Bread for the World

Farmers and teachers.  Social workers.  Some ministers.  Nurses.  So many others who don’t come to mind right now but will after I post this article – those who are Bread for the World.

My friend Bill sent a poem that came to his magnanimous mind as he read a recent posting on this blog.  That poem, about the Body of Christ on a street in the inner city of Detroit, was so good that I Googled the name of the poet, Michael Lauchlan, and found a few others there.  Since this one is available on the web already, (click)  I’ll include it here it here, with my deepest gratitude to the author.

In America

for Bob Mott, after decades among refugees

Michael Lauchlan

On a night when you dozed and woke
against a window, you walk into the cold
black of some flat town where no one
would know if you crumpled into a ditch
or got beamed away by aliens. But you don’t.
You wait, swallow your tea, lean
against the terminal and watch exhaust
coalesce behind the bus. This is not lush
Cambodia, where you fed infants in camps,
wrapped legs or stumps when mines
blew kids into the sky, and marched
for peace with saffron monks, though
Maha Ghosananda scared you shitless,
by calling you Christ. Here, you wait
in the absolute Ohio of the mind,
lacking end or beginning, framed by trucks,
stars, diners, a road, and the vast
American hunger you don’t get,
nibbling each day your one ball of rice,
cupping your takeout tea
like a handful of smoke.

I also found a syllabus – the requirements of a course the he taught at my university.  By the description of the course and his office, I suspect that he is an Adjunct at UDM, and like his friend Bob Mott living a life of sacrifice.  Adjuncts are college teachers who do not have full-time appointments, with the salary and benefits and tenure that is the closest thing in today’s world to a guarantee of a job for life.  They are rather are the part-time “filler” faculty that colleges use to staff courses for which they have no available full-time faculty.  I had a paycheck for 40 years, and benefits.  It was not a princely sum, I often reflected; my working children earned more right out of college.  But seeing the compassion in Michael Lauchlan’s writing and knowing how little he earns as an Adjunct, I realize that like the others in the professions I mentioned at the beginning of this posting, it is understandable that he would appear to me, as his friend Bob Mott did to Maha Ghosananda, Christ.  Taken, blessed, broken, and shared.  Self-sacrificing.  Sacrifice does not mean burned or killed on an altar.  It means “made holy”.  

The farmer works and hopes: seed, old family soil, weather, markets.  The Social Worker, like Sisyphus, pushes the boulder of injustice uphill all day, only to wake from a too-short night to find it rolled back down.  The nurse swims into a daily current of patients in an endless sea of need.  Ministers can choose to go into the world as Jesus did, equipped only with love against all that the Accuser has to offer there.  And Michael Lauchlan and his adjunct colleagues drive their old cars from one campus to another, working and hoping that the fire that has been ignited in them can somehow catch in the hearts and minds of the students facing them in these desks, the fire of sacrifice.

Thank you, Michael, wherever you are.  I’m sorry not to have met you at UDM.

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