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.

O Captain! My Captain!

“I’m just here minding my own business.”  Tim Moore made this announcement every time he entered Manna House to get coffee. Tim was a long term guest who started coming when he was experiencing homelessness. In recent years he had a place to live, and he worked steadily at “the yellow store” down the street from Manna House. For the past year or so Tim struggled with a variety of health issues. He died this past Sunday at work.

“I backslid again and I need you to pray for me.” Tim approached Moses every time he came to Manna House and asked for prayer. Tim was well aware of his faults and failings and his need for prayer. Of the guests who call upon Moses to pray for them, Tim was the most consistent. So it was that a regular part of the scene at Manna House was Tim and Moses in a corner or on the front porch, with Moses’ arm extended and hand placed on Tim’s shoulder, with both of their heads bowed, praying.

“I’m going to get married.” For most of last winter and into the summer, Tim would tell me on Monday of his plan to get married. On Tuesday he would express doubts. On Thursday he would tell me the wedding was off. This went on for months. Finally late last summer he told me, “I’m out of this getting married business.” I still do not know what began the cycle or what ended it. But Tim entertained me and many other volunteers and guests with his marriage announcements.

“He was a good man in his own strange way,” a guest said in response to the news of Tim’s death. That seems an apt description of Tim. There was a fair amount of bluster about him (he really never did mind his own business). He often had lively exchanges with other guests about nothing in particular. Yet the two photos I have of him are of him alone. In the one he sits by himself at a picnic table in the backyard of Manna House. He is not facing the camera (he usually did not like having his picture taken). In the other photo he is standing alone in the living room of Manna House looking toward the front door. I had taken the picture one morning when things had gotten slow and he agreed to be photographed.

“I’m going to miss Tim,” said another guest. He was echoed by many others. The chill and grey clouds on this morning gave apt expression to the gloom I felt about Tim’s passing. There is a lot of coming and going among guests at Manna House. There are new people every day who arrive for hospitality, and there are many who I see for a month or so and then they are gone. It is like the ebb and flow of a tide bringing up flotsam from the chaotic sea of poverty. And then there are guests like Tim, who faithfully arrive each day, not because they need much, but because they have made Manna House their own. Tim was more like the captain of a small boat who came into the harbor each morning with yarns to tell of what he had seen on that sea of poverty.

Tim’s death hits hard. Thinking of Tim as a captain, Walt Whitman’s poem “O Captain! My Captain!” that I first heard in “Dead Poets Society” came to mind. It seems apt on this day of learning that Tim has died. I'll share the first and last stanza:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

                         But O heart! heart! heart!

                            O the bleeding drops of red,

                               Where on the deck my Captain lies,

                                  Fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

                         Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

                            But I with mournful tread,

                               Walk the deck my Captain lies,

                                  Fallen cold and dead.

Silent Hospitality

There is never absolute silence at Manna House. Before the doors open at 8am, even before the other volunteers arrive around 7:45am, the house is never completely silent. There is the rumbling of passing traffic on Jefferson Avenue. There is the comforting sound of coffee percolating and the dryers finishing off loads of laundry from the previous day.  Early arriving guests congregate on the front porch, and sometimes those voices are loud enough for me to hear inside. When the windows are open in the summer, I can hear the songs of the birds who make their way through the yard.

The house is not silent, but it does seem quiet. The contrast between the hubbub of hospitality that is to come, and the emptiness of the house, makes possible a peaceful quiet. And in that quiet, I seek to pray.

I have a routine. I read about the “Saint of the Day” in Daniel Ellsberg’s book, “All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time.” Then I pray the psalms from the Liturgy of the Hours. 

Sometimes I recall that many years ago as a Benedictine monk my day would start with Morning Prayer at 7a.m. Here I am at roughly the same time still praying the psalms. I feel a connection with the monks at St. John’s Abbey, knowing they are in the abbey church praying the psalms too. I am thankful for this habit of prayer they formed me.

The quiet time for prayer makes possible the hospitality I seek to offer later in the morning. This prayer is God’s time of hospitality. In the quiet, I have a better chance of hearing and accepting God’s welcome. In this quiet, I listen, not for any particular word, not for any particular insight, but sit in quiet expectation for God’s loving presence.

Maybe this is why I love the hymn “Silent Night” so much. It recognizes the presence of God in the quiet, “Silent night, holy night, All is calm, all is bright.” The Word becomes flesh in the midst of silence so deep that shepherds can hear angels in the night air. “Alleluia” can be heard when the pretentious clamor of our daily hustle and bustle subsides.

In the morning quiet of Manna House, I find a connection with Jesus who was born in the silence. I remember that in his life he also sought silence, and that silence anchored his work. In silence he, too, could receive God’s hospitality. Mark’s Gospel preserves short stories of Jesus seeking silence. “When he had taken leave of them, he went off to the mountain to pray” (Mark 6:46), and “very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (Mark 1:35).

Like Jesus, in these quiet times I find a sacred silence. Silence helps me to set aside all those thoughts and desires that clamor for my attention, that assert their importance, and mine. In silence I can attend to that “the God-sized hole” in my heart. Blaise Pascal wrote of the craving each of us tries to fill in vain with everything around us. I seek to prop myself up with possessions and with identities that inflate my ego. But “none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God” (Pensees VII, 425).

Silence quiets those distractions, so I can become receptive to God’s graciousness. Centered in the silent hospitality of God’s gracious presence, and not in my loud desires to control others or magnify my powers, I can welcome others as they are—God’s own people made in God’s image. In silence, God’s love fills my heart, so I can love others as God loves me. God’s silent hospitality nourishes my soul, so I can welcome others with hospitality, seeing in them the very presence of God.