone is attached to its base with a long cord. It might strike you a lot like a college group house at first, except that the plants are all alive, and there are no empty beer cans anywhere, and no ash trays. There is, however, almost always a pot of strong coffee brewing. And if you can look past the lack of attention to any real aesthetic sensibility, you will notice that everything is very clean, as cleaning the community spaces is part of the mandatory community service at New Jerusalem.

Bible study starts every morning at 8:00, in the community living and dining space, where all chairs can be turned to face Sr. Margaret’s plaid recliner by the wood stove. It was a bit of a trick to get there by 8:00, but Trixie was a sport about being dropped off at school early, and with luck, I could usually get there in about ten minutes. Finding the right place to sit among the crowd of forty or fifty residents was more difficult, given the vicissitudes of life with a small baby – Micah was not quite six months, and probably only twice as many pounds, when I first started attending Bible study in October of 2003. I finally figured out that sitting on the steps in the first house afforded me both a good view of Sr. Margaret, and an easy escape route upstairs if Micah got fussy. But mostly in the early months, Micah was content to snooze and nurse in our blue batik sling, and I could sit entranced by Sr. Margaret.

And really? “Bible study” was probably a misnomer, because it was really more like the “Sr. Margaret Variety Hour.” She would pick a theme for a few weeks or months – while I was there, we did the Beatitudes, the “Gospel According to Martin Luther King,” the passion story from Luke – and for an hour each morning, Sr. Margaret would talk. Always with a steaming hot cup of black coffee held between both hands, stopping only very occasionally to let someone else say something or ask a question, Sr. Margaret would interpret and narrate. It was really The Gospel According to Sr. Margaret, truth be told, and not everyone was happy about it all the time. Especially if they dared to challenge the good Sister, or disagree with her interpretation. Oh dear. And if you haven’t spent much time with middle-aged African American addicts and homeless men, you may not know this, but many of them are serious theologians. They know their Bible, chapter and verse. And very occasionally, some of them didn’t agree with Sr. Margaret’s interpretation of things. There wasn’t a lot of room for that, though, so the grumblings stayed pretty low in the back of the room, mostly unnoticed by the rest of us, who sat contentedly, heads nodding, letting loose an occasional “Amen” in response to Sr. Margaret’s compelling meandering through scripture.

Lots of people visit New Jerusalem, and quite a few visit the Bible study occasionally, so nobody paid me much mind at first. As weeks turned into months, though, I slowly and quietly became part of the community. People generally knew who I was, and I started learning names and noticing who was gone, recognizing when folks were new. As Micah grew bigger and more active, I missed more and more of the Bible study, straining to hear as I bounced him and hummed at the top of the stairs. But Micah became quite the center of attention upon our arrival and departure, as I pulled him out of, and then bundled him back into, his purple snow suit. He was quite beloved of the community, and got passed around a lot to men and women hungry for something sweet and fresh and new. (When I took Micah to his one-year old appointment, I got on automatic pilot at the checklist of questions our thorough pediatrician always asked: Any smokers in the house? No. Any guns in the house? No. Do you always use a car seat? Yes. Any reason we should do a TB test? No. …Oh wait, yes, now that I think of it, maybe we should...)

***

Early that winter, Sr. Margaret asked if I would help some of the residents get ready for the GRE, a program she had long wanted to start, but had never been able to get off the ground. I was eager to do something that would give back, eager to get to know folks in the community in a more intimate way, and I eagerly said yes. I put out a call to anyone interested, and soon had about ten residents signed up. I did a thorough intake with each one, assessing their needs and goals. I got hooked up with some city bureaucracy that gave us books. I found a course at Temple and took a van full of residents to the campus to sign up for study help. I scheduled regular study times in the community house, and tried to make myself available to help whenever I could. I found locations and dates for taking the test, and tried to help folks register.

But here’s the thing – the thing I was already learning, in fact, as I watched the faces at Bible study change over time. New Jerusalem is one of the most successful long-term recovery programs around, with a relatively high success rate, and a relatively low rate of relapse. The emphasis, though, is on “relatively.” In fact, even at New Jerusalem, one of the few sure things is relapse and turnover. I guess that’s what I learned, in concrete and heartbreaking ways, about poverty in general: one thing you can count on is that you can’t count on much. Things change all the time: you grow close to someone, come to love someone, and suddenly they’re gone – because they’re using again, or they got in a fight, or they lost their public assistance. Maybe a mother or a child needs them, or their boyfriend took them back, or they ran into some of their boys from back in the ‘hood. New Jerusalem is full of hope, but it is the hope of a flower that blooms in the midst of the weeds and the trash and the used condoms and the crack vials and the hypodermic needles that riddle most every vacant lot in the ghetto. New Jerusalem is a beacon in the midst of the swirling, ugly chaos of poverty and addiction, but it is not immune from the chaos. The chaos swirls through on a regular basis, and wreaks havoc on the community. And the folks who stay, year in and year out – all of them, Sr. Margaret, and the other nuns, and the volunteers, and the long-term residents, all of them working their programs to heal themselves and heal the world – they are all saints. Saints, really, there is no other word for it.

I, on the other hand, am not a saint. It was just too much for me. By the time the test date we’d been working toward came around, almost every one of my promising pupils had left the community. Often I wouldn’t even find out for days or a week. New folks would sign up, but they too would eventually leave altogether, or simply fade away. It was confusing and disheartening and just plain hard.

By the time Easter rolled around, Bible study was becoming less and less satisfying too. Micah was more and more active, and less content to nap or play quietly in the sling. I spent a lot of time upstairs feeling frustrated. I was also finding myself a little uncomfortable with Sr. Margaret’s Easter theology, much as I wanted to revere every word that came out of her mouth.

And so, after spring break, I just didn’t go back. I meant to, I surely thought I would, but as it turns out, I didn’t. I didn’t say good-bye. I didn’t offer any explanation. I just let myself fade away, as so many folks do at New Jerusalem. I told myself it just didn’t make sense to keep going: Micah was too big and fussy, summer was coming, I was starting to tire a bit of the Gospel According to Sr. Margaret. But in truth, none of that was the real reason. The real reason was that I just needed to get away from the chaos of poverty. And so I did. That was the first time I just walked away.

To be continued.

Epilogue: I should note that have been back, a couple of times over the last few years, and I have always been wildly and warmly received with cries of “Oh we have missed you! It’s so good to see you!” Saints, I tell you. No other word for it. If you're looking for a worthwhile cause to give some money to in this season of thanksgiving, I can't think of a more worthy one than New Jerusalem!

Coming Attractions

Last Sunday Michael preached a sermon on James and John, two of Jesus’ disciples who, with a stunning lack of humility, conspired to reserve for themselves the seats of honor on Jesus’ right and on his left in his coming glory. Can you imagine? Wanting to be special like that? Sheesh.

Of course, as Michael suggested in his sermon, we probably all have a bit of that – ambition, a drive to be successful, to be great even – or at the very least, a need to be recognized, affirmed. In its most basic form, it seems to me, this is really just another way of saying that we all need to be loved.

Of course, our need to be loved can play itself out in many ways, some of them not so humble. Often, our need to be loved plays itself out as a need to be loved over and above everyone else, to be greater, better, more special. I mean really, James and John were already Jesus’ disciples for crying out loud! What more could you want?

I doubt Jesus’ response was all that satisfying to James and John, and it can be hard medicine for most of us still today: “…whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve…” (Mark 10: 43-45) Jesus doesn’t say that we can’t be special, that we can’t be great, but he redefines greatness. As Michael put it, Jesus asks not that we give up our drive to be first, but rather that we turn our drive to be “first in love … first in service.” Michael suggested that Jesus “democratizes ‘greatness’ if you will. Everyone can be great, because everyone can serve…. Beloved," Michael continued, "Service is the rent we pay for the room we take up in this world. Not something we do in our spare time, with what’s left over. But our purpose in life. Everyone can be great. And it’s one of the most beautiful compensations in life that no one can sincerely try and help another without helping himself. The best way to become yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. Everyone can be great. ‘We cannot truly live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a 1000 invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run first as causes and then return as results’ (Herman Melville). Everyone can be great. We can’t foresee our lives’ twists and turns, but one thing we can know: the ones who live best will be those who’ve sought and found how to serve. Everyone can be great. Children of God, Disciples of Christ, find your real job, and do it. Understand real success and go for it. Everyone can be great. Amen.” (Michael Ward Caine, sermon to Old First Reformed United Church of Christ, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on October 18, 2009)

I agree with Michael that everyone can be great. I agree that Jesus calls us to a different standard of greatness than the world calls us to, and that Jesus’ standard is how well we love and serve one another.

I agree, wholeheartedly, indeed this is at the heart of my faith as a Christian … and yet, and yet … that doesn’t feel like the whole story to me. Or rather, I should say, that’s not my whole story. And I want to tell you my whole story about service and greatness and my need to be loved. I want to tell you because I think it is sort of easy to be a little polly-anna about how nice and good and right it is to serve others, but I am here to tell you it can be pretty fucking hard too. And our actions, that “run first as causes and then return as results”? Sometimes the results aren’t what you’d expect. And you still find yourself yearning for a pat on the back, to be special, to be loved.

A couple of years ago I stopped blogging at the wide tent for several reasons. One was that I found myself starting to feel ambitious as a writer, wanting to be read, and recognized, to be one of the important and successful bloggers – but I didn’t like the writer I became when I was motivated by ambition. I felt that my words, in my mouth, on my fingertips, that they were often righteous, and lacked humility, that I was trying to bring craft to my work not so that it would serve others but so that it would reflect well on me. And when I did try to approach my writing with humility, I would just be left wondering, “Who the hell am I anyway? Why do I think I have anything so special to say?” Either way, it was sort of paralyzing.

Another reason I stopped blogging was that I had hit a wall when it came to writing about race and poverty. I was and still am pretty in awe of Dawn’s writing about adoption, and as I have said before, I felt, and still feel, like I don’t have a whole lot to add. But poverty and racism – I felt like I actually did have something to say, and I was tired of the same old predictable white liberal script -- I wanted to break out, and talk about these things in new ways … but again, I just felt paralyzed.

Most importantly, though, I stopped blogging because I took a job, and I just really didn’t have any time. For almost two years, from early in 2007 until late fall of 2008, I became very involved in directing my church’s summer and after school programs for children and youth living in poverty in a neighborhood of Philadelphia called Kensington. By the end of 2008, I had burned through just about everything I thought I knew about myself, and I just collapsed.

Writing again here at my goodly heritage has been wildly theraputic, and while I don’t have all the answers about why I write, and how I write, and what it all means, I do know that I don’t feel so paralyzed any more. I feel like I have emerged with a new voice, and I will admit I like it. I also will admit that I like getting nice comments from all of you. I don’t know if I have more ambition than that right now, but I’m also pretty sure that if I do, it’s okay. And, I think, maybe I’m ready to tell you my story, my complicated story about service and greatness and needing to be loved.

This story is long, and it will most likely unfold over many months. So stay tuned. If you feel so moved, drop me a comment now and again and let me know what you think. I’m not too proud to tell you that it really does make my day!

Some Thoughts on Poverty, Coercion and Adoption

If you haven’t given much thought to adoption ethics and reform (and there’s no judgment in that – most people haven’t), this is probably not the best place to start, because you might feel like you've walked in on the middle of a conversation you don't really understand. Instead, you should pour yourself a strong cup of coffee, say a little prayer (you might need both), and head on over to This Woman’s Work where Dawn writes tirelessly and honestly and personally about adoption. One of several reasons I don’t write about adoption much is that Dawn does it so damn well, and I have little to add. But it’s probably not fair to sit back and let Dawn do all the heavy hitting, and maybe I do have a few things of my own to say. So here I go, dipping my toes in….

The central paradox of adoption, it seems to me, is that it is a joyful and awesome thing that happens, by definition, in a context of profound loss and sorrow. But this alone does not make it problematic; indeed, much of life, it seems to me, is like that. Perhaps slightly more problematic is that the joy and awesomeness on the one hand, and the loss and sorrow, on the other, are pretty lop-sided: adoptive parents get most of the former, first parents get mostly the latter, and adoptive children are stuck in the middle trying to synthesize the two. But even this does not seem to me intrinsically problematic, especially if everyone is doing their work with honesty and integrity.

By which I mean that adoptive parents owe it to themselves and their children to lift up and celebrate the profound and beautiful experience of creating a family through adoption, because it IS beautiful and profound. There is something just extravagantly hopeful and glorious and absurdly against-the-odds about forging bonds that usually begin with DNA, but, as it turns out, don’t have to. But this is only part of the story, and it’s a story that easily sinks into sentimentality and, ultimately, heartbreak, if it can’t exist along side the other story, the story of what was first lost, which is also profound and real and beautiful. Adoptive parents also have an obligation to make room for that other story, and to let it be part of their family’s story, and to give their children tools for coping with that loss.

Likewise, first parents owe it to themselves and their children to, as best they can, find ways to heal their broken hearts and celebrate the families they have helped their children become part of. Under the best of circumstances, in an open adoption, first parents remain part of those families. And if all the grown-ups are doing their work as best they can given the resources they have available to them – in other words, if everyone is doing their work with integrity -- it seems to me that adoption becomes just one of life’s many crucibles, and that it is at least possible for everyone to come out whole on the other side.

I guess what I’m saying is this: adoption is full of joy, and it’s full of pain, and the joy and the pain are not evenly distributed, and that sucks, but none of that, it seems to me, makes adoption intrinsically problematic. That’s just life: it’s full of joy and it’s full of pain, and the joy and the pain are not evenly distributed, and we all have to do the best we can, with honesty and integrity, to, well, do the best we can. And some of us will get wounded along the way even so, and some of us will come out relatively unscathed, and life is just like that.

No, it’s not pain and sorrow and grief that make adoption problematic, it’s that the pain and the sorrow and the grief are all-too-often the result of coercion.

Now, some folks will argue that adoption is, by its very definition, coercive, and that I’m just splitting hairs, but I actually can imagine a scenario in which a first mother truly and freely chooses adoption for her child. It seems to me that it is patronizing and offensive to say that no woman with real agency would ever choose to place her baby for adoption. It strikes me that insisting otherwise is to insist that there is no better life for all women who find themselves pregnant than to raise children, which, it strikes me, is simply absurd. Not all women are meant to raise children, and certainly even women who are meant to raise children are not always meant to raise them at the moment they find themselves pregnant, and while the choice to place a baby for adoption will most likely have serious and life-long implications for any woman faced with that choice, implications she is probably incapable of fully understanding at that moment, nonetheless, to suggest that she should not have adoption as an option as she tries to make the best choice for herself and her baby in that moment …. well, I find that problematic. I believe strongly that adoption free of coercion, just like abortion free of coercion, should be one choice among many for any woman faced with a crisis pregnancy.

But there’s the rub: adoption free of coercion? That, it seems to me, is a rare thing indeed. There’s so much coercion in adoption, and so many others, especially first mothers, have written so much more knowledgeably and eloquently about that than I can. So I just want to think for a little bit specifically about the coercion of poverty. Dawn has suggested, wisely (as always), that a first step to getting coercion out of adoption is to get the money out of the equation, and certainly I agree that if money were less a part of the actual transactions that result in adoption, that would be A Good Thing. I’m not an adoption reform activist, and I can’t promise that I’m going to become one any time soon, but I will certainly throw my voice and my prayers and even my money behind the good folks who are doing this important work.

The problem, though, as I see it, is that even if those good folks are successful and we get the money out of adoption transactions … it still seems to me that whenever poverty is part of the adoption equation, there’s going to be coercion involved. Because poverty is intrinsically coercive. One of my pet peeves is people who claim to be living lives of “voluntary poverty” because one of the hallmarks of poverty is that it’s sticky and profoundly restrictive. Intrinsically involuntary. If you can chose poverty, then you can un-choose it, which means that it’s not really poverty in the first place.

Real poverty? No one chooses that. Because let’s be clear, poverty is ugly and brutal and violent and soul-squashing. And it is not good for children, not good at all. Does this mean that children living in poverty would always be better off living with affluent families? Of course not, because many, many parents living in poverty are able, against so many odds, to be good parents (also, it’s because affluence can be likewise ugly and brutal and violent and soul-squashing, but that’s another rant altogether). But does it mean that some children born into poverty would be better off adopted by more affluent families? Yes, I do believe so.

Of course the best solution would be to end poverty. Of course. Then the coercion of poverty could be totally taken out of the adoption equation. And working to end brutalizing poverty is at the heart of my faith and informs all of my life-style and political choices (so maybe I am an adoption advocate?) But, you know, good luck with that and all, right? Even Jesus said the poor will always be with us, and while I try to do my part, I’m sure not holding my breath. In the meantime, there are families right here, right now, in this “mean time,” families who are stuck in poverty, and the only choices they have are choices that are overshadowed by poverty’s inherent coercion. That’s just the reality of their lives. To suggest that their children are always better off with them is to romanticize poverty and to patronize them. When poverty is your context, often the only choices you have are the best among a lot of bad options. When poverty’s coercion pervades your life, the amount of agency left to you is really small, but it’s what you have, and to exercise it is to exercise the only power you have. To take away that power in the interests of eliminating coercion is itself coercive. That’s what I mean about poverty: coercion is just the sea you swim in. There is no being free from it, there is just doing the best you can to stay afloat. For some women living in poverty, the best choice they can make for their children is to place them for adoption.

There’s so much coercion in adoption, and adoptive parents are responsible for a lot of it. We who adopt have an awesome responsibility to speak out, as Dawn says, to use our privileged place in the adoption triad as a bully pulpit for those who are structurally less powerful. I believe that, and I thank Dawn for being so relentless in reminding me of it.

But the coercion in adoption that stems from poverty? All of us, all of us who don’t live in poverty, aren’t we all party to that? Aren’t we all responsible for that? Well, that's probably a whole other debate, but as for me, I'm pretty sure when it comes to poverty, pretty much we're all implicated (present company most certainly included).

Poverty is one of the hardest things for me to write about. I have tried and failed, tried and failed, over and over and over for several years now. It is one of the reasons I stopped blogging at my first blog, the wide tent – it was time to write honestly about poverty and race, but I just didn’t have it in me. And I’m not sure I do even now. As I read back over this piece, I’m not happy at all – this is exactly the sort of writing I go out of my way these days to avoid: argumentative, righteous, entirely lacking in personal narrative. But to write well – to be vulnerable enough to tell the truth as I live it about poverty and race, much less poverty and race and adoption – I still haven’t figured out how to do that. So I leave you here with this, the best I could do with the resources I have at hand right now.

And really, you should go on over to This Woman’s Work because she’s just fearless.