Cornerstone Community
Where Community is the Heart of Recovery

Letters from the Cornerstone Community

Part of our mission is to share our experiences with you. Below are some of letters communty members have written.


Tom Copps (April 2010): Read letter | Download letter
WE’VE MOVED TO ARKANSAS!!… Avenue that is.

It was hard to move. So many memories and so much healing in the Ontario Road house. Such convenience – stores, shopping and transportation and my beloved Potter’s House so close by – Joseph’s House around the corner – the energy and diversity of the Adams Morgan neighborhood. It was hard to move – we are grieving. And it has been difficult to believe we would be able recreate the beauty and “hominess” of the house we had poured so much of ourselves into. But we believe it is the best move for the future of our beloved community.

Tom Copps (December 2009): Read letter | Download letter
Attica! To anyone my age that word arouses memories of a prison riot (“uprising” according to the inmates):
a four-day standoff, tear gas, massive volleys of gunshots into the resulting cloud and thirty nine people dead
at the Attica State Prison in upstate New York. Just the word does it. Four years later in the film Dog Day
Afternoon, Al Pacino's character, Sonny, who is holding eight bank employees hostage, starts a chant of
" Attica! Attica!" at the amassed police outside evoking the excessive police force used at Attica. So when I
heard the word recently at the Cornerstone dinner table, I was immediately intrigued. Our newest resident
said that he had been incarcerated at Attica. I asked if he was there during the uprising in 1971 – yes, he was.

Tom Copps (April 2009): Read letter | Download letter
Recently, through some reading and pondering of my life, I was moved by one of the great gifts I have received. It is one of the primary gifts at the heart of my life and work – a gift like most of God’s gifts which are given to be given. It is the gift of trust – believing in someone and then entrusting them with something of value even before they have proven themselves to be totally trustworthy. Dorothy Sayers describes this as one of God’s great humiliations: “In an awesome act of self-denial God entrusted his reputation to ordinary people.” Being trusted and then entrusted with something of value makes me feel valuable and motivated to serve.

 

Tom Copps (December 2008): Read letter | Download letter
Lately, I have been thinking a bit about success. What is success to me? What is success to our beloved Cornerstone Community? In these days of economic turmoil – people losing houses and retirement savings (who told me that 401k was such a good deal!), banks failing, stock markets crashing, corporations folding, government bailouts for rich corporations appearing to ignore main street and exposing the marginalized, less money given for those trying to make a difference in society and the loss of the so-called "American dream" – I wonder if it might be a good time for our culture to reassess what success looks like. At least it is another good opportunity for us at Cornerstone to assess how we see success.

 

Tom Copps (September 2008): Read letter | Download letter
In the last couple of months we have discovered much about the nature of our community from one of our residents. It all began when he (I will call him Rick) noticed some money missing from a prepaid credit card he had purchased on line. He had only given one person his PIN number – another resident (whom I will call Caleb). It was only natural for Rick to suspect Caleb for the missing funds. Since I was out of town when all of this happened, our two wonderful community builders had a meeting with both residents on our porch. Rick calmly confronted Caleb: “I don’t feel that I can trust you and that you may have taken the money off my card.” Then he shared some other instances when he felt that Caleb proved to be deceitful – many that I had noticed as well.

Tom Copps (May 2008): Read letter | Download letter
It was children’s Sunday in our little faith community – the Sunday each month when everything in the service is geared toward children. Unfortunately there were only two kids present. So the astute teacher directed her remarks specifically to the eight year old girl present. Eventually this girl felt so comfortable and engaged that she came to the front and pulled up a chair so she could stand next to the teacher at eye level and give commentary on what was being taught. At one point toward the end of the teaching, she tapped the microphone to be sure it was working – evidently wanting to be certain that everyone would hear what she was about to say. Then she cut off the teacher mid-sentence and stated with confidence: “Big people know a lot, but they don’t hear very well.” Read the entire letter

 

Tom Copps (September 2007) Read letter | Download letter
The day had arrived. It had finally happened - I was going to prison! After yielding my identification and valuables, I was patted down by a female guard and led through a seemingly endless series of heavy duty locked doors and then outdoors next to the prison yard by a burly, expressionless armed guard. In one area there was a whole wall covered with handcuffs. In the yard we were surrounded by high chain link fences with treacherous looking razor wire. I felt more and more confined the further in we traveled. We finally reached our destination - a rather plain room with about two dozen chairs set up in a circle. Sitting in these chairs were the inmates with whom I would spend this day and two more the next weekend. I was part of an inmate-led AVP (Alternatives to Violence Project) workshop. Read the entire letter

 

Tom Copps (December 2006): Read letter | Download letter
“When we serve, we see the unborn wholeness in others; we collaborate with it and strengthen it. Others may then be able to see their wholeness for themselves for the first time.”

As I stood in our beautiful living room at Cornerstone watching Leon chat with his 22-year old daughter and make his handsome little 2 month old grandson laugh as he held him, I was filled with wonder. This was the little girl he had abandoned twenty years ago. And now for the first time in 20 years they were talking and laughing. Surely I was witnessing some of that unborn wholeness coming forth from his womb of pain. It had not been that many months ago that I first met Leon in the midst of that pain... Read the entire letter

Tom Copps (June 2006): Read letter | Download letter
There I was—in the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in downtown DC to see a movie about racial discrimination—on my right arm a transgender Latina, on my left a gaunt African American ex-crack dealer—both of them afflicted with AIDS. I thought, “What in the world am I doing here?” This is not the picture many of my friends and family would have imagined for me in my almost senior years. Obviously there have been some changes for this former pastor of a white, middle-class, “next to the University” church in the desert southwest! So what happened? Read entire letter