REPRINTED FROM THE NEWSLETTER OF FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF DEL RAY
Up north in Manhattan, past the Cloisters and Bennett Park, past where the rigid city grid starts to melt and stretch to the right like taffy, there sits a van at the corner of Seaman Avenue and 207th. The signs in the window read “Believe & Repent!” while the windshield declares “Come Out of Religion!” The van has been there in the same spot for five years, never moving, come rain and sleet and snow. Sometimes the two passengers crack the window at night to let air in so they don’t suffocate, and sometimes they keep it all closed tight so passersby won’t spit or throw dog feces at them. But day after day, night after night, Yacahudah Harrison and his wife Danetia Harrison keep their eternal vigil as missionaries for Jesus Christ, preaching for those who will listen, praying for those who will not. When they met in 1994, he was a bodybuilder and she a psychoanalyst. But after a few years Yacahudah read a book by Arthur W. Pink, famed British evangelical, that tore his mind from his life of professional vanity and directed it towards Christ. So together with his wife they left their jobs and set up their impromptu chapel. “They don’t know where to put us, in terms of categorizing,” Danetia wryly murmurs, “they never heard of missionaries in the United States, because we have so many churches and we’re not trying to convert anybody.” And they’re not. If there’s one thing we learn from Sophia Tewa’s documentary
Seaman and 207, it’s that Yacahudah and Danetia are not interested in mobbing people in the street and shoving a Bible under their nose. Instead, theirs is a ministry of presence—they give of themselves their time and attention to anyone who comes by. Most of the day they sit in their car listening to audio books of the Bible or roaming the two parks near their intersection, playing chess with the old-timers and waving at the children crossing the street to school. They don’t know where their next meal will come from, they don’t know if they’ll have enough money for gas to keep the engine going and the heat flowing when it grows cold. But they persist. And miraculously, it works. Over and over again we see strangers from the neighborhood come up to their car and tap on their window. Who are you two, they ask? I always see you two here on my way to work, but I never thought to ask. And invariably the topic turns to Jesus. Some of them are struggling Christians hungry for affirmation, some are nonbelievers who want to challenge their theology, and some are people who just want to know who this Christ is they keep talking about. And they always answer.
Seaman and 207 is one of the more fascinating portraits of missionary work in some time, in part because while the film clearly admires Yacahudah and Danetia for their efforts, it isn’t afraid to cock an eyebrow of doubt and incredulity towards their odd behavior. It pairs scenes of Yacahudah facing down a belligerent, mentally ill man harassing Danetia with Christian love— “You will never make me hate you,” he bellows—with moments where he has to be restrained by neighbors from physically attacking someone trying to call the cops on them. It zeroes in on the inner sadness of Yacahudah, a convert from the Black Hebrew movement, who still yearns for the Jewish prayers and community for his childhood. Little attention is spared to Danetia and her reasons for going along with Yacahudah in their self-imposed homelessness—but one gets the feeling it may have been reticence on her part, not carelessness on Tewa’s. Still,
Seaman and 207 burns and sears the emotions with its simple, earnest portraits of two elderly voices crying out in the wilderness. Few times in modern history has the Church struggled more to connect with the public at large and the prevailing zeitgeist. Partly it’s due to increased scientific skepticism and other socio-economic forces. But partly it’s due to our own failings as a community for Christ. We are too insulated, too myopically concentrated on outdated traditions, ceremonies, and prejudices. But as Yacahudah and Danetia demonstrate, sometimes all you need to do is sit down, meet the world on its own terms, and let it come to you.
Rating: 7/10
