Update

I haven't posted in a long time. Heck, I haven't written anything at all in a long time. It's been several months now since I left Bread & Roses.

The new job is going well. I'm a half-time homeless outreach worker now, and I enjoy having work to do that I am familiar with and good at. The administration and the other staff at FSC rock.

The new home is way too quiet. We each - Meta, Selena, and myself - strain against the stillness a bit. An old friend from Bread & Roses is homeless again, and Selena mentioned to me that she was sorely tempted to bring him home.

Sometimes, when I get home from work, having given out several sleeping bags and tarps to families with little children, I look around at the scattered books, the fruit bowl on the dining table, my boots in the corner, and the couch in my living room and wonder to myself, "What in the heavens am I doing here?" I can't shake the feeling that this house has no purpose or redeeming value.

Dorothy Day once took six months away from the Catholic Worker, to make up her mind about her vocation. She did, of course, come back to her home in the Worker. But I wonder, in that six months, if she felt anything like this? Stranded away from home, without a sense of purpose, without a center? Did she feel tired and aimless in the evenings? Did she miss some particular guest whose antics put a little grin on her lips near the end of a chaotic and turbulent day? Did she miss the chaos?

I've taken to reading a lot in our year away. I read the whole Harry Potter series in about a week, along with my normal fare of philosophers and theologians. I've also been reading quite a number of beginner's gardening books. We hope to grow a great deal of our own food at the new house when we move again next May.

Our cats do seem to like it here. We live on the edge of a great big wilderness park, a watershed that breeds multitudes of spiders and moths the size of small birds. The older cat, Benny, is always bringing us "gifts" that he caught out in the woods.

In spite of the quiet order at home, I've managed to keep pretty busy. My church is hosting the local tent city right now, and I've been involved there a bit. Meta's mayoral campaign is going gangbusters, and we're frequently off to house-party fund raisers, progressive interest's picnics, and such. I've been putting in extra hours at work for our end of year report for the funders, and also working on my mother's house occasionally.

I will try to keep up with the blog. I'm reading the Brothers Karamozov right now, and recently finished a couple books from the French Personalists, and I think I've got a few things to say about the reading. I'll catch up next time...

Update on the Home Front

Life is dramatically different since we left Bread & Roses.

Selena, Meta, and I moved out and rented a little house together on the south end of Olympia. Our back porch borders on Watershed Park, a large tract of land set aside for wilderness. I bicycle to work and am spending the bulk of my time reading (currently Daniel Berrigan's commentary on Jeremiah) and listening to the animal sounds from the park. We're on a one year lease - and have agreed to take a break from hospitality for that year to feed our burned-out souls.

Selena is working part time for Partners in Prevention. I'm working part time as a homeless outreach worker with the Family Support Center, and am writing a book of reflections on hospitality and vocation in the Catholic Worker. And, as many of you have heard, Meta is running for Mayor of Olympia!

We promised each other that we wouldn't talk about our common vocation as a household or make any plans for the future of our household until November - enough time to give us a chance to breathe a little. Still, ideas bounce around a bit as we chat with each other, and Meta went so far as to mention her dream of a "politician's-permacultural-house-of-hospitality". I practically started drooling at the thought of hosting Olympia's politicos for dinner... side by side with members of the street community. But see, now I'm breaking our rule. I should get back to reading and let next year worry for itself. ;)

Leaving Bread & Roses

When I worked as a professional E.M.T., I attended a number of trainings on how to deal with something called a "mass casualty incident". A mass casualty incident is an incident which, by its definition, overwhelms the resources at hand.

If there is one thing I have learned in my time at Bread & Roses, it is that poverty is a daily mass casualty incident.

Meta and I are leaving Bread & Roses after serving for four years as full-time, live-in volunteers. Selena leaves with us after offering six years of service. We will be moved out by May 31st. Four years (or six!) is a long time to be a full time volunteer, and it is time for us to move on.

Meta will be focusing on her campaign for Mayor. I'm working on a book. We both will be looking for part-time jobs in social services to support ourselves. Selena moves on to do some very exciting work with Partners in Prevention. The three of us will be renting a pretty little house together on the south end of Olympia, and will be taking the next year to rest, recuperate, and reflect. And then we're going to try something new and exciting! (You're just gonna have to wait until then to find out the details, though... it'll be like a good birthday surprise:) We will continue to be active in the community as volunteers and activists.

As I leave Bread & Roses, there is one last thing I would like to say on behalf of the B&R community: Get involved. Get active. Volunteer. We all have the ability to make a difference in our community, and if we have the ability it is incumbent on us to use it. The homeless need you.

Additional comment:

Since most of you no doubt read the Olympian, I would like to offer some corrections to their horrendously innaccurate and destructive article published on the front page this morning.

First, we at Bread & Roses do not "live for free" AND make a "$600 stipend". We receive free room and board and a $200 stipend. After adding up our living expenses we figured our TOTAL income per person (including room and board) to be about the equivalent of $600 per month. So I promise you, no one is getting rich at Bread & Roses (though I'll tell you that if we did actually get a $600 stipend I would have gladly taken it and bought health insurance).

Secondly, no-one at the Guesthouse is "losing" their "housing". The Bread & Roses Women's Guesthouse is a transitional shelter with up to four women to a room. The average stay at the Guesthouse is about 3 months. We are doubling our efforts to help the women find housing, and we will see to it that they each have their own home within one month. Moving from a shelter bed in a shared room to having an actual home of one's own could hardly be called "losing housing".

The Olympian should be more careful with their words.

In Gethsemane

His face, swollen and bruised, contorted as his cries echoed down the street.

“Will SOMEONE help me? What do I have to do to get someone to help me?! Do I have to beat my head against a wall to get someone to help me?”

WHAM! He slammed his face against the wall another time. Everyone jumped a little.

He had been homeless for twenty years, struggling the entire time with under-treated schizophrenia. He used to break windows when he got upset, but as he has grown older he has become more compassionate, more reluctant to harm others. Now he only hurts himself.

Everyone seems to earnestly want to help this young man; everyone wrings their hands when confronted with his struggle.

Yet his cries have a familiar ring… “Will you not watch with me this one hour?”

On the night he was betrayed, Jesus went to a garden to pray. He begged his friends - Peter, James, and John - to come with him, to stay close by as he agonized over his fate. His anxiety was so intense that it was said he “sweated blood”. Christ’s companions were earnest in their love for him. Yet they fell asleep as he contemplated his doom. For, as the scriptures say, “their eyes were heavy.”

Even among all the disciples, Peter was the most sincere. “Though all become deserters, I will never desert you.” Indeed, he had given up his whole life, his career as a fisherman and his family, to follow Christ. Yet he also slept, because he did not fully comprehend the weight of the moment.

Neither do we. Today the homeless sit outside like Lazarus at the gate, waiting to be invited in. As they wait, they are afflicted with illnesses ranging from pneumonia to staff infections. They are called names and are spat upon by passing pedestrians. They are exposed to the weather, and as they attempt to shield themselves from the elements they are persecuted for illegal camping. They are turned away from overburdened services, and are told that they alone are responsible for their plight.

The government will not provide a solution. I heard as much at a recent Human Services Review Council meeting, which is made up of representatives of local governments. Fuel prices are going up, making it difficult for officials to maintain even the most basic infrastructure. And if local governments balk, the federal government does so even more. The Housing Authority recently received notice of deep budget cuts, and has had to significantly scale back its housing voucher program. The wait list for a voucher stretched out six years even before the cuts were announced.

Yet even if the government can do so little, hope is not lost for the homeless. There is another answer.

Are we not asked to “share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house”? (Isaiah 58:7) For every person experiencing homelessness in our community, there are two hundred unoccupied living room couches. If we want for shelter and housing we have our very own homes to offer. If we are frightened of being overwhelmed and want for support, we have seminaries and universities packed full of idealistic men and women who want nothing more than to make a difference.

Yet we sleep. And as we, the slumbering masses, wait for the government to act, Christ cries in Gethsemane.

Many of us want the Church to do more. Yet we forget what the Church is. We think of the church building, the clergy and staff, and we see ourselves as mere volunteers in the church programs. But we are the Church - the hands and feet, eyes, ears, and mouth of the universal living Church. And if we are the Church, then our homes are where the Church truly resides. Our only obstacle to serving Christ is the weight of our own eyes.

I went to the hospital last night with a young, pregnant homeless woman. She told me she had lived in scores of foster homes – starting at the age of five – prior to becoming homeless. When her baby is born, it will be one more among the six hundred fifty four children experiencing homelessness in our community. A few of these children live in shelters, many sleep in cars, many more live in the Capitol Forest. They are unseen; the details of their difficult lives are largely unknown to the rest of us. They are waiting for us to wake up.

Please listen now. Listen close. Lend your ear to that little voice welling up from inside you. It may be faint, but if you listen carefully you will hear it. It is saying, “Wake up, Peter. Wake up, because I am with you. Wake up, because I have chosen you. Wake up, because I will make you the rock upon which I will build a new world… a world founded on Love. Wake up.”

Wake up, because Christ is among us. He is waiting for you.

Living in God's House

Submitted by Andrew McLeod and published in Vol 1 No 4 of the Canaanite's Call

The Church of the Sojourners is more a community than it is anything that fits most people’s idea of a church. They are 35 people sharing four large houses in the Mission District of San Francisco. It is certainly a congregation, but the level of commitment to each other and to God is far beyond that found among any group of people who each go to church together on the Sundays when it is convenient.

The Sojourners don’t go to church. They live at church.

This is not to say that they don’t do the things that are ordinarily brought to mind with the word “church.” They do have a “gathered worship” service on Sunday evenings, crammed into their largest living room. But even here, they take the extraordinary step of incorporating a shared dinner into the service, and take time to affirm how they see the Holy Spirit moving in each others’ lives.

This is only one of many weekly rituals which occur on almost every day of the week. Other beats in their weekly rhythm include a Bible study and a three-hour “Sabbath silence” on Sunday mornings; Saturday is the only day without a regular event. Church members coordinate vacations, and expect each other to generally show up for meals. Each household functions as a family within their larger family, often starting and finishing each day in prayer together.

This monastic devotion might seem like an atmosphere that would attract puritan fanatics, but the Sojourners listen to U2 while washing dishes and sprinkle their sermons with phrases like “pain in the ass.” Their book collection includes Harry Potter and their dinner conversation includes casual reference to an expected visit from the Tooth Fairy (albeit one in which it was clear to all that this was not a real fairy, but perhaps a housemate dressed up in a tutu). These are clearly just a bunch of regular folks who all are really enthusiastic about Jesus Christ.

They seek to live according to the example in the book of Acts, which describes how the first Christians lived together. “There was no poverty among them, because people who owned land and houses sold them and brought the money to the apostles to give to others in need.” (Acts 4:34-35)

The Sojourners are committed to each other, sharing resources with each other, and providing hospitality to others. While they are not a full-blown commune—each member has his or her own possessions and spending money—they do share cars, and any income earned above a certain level.

Within this group is an inner circle of “covenanted members,” who are those most committed to the community, and who collectively provide its leadership. The depths of this commitment seem to rival that of marriage, and their single members sometimes claim domestic partner status for each other under the liberal laws of San Francisco. Members are free to go, and are encouraged to have personal savings that could be used in the event of a departure. But most stick around. One member wanted to attend the seminary, and submitted this major life decision to the group’s consensus through a process that took months.

The church recently co-hosted a “School for Conversion” with the New Monasticism Project. This movement is a decentralized effort to live by the example of Jesus, and its identity is formed around a dozen “marks.” These are not rigid rules which all must obey—rather, they are some general principles that are generally agreed to be indicative of their collective efforts.

One of the high points of the weekend was the testimony of one of the church’s newer members, who had arrived by way of a long and torturous path. It was a familiar, almost routine story of coming to Christ, complete with years of addiction and failed relationships. However, it lacked a key ingredient of the stereotypical tale of salvation: There was no happily-ever-after moment in which he just gave in to God and got everything miraculously fixed. There was certainly no altar call.

What made the story so compelling to me was that it centered around the humble admission that he had repeatedly failed to turn his life around, and would have probably continued to fail had he not encountered a community of people who were willing to love him even when he betrayed their trust, who invited him to join them after he had lied and stolen. In all likelihood, his story is not over. The struggle still continues, as decades of habit cannot easily be set aside. But hopefully by finding community that shows him love in spite of his flaws, he can loosen the grips of those flaws.

Given the normal evangelical style of working up to a climactic sales-pitch built around a “salvation moment,” (and the loaded name of the event) one might expect that this weekend was geared toward that favorite Christian pastime of saving souls. However, both the preparatory materials and the event itself made clear that the conversion is an ongoing process for all involved. The atmosphere was one of general exploration, and openness to others’ states of faith.

This openness was reflected in the diversity among the Sojourners and the new monastic movement in general (as well as the school attendees): In addition to a large number of evangelicals and Mennonites, there were Catholics and Anglicans and mainline Protestants.
Here were people that supposedly can’t make it through a Sunday morning together, living together in intense round-the-clock fellowship, in a community that has lasted for more than two decades. Doctrinal disagreements do come up, but the focus is kept on the practices. Of course, this leaves certain questions unanswered—for example, who will do the dishes if part of the community gets raptured? But there are more pressing issues to address, like how can they best provide hospitality and love to neighbors in need.

The weekend underlined my uncertainty about what I believe, but also reaffirmed my sense that these people are onto something. If nothing else, Jesus had some really great ideas that—if carried out on a large scale—would make for a much more peaceful and pleasant world. I left with more questions than I had when I arrived, but I do know that the Church of the Sojourners and New Monasticism Project are doing essential work in the ongoing effort to reinvent the Church for the 21st Century.

Love, Love, Love (into Action, Action, Action)

Submitted by Rachel Winter of the Lane County Catholic Worker: Eugene, OR

Halfway through January, Jesse, Caitie and I rented a car and drove up to Olympia, Washington for “Christianity and Anarchism: Intersecting Perspectives”, convened by the Jesus Radicals and Olympia’s Bread & Roses Catholic Worker. Attendance numbered at fifty or so; we met with teachers, students, peace workers, farmers and people from several Catholic Worker communities.

We spent the day talking – talking homelessness and hospitality; hunger, sustainability and the food industry; immigrants’ and workers’ rights; grassroots organization; consumerism; the history of anarchism in the Christian tradition; the oppression of the Hebrews and Egyptians in the book of Exodus. The topics were broad, yet vital, focusing on the choices that everyday people have made to bring justice, health, and stability to others.

You might well ask what makes these Christian issues, or anarchist issues, and why it’s important for us to explore the ground that’s common to these two sets of commitments. What I observed during our conversations in Olympia was this: first, that Christians and anarchists alike believe in a new world coming, and try to hasten the emergence of that world by living according to its principles; second, that both schools use the grassroots model of transformation. The anarchist organizes from the ground up; Christian transformation happens from the inside out, from the heart that bursts into the world.

Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker, envisioned “a world where it is easier for people to be good”; for a Christian, that world begins to arrive when the love of Jesus is awakened in everyday people. Jesus subverted the powers of his day; the social mores that isolated the weak, by keeping company with them; the ambitions of a rich young ruler, by calling him to abandon his wealth; the hypocrisy of the religious teachers, by harvesting grain to feed hungry people on the Sabbath day; the violent act of crucifixion, by submitting to it in love and humility. In the Gospel story we see this pattern: Jesus acts in love, and love disquiets the domination (both material and spiritual) imposed by the powers of the day.

As Catholic Workers we believe in building an alternative order, one which – in love and humility – subverts the aggression and human isolation of the standing powers, be they social mores that separate the rich from the poor; or the cultural acquisitiveness that keeps us shopping for security, identity, diversion; or professional boundaries that keep us from caring about each other; or a government that over-funds the military and under-funds schools and social services; or our fascination with rights and privileges and status that blinds us to ourselves and to each other. But the new order begins with us; each of us has the seed of transformation within us, and we all need to be more loving.

As a community volunteering a safe, stable, vibrant home for women and children in need, we all are living out the call of Jesus: to love each other, to let go of our wealth, to be humbled and healed and made more loving in the process.

Our time in Olympia helped me to see it; the kingdom of God is already here. We’ve given birth to it, in our labors together.

"Holy Eucharist" -Catholic Worker Style

People often come by the Bread & Roses house with food donations. As they drop their beautiful gifts into my hands, they frequently thank me for my “hard work feeding all the hungry people.”

Aside from the fact that the thanking ought to go the other direction (I live on the same charity as our guests), I regularly find myself inviting the donors to stay and eat. The invitation is awkward, with an exchange of funny looks and the unspoken question, “But why am I invited if I don’t need food?”

No one starves in Olympia. If someone does, they probably need some kind of help other than food (like someone to guide them to the local soup kitchen), because there is an extraordinary amount of food here. This is one of the reasons why Bread & Roses no longer operates a soup kitchen.

Yet we still need gifts of food at our home, but not to feed our bellies. We need food because we do something special here at B&R: we eat together. Worker and guest, donor and recipient join together at the table in a spirit of fellowship, violating the social and economic norms that separate the rich from the poor.

It has often been noted that the poor in America live better than the middle class in developing countries. Yet Mahatma Gandhi and Blessed Theresa of Calcutta, looking westward, both found that we have our own unique kind of poverty, a kind of poverty that may even be more horrible than that found in India. The name of our poverty is “loneliness”.

Poverty itself is primarily a social phenomenon in western society. I have very little, yet few would identify me as a “poor person”. Why? What separates me from the huddled masses?

I have a good education, they say. But so do many of the homeless. Well, maybe it’s that I haven’t always been poor, I was once middle class. But the same is true of many of the guests in our women’s shelter. Could it be that I chose my poverty, as opposed to the many who did not? It is certainly true that I chose to be poor, but if this is what separates me from the poor then why are they reviled and I am not? Monks and nuns are praised and respected for choosing poverty, but the word “choice” is hurled at the poor as an insult.

The poor are defined more truly by their relationship to the rest of society than by their economic status. And the relationship that defines the poor and the homeless is one of alienation, isolation, and marginalization. I am not poor because I am not alienated from society. But many are.

As a community member at Bread & Roses, I see a lot of the people who are hit with the stereotype of the homeless “transient”. They are the end-stage drug addicts, the schizophrenics who frighten many people, the folks with the fine tuned survival skills that drive them to root through trash and to hold cardboard signs at street corners.

There are a lot of people, in fact I think this is true of most people, who do not see beyond the surface... beyond what can be noticed about a person with a momentary glance. They see someone dumpster diving. They see someone in poor health holding a sign asking for money. They see someone yelling obscenities at no one in particular or muttering paranoid delusions to themselves.

And, since they do not create the opportunities for themselves to get to know the homeless, they might never discover that the fellow in the dumpster has a college education, or that the person panhandling on the corner loves Dizzy Gillespie, or that the shirtless person muttering obscenities isn’t wearing a shirt because he gave it to someone who needed it more than he.

We have invited a whole lot of the homeless to come and stay with us, not just in our shelters, but actually in our home. Many of them have moved on to their own apartments or to adult family homes. Many of them went back on the spiral and are on the streets, in jail, or at Western State. Many of them cycle back and forth, making a little more progress each time they stay with us.

For people who are really ill, the process of healing takes a very long time. And this time can be very difficult. But they are our responsibility, because they are with us for better or for worse. We can have them in our community as a drain on our jails, hospitals, and public resources, rejected by society and left to live out their illnesses alone, or we can have them in our community as neighbors that we support and nurture back to health. Either way the poor are with us, and their lives affect ours. The choice of how to deal with that fact is ours to make.

We often think it easier to dismiss them as pariahs… as such the homeless become less visible, less necessarily a part of our lives. But this comes with its own cost, which we are seeing both in our decaying downtown as well as in our overcrowded jails. If we take them as neighbors, our lives suddenly seem to become much more difficult. It can take months to work through the system far enough to acquire medications for a mentally ill person, and I have spent countless nights staying up entirely too late dealing with the paranoid tantrums of a person in need of medications. Likewise I have spent too much time holding the hands of someone withdrawing from drug addiction.

But I am also aware that I am only one person, that there are some 40,000 people in Olympia, and that only some 700 are homeless. If it wasn’t just one household (Bread & Roses), but one hundred households, we could make a significant change in our community. In reality, the personal resources of 1.75% of the population of Olympia could house ALL of the homeless in Olympia, with little strain on our public resources.

This requires our personal commitment, which is far more difficult than just paying taxes and cutting the occasional check to Bread & Roses. But the truth is that a personal commitment carries a value that no amount of money can account for. The homeless are, for the most part, aware of the amount of money that is spent on them. They are aware that this amount of money could probably build them each their own personal Taj Mahal. This money is insufficient, because most of the homeless are also aware that most people would prefer to throw money at them (via services or via prisons) than to sit down for a cup of coffee with them.

While services are vital, it takes something far greater than social services to end homelessness. It takes a willingness to risk on our part. The homeless will be with us so long as we are willing to exclude them from our lives. But if we take a risk, make ourselves vulnerable, we just might make an impact.

This is why we eat together at Bread & Roses. There is something special about table fellowship. We find it ritualized in the Holy Eucharist, when Christians gather to take Communion together. Shared food brings us closer together. It makes us one community, one Body, and it heals the wounds inflicted by the class system.

So please continue to bring us your gifts of food. The small gifts you bring are used to mend souls and to restore personalities. But please know also that you have a much bigger gift to offer than food: yourself.

We have a weekly open potluck dinner at the Bread & Roses house. It is on Friday nights at 6:00 PM. (Our address is 1320 8th Ave SE near downtown Olympia.) Please join us for dinner!

The Problem with Social Services

In July of 2001, I started volunteering regularly at the Bread & Roses soup kitchen. I loved the pace of work in the kitchen. The mass quantities of food and dishes required us to work briskly, but there were always good conversations and smiles as we worked. Most of the faith communities in the area took rotations for meals, so that on Monday there might be a Buddhist group cooking, and on Tuesday a Catholic team. The guests always helped with the dishes.

The staff of Bread & Roses lived together at the house on 8^th Ave. The staff was made up of a handful of young people who offered one year commitments through Brethren Volunteer Services, Selena, a middle aged woman who had left the Carmelite order for the Catholic Worker, and a handful of people who had moved from homelessness to volunteer positions with Bread & Roses.

The “administrator” for Bread & Roses was one of the latter, an impassioned man named Gordy Ebner. Gordy was an odd looking fellow with a long face and thin grey hair pulled back in a pony tail that reached the middle of his back. He wore a long beard and his hooked nose supported a pair of wire framed spectacles. Gordy could be picked out of a crowd by the ridiculous “M.C. Hammer” pants he wore, usually decorated by florescent green geckos or tie-die. Gordy could speak eloquently about our obligations to fight poverty and injustice. He had a powerful charisma that was, no doubt, what landed him in the position of Bread & Roses’ leader. Many of the guests followed Gordy like ducklings lining up behind their mother.

Unfortunately, Gordy was also terribly irresponsible as an administrator. He was abrasive toward those who disagreed with him. He mismanaged Bread & Roses’ funds horribly. His burning desire to help all of the poor exceeded his judgment, and he committed Bread & Roses to projects it was incapable of operating. Many of the guests that he brought on staff were active, violent addicts.

The atmosphere at the soup kitchen reflected Gordy’s influence. It had a definite charm about it, and there was a strong sense of community. Everyone knew each other. It was also deeply marked by illness and depravity. Drug dealing was rampant. Fights were frequent. Ambulances had to be called regularly, and the cops circled the block like vultures scoping out their prey. The cops even wandered through the kitchen, uninvited, from time to time. They wouldn’t speak with anyone, not even the staff who approached them, but just walked around, staring people down.

The atmosphere at the soup kitchen was the inevitable result of providing a very large scale service in a non-authoritarian atmosphere. The large scale of the work required a kind of factory style, impersonal feeding system. Guests formed a line one hundred people deep for a plate of food served across a counter. There was usually only two staff on duty to keep the peace. The volunteers and staff were good hearted, kind people who genuinely cared about the people they were serving.

Unfortunately, caring isn’t enough. The care one feels for another must be communicated for it to make an impact, and it stretches from difficult to impossible to shower authentic compassion on one hundred people at once. The hardships of street life and the hurts of the guests overwhelmed the abilities of the staff, so that the culture of the soup kitchen community became ill.

Many social service agencies would respond to this illness with a set of hard-nosed rules in an attempt to maintain the law and order necessary for effective provision of services. The staff of Bread & Roses, however, had too much heart to degrade the guests with such authoritarian measures. I don’t think it was well understood yet, though, that the factory style, large scale system of the kitchen had undermined the personalist approach of Bread & Roses and degraded the guests in just the way that the staff were attempting to avoid.

It’s too bad, really. It is hard to describe how ambivalent I felt about the old kitchen. On the one hand, the acceptance and openness of the staff to anyone in need was the closest thing to real social justice I had ever seen. I also loved the guests, and delighted in the joys of their community. But the attempt by Bread & Roses to serve beyond its own capacity was taking a toll.

Many of the social services across the country are operated in this way. The overwhelming need for food, shelter, clothing, and health care pushes the people who care to attempt almost heroic feats of charity, to shoulder an unrealistic burden that ought to be spread out across a broader portion of the population. The failure of these heroic attempts to make any real change has become a target of those who hate the poor. The culture at our soup kitchen was the kind of thing that conservatives could point at as the licentiousness caused by liberal, bleeding heart, do-gooderism. And the business community of Olympia did just that.

First Day at Bread & Roses

I had an urge one day in mid-July of 2001 to walk down to the local soup kitchen and offer a hand. It was hot outside, not quite sweltering, but the midsummer Puget Sound kind of hot that brings out the life in things. I invited a roommate, Jesse, to walk downtown with me, and strolled out the door.

I had never been inside of Bread & Roses. I ran a few 9-1-1 calls there when I was working for the ambulance company, but we always did our work there on the sidewalk outside. It struck me as a run-down kind of place, with lifeless grey concrete walls and big tinted windows. There were no signs on the outside, nothing to identify the purpose of the building but the milling crowds of the poor smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk.

When Jesse and I first stepped through the door, we were confronted with a writhing sea of people. A little girl squealed as her brother chased her down an aisle. A tall, thin black man wearing a beret, a corduroy vest, and a badge emblazoned “sheriff” stood squarely off against the flatware tray, yelling obscenities and threats at the silverware. A line of hungry people stood behind him rolling their eyes and urging him to move along.

There were about 25 or 30 tables in the room, with four or five seats per table. Beyond the dining room, at the back of the building, a long counter cut the room. There were heaping trays of food along the counter, and a number of little old church women wearing white aprons and food handler’s gloves stood behind it armed with serving spoons and cutting knives.

I walked to the back to help serve the food. The line moved quickly and it was very busy for about 20 minutes, and then things began to slow down. A kindly looking middle aged fellow with glasses and a knitted wool sweater approached me, and introduced himself. His name was Phil Tenkhoff. He encouraged me to take a plate of food and to go sit and eat among the guests. I was surprised and delighted at this suggestion and I took him up on it.

I have always been shy around people I don’t know, particularly in crowds. In the last couple years I have gotten much better at being outgoing, but I still often find my tongue to be confounded when I’m in unusual settings. I sat silently, uncomfortably, and ate my food, then scurried back to the kitchen to help wash dishes and escape my discomfort.

I set up in front of a dual utility sink where the dishes were being washed and rinsed by a Hispanic man in his 30’s, and he made room for me to offer a hand. He sang a bit in Spanish as we worked, and then began trying to tell me some jokes. He spoke no English, however, and I spoke no Spanish, but I could tell that the jokes were good, dirty ones gauging from his hand gestures.

As the cleaning was wrapping up and Jesse and I were wiping down tables, a wise, stern looking middle aged woman with salt and pepper hair wearing an apron walked up to us. She tilted her head back a little and sized us up through the bottoms of her spectacles.

“Do you need your paperwork signed?” She asked.

“Paperwork?”

“Yes. You’re doing community service, right?”

I was dumbfounded for a moment. “Well, I suppose we are… is there some kind of paperwork we need to do to volunteer here?”

A light turned on in her eyes, and she grinned for a moment. “Oh, well, you’re just doing this out of the goodness of your hearts! God bless you! I thought you must have had court orders.”

I blushed a little when I realized that most people my age don’t volunteer much in soup kitchens… unless ordered by a court to atone for a crime. The funny thing is that a couple of years later, when I was coordinating the Bread & Roses Advocacy Center, I was court ordered to do community service for an act of civil disobedience. This woman, Selena, ended up getting to sign my papers after all.

Support Your Troops

In the last three years since the start of the Iraq War, it has become common to see anti-war protesters standing on opposing street corners from pro-war activists. Sometimes there are visible differences of clothing and hairstyles. Generally the differing worldviews, above and beyond opinions on the war, are strong enough that you can taste them.

Both sides, however, have latched onto one common slogan: “Support Our Troops!”

This slogan is bandied about on either side of the street as though the other side somehow doesn’t get it. In spite of their fervor many of the rally attendees have, no doubt, stepped over the bodies of disabled veterans while walking to the rallies.

I got a call the other day from the Ranger newspaper asking if Bread & Roses had seen any veterans from the Iraq War yet. We haven't. I had to be honest with the reporter. I told her that it takes time for troops' families to give up on them.

People come home from war totally mangled in mind, body, and spirit. In spite of all the sloganeering out there, the responsibility for the welfare of veterans ultimately falls on their families. Many, many families are unable to shoulder the responsibility. This doesn't make them bad or irresponsible, nor does it mean that they don't love their veteran. It DOES mean that taking care of a person who doesn't sleep at night, who suffers from flashbacks, who turns to alcohol for solace, and who becomes sorely irritable, even prone to fits of rage, is EXTREMELY difficult and should not fall on family alone. But it does fall on family alone, because everyone else is too busy sloganeering.

With time, the families give up. I know this because we at Bread & Roses have fed, sheltered, comforted, and advocated for veterans of every war from World War II to the Persian Gulf War. And we are criticized for it.

Veterans who suffer from PTSD often turn to alcohol or drugs to ward off bad memories, as well as to blunt their emotional response to being alienated from society. Imagine enduring the horrors of war for your nation, and then being left to rot in the gutter as a reward. You’d start drinking too.

Homeless veterans experience not only homelessness, but also the stigma of being considered the “undeserving” poor because of their addictions and “anti-social” behaviors. Pedestrians yell at them, spit on them, call them names, and tell them to “get a job”.

This will be the fate of many of the troops that everyone wants to “Support!” when “support” means waving a sign.

I'm frankly sick of all this "Support Our Troops" bantering on both sides of the war debate. We should all stop yelling this mantra and start doing it.

Lazarus at the Gate

I did something this week for which I become deeply angry when others do the same. I cleared the brush in my back yard to prevent homeless people from camping there.

My wife and I live in the new Bread & Roses house on 4^th Ave. This house is open to the street community about 45 hours per week. Volunteer advocates gather at our home to help homeless individuals to gain access to services such as drug treatment, disability benefits, and housing. We offer a beautiful, home-centered atmosphere in which this work can take place. But unfortunately we are renters.

When we first moved in, our landlord was excited to be able to support Bread & Roses, but nervous about how we would work out as renters. Our neighbors, who rent from the same landlord as us, were very nervous about our presence.

Neither the landlord nor the neighbors are bad people. In fact, the landlord recently sat for lunch with me and a good friend of mine who lives with serious schizophrenia. The two of them got along fabulously. If this friend of mine were to camp in my back yard, though, it would cause a problem. It could scare off the neighbor’s customers.

And there has been a problem. There have been at least one or two people camping in the back yard each night for the last couple of weeks. The neighbors have commented to us on the situation a few times now. I have gone out each night at odd hours to, in the kindest fashion I could muster, ask them to leave. And finally a few days ago I cleared out the brush to eliminate discreet places for people to sleep.

As I cleared brush, I meditated on how screwed up this situation is. Homeless people need to sleep more than other people need to use credit unions. They need to sleep more than other people need to practice yoga, or get haircuts, or buy office supplies. And the truth is that sleeping homeless people do nothing to prevent people from practicing yoga or stopping in at the credit union. It is the fear of homeless people that stops them.

Sleep is not a choice. It is not a privilege, nor a luxury. It is a necessity. People have to sleep somewhere. There are more than 1200 homeless people in Thurston County (census numbers: ca 600, additional numbers sent from Thurston Co. Schools: over 600), and less than 200 shelter beds. This spells a lot of people sleeping in public spaces, where they are vulnerable to police harassment, or sleeping on private property and breaking the law. There is simply no place for them.

As I worked, I thought about the scriptural story of Lazarus at the gate of the Rich Man. I thought about Matthew 25, “What you do unto the least of these, you do unto Me.” I thought of Jesus violating the laws and customs of his day to help the Canaanite woman. I recited the Magificat to myself and meditated on the Beatitudes. My faith, my politics, my worldview, and my commitment to others stand in direct opposition to the actions I was taking.

I hate our system. I hate it because it forces us to choose between evils. Because I either have to forbid camping in my yard or get shut down, to commit an injustice now or face a greater injustice later. What do I do?

"Nature produced common property. Robbery made private property." -St. Ambrose

Stephan

(Reprinted from my submission to the Voice of Olympia–Nov 2004)

I can’t quite remember the exact moment in which I met Stephan. I do remember, though, that he had recently stepped off a bus from the prison in Shelton, and that he at first used the soft, slightly subservient tone common among men who’ve just been released from prison and who think you’re a part of the system.

Stephan was a middle-aged black man with big hair, pointed cheek bones, and a lower lip that curved out and down a little at the center like an old shoe horn. He had a beautiful smile that lifted his eyebrows and cut deep, chevron shaped wrinkles at the corners of his mouth. When Stephan walked, he stuck his rear out and leaned over a bit, taking short steps because of a back injury. His ankles were swollen and he had a big, round, distended belly that made me think of Somali children starving in the desert.

Stephan had joined the military as a young man, most likely to stay out of trouble or to pay his way into school. He served in the Navy through the late ‘seventies, spending most of his time traveling around the Pacific. The Navy, or more accurately, all the Armed Forces, suffered from an extraordinarily low morale at the time, and drug use was prevalent. Stephan’s ship was chock full of drugs collected at the various seaports of Southeastern Asia. “Hong-Kong had THE BEST heroin,” he once told me. Stephan, like many other veterans of his day, returned from the Navy with an honorable discharge and a drug habit.

After two and a half decades of hopping from job to job and from town to town nurturing his addiction, Stephan was arrested and incarcerated. He hated prison. He told me about having to listen to people scream at night as he tried to sleep. Once, he said, a guy hung himself in his cell and the guards marched all the inmates past him to get a good look before morning breakfast.

One day Stephan was particularly ill and needed to go to the hospital, but was being stubborn. Nick, one of our advocates, went running after Stephan to give him his home phone number in case Stephan changed his mind. Realizing he was lacking a pen, Nick went into the nearest establishment, a bar, to borrow one. Unfortunately Nick was under age, and, after being chased out of the bar and around the block by an angry and violent bartender, had earned from Stephan the title of ‘Damned Cool Caseworker’. Stephan had stood back giggling at the whole spectacle.

People often have funny notions about who drug addicts are. Most people imagine that drug addicts are universally desperate, dishonest, irrational, and dangerous. They rarely notice that cigarette smokers who don’t have cigarettes often behave the same as the stereotypical drug addict, and that we are all surrounded by cigarette smokers. At any rate, we miss out on the personality and character of people when we dismiss them as “junkies”.

As Stephan and I got closer, his courage became increasingly visible to me. Stephan’s probation officer had been relatively easy on him. He had known that Stephan was still using heroin, but continued to give him chances in light of Stephan’s thirty-year addiction. Then one day, most likely under pressure from his boss, the P.O. suddenly requested a clean urinalysis, within the week. Stephan dropped his habit cold turkey, and Meta and I went with him to the emergency room as he kicked. He vomited, yelled, groaned, defecated, panted, and vomited again. Sometimes his eyes would roll back as he held his belly. Rivulets of sweat rolled down his nose and cheeks, mixing with his tears. He’d holler at the nurses, then catch himself and apologized and crack a joke to make them smile before another cramp hit his stomach and he’d yell again. He stuck it out, though- the whole night.

Every winter, pneumonia becomes an epidemic among the homeless. It seems as though everyone in sight is coughing, hacking, and sweating. A few months ago, Stephan came down with pneumonia and was hospitalized. Under normal circumstances, Stephan should have recovered after a couple weeks and been back on the streets and in our lives. But Hepatitis C, gotten from a dirty needle, had been eating away at his liver, and causing fluids to back up in his lungs, belly, and ankles. Instead of steadily getting better, Stephan’s condition crashed as his liver gave out.

Meta and I went to visit him the day before he died. When I walked into Stephan’s hospital room I was startled to find a ghost of a man, emaciated but with a strangely bulging belly. His wild and lonely yellow eyes peered out from an orange tinged face, and a huge, matted tuft of hair stuck straight up from his head like a messed-up lion’s crown. I had known that he was ill before I came, but I was now certain that he was dying. I talked with Stephan’s nurse for a moment, then sat down on the edge of his bed, took his hand, and started to cry.

“Well, it looks like this is it, buddy,” I said to him, shaking a little. Stephan squeezed my hand, held it up against his cheek, smiled for a moment, and said, “The last couple weeks have opened my eyes...” And then his voice became too weak to understand.

Nick, Selena, and I visited him the next day. We held his hands and read Psalms to him as he died.

In life, Stephan was a friend to many, a guest and a brother to us at Bread & Roses, and a junkie to most of the rest of society. He was imperfect, addicted, and afflicted with illness. In the very moment of his death, though, the man that Stephan was, his very existence, the memory of him was rarefied and transformed in my mind. As he died, I thought of how he had stuck it out in the emergency room as he kicked heroin, and of his extraordinary courage. I looked over at Nick as he held Stephan’s limp hand. At this moment I realized that it was Stephan who trained Nick and who trained me and inspired me to be who I am today. And he became for me like an angel sent from heaven to make us good.

I know that this is all a simplification, that I am mystifying an imperfect and mortal man, yet I also know that he was all of these things in his imperfect and difficult life. I also know that we all embody such a beautiful nature, and that it is imperfectly expressed through the filter of our own fallibility.

You see, the memory of a person changes for us when they die so that we might have a chance to recognize real human value for once, to see it anew because we can’t take it for granted anymore.

Life looks different to me since Stephan died. I had an intense commitment to his health and sobriety, and failed. But in this failure I discovered the real contribution I had made to him, and that he had made to me. The job of Catholic Workers, of the volunteers and staff at Bread & Roses, is to be a family for the people on the streets. The only authentic commitment one human being can make to another is the commitment to love. Meta, Nick, Selena, myself, and a whole lot of other people loved Stephan, and served as his family when he died. This is all that matters.

The Rock

[Note: Though I carefully remove names of Bread & Roses' guests to protect their confidentiality, we at Bread & Roses try hard to share the names and stories of the dead in order to honor their memory. So I have not removed names in this post.]

Three months after I joined the staff at Bread & Roses a man came to our door in desperate need. Terry Seibert was one of the long-time homeless, nicknamed “Crusty”. He was an alcoholic with a pocked face and bulbous nose, a scratchy voice and a permanent scowl.

He arrived at the Transit Center one day, having just been released from the hospital with a severe case of congestive heart failure. The bus drivers wouldn’t allow him to board because he had soiled himself so badly. He could barely walk. The Transit Center staff called the Advocacy Center and asked us if we could help him, so I walked over and invited him to come over.

I am ashamed to say that I recoiled a bit at his odor, and asked him to stand outside a few minutes while we arranged a shower and a change of clothes. One of the other volunteers gave me a severe look and invited him to come in and sit in our bathroom. Terry was pale, short of breath, and dizzy.

We got him showered and cleaned up, and I arranged a bed for him in our shelter. The next day, Selena rented Terry a hotel room. A struggle ensued to place him in a nursing home, lasting two weeks. No-one would take him.

Selena visited Terry daily. They had been friends when Selena worked in the soup kitchen. Terry and Selena shared a great fondness for good literature, and had spent hours at the old kitchen discussing poetry and trading books. On her last visit with Terry, Selena came into his room and asked Terry how he was doing. He replied, “Where is the life that we have lost in the living?”

It was a line from “The Rock”, by T.S. Eliot. Terry died the next day.

Advent at Bread & Roses 2003

Though Bread & Roses has never (at least in my term of service) been so openly and explicitly filled with spirituality as the Tacoma Worker, it has had an impressive history, spirituality and culture. When I moved in, the house was decorated with photos and paintings of Dorothy Day, Mohandas Gandhi, and Woody Guthrie. Posters and flyers quoting the great leaders for social justice adorned the walls. Our dining room, ringed with a painted border of wheat stalks and roses at the tops of the walls, served as an office and was cluttered with desks, notepads, photocopiers, and file cabinets. Selena, a former nun and devout Catholic (at the time –she has since left the Roman Catholic church and become a Unitarian, no less devoted to God) exerted a profound influence over the household, though. She emanated a “nunly” energy, and could say the most extraordinary things! She seemed a pillar of wisdom, marked with an occasional dirty joke or scandalous remark just to keep us on our toes. I had shown an interest in the spirituality of the Catholic Worker, and she fed me great books and innumerable stories.

One day in December, four candles, three purple and one pink, appeared on a table in our living room, along with some flowers. A couple of guests asked me what the candles were for, and we speculated in whispers amongst ourselves before I approached Selena to ask her their meaning. She explained to me that it was Advent, the celebration of the coming birth of Christ.

For the next four weeks before Christmas, we gathered in the living room to read scripture and discuss the meaning of the birth of God’s Son among humanity. The gatherings were required of no-one, but there was a strong interest among guest and staff alike, and our living room was crowded with quiet worshipers. Selena explained to us that the Advent candles, one for each of the four weeks before Christmas, were instituted by a Roman Catholic monk, and with a little smile on her face she declared the monk a rascal. The three purple candles were a proper expression of the asceticism in monastic life, solemn lights to guide the faithful. The fourth pink candle, added to stir things up, represented joy and reminded us that God is love and to never forget to be happy and to love one another. The candles burned pure in our home and all were still for a while.

Bread & Roses 2004

(Taken from a journal entry in the early spring? of 2004.)

It took me a half-hour to get out of bed this morning. This is a chronic problem – I have always been a grump in the morning – but only recently has it become what seems to me to be an unfair luxury. After sitting up and rubbing my eyes for five minutes, I picked up random articles of clothing from the floor, put them on, and walked downstairs. I peaked around the corner and found that T-- was still asleep on the living room couch.

T-- was recently released from a psychiatric hospital. She had lived with us twice before, leaving once for a stay in jail and a second time into an apartment of her own. T-- is mentally ill, an alcoholic, and suffers from emotional trauma so severe I would not have thought it possible until I met her. T-- is also funny, and a good cook. And when she is sober and trying to socialize, you can acquire a deep sense of both her discomfort and her real need to be accepted. It shows in her shifty feet, hunched shoulders, and the question like tone of her statements. Sometimes she will say something quite serious, quite important, and then laugh a little, sheepishly, as though her thoughts must seem absurd to anyone else.

I heard a hysterical bout of cackling coming from the kitchen, and found R-- dancing around the stove, elbows bent and hands flopping, as he cooed at some ridiculous concoction in a frying pan.

R-- is mentally ill, too. Schizophrenic, in fact, but his posture is totally different from T--’s. R-- is not particularly a drinker, but he has a kind of drunken lurch akin to a blend of “Seinfeld’s” Kramer and Captain Jack Sparrow of “Pirates of the Caribbean”. R-- has an affable, childish nature that endears him to everyone, and he knows it.

Once R-- was sitting on the back porch, smoking cigarettes with Meta (a fellow worker), when he confided in her that he had joined a new political party.

“What party is that?” Meta asked.

“Oh, it’s non-partisan.”

Meta grinned and said, “That sounds like an oxymoron, R--.”

“Don’t give me that college bullshit!” he replied.

A couple months after I joined the Bread & Roses Catholic Worker community, I was asked to build eighteen bunk beds for the men’s shelter. R-- was staying at the shelter at the time, and I invited him to help. I found R-- to be a far better carpenter than I (which isn’t saying much, to be honest). I was particularly impressed, however, with his patience for my fumbling, and his willingness to share his skills with me. R-- was companionable, and liked good music, and we got along well as we worked.

We invited him to live in the Hospitality House a short while later.

As I walked to the fridge, I smiled and said “good morning” to R--, and to E--, a homeless veteran living in the basement.

After digging around the fridge in search of a decent vegetarian breakfast, I gave up, poured myself a cup of coffee, and stepped out to the back porch for a cigarette.

Meta was sitting at the porch table sharing a dirty joke with Sharon.

“Anybody know who the lady is who’s sleeping on the dining room floor?” I asked. Sharon replied that a woman had come in late last night, and that she would be moving into the women’s guesthouse shelter this afternoon.

A--, a kind, simple, rather quiet man, walked by us and into the kitchen, saying “good morning” as he passed. A-- lived with his parents until he was about 45 years old, and became homeless after they died. At first he needed a staff person to help him get from place to place on the buses, and later was aided by others on the streets. He stayed at the men’s shelter for a couple years until we invited him into the House of Hospitality.

Altogether, the Hospitality House has five bedrooms, plus two dorms that we built into the basement, and a large room above the garage. On average, there were eleven people living in the house. We have, at times, had people sleeping on the living room couch, the living room floor, the dining room floor, my bedroom floor (three men, in fact), and Selena’s bedroom floor, all at once. The house has been so thick with people that we practically had to climb over one another just to reach the refrigerator in the morning. In addition to this, there are typically twelve women living in the four bedroom duplex next door that serves as our women’s guesthouse shelter. And forty-four men packed into bunks at the men’s shelter, so tight that a Navy admiral would be impressed.

We had to fight the temptation that came at times to believe that Bread & Roses is responsible for all of the 700 people who are homeless in the Olympia area. I spoke once with Celeste, the coordinator of the women’s guesthouse shelter at the time. She had done a beautiful job of helping the guests to get along better with one another, and was well on her way to creating a powerful, supportive community at the shelter. But she felt tremendous pressure to help each guest to find a permanent home, and to offer shelter to more women who were stuck on the streets. She kept apologizing to me for “failing”. I smiled and suggested that she take on the burden of every homeless person in Thurston County. “Oh, and while you’re at it, there are 17,000 more in Orange County, California, with only 400 shelter beds. In fact, on any given night, there are a million people without homes in America. Why don’t you try and help them all? You can take on India tomorrow.”

Guadelupe 2

9/30/05

A few days ago I went with Megan to visit the Tacoma Catholic Worker a second time. I plan to visit them every week, now.

I felt a little less awkward, a little more comfortable getting to know folks this time. I talked with Harlan for a while, and discovered that he had been at Guadalupe House for fifteen years and at another Worker house for twelve years prior to that. Father Bix has been there since the founding of the Tacoma Worker (25 years ago?), and they have other volunteers who have been around for many, many years. What experience! I could only dream of the day when Bread & Roses has a staff with such longevity. At Guadalupe this longevity breeds a comfort with the work, the guests, and among the staff that is not only visible in the interactions between the staff, but that also permeates the whole atmosphere of the House. They have a culture, and traditions, and a history upon which their community rests.

At 4:30 the staff gathered to plan the evening. They assigned tasks, discussed the menu, planned for the liturgy, and ended with a prayer. At 5:00 the doors opened, and for the next half hour there was little to do but socialize with the guests and volunteers. At 5:30 we were called to gather for the service, led by a woman named Mary. The service opened with a prayer, followed by readings from scripture, and Mary’s lecture on the life and works of St. Vincent de Paul. Then Mary began to bless a loaf of bread and a pitcher of grape juice.

Mary announced that “here at Guadalupe House we have a tradition of open Communion. The only requirement to partake of the sacraments is that you have a desire to accept Christ into your heart.”

As the bread and the juice came around, I took it with a little eager grin on my face, like a child accepting a forbidden cookie offered in secret by his grandmother. I was so incredibly grateful.

Guadelupe

9/25/05

The fall is beginning, and the nights here are beginning to get the moist chill so familiar to a Northwest boy like myself. I can’t wait to see my breath in the air in the morning.

I went to visit the Guadalupe House Catholic Worker in Tacoma last night. Megan Starr, a coordinator for the Radical Catholics at Evergreen, picked me up at Bread & Roses at around 4:00, and we had a pleasant drive up, about half an hour. We parked the car and walked a couple blocks from Yakima to G Street and south a few blocks.

There is a beautiful view from G Street that looks out across downtown Tacoma, the rail-yard and the inlet, to the mountains in the east. G Street sits squarely between a gentrifying downtown and the Hilltop slum. The street is lined with trees, old quiet houses, built solidly, and bits of trash lying here and there in the gutters and around the sidewalks. A newspaper there, someone’s discarded jacket here, dirty and matted from several weeks sitting out in the weather, and a stuffed bunny rabbit soiled with dirt, its ear bent to the side.

There is a mural painted on a retaining wall that runs along the west side of the street, with bright, bold colors, blue and orange, red and green. A weathered hand holds up a squash, a hammer breaks the chain binding down a fist. A vegetable garden, about a half acre in sized, occupies the opposite side of the street. And Guadalupe just beyond.

As we approached the house an old Hispanic man greeted us from the porch. His face was like crumpled burlap; deep wrinkles running south from his cheekbones parted around his mouth and his skin puffed out around his eyes. He flashed a friendly but wily smile at us, like he knew something we didn’t. We introduced ourselves and he showed us inside.

I was very excited to meet Father Bix. I had heard so much about him, a priest, an old wobbly, and a catholic worker. I imagined him to be a big, burly man with a gruff voice, but comfortable in his collar as he is in the struggle against injustice. And Spartacus was said to be seven feet tall, right? I blushed a little to myself as I noticed my tendency to build up heroes in my own mind.

The interior walls of Guadalupe House are cluttered with icons, crucifix’s, and prayers written on scraps of paper and pasted up, so that one is filled with the sense of being in some kind of church or holy place, except that each piece was placed by a different person at a different time with no overall scheme but the organic rhythms of people living in community.

A fellow sitting in the corner hollered at me, “Hey Abraham!” as we walked into the dining room. I found this funny because no-one else would think me an Abraham type, and he looked quite a bit like a Moses, with shoulder length matted grey hair and a beard of equal length with no part or seam to distinguish beard from hair. I smiled and said, “Hi, my name is Phil”, and we shook hands. A middle aged woman named Dotti, one of the workers, greeted us warmly and then went to tend to the concerns of one of the guests. Megan and I stood around awkwardly for a minute, shifting on our feet and looking around, and then we each found a seat on the couches lining the north wall.

A man, roughly my age, was seated next to me, and I found upon inquiring that he had just completed a year in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and had been temporarily hired on as paid staff at his old placement at the Nativity House. He informed me that the Tacoma Catholic Worker community consisted of five houses within a two block radius, and 25 live-in volunteers. These houses included the Guadalupe House of Hospitality as well as a house of prayer. Guadalupe serves dinner on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, with the Tuesday dinner being preceded by liturgy. The staff take turns leading the liturgy. In the mornings showers and laundry are offered, as well as the customary pot of coffee. There are about 15 guests living in the five bedrooms of the house, and I’m not sure where the staff sleep. They have a strong relationship with the local parish, as well as with the Nativity House (which is, I believe, a project of Catholic Community Services).

Dotti called us to gather close for the liturgy, and began with a prayer. We sang a psalm, and then the readings: a story from the Book of Ezra about the rebuilding of the temple and the return of the Jews from exile, and a reading from the Gospel in which Jesus denies his family and says that all who listen to the word of the Lord are his family.

A discussion followed, and a man across the room spoke up. “God talks to me all the time,” he said. “It’s simple. There are two paths. The good one and the bad one. God tells me, ‘Get sober’. But I take the low road, I still use. I just got out of jail, and I know I’m a goin’ back. I talked with my kids on the phone the other day, but I ain’t seen ‘em in fifteen years…” His voice broke, and his eyes welled up.

At the end of the service, we lined up to eat, and another dozen hungry people who had opted out of participating in the liturgy crowded into the room for the meal. The food was fantastic. There was chicken and rice, a variety of salads, pasta, and corn bread with peanuts and bacon cooked in.

After the meal, Megan and I both moved into the kitchen to help clean up. A fellow named Chuck was directing the cleanup. He was one of those “God’s children” types, the kind you feel good just being around. He loved to talk, to ramble on-and-on, and kind of danced around as he talked and cleaned. He had a cleft palate, a speech impediment, and, I think, a mild blend of mental illness with developmental disability. But he could, and loved to, run a kitchen crew, and we all gladly obeyed his directions. I was reminded of the “old” Bread & Roses.

Hospitality for the Poor

May 1, 2006:

The last week has brought for me a new discovery: It hurts to be unwanted.

Let me offer a little background. We at Bread & Roses are opening a new House of Hospitality at the old Yoga Center building on 4th Avenue. The move represents the fulfillment of a long term dream – to return to our old way of life as Catholic Workers, and to create a more home-centered environment for our Advocacy Center.

The new house on 4th will, first and foremost, be a home for myself and Meta, my wife. Secondly, we will be hosting the Bread & Roses Advocacy Center in the new house. We believe that moving the Advocacy Center (previously located in a storefront office at the corner of State and Washington) into a home will be tremendously advantageous to the program. The atmosphere offered by a warm, vibrant, comfortable home will dramatically affect the dynamic of our work, creating a more informal, far more personal environment in which to serve our guests.

Imagine – rather than walking into an office, signing in, and meeting with an advocate at a desk – walking across a welcome mat into a friend’s home, offered a cup of coffee, and asked how your day was. This is the experience we want each person to have as they come to our door seeking help with navigating the social service system.

As we have been moving during the last week, though, the dream of the new home has been tempered by the reality of the fear, prejudice, and even hatred held by our larger society toward the poor.

One of the new neighbors told me that he wished the landlord hadn’t rented to us. Many of the neighboring businesses, while really wanting to support us, expressed fear that our guests would drive away their customers. A front page article was printed in the Olympian that focused rather narrowly on the “not-in-my-back-yard” issues that plague Bread & Roses. One of our former neighbors was quoted as saying that he was “ecstatic” that we were moving away from his business.

While this all is very understandable and ought to be expected, it has certainly been an unpleasant experience and has affected the excitement that Meta and I have felt about our new home. It also, in the most powerful way that I have experienced, hit me with the day to day reality for my friends on the streets. Our society simply doesn’t want them. By proxy, they don’t want me as their neighbor either.

Two days ago I read the readers’ comments posted on the Olympian’s website in response to the article about our move. The following statements are taken directly from those website postings:

“Kick them to the curb and make them leave downtown. All they do is bother people. Lock them up and throw away the key - these people are USELESS!”

“…you would be a fool to let your children anywhere near them… …These people can’t make decisions for themselves and it is about time the public made them comply with the law.”

“We have a lot of homeless because they migrate here like birds looking for food! …If you feed the pigeons more will come!”

“As far as mental illness goes they don’t have a problem remembering to ask everyone for change as they walk by and what time ‘Din, Din’ is down at good ol’ Bread and Roses. I think the only mental illness most of these people have is called ‘lazyitis’.”

“I’d say the move is a step in the right direction. If we can keep them moving closer and closer to Tacoma, it won’t be long before they are IN Tacoma. Now that would be great.”

“Homeless people are worthless trash! Take them out behind the barn! Now that is problem solving at its best!”

“The VAST MAJORITY of these bums (homeless) choose to be that way. …They choose their lifestyle of being drunk and/or high wanting free hand outs and most likely will NEVER be productive citizens within this or any other community.”

“I too work with these people everyday and almost all of them are complete dregs on society. You people are enablers who allow this type of behavior to continue with no end in sight.”

“I’m sure this news is going to make 4th Dimension Computers very happy-- NOT!!!! Just what they want-- bums hanging around harassing their customers, and maybe even breaking into their building and stealing things. …Phil Owen better do something constructive about riding hard on his clients. How about paying for a police presence to make sure the clients aren’t breaking the laws?”

“You don’t continue to move a problem around, you ELIMINATE it… …Get rid of B&R and then we’ll get rid of the creepy homeless panhandlers downtown who freak normal people out.”

“…invite some of these people into your home, where they will piss on your carpet because it is too much trouble to walk to the bathroom, will leave their needles for your children to find, and will take everything you don’t have bolted down before they walk out the front door, all the while calling you filthy names.”

“If you let them fend for themselves the problem will fix itself, the ones who are hopelessly addicted will just spend their money on their drugs and die from malnutrition.”

“Its ok to hate bad people.”

“Shame them, humiliate them, Make them beg for crumbs. Put them in jail.”

“I wish it were legal to hunt the homeless.”

This kind of hatred speaks for itself; I don’t think I need to elaborate much to create a picture of the kind of bigotry that homeless people face each day.

When I was seventeen and just beginning to recover from homelessness myself, there was a woman who, together with her reluctant husband, opened her home to the youth of the Bald Hills. Not all the youth of the area gathered at her home, but it was a haven in particular to the rabble and hoodlums. These were the kids who were breaking into houses and prowling cars in the neighborhood – the potheads and meth-heads, the runaways, and the rascals. Rizae didn’t institute a program or create an organization; she just offered what little she had for a safe and friendly place for us kids to hang out. I rented a place on her couch for $100 per month, and brought my own food (two packets of ramen per day). From time to time she’d sneak me some macaroni with hotdogs.

I think most people would be terrified to do what Rizae did. Why, the kids would tear our home to pieces. What if they sell drugs? What if the neighbors complain? The impressive thing is that all these juvenile delinquents turned into angels when they were at her place. They were kind to one another (a miracle in itself), respectful of Rizae and her husband, and were unstoppable dishwashers. Rizae did nothing more to encourage this transformation than to be friendly, personable, and welcoming, yet soon the joke among the kids was that she was the neighborhood “mom”.

This is what a House of Hospitality looks like. A House of Hospitality is a place where it is easier for people to be good. It is a place where people can become healthy. Its strength rests on people like Rizae, people who have a burning drive to live in community with others, and who see the good in others and desperately want them to see it in themselves. Each and every person who took me in when I was a homeless teenager was operating a House of Hospitality. And now Meta and I have the opportunity to operate a House of Hospitality ourselves.

Meta and I want to welcome the homeless into our home because the homeless aren’t welcome anywhere else. We want to welcome the homeless into our home because everyone should feel wanted. We want to welcome them into our home because we know them, and care about them, and because we have a fundamental belief that it is possible for people to be close to one another even in the face of challenging circumstances. The homeless are persecuted, reviled, hated, and abused, much as Christ was in his time on the earth. Nonetheless, we believe that it is possible to overcome these challenges and create a little piece of the “Blessed Community” here in our home.

For Christians this time of year is Resurrection season. It is time for our community to put down the bloody nails of hatred, and to step into the light and beauty of the Resurrected life of love. Please, come and visit us in our new home. Come share a cup of coffee and a little conversation with our guests. You will be surprised and delighted with the result.