Download a digital copy (1.5 MB) - Open Door Community

274 ˜ A Work of Hospitality, 1982–2002
I was beginning a Thursday-morning shift of house duty and Jay, a member
of the community who had come from the streets, was sitting across from
me at the breakfast table. He asked if I could get him “the half.” He kind of
grinned at my blank response and said, “You know, for the washing machine.”
What he was asking for slowly sunk in: Thursday is one of the days during the
week when Jay washes clothes and towels for our community; he was needing
two quarters—a half-dollar—in order to run the machine. I smiled back—a little
sheepishly—and went to get “the half.”
There are, of course, more painful reminders of the distance between many
of us who live and work at the Open Door and those sisters and brothers who
either stand in our soup and shower lines or who live here for a time as houseguests.
For instance, on any one of the three days a week that we offer hot showers
and a clean change of clothes to around thirty-five people, some men and
women in line will use an assumed name, and sometimes no name at all. “Write
down anything, call me anything,” someone once told me. “I just want to stand
in that hot water for a while.” Maybe he was in trouble with the law; or maybe,
on another occasion, he had been involved in a fight at the Open Door, and was
asked to stay off the property for a number of months; maybe he thought we
had forgotten his face, if not his name. But in a culture that requires a profane
number of people to be crushed and stripped of personal worth in order for
business to continue, he probably didn’t care anymore. His spirit had been
stomped out.
I first met my friend Jay in that same shower line. He always signed his
name on the list as “Frazier,” and when I asked about his first name, he would
look up from his cigarette and say, “Frazier . . . just ‘Frazier.’” The message was
clear: we were coming from different places in this world, emphasized by the fact
that, at that moment, I was standing inside the door and he was outside. I was
white and in a position of power, while he was a black adult enduring the indignity
of having to ask for a shower. I lived in a place where I was loved and
made to feel whole; he knew cold streets which break people—and their
names—in half. At eight o’clock on a wet February morning, “Frazier” (number
fourteen on the shower list) and I were standing only a few feet apart. The wall
that separated us, however, seemed to be three thousand miles thick and at least
three hundred years old.
A month or so later, Jay Frazier came out of the shower line and moved into
our house. He’s lived here ever since. And, in the year and a half that we’ve
shared life, the wall that our nation has built between us, grounded in and cemented
by the rejection of the biblical promise that all people are “one in union
with Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28), has been weakened and thankfully made lower.
The distance between us has been reduced. Or, as Jay put it, “When there’s some
love around, things can change—things which a lot of people don’t believe ever