Shared Grief and Shared Compassion

I heard the word of God come through the book of Job. I sat in a classroom at Memphis Theological Seminary and God’s word described those considered outcasts. With minimal paraphrase, Job 30:5-8 gave a harshly accurate and contemporary description of people labeled “homeless.”

“They were forced to live away from people;
    people shouted at them as if they were thieves.
They lived under bridges,
    in cat-holes, and among abandoned buildings.
They cried out like dogs in a junkyard
    and huddled together in illicit campsites.
They are deemed worthless people without names
    and were forced to leave the neighborhood.”

When Job spoke these words, he tried to set himself above and apart from those he described. But through suffering, he learned compassion born of the solidarity of shared humanity. He came to listen and learn from people on the margins. Suffering “de-centered” Job so that he could both hear God and become compassionate. That is what I learned in the classroom.

On Thursday morning, the word of God came as I and other volunteers prayed with our guests gathered on the front porch of Manna House. In prayer, we placed before God the grief of those who live in the way Job described. The guests who come to Manna House live that life and carry that grief. They are pushed away, despised, and disrespected. They are seen as other than human, as wild dogs or feral cats, dirty, and disgusting. They arrive tired and cold from the places where they fitfully slept in the abandoned nooks and crannies of the city. We prayed in recognition of this grief, calling for God’s loving justice.

Then in our prayer we went a step further. We placed before God the additional grief our guests carry, which is the grief of human loss we all share. Talk with any one of our guests, and the stories of loss spill forth. They are stories any one of us might be able to tell. Loss of parents, caregivers, spouses, friends, jobs, sanity, sobriety, health. But for our guests, their stories are made worse by the fragile social safety net they already experienced in poverty, which unraveled under the weight of such loss.

Yet there is the human connection of loss and grief. Neither volunteers nor guests are immune to the vulnerability of human life. We cannot change the reality that we lose those we care about and love. And we, too, will get sick, our bodies fail us as we age, and death will come to us as certainly as to all who live.

So we prayed from the shared grief in our hearts to the loving heart of God. Heads bowed in recognition that yes, we are in this together. Touch us God with your healing love. Help us embrace our shared vulnerability. Help us to learn solidarity in suffering, grief shared in grace, and to end the illusion of separateness, and the denial of our shared humanity.

Sharing in vulnerability, we turned to God and to each other to learn compassion, and we turned against seeking to control and dominate and exclude.

Job’s words describe the results of control, domination, and exclusion. Job’s word deny the humanity of those “deemed worthless people without names.” There is no recognition of our common human experience of loss and grief. Solidarity is shattered when we refuse to open ourselves to the grief of others, and our own. In the absence of compassion born of shared grief, we exclude those we deem “different” and do them violence.

Job learned a way of solidarity and compassion from his suffering and grief. This is the way, the truth, and the life that we can learn from Jesus, who was moved with pity to heal others, who wept over Jerusalem, and who suffered and died, and who in rising calls us to new life.

In this way, in this new life, we welcome the stranger.

We come together as people.

We greet each other as brothers and sisters.

We call each other by name.

We live together in community.

We invite each other into our homes.

We know love that shares grief.

We know the grace of God.

God is Our Shelter

God is our shelter and strength,

    always ready to help in times of trouble. Psalm 46:1 (Good News)

Thursday morning was cold and damp. After days of rain, the temperature had fallen. Guests gathered on the porch and in the front yard to await the opening of Manna House. No doubt they felt the brisk and soggy North wind that ran right through clothes and went deep into bones. After a long night under a bridge, or tucked into an abandoned building, or in a tent deftly hidden in a wooded area, the desire to be welcomed into a warm place and get a cup of hot coffee, is palpable.

            So, as I came from the house onto the porch with the other volunteers, I called out to the guests waiting, “Good morning. We’re going to say a short prayer and then open. If you want to join in, that’s fine; if you don’t that’s fine too.”

I felt the frozen hands of a guest to my right and my left as we joined hands to form our circle for prayer,

“Let’s pray,” I said, and so I began, “Thank you God for the clouds, the rain, and the cold.” The guests laughed. Thank God for what? Kathleen suggested I was trying to use reverse psychology on God. More laughter. Maybe I was.

But I was also thinking of the three young men Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in King Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace who sang in resistance,

Cold and chill, bless the Lord;

praise and exalt God above all forever.

Frost and chill, bless the Lord;

praise and exalt God above all forever.

Hoarfrost and snow, bless the Lord;

praise and exalt God above all forever. (Daniel 3:67, 69-70)

            Resistance. God is above all forever. God is not defeated by, is not under, but is sovereign over the ruler that put the three young men in the furnace. They are not submitting to a mere king. And God is sovereign over the powers (economic, political, and cultural) that put people out in the cold on the streets. Those powers neither have the last word, nor do they determine the worth and dignity of those rendered homeless.

            But how do I give witness to the resistance stance that God is above all forever? I think one way consistent with God’s character is to offer shelter, a place of refuge, a place of hospitality.

I have been reflecting on how often the Bible testifies to God giving shelter. One of my favorite psalms begins, “God is our shelter and strength, always ready to help in times of trouble” (Psalm 46:1). Shelter or refuge appears over twenty times in the Bible in reference to God. (Hebrew, machaseh—"shelter,” sometimes translated “refuge,” or sithrah—"shelter,” or in Greek, skēnōsei, see Revelation 7:15, “shelter” or “tabernacle with”). A basic characteristic of God is that God offers shelter.

            God’s shelter protects, hides, secures, comforts, and welcomes those who are vulnerable, despised, and denigrated by the powers that be. God’s shelter affirms human dignity and rejects the mean-spirited ostracizing of the poor.

The prophet Isaiah contrasts God’s shelter with the way of cruel and ruthless rulers, “For You have been a refuge for the poor, a stronghold for the needy in distress, a refuge from the storm, a shade from the heat. For the breath of the ruthless is like rain against a wall” (Isaiah 25:4).

            In these days, those in power promote and amplify the disparaging and mocking of the poor, the refugee, the immigrant, or anyone identified as somehow not “great.” God is not having it, and I must not either. Cold and chill must bless the Lord. The cold-hearted must be thwarted by offering God’s shelter. And God’s shelter does not warehouse the poor and coerce into worship as a condition for services offered. God’s shelter finally means a home, a place to live. To follow the God who shelters, hospitality must point in that direction and must advocate for housing, homes. Anything less is complicity, not resistance.