James Elliot is in his mid sixties and he is going blind. Today he sees shadows and can still shuffle along from the South Tower to St. Joes, which is about one block away. James also suffers from mental illness, which, unfortunately I cannot explain in detail but alcohol and drugs have had an adverse affect on him and it's pretty obvious when he speaks. This evening James came to the five pm service which follows our four pm meal. James didn’t arrive for the meal. Most of the time he doesn’t arrive for the daily 11:30 meal, and instead knocks on the shelter doors around three or four in the afternoon every day asking for something, anything, to eat, and most of the time, if one is within earshot gives him a couple of muffins or a bag lunch and a cup of cold water. James is thankful but he continues to ask for he knows he has nothing to lose so he asks for money, for coffee, for anything.
Today Joanne led the service and towards the end she asked if there were any prayer requests. James is about six foot one, an African American, with a bald head and few teeth. I just finished mopping the kitchen floor and went outside in the fenced garden for a breather. This is the hardest job I’ve ever had for many reasons, one, the needs of the poor and the mentally ill never end. And the philosophical demarcation of Catholic Workers workers, volunteers, and those who are guests can be so blurred sometimes you’re running around putting out fires of your colleague while trying earnestly and urgently to find a pair of clean underwear for a guest who many times needs not only clean underwear but a de-lousing only the fire department could accomplish. These lines between the three groups is frighteningly close and James, well, James is more needy than I am, he is more needy than many here and when Joanne opened the floor she had no idea who this man was sitting in front of her.
James: I’ve lived in many places. Many places have helped me. Open Doors let me stay with them, St. Francis let me stay with them. St. Joes helped me out. The VOA has helped me out. I get real hungry some times and I cannot cook so I look for food. I have a sister and she gave me a carton of cigarettes but I don’t like to smoke but I smoked them. Sometimes I have a beer, only one, I’m always hungry but I can’t cook. I’ve been in prison, only for three months though, and I sometimes go to the hospital, last week I almost got hit by a car but I’m ok. I’m always thirsty and I don’t know why.
Joanne: James, Jesus can give you water and you’ll never thirst again.
James: I like water, I drink it all the time. I like coffee too, with sugar but most of the time I’m thirsty.
Joanne: James, did you hear me? Jesus can give you the kind of water where you’ll never thirst again.
James: Well I like water. I drink it every day. My sister bought me a lot of beer one time and I wasn’t happy about that but I drank it because it was in cans.
I don’t know how to counsel James. I don’t even know how to talk to him. Sometimes I’ll bring him a coffee if he is sitting outside and it doesn’t take much to get him going. I think he just needs to know someone is listening even when he doesn’t make any sense.
And today I read something in Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Power of Myth’ about suffering that I had to read again and if in God’s name I knew someone who read this could comment on it that would be great because Campbell’s ideas have blown me away but when it comes to suffering, it’s so audacious I can’t help but wonder how it could be true, if it is true indeed.
Campbell: “I had an illuminating experience from a woman who had been in severe physical pain for years, from an affliction that had stricken her in her youth. She had been raised a believing Christian and so thought this had been God’s punishment of her for something she had done or not done at that time. She was in spiritual as well as physical pain. I told her if she wanted release, she should affirm and not deny her suffering was her life, and that through it she had become the noble creature that she now was. And while I was saying all this, I was thinking, ‘Who am I to talk like this to a person in real pain, when I’ve never had anything more than a toothache?’ But in this conversation, in affirming her suffering as the shaper and teacher of her life, she experienced a conversion—right there.
Moyers: There was a moment of illumination?
Campbell: Right there I saw it. I gave her the belief that she herself was the cause of her suffering, that she had somehow brought it about. This is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati, ‘the love of your fate,’ which is in fact your life, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing, and the more challenging or threatening the situation or context to be assimilated and affirmed, the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it.
My friend thought, “God did this to me” I told her, No, you did it to yourself. God is within you. You yourself are your creator. If you find that place in yourself, from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, and perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.”
Moyers: The only alternative would be not to live.
Campbell: All life is suffering, said the Buddha, and Joyce (James) has a line, “Is life worth leaving?
Getting James Elliot saved isn’t going to help his condition one bit. No preaching Christ crucified, no preaching Buddha or Islam or Hindu is going to change this man’s life but what if, what if he were able to see that the afflictions that encumber him every moment of the day were turned inside out and he were to see that his state of mind and his physical condition could be, if he understood and that’s a big if, if he understood is a blessing.
It’s a bizarre approach but ya know what, watching the homeless and the crazed and the dealers and the lazy and drifters every day who knows, maybe it could work. Maybe James could, for the life he has lived, live a better one if he accepted who he was, another big if, that is if he knows who he is today. This evening I do not know that.
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