Downtown Eastside Wisdom

by Sean Beckett

The Carnegie Community Centre is a prominent landmark in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, an “infamous, endearing” neighbourhood that has much to teach about wisdom. Public domain.

“Get wisdom,” the Book of Proverbs shouts. “Though it cost all you have, get understanding!”

As someone who (1) loves poetry and (2) is prone to practical mistakes, the Book of Proverbs has always seemed like God’s personal present to me—a seatbelt for my own unreliability. When I came to faith in college, I found in Proverbs a book able to correct my profound lack of common sense, and to do it in pithy, memorable phrases. Thus, when given the chance to do an interview project for a class, I figured it might be a smart move to get some new perspectives on Proverbs. After all, as technologist and entrepreneur Dr. Uli Chi has described it, Proverbs is like a big toolshed with lots and lots of tools. It’s a treasure trove! But the right tools don’t do you much good unless you know how and when to use them. And those lessons can be learned from others. 

I approached the project with some excitement. Unfortunately, I chose the wrong framework, the wrong guiding questions, and the wrong interview. Yet despite—and even because of—those mistakes, I learned crucial life lessons in unexpected ways. But before I get into that, let me back up and set the scene.

Shortly after coming to Regent College to pursue a master’s degree in theology, I moved into a community house in the infamous and endearing Vancouver neighborhood known as the Downtown Eastside (DTES). My housemates were an electric mix of artists, teachers, missionaries, theologians, musicians, architects, students, worship leaders, nurses, pastors, writers, and more. Most of them wore several of those hats, and were committed to serving the Vancouver community in sacrificial ways.

No description can adequately convey what the DTES is like. It is a pulsing, passionate community. It is known as the Heart of Vancouver—perhaps, too often, a heart left bleeding on a surgical table. The Downtown Eastside is one of Canada’s poorest postal codes, a place where many residents face addiction, financial struggles, and the inaccessibility of sustainable housing. Yet it is also lauded as one of the friendliest neighborhoods in Vancouver, a place where longtime residents love raising their kids. In short, it is a messy, vibrant place where you can witness great tragedy and surprising joy at any given moment.

When I moved to the DTEs, my house shared an alleyway with the Union Gospel Mission. I quickly saw everything—I do mean everything—happening in that alley. Sirens became my lullabies at night. Once, someone threw a brick through one of our windows (probably nothing personal, they were just having a bad day). While the police stood in our entryway asking for details, an old friend rang the doorbell to bring us flowers and was quite confused at suddenly being confronted by armed officers. That picture—random devastation, police, friendship, spontaneous generosity, flowers—sums up my time in the DTES. 

After living in the DTES for about a year, I took a seminar called Listening by Design, taught by Dr. Diane Stinton and Dr. Rhonda McEwen. By that point I had realized that I really didn’t know how to live well in a place as wildly wonderful and wonderfully wild as the DTES. So, I figured I would interview the wisest people in the neighborhood, people that had spent at least a decade there, and get some further insight. Combining my love for Proverbs and my need to understand the DTES, I decided to fulfill the qualitative research assignment by interviewing some wise folks about how to get wise and live wisely in the DTES, using Proverbs as prompts. What could go wrong? 

Everything. 

To get started on the project, I used a “snowball” sampling method, asking people who had been involved in the DTES for ten or more years about the wisest people they knew in the neighbourhood. Then I asked those people about the wisest folks they knew, quickly building an expanding network of respect. Yet by the time I got to the second level of wisdom, these voices of wisdom had begun to challenge the very nature of my project. 

The first problem they pointed out was that wisdom is held by whole communities, not individuals. My project, one kind contributor pointed out, “seems quite individualist.” Another person responded, “I don’t think there is anyone who is ‘the wisest.’ ... My experience is that there has been, and is, a collective wisdom.” In other words, wisdom is maybe less of a pitcher of water and more of a kiddie pool—you need a whole team to carry it. Other respondents explicitly or implicitly bolstered this view. I was looking for wisdom in a person—they were telling me this was a contradiction in terms. 

Vancouver may be a classically lonely and individualistic city, but the DTES is a bastion of true community and rooted pride. While I had failed to even frame my questions correctly, the failure taught me two important lessons. First, my brain had been trained too narrowly. Second, the DTES was going to stretch me even more than I had hoped. 

One respondent gave me further pause by recommending I read Research 101: A Manifesto for Ethical Research in the Downtown Eastside. Reading it was just the mildly disturbing experience I needed.

A novice in qualitative research, I had not really considered how invasive an interview project could be, or how exploitative. Simply by asking interview questions in the neighborhood, I was participating in a legacy with some ugly roots. Too often well-meaning researchers had gone in, extracted information, and left, leaving the neighborhood dry. Like a factory that mines local minerals and belches out waste, research can be disruptive, smear a community, rob them of resources, and ultimately profit only far-off people. Not only had I framed my research poorly, but if I tried to do this on my own, I could continue a pattern of people going into a neighborhood, grabbing what wasn’t theirs, and moving on.  

What rescued the project was the kindness of two groups of people: the care and insight of Dr. Stinton and Dr. McEwen, who gave me crucial feedback and advice the whole way, and the generosity of the participants themselves. I was able to do hour-long interviews with six folks. Between them they had over a hundred years of experience living in, working in, and loving the Downtown Eastside. Best of all, four of them agreed to participate in the interview as a group, bouncing their ideas off one another.

After the interviews, as I sifted through audio and written transcripts, themes floated to the surface: key insights about the nature of wisdom itself, how to gain it, and how to live wisely in their neighborhood.  

One of the first findings was, perhaps, that I had made still another mistake. I asked my participants to comment on Proverbs 13:20, which states, “Those who walk with the wise become wise.” My participants testified that they had discovered wisdom coming from those places it was least expected—from the kinds of people who never get interviewed for their wisdom. One participant talked about the “sidewalk prophets” she had encountered, and another pointed out they had “been absolutely sharpened and honed by people down here, some of whom can’t read.” Wisdom, they pointed out, was not the exclusive domain of the educated, the successful, or the polished. 

Participants also recommended learning from the dead. They lived in the midst of a modern city devastated by the current complexities of gentrification and an opioid crisis. But they recommended seeking insights not from cutting-edge thinkers, but from folks from many centuries ago. The counsel of the saints, nineteenth-century Russian devotional works like The Way of the Pilgrim, church mothers and fathers—these were their mentors, offering insights right alongside guys on Hastings Street. As one participant explained, “I will tell you that when I go out on the street … I am bringing a whole host of people with me: people like Karl Rahner … people like St. Anselm, people like Thomas Aquinas. … They are with me every time I journey out.”  

A third source of wisdom that was mentioned again and again: suffering. One participant who had spent twenty years in the DTES explained it this way: “Failure and suffering is probably the only for-sure tool to help us grow into wisdom.” Another explained that “it’s not even necessarily wisdom that you could … articulate with words, but … your spiritual disposition has been reshaped.” By sharing their lives with suffering people, a respondent observed that they also gained a kind of “second wisdom that comes out of that … sharing in that suffering.” If suffering is a route to wisdom—and a short survey of the biblical canon would provide ample evidence that it is—then surely the DTES, with its history of individuals and communities in agony and crisis, is surely a well of wisdom at the very core of Vancouver.  

I started out with the wrong idea of wisdom, framed my questions in a naive way, and approached the project poorly. Perhaps I even interviewed the wrong people—or at least overlooked many of the right ones. Yet this messy process gave me a broader picture of wisdom, a challenging call to community, and a convicting appreciation of the pedagogy of suffering. 

Moreover, the project reinforced a lesson I already knew but clearly needed to relearn. We have much to learn from the Downtown Eastside: this bold and beautiful and broken and profoundly courageous community that claims the center of our city. The DTES offers each person an education that complements and fills out many other sources of wisdom, offering insights that are deeply needed in our wealthy, worldly, individualistic culture. The people of the DTES are not to be examined like animals in cages or talked down to like unruly children. Instead, they deserve our humility, for they have valuable lessons to teach—lessons that might save our very souls.  

Like many others, I didn’t last long in the DTES. I moved out just fifteen months after moving in. Yet, well over a year later, I am still convicted and challenged by the lessons the patient communities of the DTES taught me.