This is the Eleventh
Day of Christmas, and Epiphany approaches quickly.
Fr. Delp’s question, how has the birth of
Christ changed me, has been playing in my mind – falling asleep, waking, and in
moments of quiet that have somehow invaded my busy days. The question has found paths in my darkness
by the light of the three characteristics that Pope Francis says that God is to
us, and calls us to be to others – patience, closeness, and tenderness. I notice now that these paths, having been
walked on repeatedly, are becoming easier to recognize, easier to walk. God’s way is becoming worn in me.
Walking ,walking,
walking…this brings me right back to where yesterday’s story left off – my learning
from relationships with people living on the street. Step one was finding a way to actually sit
down with them. Step two is walking the
streets with them.
I’d been helped through the first step – sitting down with
Malcolm and feeling my kinship to him.
But when our parish’s shelter week was over, I lost the opportunity for
a relationship with him. It was a
Warming Center that let me proceed toward God’s call to me to “touch them.”
Sts. Peter and Paul is a parish in downtown Detroit that is staffed by
the Jesuits. With the urban mission of
the university and the urban commitment of the Jesuits and the Sisters of
Mercy, the parish opened “Sts. Peter and Paul Warming Center”. http://www.sspeterandpauljesuit.org/center.html Brother Jim was a Jesuit who had started the Warming Center,
but led from the rear, empowering those who began as guests to become
hosts. So the luncheon was prepared by
those with the gift of feeding, and the speakers were those among them with the
gift of words. The room was filled with
people sitting at round tables. They
were law school people on lunch break, parishioners, street people, Jesuits and
Mercys, and others who supported the center.
I’d shared that
Ignatian Contemplation, inviting us to enter the story, to be there in it, and not just intellectualize, had been a powerful
influence on me, driving me to take the first step. And it was that gift that drew me powerfully
to take the second. The luncheon
speaker told us that the Warming Center was special to him and the others who
were homeless because it was a place where they were welcomed, not
shunned. He told us something that I
never thought about. While there are
numerous places that those on the street can go for lunch and dinner and
shelter, the in-between times find them walking from place to place because to
stop is to loiter or freeze. Duck into a
restaurant or store to get out of the cold and you are asked to leave. Sit down and you are dangerously cold…and
seen as loitering, being seen as an eyesore or a threat. So, he said “We walk, as if we had somewhere
to go.”
Just as my retreat
had “taken me in” – to the story of Jesus and the crowd – His simple mention of
“walking as if we had somewhere to go” took me in to life on the street. As a passionate introvert, I feel capable of
being social when there is something that I can do, some use I can fill. But ask me to simply mix with people and I’m
tortured by self-consciousness. So at
conferences when I am presenting or participating in sessions, I’m
comfortable. But put me in a “reception”
in a large room full of strangers, and I want to escape. Since escape was not appropriate, I’d found a
way to cope. I’d walk randomly through the
room as if I had somewhere to go. I’d do this until we were free to sit down
for the meal…just like the person on the stage was saying. So those words “as if I had somewhere to go” transported me into a person on the
street doing the same thing. I was
walking to stay warm, self-conscious of the fact that I didn’t belong, averting
my eyes, looking at the cracked sidewalk.
And then I realized that I smelled, and that the clothes that I was wearing
were not my own.
My retreat experience
of Jesus calling me beyond my revulsion to the crowd was so real that I knew it
as truth for me. And this very real walk
on the streets of Detroit in clothes not my own had the same certain truth for
me.
I’d been given three
gifts. I knew in my mind what a
Warming Center was. I knew in my mind
why they were valued. But me than anything
else, I found that we have something in common, the street people and me. We have words to speak…and we find similar
ways to cope with our gifts being unneeded or undesired.
And three responses
emerged. I left the luncheon shocked to know that there were thousands of
people on the street in the city I held proudly as my own. I felt ashamed that I had lived so long and
thought of myself as a caring person so deeply, while this went on and I did
not feel it. And I was determined to
make this reality a part of my life.
The story has continued
to unfold since that day at Sts’ Peter and Paul. After becoming deeply engaged with people on
the streets in Detroit and those who care about and for them, retirement in
Northern Michigan gave me the opportunity to find caring on a smaller and more
personal scale.
See more about this; learn about my developing ministry with Home Sweet
Homelessness, a board game designed in a shelter that serves as a learning tool
to help close the distance between those with homes and those without. www.HomeSweetHomelessness.org
Tomorrow – Tenderness as the fruit of patient closeness.
FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
