ASBD - Detroit Banquet in Mid-Lent

I am moved to serve up this Laetare (it means Rejoice) Week Banquet in the middle of the fast of Lent.  I write it thanks to those who on Wednesday served it to me, the 50-or-so Wayne State University students now finishing up their 7th Annual Alternative Spring Break Detroit.  I was honored to join them for a morning of climbing into homelessness in their hearts, of feeling it from the inside, facilitating their morning with a panel of people who serve the homeless every day, from soup kitchens and job centers and help lines and outreach vans.  This remarkable group of generous students who live in and around Detroit actually choose, year after year, to climb deeper into their city while so many others get away from it for Spring Break.  They sleep on gym floors, spend their afternoons-into-evenings serving the poor who surround them every day, now becoming visible to them, becoming human, finding themselves so much more like them than they would have imagined.  And they come back year after year to do this, and they climb deeper and deeper into their city and deeper and deeper into their hearts, discovering there a call to compassionate participation in making their Detroit a more just city.

This was the third or fourth year they had invited me to help them see the beauty of human kindness, to find somehow in the apparent hopelessness of homelessness the song that emerges from within themselves, that rises among them in their relationships with each other and with those they serve.  And this time, even though they've blessed with their goodness before, this time they blew me away.  I saw their faces contorted with the pain of homelessness that they felt as their own.  I met them as they left, telling me how they have come to know that they need to keep doing this, being, as one young woman's father called it, "foolishly compassionate."  My moist eyes looked into their moist eyes as we shook hands, as we embraced.

They were going on to their afternoon of serving those poor they are coming to know as neighbors.  I was going on to join my brother-in-law to cook for our Irish-American wives while they enjoyed Detroit's St. Patrick's Day at Trinity Church.  Somehow my hands couldn't turn the wheel of my car onto the expressway to the suburbs.  Somehow I found myself driving down Jefferson to Belle Isle.  It was, after all, a rare and perfect day, when the weather matched the perfection of the humanity in that room, was as bright and beautiful and warm as those 50 or so Wayne State University students.  I parked my car on the west end of the island, where you can see the skyline of the city, this city where I spent 45 years, coming from Chicago when I was their age, going to University of Detroit and getting hooked like they are, hooked on this city, and on the possibilities of being human here.  Now my Detroit wife are retired, living in Traverse City, finding a ways to be human, to transplant their kind of generosity of spirit, their kind of hope and determination. 

There on Belle Isle I realized that I needed to just let the goodness that they had poured over me soak in.  I got out of my car in the warm, perfect sunshine and strolled along the river, and felt the gift of seeing my city transfigured not only by the perfect weather, but by their perfect humanity.

This morning as I wrote my Lenten blog, I happened upon the Robert Frost poem below, and I knew that it was only in poetry that I could attempt to capture all of this perfection in paltry pixels.  My poem follows, and then Frost's.


Belle Isle March Wednesday
Mid-March is not supposed to be like this in Detroit.
It’s not supposed to be so warm, so bright.
It’s not supposed to make me smile, to see hope,
except maybe that the street-splashed snow, gray not white,
melts and just… goes… away.

The sun’s not supposed to feel this good,
to warm my shoulders like this.
The ice isn’t supposed to let the warming river
rush it, diminishing, down and out… of… sight.
It’s not supposed to be this light.

There’s not supposed to be a man sitting in his car
his little dogs in the warm sunlight
him playing that sweet worn flute
those old tremoring fingers setting
such smooth young notes into the so warm breeze.

Detroit’s not supposed to look so good,
even from this island in the river,
even from here where you can’t see the homeless
and the lost
and the losing it all fast, or slow, but losing… it… all.

Robert Frost was right.
What happiness lacks in length,
it makes up in height.
John Daniels - 3/19/2010

Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length
by Robert Frost
O stormy, stormy world,
The days you were not swirled
Around with mist and cloud,
Or wrapped as in a shroud,
And the sun’s brilliant ball
Was not in part or all
Obscured from mortal view—

Were days so very few
I can but wonder whence
I get the lasting sense
Of so much warmth and light.

If my mistrust is right
It may be altogether
From one day’s perfect weather,
When starting clear at dawn
The day swept clearly on
To finish clear at eve.

I verily believe
My fair impression may
Be all from that one day
No shadow crossed but ours
As through its blazing flowers
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude.

Thanks, ASBD students.  May you be blessed by the god who you might or might not Name, who rises from within you whether or not you call that spirit divine.  You are the smooth young notes on this so warm breeze of hope.

For information on ASBD, (click here).


 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.