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The Sacraments of Hospitality ˜ 235
starve. Medical technology steams ahead with organ transplants and the creation
of artificial organs while the simplest health care is largely unavailable to the
poor. Black infant mortality in the United States rises. The cries of the poor go
largely unheard. And so we cannot satisfy ourselves with words alone. Talk is
cheap and often changes little. We must struggle to find the way to embody, to
incarnate, the misery of the poor in the public arena.
Last year, Palm Sunday—the beginning of Holy Week—happened to fall
on March 31, the last night for ten out of thirty of the city’s winter night shelters.
It has been our hope that the city and church shelters would stay open past
April 1. The critical need for shelter and hospitality is hardly a seasonal reality.
So we decided as a liturgical act of solidarity to join our homeless sisters and
brothers and to take our Holy Week worship to the streets. From the Sunday
night of Palm Sunday to the early morning of Easter we would live on the streets
in twos, fours, eights. Each night as we gathered for worship we would welcome
those who had been out for twenty-four hours and send others out to wander
the streets and shadows of the city.
I was in the first group. We gathered for worship on the evening of Palm
Sunday, and then we left to walk downtown. Norman Heinrichs-Gale, John
Pickens, and I set out with Richard Schaper (one of the pastors of the Lutheran
Church of the Redeemer). We left bursting with energy. I thought I knew something
about the streets. I though it wouldn’t be so bad. It was supposed to be
only about fifty degrees that night, certainly warm enough to be out.
What I learned by 7:00 p.m. Monday has forever changed my feelings,
thoughts, and sense of urgency about homelessness.
The entire night was an experience of being moved. “You can’t stay here!”
“You have to leave!” “Move on!” Bus stations, hospital waiting rooms, even heating
grates outside buildings: “Move on.” Security guards seemed to be everywhere.
The rules were all the same. You can’t sit here. You can’t stay there. “You
have to go!”
The only sleep I got all night was at the Trailways bus station. For fifteen
minutes I drifted off. But then my shoulder was shaken. This guard was apologetic:
“I’m sorry. You can’t sleep here. You’ll have to leave. Don’t you have any
place to stay” I went to waken Norman, who was sleeping soundly several chairs
down from me. He jumped up without realizing that his legs had gone to sleep
because of his odd position in the chair. He reeled around, trying to keep his
balance, and finally we managed to leave.
We found a place to slip into a park and could have stayed all night. But it
was too cold to sleep. A fifty-degree night is not warm. It was not life-threatening,
but when your only bed is the ground or the concrete, it’s too cold to sleep.
And so we kept moving, wandering with no real place to go. The early-evening
spring in our steps slowed. By midnight it was a labored shuffle. How long ’til
morning How long