Letter From Boylston Street #3

One in an occasional series of reflections on homelessness and my duties as a pastoral intern at St. Francis House, a daytime shelter on 39 Boylston St. in Boston (http://www.stfrancishouse.org).

Previously I have written that homelessness is a state of being that transcends the material poverty that ordinarily gives rise to it. I say ordinarily because I contend that the state of being with which I associate homelessness may be experienced without material want. Any person who feels cast out of society or cut off from the community experiences the psychological and spiritual equivalent of homelessness. The psychological symptoms include fear, anxiety, depression, feelings of inferiority and worthlessness, and other marks characteristic of trauma. The spiritual symptoms include feelings of guilt, condemnation, and a loss of meaning.

Not all the students in the Moving Ahead Program, our social skills class, are homeless in the narrow sense of lacking shelter. Several are recovering from chemical addiction or mental illness or both. Several are recently paroled from the state penitential system. However, they are all, from the broader perspective I espouse, displaced persons, disaster victims, men and women without a firm footing in the world we have fashioned and to which we cling for sanity and stability. Please remember that there’s nothing intrinsically “wrong” with these men and women, and even if there was, that is not the issue; the problem is that they lack their rightful place in society. Our shelter’s educational services enable them to reclaim such a place. As the pastoral intern, I have been given two small projects within this greater reclamation project: 1) establish a hope-filled correspondence with prisoners waiting to enter our program upon release; and 2) tutor current and former students who seek to pass the GED exam or brush up on their skills.

One of the principal instructors has assigned three students to me. I met the first on Friday. Let’s call her Mallory. A week earlier the instructor prepared me with some basic information about Mallory and her needs. He provided the results of the pre-GED exam she had taken and indicated which skills needed the most development. He provided some resources from which I could build a curriculum for Mallory. But one of the first things he made a point of explaining to me was that Mallory was a transgender person. He said he didn’t know if I had ever seen a transgender person before, so he was telling me this so I wouldn’t be surprised by her. Prior to Mallory I had met three transgender persons. The first was a black transsexual female in Baltimore, a student in the adult education center where I volunteered as a teacher. She was not a student of mine, so I regarded her with polite disinterest. The second and third I met working as a canvasser for the Sierra Club last summer. One, a female androgyne, I regarded internally with disgust, and I never talked to her. The second, a male androgyne, eventually I got along rather well with, but at first repulsed me deeply. Even in his case, I never got over looking at him as a curiosity, a self-made freak, one not to be taken as seriously as any other person.

I spent two and half hours with Mallory on Friday leading review exercises in some basic principles of arithmetic. She had arrived 15 minutes late and was in little condition to learn, suffering badly from a chest cold. It was difficult to conceal my displeasure during the session as she repeatedly succumbed to spasms of coughing and phlegmy hacking. She complained she was hot; she complained she was tired. She said she had to get her nails done; she said she had to purchase her bus ticket. She lamented she wasn’t going to see her friend in Somerville; she lamented she was dying. We trudged through the exercises with as much good will as we could offer each other. Although I maintained a professional kind of cordiality, I couldn’t help but cringe inside.

I must confess that I was relieved when our session was over. Mallory had coughed on me so much, I was sure I had caught some germs. But I’m not so sure that was the chief source of my discomfort. Here’s the nagging question: would I have been so worried about catching a cold if it had been someone else, anyone else? A black, a Latino, a lesbian or gay or bisexual, a homeless person? Mallory was none of these. She was other than these, and this was an other I had not yet learned how to be at home with. I did not know how to make her feel welcome. I must have made her feel, in a word, homeless.

***

That evening I traveled to Jamaica Plain and attended a lecture by George Williamson, a retired Baptist pastor who had participated in the civil rights movement and later joined the antiwar and gay rights movements. The stories he told described his gradual liberation from the structural sin of racism, militarism, and heterosexism, a redemption he said was mediated by the Gospel example of Martin Luther King. His final story concerned crossing yet another frontier into freedom, beyond the wilderness of social sin, with his congregation. One day a cross-dresser entered his church and sat for the service. He received a hug from a woman sitting next to her during the passing of the peace. That woman, a lesbian, spoke to Williamson in his office afterward and confessed that she felt uncomfortable sitting next to the cross-dresser, to the point where she wanted to leave. However, she continued, that would have meant denying to the cross-dresser the same dignity and personhood she had long struggled to achieve. She concluded it would have been hypocritical for her not to welcome this individual. So she embraced the cross-dresser, albeit reluctantly. She said did not particularly feel the love of God between them, but she did her best to love the guest.

A little while later the cross-dresser entered Williamson’s office, lifting praise for his congregation. For the first time he felt like he belonged in a church. He said he was overjoyed because he had been welcomed so openly by the woman who embraced her.

Jesus liked to answer foolhardy questions with his own questions. When the scholar of the law who wished to justify himself asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” the question he received, after the telling of the parable of the Good Samaritan was, “Which of these … was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?” In doing this, of course, Jesus is turning the question backward and back on his interrogator. To ask who your neighbor is, is the wrong question; it is better to ask if you are being the neighbor. It’s another way, to quote George Williamson, of “Jesus jerking us around.”

Lord, help me to recognize the sin into which I was born, the sin that I have tacitly accepted and appropriated, the sin that I now confess as my own. Help me to love my neighbor like Jesus and make your mercy manifest. I cannot be a neighbor to the poor unless I make the poor feel at home with me. Let us rebuild homes for the victims of poverty, racism, militarism, and heterosexism; let us build homes for those who have yet to feel at home in our society. By your manifold grace let us become neighbors in your glorious kin(g)dom, Mallory and me. We’re not going to be redeemed apart from each other; save us now, and save us together.

Jesus, jerk me around if you must. Amen.