To Love What is Mortal

“To live in this world 

 

you must be able 

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it 

 

against your bones knowing

your own life’s journey depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.” –Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods”

 

Oh girl, that feeling of safety you prize 

Well, it comes at a hard hard price 

You can't shut off the risk and the pain 

Without losin' the love that remains 

We're all riders on this train—Bruce Springsteen, “Human Touch”

 

“Daily washed the feet of poor people” from the Profile of Saint Oswald of Worcester, Feast Day, February 29 (the day of his death in 992).

 

“Ain’t nobody got no business mistreating nobody.” –Diane B., guest at Manna House

 

Hospitality draws us close to serve other people in their vulnerability, their woundedness, even their death. Guests come with needs, some of them physical, which are relatively easy to address. A shower and some clothes, a haircut, “socks and hygiene,” a cup of hot coffee; none of those are all that hard to share. It is the emotional and spiritual needs that require more. To listen or have a conversation with a person who has lost their place to live and have lost work, or sobriety, or family, or friends, or their minds, that takes empathy, compassion, patience, and in all of that, love. 

 

To practice hospitality with love requires being close, in the same space with those who come. Hospitality means smelling sour breathe, body odor, rotting flesh, shit. Death hangs over hospitality. People on the streets and people in poverty die younger than the general population. One study found the mortality rate for unhoused Americans more than tripled in the past ten 10 years. Another study notes that the average life span of a homeless person is about 17.5 years shorter than the general population. 

 

I doubt Mary Oliver was thinking about hospitality with people on the streets when she wrote that our own life’s journey depends upon our capacity “To love what is mortal” and “hold it against your bones.” And I’m sure Bruce Springsteen was not thinking about hospitality when he wrote, “You can't shut off the risk and the pain, Without losin' the love that remains.” But they both get at something fundamental about love and the practice of love in hospitality. In both we join with others in the shared human condition in which fragility, vulnerability, woundedness, and death are unavoidable. And to recoil from this human condition is to also recoil from love. That is the pathos and the promise inherent to human love. There is no love without risk, and finally without loss. But there is also no human life worth living without love.

 

This love is at the heart of being a disciple of Jesus. To keep practicing love knowing vulnerability and death is how we practice resurrection. We love, we practice hospitality, by getting close to people and allowing them to get close to us, physically, emotionally, spiritually. St. Oswald, whose Feast Day of February 29^th was celebrated Thursday morning at Manna House, understood that a Christian faith that does not touch and is not touched by those who are hurting, abandons Christ who both touched the hurting and was crucified. Thus, St. Oswald, “Daily washed the feet of poor people.”

 

To practice resurrection is to live the loving conviction that every person is created in the image of God and deserves respect and recognition. As a guest put it this morning at Manna House, “Ain’t nobody got no business mistreating nobody.” Our business in offering hospitality is overturning mistreatment, overturning death with affirmation of life and love, holding people close, holding the love that remains, knowing we’re all on the same train.

A Guest We Thought Was Dead, Lives, Alleluia!

Yes, she’s alive. The guest I had heard was dead, is living. Thanks be to God! And I am grateful to the St. Vincent De Paul Food Mission for letting me know that she was seen there a day ago.

This isn’t the first time a guest was said to be dead, who wasn’t. In the early days of Manna House, we received word that a guest was severely beaten, loaded into an ambulance, and driven away to a hospital. We called around to the various hospitals. None had a patient with this guest’s name. We couldn’t get any further information, and a number of guests confirmed the person was dead. 

We had a very nice memorial service at Manna House for this dead guest. Guests and volunteers alike expressed their love for the deceased with stories and heartfelt testimonies. Then, she turned out to be alive! She had been in a coma. No one at the hospitals had known who she was. When she awakened, she asked for visitors and we were contacted. That’s how we learned she was alive. When we visited with her, she was delighted to hear about the memorial service. As with Mark Twain, rumors of her death had been greatly exaggerated.

Since that event, I have tried to be careful about sharing the news that a guest has died. There have been several more times when the word on the street was grim. Death had come to so and so. Then the dead guest showed up at Manna House for coffee and a shower. Always a bit disconcerting, though joyous.

With this most recent guest, I received confirmation about her death from a number of sources. And the guest was nowhere to be found in her usual haunts. Nothing from hospitals, either. The holidays made getting word from the morgue difficult. It all added up to her being dead. Then she was seen at the St. Vincent de Paul Food Mission. Where had she been? A new place to live too far away from where she used to hang out had kept her from her panhandling corner and from Manna House. So, not dead; just relocated.

What to make of these events? When I shared with another volunteer the news about this guest being alive, he responded, “Resurrection!” Which would be wonderful, except the guest was not dead. Not even resuscitation, like Lazarus, since unlike Lazarus, this guest had not died. Maybe this experience was more like the Gospel story in which Jesus said of a girl thought to be dead, “She’s not dead, she’s just asleep.” Though I’m guessing this guest didn’t sleep through the three weeks we thought she was dead. 

Still the Holy Spirit moved me to keep mulling over that volunteer’s initial response of “Resurrection!” And so, I came to see there was something of a theology of resurrection that I was missing. When I offer hospitality to people on the streets and others in poverty, death is never very far away. The nearness of death makes it plausible that a guest who suddenly disappears is likely to be dead. So many times, the rumor of a guest’s death is true. A call to the morgue provides the awful confirmation. The memorial service goes on. The guest’s humor and stories or grumpiness and surliness are no longer in the mix. The community at Manna House grieves. We lose guests to death on an almost monthly basis. Life on the streets is deadly. Homelessness kills people, either slowly due to disease and poor health care, or rapidly through accidents, or overdoses, or freezing to death. 

Hospitality is a small attempt at resurrection in this field of death. Hospitality lives through the Living One who said, “I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! (Revelation 1:18). Hospitality rejoices to hear that a guest who was thought to be dead, lives. And hospitality continues in the face of death, to offer resistance to death through a place to be alive, to be welcomed, to be with others, to be respected and affirmed in the dignity of human life.

In the practice of hospitality, I am joyous that resurrection is stronger than death, and that a sign of resurrection is that death was cheated this time. With this guest, death was denied. “Alleluia!”