The Punk on the Porch and Me

The Punk on the Porch and Me

Usually Tuesday mornings start quietly.  But this morning, shortly after I had arrived to plug in the coffee pots, I heard a man’s voice coming from the front porch.  He was loudly shouting threats and cursing someone.  I hoped it would blow over, as these things usually do, but he kept at it.  So I headed out the front door to put a stop to the threats and curses.  I didn’t know the young man who I found shouting at a woman (who I also did not know).  She was seated on a bench and he was standing over her.  The conflict was apparently over some money that he claimed she owed him.

            Stepping up to him I said, “Enough.  Stop.  It is time for you to go.”  This apparently startled him as he stopped momentarily.  But then he resumed, only now he directed his venom towards me.  Still, for whatever reason, he also began to move off the porch.  With a few more choice words, he went out the gate and down the street.

            I turned back to the woman and a few other guests on the porch and said, “I guess he’s gone for the morning. Not exactly a quiet start to our day.”

            One of the guests observed, “So much for a nap before you all open.  I guess I’m ready for my first cup of coffee now.”

            Meanwhile, another Manna House guest lies in a hospital bed at Methodist Hospital, thirty staples holding his cracked skull together.  He was jumped this past weekend and severely beaten.  He’s conscious, but his speech is slurred and who knows if he will fully recover.

            I went back inside and sat down in the kitchen.  I’m always a bit shaky after such events (thankfully they are rare at Manna House).  I started to reflect on violence, including my own desires to strike back.  I certainly had wanted to beat the crap out of the punk on the front porch. 

            Later in the morning, I shared a passage from the Letter of James with a couple of guests who asked me for the “Word for the day.”

“What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?  You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask.  You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. … Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God (James 4:1-4)

            “Hard words” said one guest.

            “I’ve got a lot of desires warring in me,” said another.

            “Ain’t that the truth” said one more.

            Our discipline at Manna House is to follow Jesus who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Mt 5:9).  We seek to offer some sanctuary from the violence of the streets and the violence of our hearts.  It is not easy to confront evil and injustice in ways that do not imitate what is being resisted. But that is what we are called to do (Romans 12:21). 

So in addition to breaking up the occasional fight, stopping the use of denigrating language, and avoiding foul language generally, we also don’t allow the police on to the property.  At the same time we’re clear, that we oppose the death penalty, stand against police harassment and violence, and support the full dignity of every human being no matter race or gender or sexual orientation.

            This commitment leaves plenty within me for repentance, for the complicity I have in what Dorothy Day called this “filthy rotten system” and for my own desires for more stuff and the violence to protect them.  Me and the punk on the porch; we’re not that different.