hospitality challenges

Towards the end of the month more people come to St. Joes for a meal.  Today over 130 were fed in some way or another. Like the changing of seasons the end of the month means people's subsidies have dried up and they're on the move, looking to eat. Before they are let into the dining room many wait in the hospitality room where they can watch tv, sit and read something or if there are chores to be done, they can take a shower--we give them towels, soap, shampoos and conditioners, razors, body lotion or they can wash their clothes.  Usually everyone is respectful of the process and we don't need to intervene; if someone wants these services they sign up and I pray one woman doesn't occupy the washing machine and dryer for three hours until lunch is served though if it does happen it doesn't seem to bother anyone, if a man takes off all his clothes in the shower and comes out with only a towel, we intervene before the catcalls and howls.  Most of the time the atmosphere is generally calm, in a calm chaotic way.  The room can take a clubhouse mentality when the men play a style of dominoes that require the slamming of pieces on the shaky plastic table.  The tv can be quite loud, and with the fans whirring and the room filling escaping to the outdoors is tantamount.

Perhaps the hardest element is the challenge to remain relevant among a population where I really don't have much in common:

Vinny:  Hey you wanna play scrabble?  Sure, no wait, I can't spell.

Bob:  I wanna go back to school but they want money.  College should be free.
John:  What do you want to study?
Bob: I don't know but I don't wanna come here anymore for food.

Joe:  What's the book you're reading?
John:  It's about an anthropologist in Yemen who is recording tribal poetry.
Joe:  It's a miniseries now on cable or something like that?

A conversation I couldn't help but overhear:

Ali:  You ever been to Italy?
Jane: No, but I'm Sicilian.
Ali:  So that means you support Mussolini?  

Angry man:  Can I have a bag lunch?
John:  So, you're not going to be here at 11:30am?
Angry man:  That's none of your business.
John:  It is my business, for the bag lunches are for people who aren't going to be here for lunch at 11:30.
Angry man:  That's none of your damn business what I do with my time.  $#@ you can keep your $#@ bag lunch.

Frank: (in a wheel chair, lives in the 20 story tower one block south of St. Joes) "...so this guy has a car and for 17 years he's never had a problem with it until last week and he...(he begins laughing) and his starter dies...hahaha, just like that, man, his starter isn't that the funniest thing you've ever heard?  Haaahaa, his starter...

I don't know what exactly was humorous in that story but I tried to be sympathetic and offered a yodel to show I understood. Most the time I'm in the hospitality room I try to be as hospitable as I can but conversing with them is hard.  Many don't wish to talk at all.  There's a fella who comes in every morning when we open the doors, gets his coffee with three heaping spoons of sugar and looks just like Billy Bob Thornton and when I told him who he looks like he just smirked and said, ok.  Another young fella came in  and wanted me to keep his plastic martini glass safe behind the counter.

Ray: "I used to have a problem drinking but now it's just a beer once in a while.
John:  So, the martini glass is strictly for orange juice?
Ray:  Hey that's a good idea

If it is God's will for me to stay here for longer than a month I need to somehow keep my head in the game.  And this afternoon, after Sister Grace from the House of Mercy came and did the service with her choir filling the dining room with holy gospel howls I thought I could counsel these men, I could find a way to reach them, but it would take something only a Tibetan Buddhist would understand, not a Catholic Worker and I don't know if that'll ever happen.

"You can take anything considered bad, and make it good.  Ganji, for example, has tremendous power.  If your heart is right, and your intentions are pure, you can use it for great power and compassionate uses." (paraphrase from handbook read in a Darjeeling monastery) 

viva la vida

Before 2009 I never gave much thought of the world ending.  The blessed hope was part of my liturgical theology and nothing else.  Life itself was enough and singing maranatha hymns were simple dreams and wishes when distress and pain came in waves.

And then the spirit world arrived with a boom. The spirits don't see the future that far in advance.  I've gauged they know what's ahead of us by no more than a half second at best. The billions on earth who believe in some other worldly shift to come wait anxiously like those in the fourth dimension but they are limited.  The spirits Coldplay inspired to produce "Viva la Vida" foresaw an end and for reasons I don't understand believed the consummation of time was now but they were anxious, they must have sensed things were so bad on earth it must have been it.  But they don't know.  The spirit who led me to believe something was going to happen at the end of 2012 also desired and hoped his new life would begin and he too was disappointed.

So now while I still believe I don't believe.  My mind tires of asking God to bring the misery and suffering of this world to an end.  It is tasking and to be honest, quite depressing, to spend so much energy praying for something that must be inevitable; perhaps when we say "thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" this hope is an individual bus ticket to the afterlife and nothing else. We'll go to the big grassy park with lots of clouds and vertical lines when were dead and ready.  Preparing for that journey until then, is life.

Today I was in the bakery, observing mostly, but I helped make cookies, formed rolls of dough for buns, greased loaf pans and washed the large flat trays.  The quiet atmosphere has an almost sanctified presence to it.  If my place in this community is meant to be I would like to be here more so than on the front lines at the house.  I don't have the street smarts to give what so many need or want.  I can distribute the goods and I am content knowing I do my best, I simply don't understand how God can let so many suffer their entire lives.

Lord, forgive me for doubting your work but I don't understand.  I will stop asking for you to return and bring us home.  Life goes on and we make the best of every moment hoping to ease the loss for the man with nothing, for the woman with nothing.  It is not about me.  It is about them.  

Where in the hell is heaven?

By 11am the hospitality room is full, ninety three degrees, stifling humidity, three ceiling fans, two large standing fans, and two exhaust fans do nothing to relieve the men and women who wait in oblivion for the afternoon lunch.  The tv mounted on the eastern wall blasts Ted Danson and Jeff Goldbloom solving crimes and no one listens.  I look at each of the faces and cannot discern any kind of hope beyond that meal.  In one year, five years, ten years nothing for the whole lot of them is going to improve.  Resigned to a cruel and unjust fate how in God's merciful name can I  help them.  'You got any soap, shampoo, toothbrush, toothpaste, razors, body lotion, hair lotion, laundry soap, you got any bus passes, you got a towel, socks, any sugar, you got a buck, I need a buck?'  I give them what they ask if it's available, a momentary act of mercy albeit it is so small.  What more do you need when you know today and next and the day after that will not change? Food, clothing, a game of dominos.

The physiological effects of addiction, the psychological effects of poverty, the clashing and bashing of both and the endless waiting game left me depressed, no amount of empathy can give the man any hope for breaking out of a cycle that seems so endlessly unfair and is so common.

On Tuesday evenings a minister of some kind leads a service in the dining room.  This week five people and myself listened to a woman with tattoos on the inside of her forearms talk about blessed are peacemakers.  "Who is a peacemaker, one who accepts that all opinions should be respected, regardless of their religious and political presuppositions."  A middle aged black man with thick glasses and oil stained khaki trousers asks the woman if she thinks Jesus is ever going to return because life really stinks and he is having his doubts.  "Heaven is right here (she taps her heart) and  we needn't worry of the day or time because only God knows, meanwhile we must love God and our neighbors and not find fault with the mysterious plan God has for you and for all of us here."

If I didn't have an overheated headache and had more than a few hours sleep the night before I would have answered the man who's only hope is the hope that is disappearing that you need to be getting a little ticked off with 2000 years of promises and no return on a lifetime of belief.  Where is God right now?  There is no heaven for the poor and the mentally ill who have no hope and even if they did have hope in a promise they'll never see in this lifetime, well is this hell?  Do the souls who knock back black coffee and who shake and stammer and can't connect logical points and fight to survive another day for what, for what?  OH!  who are you to question God's transient plan for the disenfranchised and downtrodden?

Where is heaven in this man's heart, sister?  GIve him a job, retrain him, hold his hand and tell him he'll be with Jesus when his body dies.  Give him hope even though he'll return to the bridge and sleep in the weeds.  Tell him Jesus is going to come, it is our blessed hope but it probably won't happen while you're on this earth so suck it up until then.  A great and glorious life awaits you, but just not now.  Here, take a loaf a bread, you need some boxers?  Someone donated some ice skates, what size are you?  God bless you, see you tomorrow, inshal'allah.

The President's half Irish, dude, wear something green

On Sundays outside groups come in and serve the afternoon meal.  I hung around, met the nice church folks who had brought in the boiled hams and stuff for a salad and then I went up to the sweltering third floor and finished Leon Uris's 'Exodus'.  I exclaimed to Stergio, the Greek dude who lives in the house and spends all his time in the bakery, of my desire to go to Israel.  There's an energy there, unlike the eastern side of the world, that beckons me.  I didn't tell him of potentially imminent plans to return to the middle east because frankly I don't know if it is going to happen.  I like this city and what it has to offer but truth be told, I'm bored.  I spoke to a few about returning to school, finding a job in the evening, ya da ya da, to keep me occupied.  Right now, I have no responsibilities on the weekend, something I ought to be thankful for but hey when you got no money options are limited.  

This evening sitting outside in the garden Joseph explained to me his situation.  Tomorrow I will go with him and Tom to meet someone who may be able to give Michelle Obama his letter.  Joseph's story is somewhat complicated, but he came to the states in 1998 from Liberia and was denied asylum for reasons Joseph, without a lawyer, couldn't convince the authorities.  His family had been murdered and hey, that's' good enough for me let him stay in the country.  Who the hell wants to live in a shit hole where murdering people is like going to the supermarket.  

In 2003 Joseph had a stroke and for the last eight years has lived at St. Joes.  He works at Walmart, he has a social security card, and he has an employment card, which expires in December.  The INS informed him a few months ago he has to leave in September of this year.  It is doubtful he would be able to find the medications he is on now in Liberia.  While I have only known him for two weeks he is a personable fellow, and while he can be difficult to understand because of his accent (I'll offer him accent reduction lessons if I decide to stay here) the chance to present his case in the form of a letter to the President's wife, who is in town tomorrow to introduce someone, I told Joseph getting this letter into the right hands is a connection that may expedite his case.

"Wear something green, her husband is half Irish."

fresh lake storm

Last Saturday I headed to the beach and it took two hours to reach the southern banks of Lake Ontario.  I didn't know how long it would take before I left St Joe's but it didn't matter because it was Saturday, my first day off since I drifted in to Rochester five days ago. I walked to the intersection of South Ave and Broad St and got on the '1 Lake' bus when the driver told me it went to the Ontario Beach Park.  What the driver didn't tell me five miles later as he stopped in front of the old Kodak plant and began to turn around that I'd need to take another bus to reach the beach.  Three miles and ninety minutes later I soaked my soles in the cold almost clean fresh water.  The Great Lake.  Like an ocean it seems but imagine, you can drink from it.  I took out my bag lunch of pb and j and read 'Exodus' for a half hour, and then read 'The Long Loneliness' for a half hour until out of the lake blue a corker of a squall came and we all rushed for shelter and when it passed on its way to Ottawa I ran to the end of the pier and took photos of the disappearing storm as yachts raced back into port.  It was a beautiful day.