Still backtracking ... see Boylston Street Letter #9.
The week of March 26-30, 2007
More than ever, I regret that I don’t know how to speak Spanish.
On Monday we held a Lenten morning prayer in the day center using the lectionary readings for the feast of the Annunciation. Like a service of morning prayer we conducted during Advent, this service was open to our Spanish-speaking guests. A Capuchin Franciscan brother who does counseling and intake with the guests and is fluent in Spanish assisted me in the preparations. Now, let me confess that our prayer was not planned quite as we had advertised it. We announced that the prayer was going to be bilingual, but in reality the prayer was in English with one reading, the Gospel of Luke, in Spanish. You see, in December we prepared the opening and closing hymn in English and Spanish as well as every reading from Scripture. We were looking forward to an enthusiastic response from our Spanish-speaking guests, but in the end none came. Therefore, this time around we hedged our bets: we invited all to come to our prayer whatever their native language, but we expected to have an Anglo audience and planned accordingly.
Well, on this Monday we had one English-speaking guest and five Spanish-speaking guests. They were attracted to the large classroom where we were worshipping because we were offering coffee and breakfast pastries. The only trouble was, they did not seem much interested in participating in our prayer, despite my Capuchin partner’s communication of our purpose to them. The atmosphere became uncomfortable for me as our guests looked at us in bewilderment. Why were we handing them songsheets written in English, when we knew they couldn’t read a single word of the lyrics? And why did we go on singing words they could not hear?
All our Bibles were in English, and I had only one copy of the Spanish text of Luke’s Gospel for the Franciscan friar to read. Feeling desperation, in haste I asked the Capuchin to translate the verses I would be reading from Isaiah as we proceeded. This he did heroically, but the effect was not very prayerful, and our Spanish guests grew only more disengaged. Murmuring, two of them carried on some bit of merriment between them, laughing among themselves, sharing what I worried was a kind of malicious delight in our linguistic difficulties. We tried to recite one of the psalms responsorially, but this was a spectacular failure. By this time our sole English-speaking guest had become restless, telling me he couldn’t understand what we were saying with the Bible—that it wasn’t the way his preacher had taught him to understand it. In the meantime, a couple of guests had walked in for some coffee, oblivious to the prayer going on. Their insensitivity offended our English-speaking guest, and he rebuked them. At this point I lost my cool, and I sternly warned everybody to attend to the purpose of this gathering, which was to hear the Word of God and be still before God’s presence.
Everybody got the message, regardless of their native tongue, and we continued with the Gospel of Luke in Spanish, then English. We paused for silence, then we attempted some prayers and petitions. This did not work well, and the fellow who said he couldn’t understand how we were reading the Bible made a protest and left before we concluded. (Meanwhile, the other two guests who had come in for the coffee, both English speakers, stayed on.) The snickering continued among a couple of the Spanish speakers, and we ended with an awkward Our Father in Spanish. During that prayer I moved my lips, but no words came out.
I felt so foolish after the service was over. I’ve been working at the shelter for over seven months; I should have known better than to prepare a prayer expecting a certain kind of turnout. I forgot one of the axioms of pastoral ministry to the homeless: you don’t prepare, you get ready.
See what happens when you make plans? I don’t need to read the story of the Tower of Babel to be convinced that God delights in undermining our unitary designs. But what makes this incident different from the Babel story is that our tongues were already confused before we met, and we never intended to do the same work. Even the English speaker was speaking a different language from the Capuchin Franciscan and me. We acted like Pentecost had never happened. But we are living on the other side of Pentecost, and we have the gift of the Spirit to help us interpret tongues—to translate, not transliterate. We can do better. And if I can’t learn Spanish, at least I can speak Christian.
Showing posts with label Lent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lent. Show all posts
Friday, August 3, 2007
Monday, March 12, 2007
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.
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.
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