The Corner of Haight and Ashbury

"Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier."
- Mother Teresa


The summer of 1967 was declared to be the summer of love and created by...yep, hold on to your hat for this one..."The Council for Summer of Love".  It was to take place every weekend that summer on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco, the birth place of the hippie movement (not my choice of words but that of a recent documentary on the sixties and I like it). The objective for that particular summer by it's council was that everyone who would come to visit would come in love and treat each other in love.

Most of the youth were drawn to this corner not just for love and peace, but for LSD. Wow! That rhymes so much it should be a song: Love, Peace and LSD.

 Forget the Golden Gate Bridge, it was The Psychedelic Shop that was attracting all the attention in San Francisco. It was the place for hanging out, listening to music, smoking pot, and venting about life and how tragic it was and how everyone should live in ecstasy. Outside the shop youth were either playing instruments, dancing in the streets, or selling beads and tie dye shirts. Oh and shhh, don't tell anyone but..drugs. Yes, selling lots of drugs!

What was once imagined to be a summer of love and great pilgrimage turned out to be a war of youth culture vs. the establishment. And the establishment won.
By the fall of 1967 the corner of Haight and Ashbury was abandoned, trashed, and laden with drugs and homeless. I like how the Huffington Post once described this corner today,

"While a stroll down Haight street today certainly evokes nostaligia, it also makes us yearn for a place that once was the epicenter of peace and love...."

Despite all the drugs and the hippie movement's ideology of love and peace and they're philosophy of everything shared, everything free; you can't hide the fact that they did try to unite people to come together in love and peace.

In the streets of Chicago, where shootings and murder just keeps escalating year after year, one wonders how the Council of Summer of Love would approach this.  Imagine with me, if you will, a council of churches declaring this a summer of love. A summer where The Church makes it's presence known and felt throughout the many neighborhoods of Chicagoland.

If you do live in one of the surrounding areas and suburbs of Chicago and your church is looking for a connection to help get involved in the city, especially with the homeless, the Night Ministry is always looking for groups to partner with them. The link to their website is on my home page.

And of course, the greatest good all of us can do no matter where we live, is this:


Then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and restore their land. (2 Chronicles 7:14)