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Saints and Martyrs ˜ 275
will. Sometimes, though, you’ve got to put a plank or two over what you
thought were burnt bridges.”
Two Easters ago, Jay did just that. When Holy Week arrived in 1986, our
community was preparing to spend twenty-four-hour periods on the streets in
solidarity with our homeless friends. We were dividing into groups of three to
five people and encouraged—but didn’t necessarily expect—houseguests who
might want to, to go with us. After all, we were going places most of the women
and men we live with probably never wanted to see again. But Jay, who had only
been living in the house for a few weeks, signed up. My surprise was equaled by
his own amazement at the Open Door’s peculiar observance of the week leading
up to Easter. “Why give up something good,” he asked (and continues to ask
from time to time), “and put one foot in hell” Good question, I thought, as Jay
and I, along with Alfred and Helen, began a long, cold night feeling the pain of
Atlanta’s streets.
I’ll always be grateful—deeply grateful—to Jay for his willingness to rebuild
and to cross burned bridges and to shepherd me through the cancerous belly of
a city that for four years had been his home. On the several occasions since that
Jay and I have spent together on the streets, I’ve come to receive this act of reverse
hospitality as a profound gift: in recognizing our community’s call to know
and serve the homeless poor, Jay lovingly has taken it on himself to help us understand
the condition and context of those who live daily with both feet in hell.
As he openly shares the places from his own broken past, we are reminded of our
constant need to share those places of woundedness which, in the sharing, can
bond and heal us as a community.
There are other times, too, when Jay reveals his commitment never to forget
where he’s been, nor the people who walked in the dark places with him.
Two mornings a week, he serves coffee with us at the Butler Street Breakfast, a
place where he used to eat meals and find a few moments of warmth. But with
deep compassion he also serves up a healthy dose of pastoral care to many of the
folks he knew in his “street days.”
“A lot of people out there—on the streets—are really needing some love,
some caring, or at least a handshake to let ’em know that they’re still human.
And so that’s one reason I keep coming down here. Some of ’em will get to expecting
you to be here, and you can make someone’s whole day if you just
show up.”
It seems, though, that Jay’s special calling to return continually to the streets
in service to his sisters and brothers who still suffer can only be understood—
and fully celebrated—in light of the fact that he has claimed a measure of ownership
in our community. He can serve those who remain in the streets with
compassion only because he has sunk roots in a place that gives him the power
to do so. As he put it in a recent house meeting, “When I was on the streets, I