Meribah – the Field of Dreams

It has been the homeless who have helped me see the Doubting Thomas in me, and it has been they who have shown me the Doubting Moses.  Kathy and I were for decades members of a “prayer group” in Gesu Parish in Detroit.  The prayer that the group did was less and less overt; we simply grew together in the growing edges, the wounded edges exposed to each other in prayer.  Every year Gesu would host a group of homeless neighbors for a week during the winter, part of a rotating shelter program in the city.  I would use my over-committed life at the university as an excuse to avoid volunteering for the program.  But one year when I was working (from a safe academic distance) with the problem of homelessness, the prayer group people let the word out that we would be making sandwiches one day for the homeless to take with them when they got on the bus after breakfast that day, to spend time back in the inner city while the kids were in the school that had been their home the previous night. 

Jesus' “Touch THEM!” that I mentioned in yesterday’s blog came to mind, and I saw keenly my hypocrisy in studying the idea of homelessness but not serving those in front of me.  The experience that I had with my prayer group made a small crack in my heart,

just enough to allow a wedge of additional experiences to take purchase and open it wide.  Soon I was engaged with the homeless on the street of Detroit, bringing hot food to the cold tarpaulin and cardboard box shelters in urban fields and caps and gloves to those huddling in the leeward recesses of Hart Plaza along the river downtown.  I was touching them, and their eyes were showing me glints of appreciation, not just for us who came to them, but appreciation too of their own humanity and worth, because they were important to us.

Moses (in chapter 20 of the book of Numbers) was besieged by his followers who were thirsting in the desert.  He and Aaron fell on their faces before Yahweh and prayed for his guidance.  Yahweh told Moses to gather the people and tell them that water would come from the rock there at Meribah if he struck it; then to strike the large rock there and that water would come out of it in abundance.  Moses did gather the people, and did tell them, but when he first swung his staff to strike it, he doubted that it Yahweh would come through.  He doubted that water would come from a rock, and the staff glanced off of the rock with no result.  He struck it a second time, though, and sure enough water did come out despite his doubt.

For me, the Moses Meribah experience came in my car, driving south from our quiet, safe old farmhouse at Manresa Jesuit Retreat House north of Detroit.  Here I was, driving into the city to my job, where I had after six months of promotion found myself in the middle of a city-wide engagement in my dream of counting our thousands of street homeless.  The project had “caught on” like a fire in dry tinder, and I was overwhelmed by the work it would call for.  I was being caught up in my own conflagration.  I began to sob, there at a red light, with my inadequacy.  What had I been thinking? 

Like Moses and Aaron, I was, in a way, falling on my face to God, right there in the middle of Woodward Avenue.  And as in the Meribah story, God spoke to me.  I found myself crying “God, I can’t do this!”  But even before the light changed to green, God said “But I can.  Just bring me along.”  I felt (and I feel it now, as I type) a physical relief, my shoulders rising as if a load had been lifted from them.  The project was a huge success.  Just as there had been enough water from that rock in Meribah, the night of the homeless count found a ballroom full of helpers.

So the Meribah story of Moses’ doubt and the Easter story of Thomas’ doubt are a pair, encouraging us toward relationship.  If we come, God will give us all we need to build it.

Next: Use your heart, stupid!