The Power of Our Guests at Manna House

The Power of Our Guests at Manna House

Eddie was sitting on the couch with his paper bag of belongings.  Another guest took a look at the bag stuffed with things and asked, “Do you have a dining room table in there?” As the laughter started to roll around the room another said, “That’s like a dang traveling chifferobe.” 

Eddie took it with good grace, laughing along with the others.  “I’ve got everything I own in here; it’s bound to be a little crowded.”  Later in the morning he asked me for a larger bag.  His traveling chifferobe had given way under the pressure and ripped open.  I got him a plastic shopping bag from a local department store.  It was bigger than a grocery store bag and smaller than a typical garbage bag.  “Just right for toting” Eddie observed.

We’ve had so much cold weather this winter that on most mornings, guests are crowding into the living room and dining room of Manna House, and are making less use of the space on the porch and the front yard.  This means not only a lot of people in a small space, but also all their bags.  Some guests carry more than others. 

Backpacks are favorites for carrying things, and we never have enough to give away.  Guests also favor duffle bags with shoulder straps.  A few use those little suitcases on rollers, though in the snow and ice those aren’t so handy, and the wheels tend to fall off from too much rolling.  Plastic grocery bags, paper grocery bags, little canvas shopping bags, those all get put to use, too. But usually guests need two or three of those kinds of bags to manage.  That’s not very convenient.  Of course we do have guests who are not homeless.  They come from the rooming houses and apartments nearby and thankfully have no bags. 

With all the guests and the bags, getting a cup of coffee and carrying it back to one’s place requires nimble movement along with lots of “excuse me’s.”  It really is amazing how little coffee gets spilled each morning. 

Besides nimbleness, the movement without spills and tussles between guests also bespeaks of the community and compassion our guests share with each other. Guests share information with each other about soup kitchens, shelters, safe places to be during the day, opportunities for housing, and more.  Guests share socks and cigarettes and books among other things.  Hosting the Room in the Inn pick up the last week or so, I’ve seen guests give up their spot for the night so that another person who is more vulnerable will have a place to stay. 

Their decency and humanity to each other in the midst of horrific conditions on the streets is humbling.  Guest spend their days (and often nights) in the cold.  They eat barely adequate food.  At soup kitchens there is rarely any fresh fruit, and meals are high in starches and carbs.  They walk for miles from one place to another, often in ill fitting shoes.  Many go without glasses, because who can afford them?  They carry within a gnawing sense that no one cares and the wounds of rejection from family and former friends.  They experience the constant indignities of depending upon the fickle good will of others.  All of this is part of the slow death of the streets, the crucifixion of the poor.

And yet our guests carry their humanity in the midst of all this.  Their laughter and their ways of screwing with the various systems aligned against them form a resistance to the injustices they experience daily.  Eddie laughs about his “traveling chifferobe.”  Guests have catholes that no cop can ever find.  Freddie rides a bike in which he has fashioned handlebars covered with gloves in the “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot Position.”  And guests organize with Homeless Organizing for Power and Equality (H.O.P.E.) to fight for housing, and ending police harassment.   

There’s a power in the folks who come to Manna House, it’s the power of their humanity and it’s the power of God, of which the Psalmist writes, “You, O God are the eternal light. Your glory reaches higher than the heavens. Who is like you, magnificent in holiness? And yet you live so close within. You raise the poor from their lowliness; you lift the oppressed from the depths. You give dignity to their lives, a place of honor with all the faithful” (Psalm 113).

A Prayer for Rhonda

A Prayer for Rhonda

Rhonda (not her real name) stopped me as I walked by the coffee line.  Rhonda is a difficult person.  She is not homeless now but has been in the past.  She still comes to Manna House on a regular basis for coffee and some level of companionship.  Few, however, seem close to her, which perhaps isn’t so surprising.  She has what might be described as a “prickly personality.” 

She is easily angered and quick to take offense.   She can also be garrulous, cornering another guest or sometimes a volunteer for a lengthy monologue.  There is almost always a cigarette firmly planted in her mouth.  She is a voracious smoker.  Her hands shake when she tries to light a cigarette with the dying embers of her previous cigarette.  Years of smoking and other hard living have made her voice raspy and deep.  And in that voice she asked me, “Do you have the pictures?”  A couple of weeks before I had taken her picture, and she had made me promise to get ten copies. 

            “Yes, “ I replied, “I have your pictures.  Hold on, let me get them.”  Over the past few months, I’ve taken photos of guests who wanted their pictures taken, and then shared copies with them.  This was the first time, though, that a guest wanted so many copies.  I’m not sure what Rhonda wanted with ten copies of her photo.  I had asked her, and she had answered by glaring back at me like I had asked her a very inappropriate question.  So I got the number of copies she wanted.

            I returned from the kitchen where I had kept the photos and handed them to her.  She smiled and thanked me, “These look real nice.”  And then she said to me, “Pray that the Lord will take this sickness out of my mind.”  As she said this she pointed to her head and grimaced.  “I’m not doing very well, not very well at all.”

            There’s a river of suffering that runs each day through Manna House.  Some days that river isn’t quite visible; other days it can’t be missed.  This has been a week of bitter cold and the river of suffering has overflowed.  Guests today were especially shaken to have heard of a person on the streets in Memphis who had frozen to death.  Nobody knew him, but everybody knows that death from grinding cold and grinding poverty follows all of them around.

            Rhonda’s eyes looked tired.  Her hair was unkempt as it almost always is, and she said with insistence, “Don’t forget. Pray for me.”  I said I would. She walked away with her pictures and a cup of coffee.  She headed out the front door. I didn’t see her again the rest of the morning. 

            So tonight I’m praying for Rhonda, and I’m praying for our other guests, and for the man I didn’t know who died this past week in the cold. I take up the ancient words of the Psalms and join my voice to the pain I heard in Rhonda’s voice, “O God, hear my cry for help.  From the ends of the earth I call; my spirit fails.  I pray that you make new this heart.  Lead me to a place of rest, for you have been my refuge, my strength against the foe.  Let me dwell in your presence forever; hide me in the shelter of your wings” (Psalm 61).

The Ice Came and the Winds Blew

The Ice Came and the Winds Blew

The past two mornings, we have opened Manna House early. Instead of our usual 8:00 a.m. start, we opened the door at 6:30 a.m. At that time on Monday morning, the sleet and icy rain were still falling, and kept falling for several more hours, while a strong north wind made temperatures drop. The house filled quickly, especially when the vans came bringing people who had stayed overnight at Room in the Inn.
This morning, when I arrived at 6:15 a.m., there was already one guest waiting, standing on the ice covered sidewalk. He had several blankets wrapped around him trying to fend off the 17 degree cold. When we attempted to get into the yard and then into the house, we discovered the lock on the front gate was frozen solid. The waiting guest produced a lighter, melted off the ice, and the lock opened. When he came into the house, he peeled off the blankets, and then several more layers, and laid back on one of the couches, and promptly fell asleep.
When we “officially” opened at 8:00 a.m., we prayed together, warm and cold hands joined in a circle in the house. We thanked God for our not falling on the ice, at least not too hard. We also asked that the cold might lighten up and the ice might melt.
Later in the morning I asked Jamal (not his real name) where he would stay the next couple of nights. I told him I was concerned since the temperatures are supposed to go into the single digits.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I’m worried. I don’t think I can survive outside. I may get myself arrested to get a warm place.” I told him about the Orange Mound Community Center that would be open and encouraged him to go there. (He told me he can’t stay at Room in the Inn or the Union Mission or any other shelter because he can’t stand to be around people). “They probably won’t be too busy,” I tried to assure him, “It should be quiet.” Another guest asked, “Do you think the police would give me a ride there?” I really didn’t know how to answer that question except to say, “I don’t know.”
Another guest recalled when one night he was so cold he built a fire under the bridge where he was staying. “Someone called the Fire Department and they came and put the fire out. I waited until they left, then I got me some gasoline and made that fire again. I figured if they came back or the police came I’d go to jail. I was going to be warm one way or another.”
The “Radio Station” which everyone on the streets calls the soup kitchen near Manna House was closed due to the bad weather. So, on Monday at Ashley's suggestion, we dug into our More on Monday supplies, and offered sandwiches to our guests. Today we bought more bread, cheese, and turkey, along with bananas to make sack lunches. Ben and Jenina led the sandwich making crew. Some eighty people got lunches.
Toward the end of the morning a conversation started among the guests about how nice and warm it was in Manna House. “This place isn’t drafty at all.” “I feel so good in here out from the cold.” “How old is this house? It sure seems well built.” One biblical scholar guest remembered Matthew’s Gospel, and said, “This place is built on rock, not sand. It’s solid.”
So we read from Matthew 7:24-27, where Jesus says, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock.”
I think that biblical scholar guest paid Manna House quite a fine compliment. The ice came, the winds blew, and we were still open. His words gave us a good end to a good morning.

The Grace of the Ordinary

The Grace of the Ordinary

When the temperatures are below freezing, we open Manna House early.  This morning was such a morning.  When I arrived around 6:40 a.m., there was only one person already waiting.  When I invited him to come on in since it was too cold to be outside, he graciously accepted the invitation.  It wasn’t long before others started to arrive, and they, too, were pleased to get in out of the cold.

            The coffee percolated in the kitchen, but the rest of the house was mostly quiet as guests from the streets thawed out.  One came in and said softly, “That wind is heavy.”  I had never before thought of wind as “heavy,” but it seemed appropriate this morning as it came strongly out of the north weighted with an oppressive cold.   

            Another guest came in out of breath, and said with emphasis, “I gotta sit down and rest my bones.  I’m nearly sixty years old.  I’m forty-nine.”  I smiled at the math in her statement, but it did seem to sum up the weariness many were feeling as they sank into couches or over-stuffed chairs and fell quickly asleep.

            As I stood in the kitchen doorway, a guest asked about getting on the “Room in the Inn” list.  I explained what he needed to do.  He was worried about having a place to go tonight.  “I can’t hardly handle this being on the streets anymore.  I’ve got high blood pressure, arthritis, and now this bad eye.  They may have to dig it out.  I try not to cause trouble, but I just can’t be around crowds of people.  You know, other than here, I’m not welcome anywhere else.”

            Guests continued to come through the front door.  It was just a little past 7am and the morning was well under way.  The quiet had become a buzz of conversation.

            I had read earlier a quotation from Fr. Alfred Delp in Robert Ellsberg’s All Saints, “If through one man’s life there is a little more love and kindness, a little more light and truth in the world, then he will not have lived in vain.”  Guests coming in were greeting each other, asking about each other’s health and well being.  There was a comfortable spirit of welcome in the house that we were all sharing.

            Most of hospitality, most of the time, is rather ordinary.  We go about our daily tasks, and experience God’s graciousness in the bread of daily life.  Dorothy Day often used the phrase, “little by little,” the seemingly small, yet crucial, day to day activities that constitute our relationships with each other, and thus also our relationship with God.

At Manna House this means the graciousness of God comes to us through simple things like conversation with guests, and filling sugar containers (and refilling them throughout the morning), serving coffee, greeting guests as they come into the yard or the house, working through the “socks and hygiene” and “shower” lists helping people in the “clothing room,” and for the person handling the list, answering over and over again the question from different guests, “Where am I on the list?”  And there’s always laundry to be done, and donations to be sorted through.

             By 8am, our usual time to open, the house was full.  We stood together for a moment, holding each other’s hands in a circle of prayer to officially begin the day.  We prayed for those in jail.  We prayed for the sick.  We prayed in thanksgiving for the witness of those who on this day in 1960 had sat in at lunch counters as part of the struggle for Black freedom in the United States.  We asked God’s blessing on the coffee, the sugar, and the creamer. 

And then the organized chaos of the day got under way.  The first names of the shower list were called.  The coffee line formed.  And I heard in my heart and saw all around me the sacramental truth about this ordinary Monday morning at Manna House, which is, as Dorothy Day said, “The mystery of the poor is this: that they are Jesus and what you do for them you do to him.”