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.”