In spite of several glorious moments of beauty throughout the course of the day, I’m feeling heavy with the brokenness of the world tonight. In addition to walking through some discouragement and sorrow in my own personal life, these past few days at the center have been full of hard stuff–today in particular. Before we’d been open even an hour we’d received a visit from the fire inspector indicating that we need to install a new oven hood–at a cost of approximately $10k (our program doesn’t have that kind of money)–I’d spent a hefty chunk of time on the phone with Adult Protective Services advocating for a client who had been taken advantage of by another drug-affected client (who had been making so much progress until now!), and a client returned for the first time since we had to call Project Respond in several weeks ago because this client was so lost in their delusions of our being a target for HIV specific terrorism we were concerned they were a danger to themselves or others in the community–and today the sideways delusions continued. Client after client, it seemed, occupied a state of utter chaos and escalation, so much so that we found ourselves triaging the most severe cases first and hoping the others didn’t further escalate and explode in the meantime.
At one point a member of the community who lost both his estranged father and brother at this time last year came to me with yet more grief. A gentle, pensive, trusting fellow who gives of himself to others without hardly a thought for himself, he came into our office to tell me of his broken heart. He thought he’d finally found a partner, and had invested much time in pursuing this individual and giving of his heart, only to find that this person had other, more strategic (read: financial) intentions. Not only was he experiencing the broken heartedness of losing this particular individual, he was also grieving what he understands as his perpetual aloneness. He believes he will always be without a partner to walk through life with and this distresses his heart and mind greatly. Oddly enough this was quite akin to my own distress through which I was walking–and I found myself thinking that we find solidarity in the most unlikely places . . . that we all fundamentally desire to love and be loved and our world really just sucks at it. It is, after all, broken, and in spite of our most ardent attempts at restoration, it continues in brokenness.
So when the day was over all I wanted to do was run around the corner to the local pub, have a beer and decompress. I took along a book I’ve assigned to one of our interns (but haven’t actually finished reading), and was so touched (grounded, centered, inspired, what have you) by what I read I felt I had to share part of it. It is a collection of reflections by a priest who used to minister to the folks on Portland’s streets and low-income housing. It’s a pretty hefty chunk, and I’m probably violating numerous copyright laws, but the story so needs to be shared . . .
From Radical Compassion by Gary Smith (emphasis added is my own):
I had not seen Melinda in a long time, although our friendship reached back over the years, here and in other places. She showed up at my door one night, cut loose after completeing a six-week drug rehab program. Again. She needed a ride to Seattle; could I help her with a ticket? Yes, I could.
At thirty-two, she was tall and had an extraordinarily beautiful face–an exterior beauty that belied the near total self-disgust that occupied her like an invading army of parasites. At some point during the painful early years of growing up in bitter poverty and with the racist abuse of the ghetto, she had crossed over into the murky and predatory life of sex for drugs and drugs for sex. It was madness. She had a wonderful personal side, one that emerged in her honesty about her confusion and self-hate and in her longing to be happy and healthy. She had burned most of the bridges to her family and friends. But she hadn’t burned the one to me.
I love this woman. True, to love her requires a certain courage and an acceptance of my tendency to make mistakes, to be excessively generous, and to be taken for a fool. Anyone who has seen addiction in operation knows this. To love her, though, does not mean I must always be prudent or that I must calculate all the pros and cons. I think love does not always look for success, nor is it blind to danger. But it does believe in the intrinsic beauty and possibility of the beloved. In the end, I believed in that sacred quality of Melinda–the presence of God–that longs for her wholeness, for the unique and living forces of her real self to develop.
There is in the world of nature constant renewal; as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it in his poem “God’s Grandeur,” “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” This renewal also takes place in our own hearts. In this renewal and in her hope for herself, Melinda will realize her own feelings and thoughts, her wishes, interests, resources, and movements of love. This constant pull toward life is what gives her dignity. I saw this dignity in her, a dignity given to her by her Creator, independent of all the failures and bad decisions and ugly stuff that society frequently holds up as reasons for her condemnation. If I am called to anything as a priest and as a Christian, I am called to stride into–not run from–the untidiness and fear and brokenness and shame that is around me, that country of humanness in which we all live and share.
We waited briefly in the ticket line of the Greyhound station, that inner city launching pad, where people like Melinda are constantly departing toward sanity and the possibility of a new life, a life where maybe they will be able to be happy, eat with friends, and be with those who love them, a life where they may be able to freely take their children into their arms as they saunter through a city park.
One-way ticket to Seattle purchased, we had coffee and a sandwich and a cigarette together. We stood there, thinking of other streets in another place; we had been in this moment before. As her bus number was announced, she reached for me and held me close to her, weeping gently in my arms, whispering that she loved me for never giving up on her.
No, I never have. Never will.
When I think of Melinda, one movement in me is the raw gut reaction to her oppression. I hate that women like Melinda are used up sexually by pimps, made into beasts of burden by drug dealers, taunted and raped by indifferent men, beaten up by their poverty. I have known women, fearful of shelters, who spent their nights standing in storefronts, waiting until dawn, when they were safe to sleep on park benches and at bus stops; I have known women who were deliberately infected with HIV in an act of retaliation; I have known women of the streets who have been shot, stabbed, strangled and murdered. They didn’t have a chance against the power that was being used against them. You want to know about indignity inflicted on another human being? Talk to a woman of the streets.
Another movement in me is a more hushed one. It has to do with the interior beauty of women, a beauty that enables me to claim my own sensitivity and tenderness. They have taught me that the function of my chosen celibacy is not to be loveless but to contribute to the great treasure of love and sacrifice needed by humankind. The women who I call friends–and in their midst stands dear Melinda–have uncovered me as no man could ever do and have led me into the world of loyalty and fruitfulness; they have helped me to love the mystery of myself. If a man wants to understand the heart of God, he must surely begin by standing next to the heart of a woman.
I don’t have any illusions about Melinda’s chances. The recidivism rate of addicts is statistically very high, as is the rate of premature deaths of addicts. So I am not kidding myself. But stats don’t drive one’s life of service down here. The heart does. I am not sure how God’s heart connects to ours, but as I walked away from the bus depot, that connection was there, and I felt encircled by peace and joy.
And there you (and I) have it. Amen and Amen.
I cannot share the details of how a story like this impacts my perspective in the place I am in–only that I am struggling against a culture of cynicism in an environment where the above attitude would be a much better representation of who we claim to represent.
Thank you for sharing it. God be with you, friend. Despite any gaps you wish were filled, you can rest assured that you have shown love to friends and people in need you come in contact with. And in turn, the friends and people in need that you have touched love you back, even when our culture makes it hard for them to know how to say so.
Thank you for your kind words, my friend. God be with you as well as you endeavor to live hope in the face of cynicism–it is, in many ways, our most dangerous enemy . . .