Why, My Soul, Are You Downcast?

Why, My Soul, Are You Downcast?

On Tuesday I woke up about 3:00am and never really got back to sleep. As I lay there awake, I felt surrounded, both literally and figuratively by the darkness of the night. I was in a constant loop of worries and anxieties until my alarm went off at 6:00am.

I had a lot on my mind, really on my soul. This time of year at Manna House, due to the cold, we switch from being in the backyard for serving coffee and generally hanging out with our guests, to being in the house. This is never an easy transition. The house becomes crowded, sometimes chaotic. Guests who struggle to be in close proximity to others, get anxious and sometimes act harshly toward those who get too close.  

The move indoors means winter is coming. On Monday morning guests had asked me about the weather forecast for the week. So both they and I knew the forecast for rain and cold. Part of my worries in the night were about our guests who do not have shelter. Some of my anxiety was sharing their anxiety about what the change of season means for being on the streets. There is anxiety about getting warmer clothes, hats, gloves, blankets, coats. My anxiety on this night included wondering how we are going to meet those needs. And behind all these anxieties is a deeper anxiety. Will someone on the streets, perhaps someone we know, freeze to death this winter? Death from the cold comes almost every winter.

I also mulled over the hatred toward people experiencing homelessness, which makes providing housing and other basic necessities controversial.  I know it is a hatred fed by a banquet of racism, an individualistic culture of competition, fear of strangers, and a false sense of scarcity. And in these days, this banquet of hatred is served up by people in the highest offices of the land, including the presidency. Trump and his followers revel in the denial of human dignity for people in poverty—including people on the streets, and people of any color other than white, people of any nationality other than “white American.” My soul was bedeviled by how many of Trump’s followers are people who claim the Christian faith, who believe Trump is divinely authorized, despite his disdain for the poor, the very ones Jesus said are blessed.

When I got to Manna House on Tuesday morning, slightly groggy from the long night, I turned to Psalm 43.
Vindicate me, my God,
    and plead my cause
    against an unfaithful nation.
Rescue me from those who are
    deceitful and wicked.

The psalm seemed to have been written for this day in its analysis of the present realities, “an unfaithful nation,” “those who are deceitful and wicked.” And though I wished those words did not apply to me as well, the psalm implied that I, too, have done something wrong that warrants God’s rejection. I am not immune from the sins of racism, self-righteousness, fears grounded in insecurity, and worries about scarcity.
You are God my stronghold.
    Why have you rejected me?
Why must I go about mourning,
    oppressed by the enemy?

Given the signs of the times and my own brokenness, the psalm then offered exactly what I need in my life:
Send me your light and your faithful care,
    let them lead me;
let them bring me to your holy mountain,
    to the place where you dwell.
Then I will go to the altar of God,
    to God, my joy and my delight.
I will praise you with the lyre,
    O God, my God.

If the psalm had stopped there perhaps I would have been good. I would simply “let go and let God.” But the psalm as the word of God did not end on such a sappy, superficial, “Don’t worry, be happy” false note. No psalm, no prayer, magically ends the realities that caused my anxieties that troubled me in the night.

Those realities go on, and they require my attention and my resistance. If I am to follow Jesus I have to take up the cross. I have to go against the death-dealing meanness of our culture and our economy and our political life. And I have to struggle against the misshapen desires of my own heart. Neither of those realities is going away anytime soon.

So the psalm ends with hardness intertwined with hope.
Why, my soul, are you downcast?
    Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
    for I will yet praise God,
    my Savior and my God.

Grace Abounds

“Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20).

I saw her standing on the sidewalk at the end of the Manna House driveway. I was hopeful that she was in a peaceful mindset. This guest has had a difficult history at Manna House. Her outbursts, her threats of violence, and finally her throwing of hot coffee at a volunteer, culminated in her being banned indefinitely three years ago.

A guest who is banned is not allowed at Manna House. Usually a ban is for a week or two, or maybe a month. The hope is that the time away will allow the guest to evaluate what went wrong, and then come back to discuss how a change can lead to being welcomed again.

With this guest attempts to help her develop some minimal respect for other guests and volunteers with shorter bans had utterly failed. The combination of her personality and mental illness were too much for us to handle. So a “permanent” ban was reluctantly imposed.   

During this ban she still came around to Manna House once in a while. One of us would serve her out on the sidewalk, away from other guests and volunteers. Sometimes this service was as simple as a cup of coffee. Sometimes it involved more complicated negotiations about clothing items she wanted.

Kathleen and I would also see her around midtown on occasion. Each encounter was always fraught with some anxiety. This guest can move from friendly to volatile in a manner of minutes. Then she disappeared. Months passed without seeing her, until this morning, when I went down to the end of the driveway to talk with her.

I greeted her and asked if she would like a cup of coffee.

“Already sent somebody in to get me a cup,” she replied matter of factly. For this guest going around the rules comes easily.

“Glad to hear you’ve got coffee coming. How have you been?”

“I nearly died a few weeks ago. Sunstroke. I was in the hospital, ICU. They thought I wasn’t going to make it. And I almost didn’t.”

She looked at me as if to emphasize she had been on death’s door. And then added,

“None of us know when we’re going. Could be anytime. Wasn’t my time. Will be sometime.”

“I’m grateful it wasn’t your time.” She smiled when I said this, and then asked for some socks and a shirt.

“I can get those for you.”

Sin’s power is death. I see the power of sin in how this guest nearly died. The summer’s heat and humidity and the lack of shelter, of a place for her to stay, had nearly killed her. And maybe even our ban from Manna House had nearly killed her.

As she sat on a bench in the front yard of Manna House to put on her new socks, she said, “Look at my feet. All swollen and red. Guess it’s from that sunstroke.”

A pair of socks is a small grace. And she liked the shirt I brought out. I knew she likes shirts that are big and hang down around her. I had brought out an XXL.  Perhaps another small grace.

I knew the big grace was that despite all she had been through, despite her being banned from Manna House, she was talking with me. For a moment she trusted me enough to share her life, and extend a gracious welcome to me.

We were in a very small space of grace where Manna House boundaries and her ability on this day to be pleasant intersected. Sin was all around us, and in us, and yet this was a moment in which grace was abounding.

Jesus said the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. So small I can easily miss the abundance of grace in the Kingdom as it grows and pushes against the power of sin and death.

I left this guest sitting in the coolness of the morning on the bench as I returned to the back yard. Death had to wait for another day.

  

Thirsty Soul

“I lift up my hands to you in prayer; like dry ground my soul is thirsty for you.” (Psalm 143:6).

I had this verse in my heart as Memphis went without rain for September, making it the third driest September on record for Memphis. And despite a few showers in the early days of October, the verse stayed with me. The ground is still hard and dry. The hydrangea plants in the backyard of Manna House are still droopy.

As I got out of my car in the parking lot across the street from Manna House, a man approached and asked me, “Do you remember me?”

He looked familiar, but I did not remember his name. I knew he was a Manna House guest from a few years back.

He told me his name and said he’s been working and has a place where he lives. “Did you know I got married?” he asked. Then he added, “My wife, she’s got stage four cancer. She’s at Methodist. That’s why I’m here, taking a break from being with her in the hospital room. You all still serving coffee?

“Well shit. I’m sorry. What’s your wife’s name so I can pray for her. And, yes, we still serve coffee. We’ll open at 8.”

I stood there in the parking lot feeling parched. I felt the hard, dry soil of life. I couldn’t help but connect this man’s story to Ronald Kent, who died of cancer just a few weeks ago. I won’t hear him singing in the Manna House showers anymore; or get to rib him about the Dallas Cowboys, his favorite team.

The former guest interrupted my thoughts of drought. He had more he wanted to share with me. “People tell me the good Lord doesn’t give us any more than we can handle,” he said. “I don’t know about that. Either the Lord thinks I’m super strong, or that’s just flat out wrong. What do you think?”

 “I think it’s wrong,” I said. “I guess I don’t think it’s so much about God testing us, trying to see what you or I can handle. I think it’s more about how God is always with us, God holds us close even when it doesn’t feel that way.” I was trying to talk my way through my own thirst for God.

Then the man shared with me how God's gracious rain comes to him in drought. “I have no doubt God is with me,” he said. “But really it’s God in Christ. Jesus is the one who knows our suffering. He suffered. He died. He’s been there. He’s suffering with my wife. He’ll die with her, just like he died for her. We’re never completely alone.”

“You’re right, so right. You have a strong faith,” I told him, “I’ll keep your wife and you in my prayers.”

“Thanks,” he said, “Prayer is all I’ve got now.”

This parking lot theologian reminded me of the biblical and Christian tradition of affirming God’s grace is like rain. God freely offers God’s grace to each of us, like a gentle rainfall. C. H. Spurgeon notes how lovingly God shares this grace. God “directs each drop, and gives each blade of grass its own drop of dew… God moderates the force, so that it does not beat down or drown the tender herb. Grace comes in its own gentle way.”

In the times of drought in my life, God can seem more absent than present. The rain of grace can seem shut off. But the guest in the parking lot showed me how to stay open to God’s gracious rain, to the life-giving water given us in Christ. When I stretch out my hands to God in prayer, when I keep yearning for God’s gracious rain even when my soul is dry and thirsty, God will slake the thirst of my soul.

Heat and Hospitality

“At that time this people and Jerusalem will be told, ‘A scorching wind from the barren heights in the desert blows toward my people, but not to winnow or cleanse; a wind too strong for that comes from me. Now I pronounce my judgments against them’” (Jeremiah 4:11-12).

The hot dry weather of the past month in Memphis suggests Jeremiah’s word of judgment from the Lord might also apply here. And, too, as global climate change is manifested in raised temperatures around the world, I find Jeremiah terribly accurate in pointing towards our self-inflicted punishment.

“Your own conduct and actions
    have brought this on you.
This is your punishment.
    How bitter it is!
    How it pierces to the heart!”

Disaster follows disaster;
    the whole land lies in ruins.

“My people are fools;
    they do not know me.
They are senseless children;
    they have no understanding.
They are skilled in doing evil;
    they know not how to do good.”  (Jeremiah 4:18, 20, 22)

Jeremiah and the other Old Testament prophets see a connection between human degradation and the degradation of the creation. As we pursue a way of life marked by disregard for the well-being of others, the creation, too, is adversely affected.

A prophet sees the connection between the heartless conditions of homelessness that lead to thousands of early deaths, and the poisons that have killed of millions of birds in the United States. Environmental racism combines white supremacist hatred of Blacks with the placement of toxic dumps in Black neighborhoods. Treating other human beings as objects to be used is intertwined with treating the creation as an object to be exploited. Depersonalization of human beings is inevitable in connection with desecration of the creation.

I do not have to look far for the prophetic connection between denying people their dignity and destruction of the creation.

Guests from the streets in search of a shower at Manna House, arrived this week particularly hot, sweaty, and dirty. Doing the laundry meant encountering the smells of soiled socks, shirts, underwear, and pants. To walk the streets of Memphis means going through neglected neighborhoods, sleeping in abandoned buildings, and being assaulted by the trash blowing around.

At the national level, earlier in the week, President Trump proposed rounding up people on the streets and putting them into concentration camps. At the same time, the building of his wall of shame on the southern border of the US is destroying wilderness areas, and his regime is turning back years of protections for the air and water.

A prophetic vision sees how hatred of others leads to hostility toward the creation.

But the prophets also point to how we may heal our relations with each other and with God’s creation.

Isaiah says,

“If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
    with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
    and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
    and your night will become like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you always;
    God will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
    and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
    like a spring whose waters never fail.
Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
    and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
    Restorer of Streets with Dwellings” (Isaiah 58:9-12).

Hospitality thus is a way we seek to practice resistance to the hatred and hostility. Kathleen draws from the Montessori school tradition to encourage us at Manna House to “prepare the space for hospitality.” We work to have a beautiful backyard where trees and shrubbery form a green welcome for our guests, “a well-watered garden” where guests can get away from “a sun-scorched land.” Affirming our guests’ dignity, we seek to create a place that has beauty, comfort, and a sense of sanctuary, even during these hot days.

“It’s challenging.”

“It’s challenging.”

A guest in the backyard of Manna House shared his approach to living in the hot and still humid early September Memphis weather.

“It’s challenging.”

A slight breeze tried to move the dense air. This guest shared that he does not expect the heat to break anytime soon.

“Looks like it will be another week or more. But what can you do? Make the best of it. Keep living.”

I thought, this is Job who has heard God speaking out the whirlwind, reminding Job that God is the Creator, and the world (including its weather) does not exist under Job’s direction but under God’s (Job 38-41).

Like the biblical Job, the Job of the backyard has learned that there are powers so great that the best one can do is adjust to them, survive them, acknowledge their presence, make peace with them, and keep going.

“It’s challenging.”

I heard in this response, the biblical Job’s response to God. Here is a willingness to listen, to learn, and to go on, chastened but assured of God’s loving presence.

“I know that you can do all things;
    no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
    Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
    things too wonderful for me to know.

“You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;
    I will question you,
    and you shall answer me.’
My ears had heard of you
    but now my eyes have seen you.

Therefore, I humble myself
    and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:1-6).

The great illusion that I live under so often is that I am in control. This illusion drives my attempt to control my own life, and the lives of others, and even the world around me. The illusion of control tempts me to do violence, to try and force the world to meet my expectations.  At the very least I get angry and live with a kind of frustrated smoldering resentment because I cannot make the world fit into my expectations. My desire for control can even make me try to make God into my own image, giving divine sanction to my efforts to control others.

This teacher at Manna House, this Job of the backyard, points to another way. This is not passivity or resignation to the inevitable. Rather it is a way of compassion, of acknowledgement of shared suffering, shared vulnerability, and the commitment to live through it together. It is a way of modesty about my place as a human being in a world which is not centered on me.

“It’s challenging.”

The reality of struggle is not denied, but it is also not defeating. I can live with this Power greater than me because it is not out to get me, even if it is not organized around my desires, and not amenable to my control. God is disclosed to us, James Gustafson wrote in “Theocentric Ethics,” as the powers bearing down upon us, sustaining us, and ordering human life within the complex interactions of the natural and social worlds. God both makes possible our lives and places limits upon us.

“It’s challenging.”

The Job of the backyard teaches me humility. This word, derived from the Latin “humus,” means earth or dirt. I am of this earth. I live within the heat and humidity. And with others, I can do this with hope, and maybe even love. And that is challenging.