Boylston Street Letter #6

Continuing backtracking ... see Boylston Street Letter #4.

The week of Feb. 19-23, 2007

Some days at the shelter it happens that you have to minister to the masses, leaving no time for one-to-one encounters with those who need your help or those who may be in a position to help you in your hour of need. Lately I have regretted being in a space where it has not been possible to have what I consider to be pastoral conversations. But upon further reflection what I think I mean is that I would like to have some more spiritual encounters and some more spirit-building conversations before this ministry is concluded. May the disciplines of the Lenten season sharpen my senses so that I might attend to my duties at the shelter with renewed awareness of the opportunities for a meeting with the image of Christ in any face, fair or homely. These moments are nearer than we think. On Friday there came two moments like this.

For the first time, none of the guests came to our hour of faith sharing and Bible study. It may have been a fluke that all the regulars (I use that word loosely) were not to be found around the atrium or the day center. Or if they were present on other floors of the building, they could not be bothered to return to the day center. Certainly it was no help that the elevators to the mezzanine were once again out of order, once more because of a fire in the trash room on one of the top floors. Perhaps it is again time to spread the news about this group by word of mouth. Whatever the reasons for guests’ absence, not all was lost. Another pastoral intern from Harvard Divinity School, who has platooned with me at the hospitality desk on Fridays, joined me for the hour of prayer and reflection and discussion. We lifted up in prayer the men and women who have attended our meetings before and hoped that good things were preventing them from attending, such as new employment, educational opportunities, or even new housing. My partner from Harvard is fresh-faced, good-natured, and far more imperturbable than me in the setting in which we minister. He arrived at St. Francis House last year in mid-autumn, and his duties have largely overlapped mine. It may surprise you to hear me confess that, at first, I felt like he was encroaching upon my turf! How territorial! How ridiculous! But since then I have been humbled by his gracious affability, and now I readily seek his presence at the Bible study. By his participation Friday, we were able to keep this chain of weekly gatherings in Christ’s name unbroken. God bless him for that.

God also bless Mallory and me as we struggle together through our Friday afternoon math tutorials. Again she was feeling less than her best, coughing and hacking out a chest cold. She arrived late and in a difficult mood, haggling with several telephone operators and physicians’ secretaries to renew some vital prescription medication in vain. In spite of Mallory’s churlish feelings, we slogged through two hours of word problems and broke through the darkness into some place of light. I can remember the exact moment: we were practicing the fifth in a series of arithmetic word problems, I was half-asleep on my feet, and Mallory in her melancholy was insisting that there was not enough information in the question to make a solution possible. I told her to think again and look carefully. There was a minute of silence, then, in a voice more buoyant than I had yet heard that afternoon, she announced that she had figured out what to do. She was pleased to tell me that it took her a little while longer to work it out, but she discovered what she needed to do. The last fifteen minutes of our tutorial were the happiest and most productive of them all. Whether Mallory continues with this Friday afternoon remediation has yet to be determined because her life is very much touch and go, not least because she is a transgender person. I hope we may keep going forward, if only for the fact that I felt a precious lightness of being at that moment when she understood what the problem was and how to solve it. She felt so proud of herself, and it made me care for her, genuinely care for her, for the first time. She made a breakthrough, but so did I.