BREAD AND ASPHALT

c 2000
by Jim Burklo

jtburklo @ yahoo.com

openchristianity.com

(This book is a journal of my experiences as the lead organizer and later as executive director of the Urban Ministry of Palo Alto -- the period from 1984-1993. The stories included here are factual, but names of all people but staff members of the nonprofit groups have been changed.)

Dionicio lived only a few blocks from the office of the Ecumenical Hunger Program, down by the junkyards in East Palo Alto. George, a member of one of the local Catholic churches, asked me to visit Dionicio and help him get a job. I found Dionicio in a broken-down garage which he had neatly converted into his living space: a carefully made bed, a hot plate plugged into a socket above the bare lightbulb hanging from the rafters, an altar to the Virgin in the corner near the bed.

With the greatest difficulty I attempted to introduce myself. I had started listening to Spanish tapes at Stanford University's language lab at night, trying to learn on my own. When I said the name of our mutual friend, "George", Dionicio beamed widely. He awkwardly stood to shake my hand: his grip was firm but uneven due to his partial paralysis.

"!Si, George!" Apparently George had told him I would be coming to visit. In my extremely rudimentary Spanish I told Dionicio I had heard of a janitorial job in Palo Alto.

Thus began our friendship, my first with people other than the staff and volunteers at Ecumenical Hunger Program. He came over to the office on the way to the job I found for him, and sang me songs he'd composed in Spanish. I picked up new words in Spanish from him, because he did not know enough English to be a bad teacher! He talked to me as if I was supposed to understand, so I had to figure out what he said by the contexts of his utterances.

He grew up in a town in Mexico named Aguililla. Many of the people who came to us for emergency food were from this village and others nearby in Michoacan state. Some of his songs memorialized his home town. People in East Palo Alto said Aguililla was like a Wild West town from a cowboy movie: dust, cattle, men with guns.

I was a minister from Palo Alto, a mile across the freeway and a world away from both East Palo Alto and Aguililla. I had come to continue a career of service and activism that began in high school when I was involved in the anti-war and environmental movements of the late 60's and 70's. I'd worked as a nursing home orderly while in college; I had been a community organizer while a student at seminary. I had spent four years as the associate pastor in a big church of affluent and educated members, ministering among electronics industry executives and Stanford faculty families. There, at First Congregational Church, I found a supportive community in which to be part of the quest for peace and justice. While serving the church, I had become increasingly committed to efforts to help local people in need. I put a lot of time into organizing a shelter in nearby Menlo Park for homeless families. I was the chairperson of another interfaith group that wanted to start a drop-in center for homeless people in Palo Alto. But I yearned for a more direct connection to the cause. I longed for moments like this, straining to understand Dionicio as we walked past the junkyards on the way to Crystal's Dinette. When I was offered the two half-time jobs with agencies serving hungry and homeless people, I accepted eagerly, feeling it was the right time to plunge completely into this kind of work. It seemed a natural next step in my career. I began as a caseworker for the Ecumenical Hunger Program in East Palo Alto and for the Community Services Agency in Mountain View, ready to hit the streets with new responses to the needs of people in poverty.

We went to Crystal's Dinette up the street for late breakfast one morning. I treated him with a breakfast of grits and eggs in exchange for a Spanish lesson done entirely in Spanish. Our texts were Catholic religious tracts. He was deeply religious, but didn't seem to care that I was a Protestant preacher. Same God, same Christ, he said. So I read prayers aloud to him (he could not read well in Spanish), and he corrected my pro- nunciation. Thundering around us were the loud conversations and roars of laughter of the rest of the patrons. Joyce, the boss at Crystal's, was an Asian woman less than five feet tall who barked stern orders at her 6'4" cook and 6'2" waiter; they answered back in black English that was sometimes hard for me to follow.

When I first went to work in East Palo Alto I began fre- quenting Crystal's. In one of my early visits, I entered as the building was shaking. I thought it was an earthquake, but once inside I saw it was the former cook beating up the waiter in the kitchen, throwing him against the wall as they howled and swore at each other. The patrons were laughing as usual; the fight seemed to be an added entertainment for the morning. A dozen people from the neighborhood gathered at the front window to watch the fight, and more were gathering at the other windows as I, having lost my appetite, walked back to the office of EHP, the Ecumenical Hunger Program.

I was working on the incorporation papers for the Urban Ministry of Palo Alto, a new group that was forming from among the same group of churches that supported the Ecumenical Hunger Program. We wanted to reach out to the chronically homeless people who came to the churches asking for help. Also, I continued working with a group of people to set up a local shelter for homeless families. A local realtor, the head of the shelter agency, and myself toured properties nearby, looking for a building to house the shelter. The realtors representing the owners asked how much money we had. "$500,000? No problem," we answered, when in fact we didn't have any money yet in hand! Through such encounters I got an education about business and real estate that was never offered in seminary.

At Ecumenical Hunger Program, we considered far smaller but sometimes overwhelming needs for money. Just getting $500 together to make the rent for a family in crisis was a sufficiently difficult undertaking. And Dionicio had enough trouble hustling $50 a month for his garage.

But breakfast with Dionicio made spiritual sense of my work. He gave me a sense of direction as I followed this new turn on my path. It was about something more than designing new programs and services. I had to listen, straining to understand languages and ways of life foreign to me, in order to enter and accept the life stories of the people I had come to serve.



Each of us did everything as staff members of the Ecumenical Hunger Program. Each of us did interviews with the people seeking help in unemployment and poverty and crisis. Each of us packed food and threw moldy donated bread and rotten zucchinis and spoiled bananas into the dumpster. The place was unimaginably inefficient. But the inefficiency was a big part of the magic of Ecumenical Hunger Program.

I never had thought of myself as a person needing a lot of or- der in my work space until I came to EHP. I quickly built a reputation as the member of the staff most likely to throw "junk" into the dumpster. But none of us wanted the Ecumenical Hunger Program to look and feel like just another professional office, and our "clients" to relate to us just the way they did up the street at the welfare department. At EHP, people in poverty knew they could come just to visit, and business would stop until their stories were told.

Nevida Butler, our boss, created this atmosphere simply by being present in the building. The bigness of her caring filled the place and made holy the otherwise unholy mess. Paperwork and food packing stopped when a troubled person needed her attention. When I grumbled about our budget problems, or fussed about the pile-up of clothes donations, she put it to me with a smile. "Have faith, Reverend!" she said. It was impossible to argue with such an order, coming from this naturally faithful woman.



Community Services Agency, five miles away in Mountain View, was also a world of dented cans of food and odd lots of donated diapers. I worked with Estela Salgado, who, in addition to being the source for emergency assistance for people in need, was among the most trusted and helpful people in the Hispanic community of Mountain View. Estela came from a wealthy Mexico City family, and carried herself with style; a steady stream of Spanish-speaking people came into her office to confide their troubles in her, to get emergency food sacks, to sign up their children for summer camp subsidies, and to translate documents. I began as her understudy, learning about resources for the people who came to us, and meeting the community of poverty in the neighborhood.

Evie and Ramon came in every day after school to pick up milk and bread from the surplus donation area in the lobby of the cinderblock storefront of Community Services Agency. From our daily conversations I followed the rhythm of life in the little barrio surrounding the CSA office. Their mom, a native of Aguililla, worked in a laundry: a steady job. Grandma welcomed the kids home from school. Dad, divorced and remarried, spent lots of time going to and from Michoacan, and Evie and Ramon didn't see him much.

Alfonso was a dignified retired man who spoke no English and whose Spanish was flavored with a Castillian lisp. He relied on Estela to make sense of his Social Security and Medicare health insurance paperwork. One day, he came into the office when Estela was busy, so I tried to help him translate his mail. He was quite worried about one of his bills. He didn't understand why he owed such a huge amount for something he did not remember ordering or buying. I looked at it, and laughed. It was not a bill at all. It was an advertisement inviting him to enter a sweepstakes in which he might "already have won $1,000,000". How bewildering to receive junk mail in a foreign language!



She was a clean, healthy, well-spoken woman, a bit breezy and scattered in her conversation, but I had no clue that she had come to the office for any special kind of help. She was in the CSA lobby, where I was putting up some job listings for use by unemployed visitors, and we began a conversation. She was a Christian Scientist. She told me she had spent a lot of time in Great Britain in Christian Science Reading Rooms trying to stay warm, and in the process she was converted to the religion. She had been in the catering business in Britain, but when the business failed, she had come home to America. From what she told me, I gathered that she had been on the road for a long, long time since her marriage ended after her children had grown. Something about psychiatric hospitalization in Arizona, arguments with doctors in Britain . . .

"What brought you to Mountain View? Frankly, you seem more than a bit out of place!"

"No, I was led here. I got a plane ticket to San Francisco, and a bus ticket here, because I felt led here."

"What's special about this town?"

"I read the Bible and prayed, and this is where God led me."

"Where in the Bible did you find the advice to come here?"

"It didn't suggest it in so many words, but this was the place I was told to come as a result of my reading of Scripture. God led me here."

After further conversation I learned that she had no money, no food, no housing, and no job. She had spent all her money getting home. God had led her directly into my office to get whatever help I might offer.

When she said she wanted shelter, I suggested the emergency shelters in San Jose. "No, God led me to Mountain View only, and here is where I shall stay until I find out his purposes for me."

"Maybe God is using me to tell you that it is time to get on the bus with this ticket I'm giving you and go down to the shelter in San Jose so you don't get mugged or get sick from exposure," I replied. "Maybe God's purposes are being worked out right here and now in this room!"

"No, no thank you," she said. She picked up the sack of food I had given her and went on her way, led by God out into the cold.

My need for a working knowledge of Spanish grew with every moment I shared with Hispanic people in my work. So, with the blessings of Nevida and Estela, I went to Mexico for language study in Morelia, the lovely colonial capital of Michoacan. One weekend I took a long, hot, bumpy bus ride to the town of Aguililla. On the battered bus I sat next to a woman named Herminia. As we bounced and lurched for hours down the dirt road, she told me why she made these trips to and from Mexico City. She had to go to a clinic there to pick up medicine for her son.

"What's wrong with him?" I asked in my third-rate Spanish.

"He has a sickness in his mind," she told me. "He hardly eats anything; he won't eat anything unless it is mentioned in the Bible. He believes that everything in the Bible is literally true." "What kind of illness is that? Never heard of such a problem."

"The doctors in Mexico City say it is common. They say it is caused by reading the Bible too much. You know, you have to study the Bible and be taught by the church in order to read it. But my son won't go to school. He won't play soccer with the other boys. He won't work. He won't do anything that isn't in the Bible. He is always scolding me and my sister because we don't live according to the Bible."

"How did this start?"

"When he was very young he would go up to the church in Aguililla and read the Bible there. Then he got angry with the church because he thought it did not do things the way the Bible said they should be done. It just got worse and worse. He is dirty, he won't wash, he is too thin. He is sick, very sick. The medicine helps, but not very much."



Sunset let down a rush of cool air from the mountains looming around the town. Aguililla was subdued by the dense brush and forest that rises around it, and I was lulled still by three hours of dust and stones under the bus that jangled my body out of space-time on the bus on the dirt road from Apatzingan. The plaza was overwhelmed by the sudden chirping of hundreds of birds, stirred by the wind, in the big tree on the north end of the square. Demurely-dressed young women walked arm in arm counterclockwise around the bandstand in the center; the young men, leaning on each other's shoulders, bantering verbally and physically, circulated in the opposite direction. Friday night: a few "camionetas" -- pickup trucks -- rattled around the plaza. I sat, enjoying the colors glowing after sundown above the ridge to the west, savoring the tranquility.

Dionicio had told me to visit the church. Its dome and bell tower stood on a steep hill a block above the plaza. It was the night of Day of the Dead, and below the church a little proces- sion with a string band was forming to follow the image of the Virgin up the hill. In Crystal's Dinette, he and I would eat grits and eggs and I would write out for him in big letters his favorite prayers to the Virgin so that he could read them to himself at night in his garage. If he'd been in Aguililla that night, he'd have been one of that faithful handful following Mary up the hill, straining his stubborn leg to climb the concrete stairs from the plaza up to the church.

Dionicio's story was a good one. Not because it was a happy one. Not because it made him worthy or unworthy of anything. Not that it made him out to be one kind of character or another. His story was good, and from more than a literary point of view. To know his story, to be part of it, involved me more consciously in the human and divine condition.

Sitting on that bench on the plaza of Aguililla, I found myself coming to a new understanding of Dionicio, and a transformation of my sense of vocation. When I first met him, I saw him through the lenses of social and political analysis. I thought of him as a disadvantaged Mexican who was lured over the border by North American jobs and dollars, locked into the U.S. poverty cycle by low wages and high expenses. I classified him as a disabled person needing rehabilitation and emergency food assistance, and as a wife- and child-beater under the supervision of the courts. These categorizations were convenient for deciding how to provide social services for him. But Dionicio was hardly explained by the codes on the intake forms of social service agencies. For me, arriving at the plaza of Aguililla was the culmination of a pilgrimage. I was now on the inside of Dionicio's story, looking out; I was now living the meaning of service instead of thinking or acting it.

In East Palo Alto and Mountain View, signs on the windows of convenience markets and liquor stores offered money orders for sale. Documented and undocumented natives of Aguililla took a lot of the money they made as gardeners, carpet-layers, maids, dishwashers, and busboys in California, converted it into money orders, and sent it to their families in Mexico. Perhaps some of those dollars were converted into the pesos that were spent in the soda stand facing the plaza of Aguililla, where a few teenagers drank "sidral" sodas and played Aguililla's two video games.

Aguililla had a very modern-looking Banamex bank. There were no banks at all in East Palo Alto, because of the crime rate and incidence of mortgage foreclosure.

Like most of the people of Aguililla, Dionicio identified as home both the town and the vast "campo" -- countryside -- around it. Aguililla's densely-placed, tile-roofed houses of concrete and brick were filled and emptied with people who lived most of the time in the dozens of ranchos outlying the town, where runty chickens scurried around the pigs and the children, where the corn grew on the foreheads of the mountains, where patches of "la yerba" -- marijuana -- grew with the paid-for ignorance of local authorities, where a cow lived and died to provide me with the tough but tasty steak I ate with the help of several flies in a restaurant in town. In many of the camioneta-beds stood bunches of people from "el campo" coming down to stay with cousins or brothers for a few days to do business, or just to escape the isolation of the ranchos, even more extreme than that of Aguililla itself.

It was on one of the ranchos near Aguililla that Dionicio had his accident; he fell off a horse when he was 13 and was left with damage to his brain's motor functions, making many of his movements awkward. Out of the teasing he got from his clumsiness, out of the ironies he lived due to his physical oddities, he developed a daft wit that he expressed in the tradition of the "corrido" -- the Mexican ballad. His songs were spoofs on the pains of love, mockeries of the fate of the "mojado" -- wetback -- in the U.S., laments to God and the Virgin about life's indignities. His were the songs of the less- than-ideal reality of life north of the border for Aguilillenos. Be- fore I left for Michoacan he told me that "everyone in Aguililla thinks I'm cu-cu," and indeed I met several in Aguililla who de- scribed him as such. Dionicio was the "payaso" -- the "fool" -- of a town that was located in two different nations. In nearby Redwood City's "Little Aguililla" neighborhood, he performed his songs at a nightclub before rowdy audiences that mocked him as much as they enjoyed the humor and pathos of his songs. But through his songs, in his unique way, he helped to hold his story and the community of Aguililla together.

Dionicio's marriage collapsed when in a jealous rage he beat up his wife and kids. I often wondered how he was able to do it, given the slowness and clumsiness of his arms and legs, but when his mind was made up to do something, he eventually got his body to follow. To see him walk or try to write his own name, it was hard to believe that he could keep a manual labor job and drive a car and lug boxes of donuts around the Ecumenical Hunger Program office as a volunteer. Apparently he put himself so thoroughly into his anger that his visits with his two young daughters were supervised by a welfare officer. Some of his "corridos" made bitter reference to his former wife; it was an ongoing tragedy for him.



The shoeshine boxes with the big shiny tacks along the edges gave them away. Two scruffy boys approached my bench in Aguililla's plaza and, seeing I was clad in running shoes, figured I was only good for a little pasatiempo. They peppered me with questions. "Why are you here?" "Where are you from?" I told them I was a minister who was a social worker in East Palo Alto and Mountain View, California, and that I was studying Spanish at a language school in Morelia, Michoacan. They hustled off eagerly to tell their friends. Moments later I was surrounded by dozens of young men, aged ten to thirty, asking me questions, telling me dirty jokes three and four times to make sure I understood them. Together we laughed at the craziness between the U.S. and Mexico. Their faces opened with mine in the delight of sharing hilarious truths with someone new. Playfully shoving, lighting firecrackers, yelling, their en- thusiasm for this norteamericano's surprise visit grew riotous, and through my own laughter and bad Spanish grammar I found myself trying to talk them down from a public disturbance. Just by showing up, I had become the main entertainment event of the evening.

Through the jokes and jive I managed to ask who had been in El Norte. Many of them had spent a few years in Redwood City or East Palo Alto. Another area where a few of them had lived was Yakima, Washington (in Spanish, Guachintan). Their families had been making trips back and forth across the border for a couple of generations.

The Second World War inspired the bracero program, a way to break the back of organized farm labor with the excuse of replacing U.S. boys sent from their jobs into the military. By the time the bracero program was over in the 50's, migration across the border had become integral to the way of life of hun- dreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. For many of these young men in Aguililla, the trip north was an archetypal quest, a seeking of fortunes beyond the merely material. It became for many young people the way to go out and make a life for themselves. Of course, there were sobering economic facts to urge them on their way. But this migration became a cycle with its own momentum, its own culture and traditions, a cycle presenting the United States, a country accustomed to successful problem-solving, with an unresolvable situation.

Two of them, men of about 25 years in nice clothes and wearing shiny digital watches, had recently worked at a small manufacturing plant not a half-mile from my office in East Palo Alto. They told me that things were dead in Aguililla. "No jobs here, nothing but el campo. Nothing to do. But we don't like California, either. Too many drugs, too much crime. It's crazy there, man."

Pickup trucks rattled and donkeys brayed in the stone streets as the town vibrated with the tolling of the church bells. The starlights wiggled a little in the wind from the dusky western mountains. Just to be alive there on the park bench, letting Aguililla enliven Dionicio's story of his home town: it was enough to be present with his story rather than analyzing it or engineering solutions to it.



On my first morning back at work after my return from Michoacan, I arrived to find the Ecumenical Hunger Program without electricity. The chickens were thawing in the freezers. I went outside. It was hard to trust the reality of what I saw. Someone had stolen our power meter. Pulled it right out of its socket. Food, typewriters, an electric heater had been stolen from us in the past. But a power meter? Later we learned that a man had his power cut off because he didn't pay his bill, and since the power company took out his meter when they shut off the electricity, he erroneously figured he could steal another one to get it going again.

Often people would come in to ask for food, so full of whiskey that it exuded from their skin. One day a mother came to the office so high on amphetamines that she could hardly sit still long enough to make it through the interview. Sometimes it outraged us that people came to us this way, high as kites, and brought their children with them. And it was outrageous. But when I reflected on it, I saw that they were sharing their stories, their very human pathos. They were letting us know, without needing to tell us, major details of their lives. But so much of the time, in situations like these, I became another two- dimensional, predictable social worker, drawn and filled with the appropriate colors, asking the social worker questions and writing the answers down on the usual forms with the usual blanks to be completed. Often I found myself seeing our patrons as cartoon comic characters with wiggly little lines coming off their heads denoting "stoned", with bubbles above them containing their words.

Daily I had to decide whether to go with such perceptions or to endure, more consciously, such confrontations with human nature -- daily confrontations that, when I let myself feel them, left me in awe of life, in awe of the ambiguous mysteries of good and evil, love and hate, joy and misery. These confrontations left me with no resolution other than a com- mitment to get up the next morning and deal with my prejudices and fears again, and be a real participant in the human drama.



The work was a series of impossible situations, and the idea was simply to live in the midst of them. At EHP we spent our time listening to undocumented aliens who were broke because the man disappeared when "La Migra" -- the immigration agents -- caught him and the woman couldn't get food stamps or Aid to Families with Dependent Children except for the two of her five kids who were born on this side of the border. We found ourselves helping people find housing and jobs, studiously ignoring the question of whether or not they had green cards (legal resident alien status). We found ourselves unable to tell whether a family living in a garage with no heat in East Palo Alto was better off here or back in Aguililla. We found it impossible to judge whether it made sense for a family to be asking us for emergency food while they were sending a "diezmo", a percentage, of their income to Aguililla so that the husband's older brother could buy a tractor to till the family's land.

It was impossible to think of one's self as an effective social engineer when spending time with a woman from Aguililla who, after Magdalena, our social worker, helped her get into a women's shelter after her husband threatened to slice and dice her with a kitchen knife, then moved in with an alcoholic twenty years older than she. "He's so nice to the children," she said. She was 22, and had four of them. When I was 22, I was no more amenable to the social engineering or psychological maintenance of other well-meaning persons . . . but, then, it wasn't so blatantly obvious to me.



The Jesus story did the same sorts of things to me as did these poor stories. It left me in awe of the impossibility of human life, and yet also left me utterly committed to it. It did not help me understand so much as it helped me to tolerate and even appreciate contradictions. Jesus did not give me much help in figuring out how to solve the problems of poverty. "For you always have the poor with you," he said when someone offered to rub him all over with expensive body oil and Judas com- plained because the money could have gone to feed the poor. But the same Jesus told the rich young man who wanted to be saved, "One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me." (Luke 18: 22) If we had run EHP according to this advice, we wouldn't have been in business for long.

A food distribution policy for the Ecumenical Hunger Program was not to be found among the teachings of Jesus. Maybe this omission was as important as the contradictory things he did say about the poor. Perhaps such policies would have missed the point entirely. "For you will always have the poor with you." This was not so much a resignation to the inevitability of poverty as it was a call to commitment. Our vocation at EHP was to always have the poor with us. By being with each other, living together with the contradictions and impossibilities, we could experience God together.



My wife and I shared an evening meal with a Viet- namese refugee family whom the Ecumenical Hunger Program had helped to house. He and his children had the party for us and the Catholic social workers who had joined us in arranging for him to occupy a boarded-up house. We contacted the own- er, offering to fix it up and put a tenant in it in exchange for a month's free rent. This family had been packed into a tiny apartment in a building that was well-known for its violence and drug-dealing. That apartment had been just another of the apocalypses they had endured. The father of the family had run a restaurant in Vietnam before leaving his country as part of the "boat people" exodus, so he made huge meal of exotic entrees to celebrate his joy and relief to be living in this clean, spacious house.

We sat around the card tables, moved deeply by the warmth and appreciation of the family and their friends who shared their happiness. A Vietnamese guest raised a toast, "To the American people, and I don't mean the American government!" The host, grinning his agreement, raised his glass, revealing an ugly scar on his arm from a shrapnel wound. It was a moment of reconciliation in the flesh, which made us witnesses to a healing of the wounds of a horrible war.



When the 82-year-old woman came to us asking for food for her great-grandchildren, two things happened. We supplied her with food several times, and we worked out a story. It was a sad story, but a good one from a divine point of view. "Well, my grandkids, they be gettin' food stamps, but I never see 'em. They be runnin' around all the time, and somebody gotta feed they childrens." Great-grandma ended up buying the food and paying the rent for a house full of children with nothing more than her Social Security check. She didn't feel safe making a report to the welfare department, because, although she hated to admit it, she was afraid of her grandkids. So Anne, our food manager, told the volunteers to pack her three frozen chickens, a bunch of mustard greens, rice, beans, milk, apples, tomatoes, and yams in a large box . . . and to share in the story of her impossible situation.

Would giving her the food have helped to perpetuate a bad situation? Would it have been better if the kids began to starve and someone had called Child Protective Services to take them away to be placed in the homes of people with more resources? Yet we so deeply respected great-grandma's desire to love and care for them that it was equally impossible for us not to give her the food.

The great-grandma's story was not the sum of the information that she gave Nevida at our office. The story was a creative, lively interpretation, worked out in a unique way because of the unique people who were talking and listening and forming it together. Its quality was utterly a function of the quality of the relationship in which it was created. Once the story was out, it was remembered and treasured for its own sake, an act of service lasting and growing beyond the day when the last can of our food was opened and eaten by those great- grandchildren in East Palo Alto.



My office in Mountain View became "home base" for scores of homeless people. I set up a separate phone line for their use, started doing resumes for them for free, and made it a place where at least a few of them at a time simply could hang out. Our phone and address became their lifeline to the outside world, and we could offer them many kinds of practical help in day-to-day survival. But the most important function of my office at CSA was as a place to be, a place where people in the most dire circumstances could feel at home.

Cal came to Community Services in Mountain View every afternoon for about two hours for a couple of months. Each day I got him a cup of coffee and we talked for a while. He lived in a bush near the freeway under a piece of black plastic. He smelled like someone who lived in a bush, and I told him so. He apologized every time. "Guess it's time to get these clothes washed. Got a few bucks so I can go to the laundromat?" Then I told him about the latest job opening I found that might be appropriate for him. Cal squirmed and slugged down coffee and indicated with body language his unreadiness to get a job. He wondered aloud to me about what his wife was doing in Pennsylvania, where he left her after she started drinking again. He had not communicated with her for several months, because he didn't know what to say to her. But his life was still oriented away from or toward her; she was still the other to whom or against whom he lived. I pushed a pencil and pad of paper at him. "Write her a letter. A first draft of a letter. If you don't know what to write, write down that you don't know what to write." He wanted to do it, but he couldn't even write that much. "I'm stuck, man. I can't get off my ass. I can't get going." Sometimes we got into arguments; he asked me for food, and I raised my voice and said "Dammit, this has gotta change! If I keep giving you food, you'll stay stuck!" "Yeah, but without food I'll starve and then what'll happen?" Sometimes he stormed out and spent the night hungry and angry. Sometimes I gave him the food. But every day we were back in that office, being together in the impossibilities of our re- spective situations.

Like many of the people I met who lived on the streets, Cal thought and lived biblically. Often, he woke up at three in the morning to read the Bible under the sodium lights of the freeway. Once he read the story of the feeding of the five thousand with the few loaves and fishes. It bothered him for weeks.

"You've studied the Bible. You've been to seminary. Tell me. How did he do it? How did Jesus feed all those people and have all of that fish and bread left over?" he asked. "Knowing that the impossible will have to happen for you to get your bread and fish, your question explains the story as well as any of the books I've read or professors I've heard," I answered.

Over and over again we recited our poor story together. He was stuck; he had no ambition, and no job opportunities or counseling sessions I offered would get him in gear. I was a failure at social work and ministry, and Calvin was an economic and emotional failure, and both of us admitted that we were utterly dependent on grace. If anything were to change for the better, it would have been the grace of God, and it would have been impossible for either of us to claim the credit. Nothing changed, but grace was there still, revealing to us the divine quality of simply being together.



A woman came into Community Services Agency at the re- ferral of the welfare department. Her food stamps wouldn't be available for a week, and she had no cash to buy food. She presumed, incorrectly, that we are part of the county welfare system, so she was offended when I asked her, "What's your situation?"

"What do you mean, what's my situation? You were sup- posed to give me food, not ask more questions!"

"Well, how about this. I'll tell you what we do in this office, and you tell me what you want."

She was infuriated because I had become just another annoying character in the story of her predicament. She had been hired by a Quick Stop store as a clerk and then was told, to her surprise, that the job wouldn't start for a month. She was a young, attractive Amerasian woman who did not feel like she belonged in a place for down-and-outers. I convinced her to take our Community Kitchen meal pass as well as a sack of food.

"What's the food like? Are there going to be weird men who hassle me?"

Part of my job was to supervise our Community Kitchen meal program for the homeless, where with lots of volunteer help we fed about 100 people in a local church social hall. I learned quickly that the most important part of my job at the Kitchen was to eat and listen. So, at the Kitchen I sat down and ate dinner with her. Her trust level slowly rose until she let out her feelings about her job search and about herself.

"They give you the runaround everywhere you look for work," she griped as she recited stories of job interviews and applications she'd made.

"It looks to me like your anger about not getting a job is now one of the reasons you have trouble getting a job," I suggested, and after two hours of very intense conversation she admitted as much. The fury etched in her face was still there.

The Kitchen was closed. We were alone in the room. I of- fered to take her home, since she was on foot. At first she re- fused, then, bitterly, she accepted. At her corner I stopped: she got out without a word, slammed the door, and walked away.



A tall young man, clean and friendly and with a sensible air, came into my office in Mountain View to ask for some food. He was having trouble paying his hotel bill, and generally wasn't making it on his temporary jobs through a job agency. He was frustrated and discouraged, but he had been working more or less consistently through a temporary agency for a couple of years. "I'm a workin' guy and the only time I screw up is when I drink on Friday and Saturday night."

"But I ain't asking for help for my drinking problem, believe me! Let me tell you a story about the last time I asked for help when I was drunk," he prefaced, leaning his big frame toward me, smiling.

"It was a Friday and I was bar-hopping until four in the morning and man, I was drunk. So there I am, four in the morning, the last bar's closed, and man, it's cold! And I just had to have somebody to talk to, I was feeling so lonely. So I went in a phone booth and dialed the operator. "Ma'am," I said, "It's not an emergency, but I gotta talk to you. I just need to talk to somebody." So she says, "Hold the line, stay on the phone," and the next thing I know, I'm talking with some guy at a crisis center who starts asking me questions. "Are you suicidal?" he asks. "Are you going to hurt yourself?" I answer him, "Man, no, it's just cold out here and . . " But the guy keeps asking questions. "Where are you? What's your phone number?" So I told him where I was and gave him the pay phone number. So he keeps asking me questions and in no time while I'm still on the phone up comes a cop car, man, just about blinded me with his lights, and I'm on the phone goin' "Oh wow!" and the cop comes up to me and says "You all right?" And I go, "Hey, I'm just cold and lonely, man! So I get on the phone here and then all this stuff happens!" The cop says, "Where do you want me to take you for coffee and some breakfast?" as he walks me to his car. So I get in the car, kinda confused, and I say, "You takin' me to jail? Cause I don't wanna go to no jail!" And he says no, no, man, just tell me where you want breakfast. And he takes me to Lyon's Restaurant and feeds me breakfast and coffee and as soon as the food comes he says "See you, I gotta get back to my beat," and he's gone. So there I am, miles away from my hotel at five in the morning, still pretty mixed-up, and I fall asleep in the restaurant, and at six in the morning they start shaking me. "Get up, get out of here, man," and there I am, out in the street, walking five miles home, in the cold!"



In my office at Community Services in Mountain View, I was put face to face with the life and death of the cross on a daily basis. Every day I was shown a new part of the reason that I followed this turn in my ministry's path.

I encountered people who did not take life for granted, because their bodies and minds were on the edge. They were on the brinks of life, looking back at it, wondering at it, observing it, questioning its value and its worthlessness. They were at the foot of the cross, and a remarkable number of them use biblical or other religious images to describe their experiences. Mike, diagnosed as schizophrenic, came into my office asking for a pass to our Community Kitchen. We talked about his life and his difficulty making it on his Social Security check, and as he felt more comfortable he began expressing himself more and more in the terms of Christianity. He described his battle with drugs and alcohol as one in which he went to hell with Jesus and then later saw the glory of God reflected in Jesus' face. He believed that he was the man that the gospel of John described as sitting in the tomb instead of Jesus after the resurrection. And as he spoke I had not the slightest doubt of the truth of his experience.

This man and many others of the people I met had the ability to confront me instantaneously with the human condition, not in an abstract and detached manner, but in an immediate and palpa- ble way. In my office we did not so much talk about other times and places; we did not discuss other people and relationships; we did not deal with ourselves as if we were objects to analyze or improve. In my office we dealt with what was going on right then and there in the room, with each other, with ourselves, on the spot. Day after day, the human condition was lifted up in front of my eyes and the eyes of the rest of the staff and volunteers. And although the stories we heard were ones of sadness much of the time, this lifting-up of the human condition somehow uplifted us all, both servants and served.



The people who were alcoholic, the people who were drug addicts, the people who lived under the bridges, the people who moved out of middle-class homes out onto the streets in beat-up station wagons with their kids . . . to these people, the imagery of the cross and the rich images of the Bible made more perfect sense. People opened up to me using religious language more than ever before, without knowing that I was an ordained and seminary-trained "Master of Divinity". I felt sometimes that my "Reverend" title had been getting in the way of such encounters before I went to work at CSA and EHP.

A middle-aged man named Walt came into my office; he had been using my office phone to call temporary agencies for the three months. Early on, we developed a ritual: Walt would ask to use my phone to make calls for jobs that I knew he'd never get, and I would choose not to confront him harshly with my observation that he was an alcoholic. I was confused and strained about how to handle him, how to respond to his pattern of denial in a sensitive way. Many years before, he had high- paying jobs in a high-tech field, but now he was on the skids, and prospective employers knew it without even meeting him. When Walt came into the office, reeking of whiskey, I always told him that I could see he was drunk, and left it at that. He made his calls to the job shops, and told me "Well, things are slow now, but they'll pick up after Christmas, . . in February . . . now March . . . sometime in the spring."

This visit to our office was different. His face was loosened by tears from his usual forced grin. He had a big bruise on his head. He came into the office, sat down, and said, "I'm an alcoholic." He had been drunk over the weekend, he had run out of rent money and been camping out by the freeway. He had fallen, and later he had an alcoholic blackout. "I'm a drunk," he said, and we both sighed with relief. It was a moment of redemption that came with the lifting up of life as it was: we both felt differently about ourselves and about each other. In his lifting up of himself as he was, he was made ready for change. Two days later he had checked himself into a nine-month alcohol rehabilitation program, after admitting to me and to himself that he was probably not going to get either of those engineering jobs he was currently sure would be offered to him in "just a few weeks". I changed, too: the strain I'd felt in his presence was gone. I realized that, all along, Walt was acceptable as he was, without satisfying my desire to change him. I had a taste of the new being even as he was lifting up himself and making ready for his own new being.

This moment with Walt illustrated the meaning in a biblical story. In the desert the people of Israel were bitten by snakes that God had sent to punish them for their sins. They asked Moses for salvation from the poisonous snakes. So Moses, at God's command, made a brass snake and lifted it up on a pole so that when the people gazed at it, they would be cured of snake-bites. This was a biblical illustration of the ancient healing principle of homeopathy, in which the cure resembled the cause of the malady.

Jesus understood his crucifixion as a parallel to the raising of the bronze serpent in the desert by Moses. In the homeopathy of the cross, the disease was not a snake-bite, but human life itself. And likewise, the cure was not just a snake on a pole, or, as in the rest of homeopathy, a small dose of the same problem needing a cure. The cure for the disease, which was the human condition, was human life itself, in its completeness, its totality: it was the whole of human life, lifted up.



I told Walt's story (changing his name and some details to protect his confidentiality) in a sermon I preached in a church in nearby Los Altos. After this sermon, during coffee hour, a well-dressed man approached me. He had come to the church with a friend while he was in the area on business. He told me he was a marketing executive who did a lot of traveling and ate a lot of drugs and drank a lot of alcohol along the way. Walt's story touched this businessman profoundly. "It's as though I was supposed to come here today. I didn't plan on being here this morning. I've been denying it for so long," he told me. "Listening to that story, I see myself on my own cross."



Eula called me at CSA every week for job leads, which I gave her as I heard about them. I first met Eula during the time she kept house for Margaret, an aged member of my church. In her Jamaican accent, she would wail her complaints to God about Margaret's racist attitude and stubborn refusal to exercise or go out of the house. I spent much more time listening to Eula than I ever did talking with Margaret. Over time, I learned that she was a very lonely and frustrated soul who had never married and had been cut adrift from her impoverished family in Jamaica. After Margaret died, Eula struggled. She got home care jobs with seniors who then died or went into nursing homes, and overnight she found herself jobless, with no unemployment benefits. I got her a job which didn't work out because Eula couldn't stand the meddlesome behavior of the family of the patient. One day she came in to my office in Mountain View, thinking that if she saw me in person, I would get her a job that would stick.

"Close the door, Reverend!" she said as she came in to my office.

As soon as the door was shut she began wailing loudly to God and to me with an up-raised palm. "Why don't the Lord just take me home?" She cried out her sorrows into her big white hanky. She was behind on her rent and running out of food. She was getting some help from her church, but it wasn't going to solve her problems for long.

In her cries she did not distinguish between me and God. In my listening I could not distinguish her anguish from the frightened, frustrated lament of Jesus on the cross, from the whole human race unable to reconcile itself with its suffering in the impossible divine and human situation.

I went to the food closet in the back of the CSA building and returned with a bag of groceries for her. I wrote down and gave her a phone number for the latest senior-care job that had been called in to me. But as she left, I knew that she was dissatisfied with me. Another wearisome load of groceries, another tiring and thankless job: I had not given her what she wanted, which was relief from that great and heavy burden of life itself. I had not taken her home. She left a sojourner and a stranger, in this world and yet not of it.



A woman came to us for bread and milk, which we set out in CSA's lobby to give away with no questions asked. She re- vealed that she was a recovering alcoholic.

"For me," she said, "healing is like that of the lepers who came to Jesus asking to be cured. He told them to go and show themselves to the priest. It wasn't until they turned away and went toward the priest that they were healed. It wasn't the priest who healed them, and Jesus didn't claim the credit, either. They were healed along the way to the priest. The healing comes along the way to healing."



During my days at EHP and CSA, I served as the chairperson of the group that formed the Urban Ministry of Palo Alto. We wanted to create a place in Palo Alto to respond to the needs of homeless and hungry people. But when Urban Ministry's drop-in center opened in the All Saints Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, we could not have predicted the outcome of our efforts. We hired a woman named Lee Schmitt, a registered nurse and a seminary student who had raised four of her own and two foster children. We opened up the choir room in the church and plugged in a coffee pot. Within two weeks, instead of a social service office, Lee had presided over the birth of a community.

One of my life's little pleasures was calling and not having any idea who would answer the phone at the office of the Urban Ministry of Palo Alto. Even the answering machine had a different homeless person's voice every time I called the place. It was a reminder to me that there were a lot of ministers, and that a lot of ministry was going on, among the street people at the Urban Ministry. Love exuded out of the place, out of the soup pot, even out of the cigarette butts outside on the patio, even when somebody's voice was rising, even when somebody inside the drop-in center was silently freaking out.

Lee was a loud, funny, big-hearted lady from New York City. The people of the streets loved her, and she loved them. When one of them O.D.'ed, or when a fight would break out among them, she would call a "mandatory meeting", and would go out to the El Camino Park, an area where lots of homeless people camped, to circle them up and discuss a response. I visited some of these circles, and also some of the communion services that were held in that cramped drop-in center room, with its odors of Camel "straight" filterless cigarettes and hot minestrone soup. With gentle firmness and a quick wit, Lee kept those sessions on track, and the people grew to own their community life and to find ways to invest in it and care for each other. As the chalice passed among the street people, they shared their prayers and dreams and shreds of their stories; updates on who was in jail, who was in the hospital. Indian Pete would then recite the Lord's Prayer in Navajo. Those communions were the most profound worship services I had ever experienced. None of us had predicted that this communion and this community would be the fruit of our efforts when we began to organize the Urban Ministry.



I thought I had an answer to the question in the story Jesus told about the righteous at the judgement day: "When did we see you?" they asked, after having passed by his incarnation in the poor people they had ignored in life. But a pair of incidents occurred at CSA which challenged my assumptions about that story. A man of about 30 years came into my office and after telling me of his need for some emergency food aid, he began to spin out the story of his life. A big, good looking man, dressed nicely, with an air of good sense and good attitude about him; he was flat broke, recently divorced, and in an alcohol recovery program. When he left, two hours of intense conversation later, I was sure that God had just paid me a personal visit. The man understood his life as a walk with God; he told me he felt like he'd been asleep for 12 years since he started doing dope and alcohol in high school. He was experiencing a spiritual conversion that was still underway, happening right there in my office. It was a wonderful encounter that left me encouraged when he left.

Later that same afternoon a woman of seventy-one years came into the office, asking for emergency shelter. I had seen her before, and predicted that this was going to be a hard visit. Her arm was in a cast because in a drunken stupor she jaywalked into a car on the way back to the motel where she was staying. She was in the motel because she refused to cooperate with the housing placements arranged for her by other social workers. Because she was living in a motel, she'd run out of money by the time she got out of the hospital to have her arm set. She'd been kicked out of one emergency shelter already before coming to me; they ejected her because she had a habit of inviting truck drivers into her room for a few drinks in the middle of the night. She'd pick them up, somehow, in the bar a few doors down from the emergency shelter. "A very outra- geous old lady" was the description given to me by the manager of the shelter. But what was I to do? This woman had no money left from her Social Security check, and had burned most of her bridges to survival already. "Where am I gonna go?" she asked me, looking pitiful in her dirty clothes, wearing a cast that seemed to weigh as much as she did. Well, I was mad at her for blowing it so badly already, making it mighty hard for any of us to help her, and I told her so. When I told her she belonged in a board and care home, she wasn't interested in cooperating with me. In the end, I made a surreptitious phone call to the police, authorizing them to pick her up later and put her in a motel on our agency's credit. I then escorted her to the door, refusing to help her. "What am I gonna do?" she asked, crying. "I don't know, but if you want to reconsider a board and care placement, come in and see me tomorrow." So I had the unpleasant role of kicking a homeless, crippled, aged woman out onto the streets at night.

As I drove home that evening, the question came to me. Who was God? Which person paid me a divine visitation? The man successfully struggling into sobriety and sanity, the man who prayed and tried to love God and others again, or the old lady who blew all her money getting drunk with truckers in the corner tavern, seemingly trying to drive do-gooders like myself to distraction?

It disturbed me to recognize the possibility that the old woman was God. If it were true, I had just kicked God out into the streets to fend for her sad and sickly self. I realized that maybe God belonged in a lonely booth at Denny's Restaurant all night that night, but I also realized that if I had seen God in that woman as she sat in my office, I probably would have reacted to her differently. I might have asked myself why God had taken this form before me. What was the message in this visitation? What might have happened had I recognized the divine in this outrageous old lady? And the young man: maybe he was God, too, but maybe God knew that I was getting an overly idealized incarnation. Maybe God was showing me what Jesus really meant by the "least of these" by coming in two forms and letting me figure it out for myself by presenting me with such a disturbing contrast.



I continued working with a group of people from agencies and churches who wanted to start a shelter for homeless families. After two years of effort, we found a site. The shelter agency planned to operate it as the Menlo Park Family Living Center. With volunteer help, we began to clean it up and paint it. It was an old travel court motel which had not been upgraded since the 1950's; in its waning years as a business, it became known as a "no-tell motel." In one storage room, during one of our volunteer clean-up projects, I found a stack of dusty Gideon's Bibles next to a stack of 1950's pornographic magazines. The courtyard was barren with dry crabgrass; the deafening roar of the Bayshore Freeway next to it drowned out conversations. But all of us were excited at the opportunity to have a place to send homeless families with kids.



For a month, until the shelter agency began operation, I was the keeper of the dozens of keys to the old motel. One day at Ecumenical Hunger Program, Nevida called me in to her office. "Jim," she declared. "We've got to do something about the Hernandez family."

Hector and Leticia Hernandez had 6 children and one on the way. Hector was laid off work as a carpet layer. He was undocumented, which made it harder to find work despite his valuable skill; he was left with fly-by-night contractors who sometimes stiffed him on his pay. Leticia, who spoke Spanish only, was burdened with a huge family, but she still found time to volunteer at EHP, packing food and sorting clothes. She was a beautiful soul, a warm and patient person.

The family lived in a one-room, ground-level garage in "Little Aguililla" in Redwood City. It was winter. There was no heat. One by one, the family caught the flu, coughing and hacking at night, suffering through the day.

"You have the keys -- do something!" Nevida pleaded. "Sure, I have the keys, but the shelter program staff hasn't started working yet!"

My protest sounded even weaker to me than it did to Nevida.

That night, when I left the eight of them in that warm, lighted motel room, children smiling, parents shaking my hand - first Hector, then Leticia, then Hector again - as I drove home, I cried.



The shelter had been operating for only a few months before a handful of its neighbors decided that the city should impose a use permit on the shelter, as a means of eliminating it later. So we mobilized supporters and local church people and shelter residents to convince the Menlo Park City Council that the shelter should continue. Some of the opponents of the shelter were civilized in their opposition, citing their long-standing desire for single-family homes on the site. Others of the opponents of our shelter seemed to be just plain nasty; they made outlandish and unfounded personal attacks against those of us involved in starting and running the shelter, and told outright lies in the public hearings before the city council.

We felt our blood pressure rising with each new attack against our shelter, into which we had poured countless hours of loving care and effort. We felt righteously indignant, and that indignation crept into some of our supportive comments at the hearing. Naturally, without reflecting on what was happening, we reacted negatively to these unpleasantries and to the people who expressed them. They became our enemies. The evening became dramatic; it became the stuff of newspaper articles and television stories. It generated a lot of publicity which helped the shelter a great deal, as more donations and political support came to it from the public.

But it wasn't until afterward that Barry Del Buono, head of the shelter agency and a former Catholic priest, and I speculated on whether or not those nasty people might indeed be incar- nations of God. Barry and I found ourselves reflecting on the question Jesus put in the mouths of the righteous: "When did we see you?" We had dedicated ourselves to serve God in the form of the homeless and hungry. But we grudgingly entertained the thought that, yes, those few opponents in the neighborhood of the shelter might be God in the flesh. We accepted the likelihood that some of our opponents were broken souls, very much in need of love and caring, and that our negative responses to them were only maintaining their crippling alienation. How would we have spoken, what would we have done, had we seen God in the flesh in our most bitter adversaries? How would things have been different?

"As you did it unto the least of these my brethren, you did it to me." (Matthew 25: 40) The least of his brothers and sisters might have been the least likeable, the least moral, the least tolerable person I knew. And when I could see the Christ in them, I found the Christ to be disturbingly real, and not some polite fiction.



At the Community Kitchen in Mountain View, a young man was muttering to himself, kicking the legs of tables, and seemed in danger of "losing it" completely. I walked him out the door and stood with him to see if he could be talked down. He was, in the best of times, severely emotionally disturbed. He lived on a psychiatric disability check and slept in his truck, which, most of the time, did not run. Someone had broken into his truck and stolen most of his stuff. He felt helpless and violated and angry. And he couldn't find a socially acceptable way to express it.

Outside was a woman who was a regular Kitchen diner. A few years before, she had traded a heroin addiction for a methadone treatment program; she lived on the fringes for years, and continually faced her own dislike of herself and her insecurity about being able to live anywhere but on the streets. She was a naturally empathetic and caring person, despite and perhaps because of her struggles. She immediately responded to the young man in turmoil by saying she knew what it felt like to be ripped off; it had happened numerous times to her, and she said she was very sorry to hear what had happened to him. He quieted and stopped fidgeting as she spoke: "You lost everything, huh? You've got to replace it all?" Feeling more sad than angry he answered her, "Right now what I need most is a hug." She smiled and hugged him and then went on her way.



Once the Urban Ministry of Palo Alto was under way, I dropped my membership on its board of directors. But I was invited back to lead a board retreat to reflect on what the Ministry had become. I wrote and celebrated this mass with the participants:


Let us notice the bodies we are in, the intricate wonder of our human organisms, the inexhaustibly complex web of human relationships in this room, the body we call Urban Ministry of Palo Alto.

There is a body into which we may take being anew, a body coming to be. And there is a hunger, a thirst, a strangeness, a nakedness, a sickness, an imprisonment, in the yearning to be in that body. We choose it and will enter it by grace.

This is a world in which we must choose which world in which to be. It is a world in which we must live with the pains of our choice, and with the joys of gifts received.

The bread: "Take this; this is my body." The cup: "This is my blood." This was the form he chose, the body he took on, the body he gave.

I had no body, and you gave me one. "I was hungry, and you gave me food. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me." (Matthew 25: 35-36)

The bread: This is the body we are given. It knows what it is like to have a nice house and a well-paying job. It knows what it is like to feel uneasy about being wealthy. It knows what it is like to be lonely, to be a stranger. It knows what it is like to live in a bush at El Camino Park. It knows what it is like to be lonely but not a stranger, to be known by everyone but one's self. It knows what it is like to sleep in a rain-soaked sleeping bag. It knows how to curl up properly in order to sleep on the front seat of a car without getting bruised by the steering wheel. It knows who it is afraid of, and what is out to get it. It knows how to sit politely in a board meeting and when to be silent and when to say something. It knows where it wants to go for its three-week paid vacation this year. It knows what it is like to have made up its mind about how much money to give to which good cause this year. It knows what it is like to have lots of worthwhile activities to occupy its time. It knows what it is like to drink a fifth of Southern Comfort every day, and what it is like when there is no bottle to drink. It knows what it is like to look for a job when it doesn't have the money to pay to look for a job because it doesn't have a job to make the money to get a shave, shower, haircut, and clothes. It knows what it is like to laugh at little things. It knows what it is like when it is safe to hug. It knows what it is like to lapse into existential terror for no particular reason that anyone else could discern. It knows what it is like to be afraid of being afraid. It knows what it is like to know that other people don't want to have to look at it or hear it or smell it. It knows what it is like to be listened to when it hasn't been heard out and respected for a long time. It knows what it is like to see an Urban Ministry take form in a way that fulfills its dreams without matching its expectations. It knows what it is like to be so far away from what it wants that it talks about scams and plans so much that it no longer takes its own dreams seriously. It knows what it is like to lust, to love, to be treated like an object, to be a client to someone else, and to be treated like a some body instead of like an any body.

There is so much life in this body! Let us take it on, let us choose this body. Let us find out what life is like in this body. Let us receive the grace that comes in the form of this body.

This is my body: take and eat.

This is my blood: take and drink. Amen.



k Gilbert came into the CSA office lobby, asking for day-old milk when he didn't see it on the giveaway shelf.

"Sorry, Gil," I said. "None was donated today from Safeway. Maybe tomorrow."

"No milk?" I could see the agitation in his eyes. He rubbed his head frantically. "No milk! Dammit, where's the milk?"

"Like I say, Gil, maybe tomorrow. Now, there isn't any. You know how it is here. When it's available, we get it and we're happy to give it to you."

"I want my milk, dammit! Give me the milk!" He roared at the top of his voice. The office staff stopped typing, on guard for what he might do next, although none of us ever had seen him do physical violence.

"Milk! Now! Don't give me this bullshit about tomorrow!"

Gently I ushered him out the door and invited him to return the next day, but he was howling all the way down the street away from our building.

We said, "Gilbert is having a bad day," having identified him as a psychotic, schizophrenic alcoholic, and, considering ourselves to have a superior perspective on his life to his own, we predicted that the next day he would not lose it over a quart of milk.

But he said he wanted milk, and he wanted it now. To hell with tomorrow! Nothing was more important in the whole cosmos than that quart of milk he wanted and expected but which was not being given to him. The entire universe was the udder producing that milk and there he was at the teat and nothing was coming out. Damn!



The next day I found a note on my desk:

"Jim. I am not a citizen of this planet at all. I have been sent from heaven and one day I shall return there. Gilbert."



Every day I spent time with people whose values were con- siderably different than my own. I enjoyed living simply, being with my wife and family and friends, driving old cars, gardening, reading and writing, traveling and learning. I had enough of everything. I got my money from my work, and it was enough to pay the bills. I lived under my means. But some of the people who came to us for emergency food assistance wanted much much more than I did in the way of material things. Most of them had televisions; I didn't own one. A few of them had brand new cars with payments so high that they couldn't afford to feed their kids. Some of them lived in houses much larger than our little apartment.

I gloated over my simplicity, but it was easy for me to be happy in my simple lifestyle because I had access to a richer material world. I was part of a culture of wealth, even though I didn't own much myself. I got to enjoy wealth without any of its responsibilities, because I had wealthy friends and associates. Though I didn't own one, I could sit in a hot tub any night I chose.

Expectations were brainwashed into us, poor and rich alike, by billboards, television and radio ads. Poverty was defined as the lack of things. Poverty was described as a "level", a material measure. So the desire to get out of it, to have a higher level of material wealth, kept people in it, like bees trying to fly through the glass when the window was open a crack underneath it.

The host in the biblical story of the wedding in Cana (John 2) was trapped by his own expectations, by the expectations he perceived from others, that there would be plenty of wine at the wedding feast. There had to be enough. It was expected. To run out of wine would reflect poorly on the host's side of the new couple's family. Jesus understood the host's situation as a sign of poverty of the most insidious kind, the kind in which the world was seen as a place of insufficiency instead of abundance, a place in which some lost and some won, and the sum was zero. A place in which there were the righteous and the wicked, the decent citizens and the skidders. A place in which some got all the breaks and others got ripped off, if not by the ones that got the breaks, then ripped off by God.

In my jobs I heard a lot about things that were lost. Houses, jobs, stereos, wives, husbands, kids. But the really poor people were the ones who explained each new loss in terms of the last. "They wouldn't hire me because I didn't have an address." That might have contributed to the failure to get the job, but it also might not have been the only reason. Not having an address didn't mean it was a total waste of time to try to find a job. But when a person expected that he should have a house in order to get a job, he turned all employers into those that might have told him he needed an address to get the job. That attitude was poverty. "The government cut back on food stamps. So how can I feed my family?" Well, I didn't like our government either, but maybe food stamps weren't the only way to feed the family. Poverty, for Jesus' host at Cana and for people at CSA and EHP, was the reduction of the incredibly complex economy to just one or two missing things. "What am I going to do? I've run out of wine. My name will be mud in the town of Cana. I must have enough wine."

Jesus, only at his mother's insistence, bailed the host out of his experience of poverty: he changed a jug of water into wine, and the party went on. Likewise, with emergency assistance we sometimes grudgingly bailed out people who were in financial ruin because they felt compelled to have higher-class houses and cars than they could possibly afford.

It was hard for me to refrain from trying to impose my values on others, but restraint was necessary in order for me to let them into my life and for them to let me into theirs. It meant that I had to suffer with the paradox of supporting someone else in pursuit of values that were incompatible with mine.

In my work I had to be reminded time and again that I was not there to serve people who were moral or psychological clones of myself and who just happened to be disadvantaged. Rather, I was called to get tangled up with people and situations I didn't like, people who made decisions out of a value system I could not stomach. Jesus, too, was tempted by judgementalism. He was tempted to stand apart and to associate only with people who shared his values. At the wedding in Cana, his mother snapped him out of his self-righteous isolation and sent him into service in the real world, mixing and relating with people who didn't share his lifestyle. His mother dragged him into a world of people who were not serious spiritual seekers, whose biggest moment in life was a common wedding feast. She understood, and then convinced him, that if he could not be part of the world of such people, he could not be who he was and do what he was to do. The wedding at Cana was the beginning of his ministry; he was transformed by that act of service, turning water into wine, and was motivated by it for the rest of his life.



I noticed that homeless and low-income people depended upon each other for survival, day to day. This was for me in striking contrast to the lifestyle of middle-class people in churches and neighborhoods. In suburbia, people became separated from each other because they did not feel dependent upon each other. People in suburbia had to create artificial means of community life, through churches and their supper groups, studies, boards and committees, and other community groups. The amount of energy and stress required to create an intimate community in suburbia was enormous, because people thought of community as an option. It is something we could choose or choose not to join. But there was a profound quality of immediacy and intensity about the sharing I witnessed among people who were broke: for them, community was essential. It wasn't optional at all. How many people did I deal with in order to get from my home in Menlo Park to my job in Mountain View? None; I drove my car. How many people did a poor person, riding the bus, have to deal with to make that same trip? Dozens.

I lived in an insular, nuclear-family lifestyle in which my wife and I were not dependent on any single identifiable group of people. We were interchangeable parts in the great American machine, addicted to what we thought was independence. We, like so many in churches and neighborhoods, were caught in the quandary of wanting community and not wanting to pay its full price.

I began to wonder if people who lived in the streets could teach those of us with jobs, houses, and money how to ask for help, how to admit that we depended on others. "If you don't give me a ride to Valley Medical, I'm going to go into a diabetic coma under this bush." The churches needed to ask for help with the same urgency. The churches needed to cry out: "If somebody doesn't do something different, we are going to croak from boredom and loneliness and spiritual dryness."

"What goes around comes around." This was a phrase I heard often on the streets. Jesus drove seven demons out of Mary, so Mary naturally returned the favor. The Pharisees were offended by her; she was unclean. What most made her unclean was the intensity of her personal attachment to Jesus. In my middle class life, I felt bothered when people got too attached or dependent on me, because it challenged my lifestyle of in- dependence. I didn't like owing things to individuals outside of the arms-length of money; anonymous, impersonal business relations were more efficient and quicker. But people on the fringes lived in such a way that serendipities such as Mary's ointment on Jesus' feet were bound to happen.

For the homeless people I encountered, time did not come in interchangeable units like money. Whatever happened was happening in the now. Conversations that referred to other times and places became too abstract. Saving money for tomorrow was futile when life was conducted day by day. "Give us this day our daily bread", as the manna in the wilder- ness was given: Jesus and Mary Magdalene lived day to day. Marginalized people could relate to them: blowing a meager paycheck on one night's good time was the same way of life that Jesus knew. How could I live in the now, and yet hold on to the middle-class lifestyle that was all I ever knew?



Lee Schmitt graduated from seminary and it was time for her to be ordained as a minister. I was asked to preach at the ceremony. From the streets, from the campsites in the bed of San Francisquito Creek, from the abandoned buildings and the downtown hotels, the people of Urban Ministry's community came to the church. Some clean, some sober; some in their best clothes, some in rags. A man diagnosed with schizophrenia free-formed a prelude on the grand piano. The ushers were two alcoholics who came sober for the occasion. The soloist was a woman with eyeglasses scotch-taped together at the bridge of the nose. There was hugging, crying; there were unusual outbursts at surprising moments. The congregation, consisting equally of people from the churches and people from the streets, was visibly moved by the ceremony. The weight of the hands touching Lee's head at the moment of consecration, touching each other all the way to the back pew, was enormous. I could feel the weight, the power of it, in my heart.



His medicine made his mouth dry and his memory porous. The ends of his sentences tended to get away from him, let loose like the traffic against the light at the corner of Castro and Central which, at the green, accelerated to unknowable destinations. He longed for an angelic rubdown of his aching neck, thrown out of joint in a midnight bout with one of Bruce Lee's warlocks. (He believed that Lucifer had been usurped in his role as Satan by the dead Kung-Fu movie hero.) For him, paragraphs were verbal pyramids, unimaginably huge, impossible for one man to finish in a thousand lifetimes. But this night it was going to be different.

The big thing in the way had been his smoking. Once he quit, he believed that Regina, bride of Christ, would come to him in the night in his room in the Mountain View Hotel and consummate with him in a holy union. It had been his own fault that Regina did not manifest in physical form sooner, he used to tell me. His doctor told him his medicine was a bit off balance, but what did Regina care about the Haldol? It was the impurity of tar and nicotine that offended her, much as she was otherwise eager to be one with him.

But on this night he was ready. He'd been off the coffin nails for several days. He came up to me in the Community Kitchen after dinner.

"Jim. Can I have the leftover coffee?"

"Sure, you want a cup?"

"No. I want all of it."

"Gosh, there's a lot, Mike."

"I want it."

There was a radiance in his face that inspired me to un- questioningly cooperate. I served him coffee, sacramentally. I filled up two empty mayonnaise jars with coffee and screwed on the lids and gave them to him; he glowed with gratitude.

"Planning to stay up late tonight, eh, Mike?"

"Yes. She is coming tonight. I must be awake and ready. Tonight, Regina will come."



I did not know Gil's story; I never found out what happened before. At the age of about forty-five, he lived on a trust fund set up by his very wealthy father. He had a brother somewhere in the Bay Area who wrote letters to him. He went to Stanford in the fifties. And that's about all I gathered from him about his history and background. Scattered in his conversation were snatches of literature and philosophy that indicated a classical, liberal education. He was the caricature of what an intellectual snob of the nineteen fifties would be like as a psychotic in rags drinking tall Olympia beers in a parking lot in the middle of the day in the nineteen eighties. The trust fund paid the rent and bought the beer, and the rest was on us: milk, bread, yogurt, and whatever else came in to our office from the day-old stocks at Safeway.

We talked every day when he came in for food. Sometimes we went outside so he could smoke; he pulled crumpled cigarettes from his decaying polo shirt pocket. His ramblings free-associated but after a while I began to comprehend the threads hanging his utterances together. I got into a rhythm with him, keying into his associations, taking off on my own. It was a most creative and invigorating exercise.

He wrote me letters when he came in the morning before I get to the office:

"To Jim. Love is leaving alone and allowing to grow. An expanding kind of feeling. Change does go on by itself. Let it be let it be! Gilbert."



"I see a pattern, Marci," I told her. "Every time you and I talk, I hear a story about how you just want to be friends with some man who then gets jealous and then does something vi- olent or vicious to you. Seems like it's not an accident. It just keeps happening."

"Well, this time it was different, you know. I never before had anybody lock me out so I couldn't get my clothes. I mean, that was cold!" She went on to tell me how this latest relationship had gone rancid. She lived with him; she didn't have a job or pay rent on the place. They had arguments; he threatened her. She walked out on him for a few nights, staying with friends. When she returned he had padlocked the room they shared so that she couldn't get her clothes. Another case of instant homelessness in her life.

The last story she had told me was that she had accepted an offer of a ride from a man who said he was going up to the Sier- ras, where she wanted to go to see the snow. They got as far as a truck stop in Modesto before she figured out that he wanted to give her a lot more than a ride, a lot more than she wanted from the man. So she found herself stranded. Of course her solution to this problem was to hook up with another nice man who offered her a ride to the Bay Area in his truck.

Marci grew up in foster homes; when she was 17 she had a child who was then put in foster placement. She had been on and off the streets for years; what I called chaos was what she knew as life.

I observed that Marci was exceptionally perceptive about her life, but she repeated destructive patterns even as she expressed awareness of them. She was extraordinarily bright and clever; she talked nonstop in a stream of consciousness that after a while revealed an unusual intelligence. She was artistic, ex- pressive; always writing letters to people, maintaining a journal which was locked up in the closet of her most recent boyfriend. "I can't even get to my art projects!" she howled in her throaty cackle, retaining her uninterruptable sense of humor. She was skinny, bright-faced, with the scars of a pimply adolescence that was not over. Ron, a regular homeless visitor to my office, could not listen to her for more than a few minutes. Whenever she was around him in the office, he rolled his eyes and decided it was time for a smoke outside. Male and female, the patience of other folks at the Kitchen was quickly worn down by Marci. But I harmonized with her energy. She and I had a similar story-telling vocation, and, even though I got exasperated with her predictable patterns, I liked her.

One time when she came in, she had a woman friend with her. I told the friend, in jest, to keep Marci in line. "Don't let her get mixed up with weird men," I laughed, having just heard yet another mean ex-boyfriend story. Marci left in a huff, and later at the Kitchen she made me apologize for having insulted her. I confessed that indeed, I had insulted her. In an ironically sexist and domineering manner, I had acted the part of yet another obnoxious man. I apologized. She accepted the apology.

Later she came in and we talked about that previous en- counter; I repeated my apology. "But really, Marci, there is a pattern in your stories that is hard to miss. Let's make a deal. I'll take a piece of your advice and put it on the wall in my office if you'll take a piece of mine and keep it in your wallet." On one of my business cards I wrote a question: "Does this promote love and life, or work against them? I have the power to choose love and life." "Ask yourself this question the next time you are about to get into one of these weird situations you are always talking about," I said. She smiled. "Okay, that's fair. But you know I am a loving person; I am for life. Everybody who knows me knows that!" "Oh, I see that!" I agreed. For her part of the bargain, she wrote a poem on a scrap of paper, and I tacked it to my office wall:

"Today's date: 4-28-86. A Verse.

'As you go on through Life,
You'll find not all is fair,
And if you try running away from your problems
They will always be there.'

Marci Mitchell. When originally written: 14 years of age, 1974."



Rolling Estates was the name which we gave to the mail box in my office in Mountain View. When someone living in a car or in the bushes needed an address, he or she could add "Rolling Estates" above our office's street address to ensure that our secretaries would accept mail to it without knowing the names of the addressees. It had a sort of vaguely exclusive air about it: Rolling Estates: one could picture green hills and perfectly- painted white fences around pastures and mansions.

This was the bright idea of Ron, whom I stuck with the nickname The Missionary, or The Missionary Mechanic, because he kept everyone's' estates rolling. Whenever any of our people had a car break down, he somehow appeared with his tools.

Ron, the Missionary Mechanic, volunteering at Community Services Agency in Mtn. View

A day in the life of the community of the streets of Mountain View: Ron came in to my office to announce that a plainclothes cop in an unmarked car nailed him the night before on a "502" -- drunk driving. They let him out of jail at 2:30 am. In a pair of flip-flop sandals he walked 5 miles in the middle of the night to go back to home-sweet-station wagon, which meanwhile had been side-swiped by a hit and run driver. Ron was having a bad day.

Calvin was in the back yard of the CSA building, whacking down weeds to make way for a garden in which we planned to grow vegetables for the Community Kitchen. Calvin still lived in the bushes by Highway 85. That day, things were looking good for Calvin. He was loquacious and weirdly vivacious. He was waving his cigarette about, telling about his attempts to cheer up a middle-aged lady living in a Volvo on the El Camino by a Jack In The Box. "I told her, look, go down to Community Services and ask for some bread. You are all the time whining about how you don't have any food. She says, 'Those kind of people just tell you what to do. That's the trouble with everybody. The trouble with my family. They all tell me what to do.' I says, look, lady, maybe that's what you need. A swift kick in the ass. That's what I needed." I answered Calvin: "Tell your friend we give the bread first and the swift kick in the ass later, after we have had time to get acquainted." Calvin was relishing the labor behind and ahead of him; the wonderful uniformity of earth scraped level of weeds and rocks, readied to yield to the rototiller. The Missionary, cocking back his leather cowboy hat, speculated on a system of plumbing for watering the new garden.

Later that afternoon, along came Pops, wearing his shorts, propping a sack of food on his pot-belly, stuttering in his characteristic manner about how the cops were going to run off everyone parked on the Seven-Eleven lot "any time now. What am I gonna do? Get me a gun, Jim, let's get it over with. You can have it back when I'm done." Pops had been living in a Datsun 280Z for 14 years until he got his Social Security retirement and had a regular check; since then I had been trying to help him get indoors, but he would not cooperate. He had habituated to the lifestyle of the streets, and had lost the social graces needed to live indoors. "You move into those places, and they tell you what to do. Who to talk to, who not to talk to, what to think, how to act. I just want people to leave me alone. I need my own place, not one of the senior citizen places. Or gimme one of those lead pills, Jimmy, let's get it over with." Since having roommates was unacceptable to him, there was not much I could suggest that he could afford. It seemed that Pops preferred his Rolling Estate to all others. "When the cops hassle me, I tell them, beat it! Leave me alone! Bug off, out of my face! And they go away." What was a cop to do with a stuttering senior citizen living in a Datsun 280Z?

Gil came in and left me a note while I was outside in the garden. This one, like his many other notes to me, was scrawled in big wiggly letters:

"Upsetting. Dear Jim. I had to call the paramedics to deal with Lew. I certainly hope it does not happen to him again that way. It was bad enough that Ruben died. Life has a way of regulating itself. Thanks for the milk, etc.. Gilbert."



A few weeks before, Gil had come in with a similar letter protesting a visit by the police to our Kitchen dinner. This time, I read his note and explained to him that Ruben was dying of liver failure on the doorsteps of the Kitchen -- couldn't even get up the two steps to the door -- and since he had refused my offer of a ride to Valley Medical, I had called the cops to take him. Gil and I talked about how hard it was to have to drop a dime on a friend, for his own sake.

Gil had written the note to me on the margin of a page from a discarded geology textbook, which out of curiosity I asked to read. Inside was a picture of a dinosaur skeleton under which he had scratched the letters "HUD".

"What's the connection, Gil? Between this dinosaur and the Department of Housing and Urban Development? Give me the metaphorical link."

Gilbert ranted about a television show he'd seen in the lobby of the Maas Hotel that discussed federal housing projects. He was rubbing his head, with its hair at many lengths as a result of his self-inflicted haircuts. His clothes were decomposing on his body as usual. "Yeah, the show was all about the beast, the government, you know..."

"Yeah," I said, "the beast has big teeth, doesn't it?", pointing to the mouth of the dinosaur.

"Ever looked into the mouth of the beast?" asked Gil. "Awesome, Jim, this machine we're in. All about redevelop- ment and restructuring of debts and the like; Reverend Gene Scott explains it on Channel 36, if you know what I mean. I don't understand it all, but it's big, like you say."

"Yeah. I hate it, looking into the mouth of the beast. Got to do it every day; somehow got to get used to it," I said.

Later, after Gil left, the billing agent from El Camino Hospital called about Lew, who had spent a few days in ICU after being scooped up after Gil called the paramedics from the phone in front of the Maas Hotel. Lew collapsed one night on his way from the lobby back out to the manager's car where he had been living because he was out of rent money. The agent wondered if I was helping him get on MediCal state health insurance. She was interested because for various bureaucratic reasons, the Great Beast at El Camino Hospital would not enroll a person for MediCal, but if the patient did it on his own, MediCal would pay the hospital part of what I presumed was a $25,000 bill. Despite my repeated efforts to get him in to sign up for MediCal before he collapsed, he never followed through because he was so depressed and weak. The agent thus wanted me to get him signed up for MediCal so she could collect on a bill that otherwise would never be paid. "That's perfectly silly," I told her. "I know this is not your personal silliness, but wouldn't it make more sense for you people to have a MediCal contract so you could have signed him up while he was in the hospital?" The Great Beast had crooked teeth, and bad digestion.



Calvin spent his life trying to make sense of a very few incidents in his youth. His alcoholic mother revealing to him that she was not his aunt; his alcoholic uncle dumping him on a street corner when he was seventeen; telling the prison chaplain that the reason the chaplain had come to visit him was that his uncle had just died. Leaving his alcoholic wife and his stepchildren in Pittsburgh: did the Bible say it was a sin? He repeated these incidents to me without end, and while on one level it was boring, on another it was amazing how he ruminated on these stories, how he processed and reprocessed them like a tiny lump of nuclear fuel that could run a gigantic submarine.

I came to appreciate this phenomenon. A life lived in coming to grips with just a few of its stories was a life still worth living. Cal's stories were worth his while. Maybe there were better things for Cal to do, but for that time, those stories were his life. I also at times endlessly replayed past incidents while letting the present world run on idle. But what valuable discoveries might I have made about myself and about life if I did as thorough a job of it as Cal did?



In the Kitchen dining room while passing the serving line on his way for seconds, Dirty Bill took me aside. "Jim, I've been reading the Bible lately and I found the passage where Jesus curses the fig tree. (Mark 11) You know, it seems a bit out of character for him to do a violent thing like that. You've been to seminary, you're a minister; explain this story to me."

Dirty Bill did a lot of reading, but this was the first time I knew he read the Bible. Bill lived in his Pinto with his banjo and his telescope and the rest of his worldly goods. When he was an electronic engineer, he had paid a friend to mill him that banjo out of solid brass. But once he hit the streets, Bill spent his days playing the banjo in the park, reading books, and watching the trees grow. Whenever I stopped to talk with him at the Kitchen, we made observations together about the amazing ways of nature. He'd pull out the scope so we could stand in line in the parking lot to look at the moon through it in the twilight. Bill displayed a vivid awareness of the habits of birds, the qualities of plants, and the changes of seasons as reflected in the heavens and experienced by him while living in his car. Subject as he was to the weather and the other transformations of nature, he noticed so much that otherwise I would have missed.

Dirty Bill was so named to differentiate him from other Bills who ate at the Kitchen. I first met Dirty Bill when Ron, the Missionary Mechanic, brought him by the agency office to set him up with a meal pass. Most people came into my office for the first time because they needed and wanted something: food, jobs, showers, soap, or just a cup of coffee and a listening ear. But Bill was different. He asked for nothing. He didn't hustle for his survival. He was absolutely courteous and well-spoken and in no hurry for anything. He seemed not to be driven by passions or bad habits. He didn't grasp for life, and depended totally on whatever means of survival landed in his lap. One evening after dinner, I asked Bill how he was getting along. "I have no idea how I get along. It just happens!" He waved his big arms, gesturing the downpouring of daily grace from above. "If the food or the gas runs out, it just comes! I wake up in the morning and to my amazement, I am still alive. I have no idea how I make it." That was his attitude when Ron the Missionary Mechanic brought him to my office for the first time.

Ron, too, lived in his station wagon, which was equipped with a color television that plugged into the cigarette lighter. The Missionary, as yet unable to quit drinking and get a job and a house, avoided fixing himself and focussed on fixing just about anyone else who would let him. He had done dirty to more than a few in his younger days, and since he believed in cosmic justice, he was exercising as much righteousness as he could, to settle his own karmic account. One of his missions was Dirty Bill. He got Bill to go get a meal pass from me, he tuned up his Pinto, gave him a few bucks for gas in exchange for sharpening his knives, and gently tried to convince him to get a shower.

According to the calculations of the rest of the Kitchen patrons, Bill had not taken a shower for six months. The dead skin on his arms was in patches under his arm-hairs. Three hundred pounds of Dirty Bill stuffed into a Pinto every night with a poodle and a few opened cans of tuna from the agency office; the force-field around him at his table at the Kitchen was so powerful that few could penetrate closer than two chairs away without choking. Three months before, I had given him a pass to our free clothes closet, a towel, soap, and a shampoo bottle. He never showered, but he got a clean shirt and wore it and we celebrated. Three months later and the new yellow polo shirt was blackened down the chest, and his same old Levi's were stiffer with dirt.

"What do you think? Why did he dry up the fig tree?" The story had always intrigued me, as well, but I had not reflected upon it with anyone before that conversation with Dirty Bill. "And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to it to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said to it, "May no one ever eat fruit from you again.""

My intellect quickly went into action with Bill's, and I speculated on an aspect of the story that I'd never considered before. "I don't understand the story, either. But it might be about timing. The Greek word for 'season' is kairos, which also means the right or appropriate time for something to happen. Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem for the last time when this incident happened. The story might have been an illustration to his disciples that now was the right time, the 'kairos', for bearing fruit, because now was the hour of his passion and death. He was telling them that now was the time for Israel to bear fruit, or never."

Bill nodded, pleased with this interpretation. "I figured it had to be something literary. What's that word in Greek, 'kairos'?" I wrote it out for him on the back of a scrap of paper; he could pronounce out the Greek letters, because he had once studied a little Greek himself. I was pleased to have been asked the question and to have given such a clever answer.

On my way home in my Pinto, which was the same year and color as Bill's, I continued to meditate on the story of the fig tree. As I did, I had to admit that I still did not understand the story. It was still disturbing, still a side of the personality of Jesus that I didn't like. Why did he wither up the tree, depriving some hapless householder of its fruit in its own right time?

And then the more important question surfaced. Why was Dirty Bill so interested in this story? I had not bothered to find out why he read the story of the fig tree, and why it bothered him enough to ask me about it. Was Dirty Bill himself the damned fig tree, a fruitless, smudged lump of a man who had no season, no hope of coming to bear? In my pleasure at my interpretive ability, I had missed the point of the reading of the Bible at all; it is a means of revealing and describing what is going on around us now. I had missed the opportunity to reflect with Dirty Bill on our life situations and on what the fig tree story had to do with us. I had succumbed to the temptation to be in the helper-client, teacher-student relationship. I had succumbed to the temptation to settle with answers instead of living with questions.

The story didn't get any less disturbing the more time I spent with it. At home, I read the different versions of it, and the parable of the fig tree, and other related passages.

In this story, everybody blew it. First, the fig tree missed the extraordinary opportunity to offer the hungry Jesus some fruit. Think how wonderful it would have been to be able to serve a meal to the Christ! But the fig tree was busy growing out its leaves, and refused to speed up the process for Jesus' sake. Then, the spectacle of Jesus himself. He was having a bad day. He was homeless and hungry and about to find himself in big trouble in Jerusalem. He was in such a foul mood that when he went up close to the tree, which any Palestinian would know was not ready to bear fruit, he cursed it so thoroughly that by the next day, it was dried up and dead. Now, Jesus' disciples were no better. Did they offer food or comfort to Jesus, who was in such a funk? No. They asked, "How did the fig tree wither at once?" (Matthew. 21: 20) The disciples wanted to know how the trick was done, because all they cared about was power. They wanted to do deeds as awesome as those Jesus did. They didn't care about the immediate situation and need of Jesus. And there I was, completely missing the opportunity to listen to Dirty Bill's story as revealed in the story of the fig tree. All I cared about was solving an intellectual problem and showing off my answer, to demonstrate my ministerial professionalism and to think I could serve another without becoming deeply involved myself.

I had missed Bill's kairos, his right time, for sharing his life. Once he was an engineer in the Silicon Valley, making good money. Once he had a big piano, and played classical music with his interesting and educated friends. On the streets, he played banjo for Bruno, his dog, up at Cuesta Park. He lived off the fortuitous encounters with helpful street people, picking up the stray day-labor job or dollar for a gallon of gas or a hamburger. Did he blame Jesus for his withering? Did he blame God for the drying-up of his life, the loss of his will to live and bear fruit?

Bill and I after this incident shared some right times. After his poodle died, and Bill became more listless than ever. He was not as talkative as he used to be, but in a few words and gestures we acknowledged to each other what was happening. I told him how big my wife was getting: she was pregnant. He liked to hear about her, and to speculate about the sex and size of the baby.

I wanted to know: who cursed Bill and caused him to wither? And was it true that he would never bear fruit again? Would Jesus ever lift the curse from the fig tree? I was waiting for the rest of the story, trying to trust that it would come in its own right time.



The people who lived on the #22 bus, riding from San Jose to Menlo Park and back again, all night: did they really belong somewhere else, as I sometimes believed? In houses, rehabilitation programs, hospitals? Jesus wasn't where he was supposed to be, according to his parents, after their family outing to the temple in Jerusalem. (Luke 2) He said he belonged rather in his Father's house, but what kind of a house was that? Drafty, full of sacrificial smoke; a public place. Where was he supposed to sleep? On stone benches, in porticos?

In so many encounters, after so many referrals to other services and placements and resources, I quietly questioned my assumptions. Could I be blind to the possibility that the people of Rolling Estates belonged on the streets, where they lived and slept, working out their vocations and their stories, following a divine call I could not discern or understand?

It was as if I had put myself into a position where I would get daily demonstrations of the continuum of body and mind, of spirit and flesh. One evening I spoke with Rick and Rhonda outside the Community Kitchen. Rhonda's arm was in a cast. Rick and Rhonda lived in a Toyota. They wrote $6,000 in bad checks and each of them was about to go to a different jail. When I saw the cast, the latest of their misfortunes, it made me shake my head in wonder at the way the world worked. "It was an accident. I slipped on a concrete floor." She wanted very much to believe it was an accident. Our culture suggests that accidents are disturbing realities, but we can discount them on a statistical basis. We live with the odds, and believe they strike us more or less at random. But I learned to stop believing that such incidents were mere accidents. If the arm-breaking could have been isolated in the immediate period around itself, it would have seemed "only an accident". But knowing Rhonda as I did, the broken arm was extremely meaningful to me. It was an act in a drama which she was playing out, only in her dimmest self-awareness. It was a lot easier for me to watch this painful drama than for her to be its audience, because she had made herself the star performer in it.

Mitch came in my office and we had a long talk. His arm was also in a cast; a bad sprain. "Just when I had a job offer, this happens. Can't do any electrical work with a bad arm," he complained. Mitch was a heroin addict, and he told me his life story: a tale of lost jobs, failed relationships, using, abusing, quitting, and starting to use again. A tale of the lost drivers' license, the outstanding warrant, the lost credit rating. "The harder I try to climb out of the hole, the deeper it gets." And he sincerely wanted out. Yet the drama continued. He played it out. Did he have any control over the plot? Could he stop it? The bad arm fit integrally into the plot. In isolation, it had a random quality. But in the context of Mitch's life, it had blatant meaning. Of course he had a sprained arm! It was in the story.

The metaphors for Bernie were "get down on your knees", "hit the dirt", "fall flat on your face on the ground". Bernie was drunk on the job and fell in front of a fork-lift that ran over his knee, disintegrating it. Because he was not cooperative with his doctors, the knee never healed properly after several surgeries. Bernie slept under a sheet of clear plastic in a vacant lot behind the 101 Club bar. "Every morning I wake up and thank God I have another go at life, another day." He was a pleasant, pacific fellow in wild hair and a wide mustache. Repeatedly he was hauled off to Valley Medical because he stumbled on his crutches while he was drunk, and couldn't get up again. He hobbled into the office with no crutches. "You don't look ready to stand on your own," I immediately observed. "I'm not. Some punks stole my crutches while I was at the bus stop this morning," he replied. What was supposed to happen when he fell to his knees? Was some prayer supposed to be spoken, or was he waiting for some kind of answer?

I repeatedly observed that the most useful occupational training I underwent was the careful reading of literature, of meaningful stories or poetic constructions. There was plot development and poetic artistry going on everywhere in my universe. Physical realities -- slippery concrete floors, fork- lifts, and their constituent masses and energies -- all were busy in the development of layers of plot and meaning. Nothing was meaningless.

I used to believe in accidents, in the meaninglessness of whole classes of phenomena. But too many meaningful broken arms presented themselves to me, cracking what I thought was common sense.

I wondered: assuming I was absolutely surrounded by meaning, by grand dramas and unfolding poetries, what else would I be able to allow myself to discover? And what did it suggest about the structure and nature of the universe as a whole?



"Can I get some phone numbers from you?" asked Anne. She wanted some information about clinics for her 14-year old daughter, who was 7 months pregnant. Anne herself had epilepsy which may have resulted from drug abuse several years before. She lived in a car in front of the apartment house where her daughter, alcoholic mother, and aged grandmother lived. Because the landlord wouldn't let four people live in a one- bedroom unit, Anne, being the least vulnerable of the family, used the car as her bedroom and took her showers in the apartment during the day.

"But what about the Violet Rice Home?" I asked, surprised. "What about adoption? That was what Julie wanted to do when I talked with her a month ago."

"Well, she changed her mind."

Anne was a tall, spare woman with wild, blonde hair that was thinning in spots. Her epilepsy medicine made her hair fall out and her gums recede, giving her a cadaverous but still bright smile. She shrugged her shoulders, as she often did, at her daughter's decision to keep the baby.

Julie had come into my office with her boyfriend to talk about adoption. "Hey, I won't get busted, will I?" asked the boyfriend, age 18 and guilty of statutory rape. "Don't worry about that. Let's worry about the child," I replied. He was a skinny fellow with tattoos (one of which had another girl's name in it) and a dangling silver cross earring. His mother, whom I knew, had been on AFDC welfare when he was born.

Julie was a pale, thin and pimply but very lively young wom- an who told me herself she had no business raising a baby at her age and in her circumstances. She had found she was pregnant after abortion was no longer an option: "I just thought I was getting a little fat, that's all." I put her on the phone to the Violet Rice Home to get her started on the process of adoption.

But those efforts came to nothing. "Well, Anne, it sounds like you changed your mind, too; you could make it pretty hard for her to keep the baby if you wanted it to be adopted." I went on to explain all her options, laying on her my strong opinion that the child should be put up for adoption.

Anne's face went vacant, glazed in front of her thoughts, as my lecture continued.

When I finished, I saw in her eyes what I had done. She already knew her options. She had made up her mind to take care of the baby. She knew that there would not be enough AFDC to make any real difference in the household income, and that the housing situation would get tighter, and that it would lock her daughter into the poverty cycle. But I could see that my forceful oratory had just denied the value of her own life.

I saw in a flash that Julie's baby would be born into the same sort of circumstances into which Julie was born, which was the way Anne came into the world, and which was the way Anne's mother was raised, as well. This was the fourth, and maybe the fifth or sixth or seventh, generation of birth into poverty and family instability.

I had just re-written the script of Anne's life from what it was to what it "ought" to have been. Anne herself should have been adopted away to a nice, middle-class suburban family. She should have been married to an accountant and Julie should have been living in one of four bedrooms in a house with a two-car garage. Julie should have been doing well in school and had plenty for which to live besides getting pregnant at age 14.

But Anne was right. Her own life had infinite value just the way it was. Anne had the right family, the right mother and daughter. The infant would be born to the right mother, the right grandmother, great-grandmother, great-great grandmother.

So obvious, yet so easy to forget: I was not Anne. It was good that she know my values, that she knew of people who made different kinds of choices than she makes. It was good that she knew that if they had made the choice to adopt, there would have been more support for it. But for better or worse Anne and Julie had the right to keep the child, or at least give a go at it. So I had no business telling her what to do.

"Anne, I'm sorry for the lecture. Please forget it happened. Let me know whatever I can do to help when the baby comes. And now, let's get those phone numbers . . ."



I read the paper one morning and saw the crime report, which I usually avoided. "Calvin McGowan of Mountain View was arrested for robbing three banks and buying heroin in East Palo Alto." "Oh no," I moaned. This man as much as lived in my office for several months; we had talked out his whole life story dozens of times. He had once been into dope, in jail for car theft, but had stayed out of trouble for years. Cal had been a success story. After months of emotional paralysis, he went on to get a job in a carwash, and he moved into a storage shed. Now this: bank robbery, heroin addiction again. For a few days I tried to deal with this disappointment and grief about my friend Cal, about the tremendous difficulty of keeping one's head together while wandering the streets, about the effort Cal told me was required for him to resist the temptation to act crazy and be criminal.

A few days later I was in the lobby and in came Cal. "What are you doing here?" I asked, blown back with surprise. "What do you mean, what am I doing here? Remember that $20 bucks you gave me once? Here it is." He gave me the twenty I lent him out of my wallet nine months before, and had forgotten. After talking with him for a few minutes I found that it was a different Cal that had been busted for bank robbery. Same name, same age, same city of residence. And there was my friend, paying off an old debt, straightening out his life yet a little more, even as I had despaired of his fate.



Gilbert left me another of his drawings: a network of overlapping networks of lines connecting ovals, done in ball point pen on scratch paper that I left in the front office for him.

He would often sit there in the morning in the office and go through a stack of scratch paper, making unique network drawings on each sheet, and would leave them in a heap in the lobby.

But this unusually clear picture suggested something wonderful and disturbing to me. I recognized what had seemed familiar about his designs all along. They looked like neurons, like brain cells, with tendrils networking among themselves.

Was Gil drawing the architecture of the thoughts of his own mind?



Mike came into the CSA office for a loaf of bread. He lived in a downtown hotel on a Social Security Disability check. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic. In days past, he would have been locked up in an institution, but now, when and if he took his medicine, he was able to live independently, with a little help from his friends. He could converse in everyday patter like the rest of us, but he and I went deeper.

He told me that he was a black belt in karate now. "Really? I'm surprised," I told him, because he was an unlikely candi- date: he was hunched over, with a pot-belly, and moved slowly under the effects of his prescription drugs. "Yes. Finally I made it. Now I'm ready for Bruce Lee. Just the other day," he told me, "I was talking with my psychiatrist when out of the corner of my eye I saw the devil slithering into the room on the carpet in the form of a rattlesnake. I spun around, snapped out my foot and leg, crushed the head of the snake, spun back and faced my psychiatrist again so fast that he didn't even notice what I had done!"

"Indeed you must be a black belt to do such a thing," I agreed.

What happened in that incident in the psychiatrist's office? To deny the literal truth of my friend's story would have been to disrespect the vividness of his personal experience. To have told him I didn't believe he was a black belt, that I thought he was only using it as a metaphor for his ability to resist evil and temptation, would have been to dishonor the validity of his own experience. I had absolutely no doubt of the sincerity of his expression of what happened in the psychiatrist's office. To him it was certainly real. Insofar as I could participate in his ex- perience, it was real for me. And insofar as I could validate his experience -- without pretending to be schizophrenic myself -- I could do him the deep service of listening and responding.

There was a lot to learn from Mike the black belt and my other schizophrenic friends about the varieties of truth and reality. I found schizophrenia to be a most useful starting point in understanding the Bible and, in turn, in understanding all kinds of people. Like the black belt, the writers of the Bible took events and material around them and in their imaginations and blended it in their realities. They were extremely free and creative in their interpretations. In the pattern of waves in the lay of the carpet in his psychiatrist's office, my friend saw a writhing rattlesnake. An absolutely real rattlesnake. In the light that blinded him on the Damascus road, Paul found transforming power. In the sight of Jesus breaking bread with the disciples after the crucifixion, they experienced profound and personal resurrection. But these experiences are known only when they are honored for having the same, and perhaps more intense, vividness that we associate with reality. Mike's story, and those of many others, taught me to have total respect for the reality of subjective experience . . . including that of my own moods, dreams, and visions.



The Missionary Mechanic got his license back; he'd been carefully driving without it for six months and never got caught. But his 502 charge was coming up, and he was still hustling to get the money for a bankruptcy lawyer. Ron was about $30,000 in debt: bad checks and overrun credit cards darkened his future. Felony theft, those bad checks, and if he wound up in jail for his drunk driving charge they might notice his other crimes. He avoided getting jobs that deducted for taxes and Social Security, fearing that the law would catch up with him that way. So he fixed cars, did odd electrical and maintenance jobs, walked the carpenters' picket line, and whatever else he could find for cash under-the-table. But he couldn't seem to save the thousand dollars he figured it would cost him to get a decent lawyer to do his bankruptcy and minimize the trouble he faced with the bad checks.

And there was more news from Rolling Estates. Dirty Bill was reading Moliere plays, among his other literary interests. And he gave me a copy of Elmer Gantry, saying I'd enjoy it. I was not sure what he was implying about my profession. Cowboy Dick was trying to get the money together to go to Alaska to be with his dying mother; $600 bucks in round trip airfare; a lot for a guy who mowed the occasional lawn and swamped the occasional bar for a living. The Colonel, who was a Vietnam vet living on $1,500 a month military pension and bankrolled the boozing of dozens of our Kitchen people, got murdered in a motel by two guys who ate at the Kitchen for a few nights, resulting in all sorts of suspicions and speculations on the streets. The cops came and interviewed me about the case. The suspects had not been sighted since they ate at the Kitchen on the evening of the murder. Hilario came in and paid me back the $12 I'd forgotten that I had loaned him out of my wallet a month before. There was so much bread coming every day from Safeway that I kept tripping over it in the hallway.



Nevida and my pregnant wife and I accepted the invitation to attend the christening party for the seventh child of Hector and Leticia Hernandez. The party was held in the nice, airy house they had rented in east Menlo Park. Lots of brightly colored plastic children's toys littered the front yard as we approached. The healthy and happy family swarmed us with goodwill as we joined in the conversation and good food.

They didn't need the room in the shelter for long. Hector got back on a carpet-laying crew; they saved their money and rented the house, and with EHP's help furnished it with donations. The invitation to the christening party was their way of thanking us for our help.

As we left, the family protested that we should party with them for the rest of the night. But we pleaded a need for sleep.

"You aren't the only one pregnant," said Nevida to my wife as we walked to our cars. "Leticia has another one on the way -- number eight!"



A member of a local church took me aside one evening as she served dinner as a volunteer at the Kitchen: "Why can't we find shelter for these poor people? Ever since I started working here, I haven't been able to enjoy my nice warm bed anymore, knowing that these people have to live in cars or bushes in the cold."

Clever were the ways of evil, to take a perfectly good bed -- not a fancy waterbed, just a regular Sealy Posturepedic -- and make of it a bed of torturous guilt for a lovely, caring woman. Would the homeless be any warmer at night for her suffering? No, everyone's hell would be just that much colder.

I seldom found that guilt was the motivation for homeless people to help each other. They shared because that was how people survived in their world.

I prayed that I could do my job just because it was what I was to do, and not out of pity or out of a sense of cosmic guilt. Evil itself was the only moral accountant in the cosmos. Evil was our forgetfulness that all debts were forgiven, including the incongruity that some had beds and others did not.



I was walking down Castro Street and found Gil sitting at the bus stop reading the paper. He walked with me toward the office to see if he could get any milk. On the way, he was rub- bing his swollen jaw.

"Gee, Gil, have you seen the dentist about that tooth yet?"

"Dentist?" he howled, stopping in the middle of the street we were crossing. He backed away from me, waving his arms. He went into a harangue against dentists, and against people like me who meddle in other people's lives. I realized that in the mere mention of dentistry, it was as if I had become the dentist, and the street was the dentist's office, and Gilbert was terrified that I'd turn the drill on him right then and there.

Only after artfully changing the subject was I able to help Gilbert out of the dentist's chair in the middle of Evelyn Street and walk with him into the safety of the office where, to my relief and his, a quart of half-and-half awaited him.



The next day, I found another note on my desk:

"Dear Jim. An idea for giving competent or complex den- tists mercury in the morning. Breakfast with a straitjacket. Sanity a thin line. Do we all walk it? My morning column!"



Pops presented himself at the office before I left to work at the Santa Claus Exchange, our Christmas gift program for low- income people in Mountain View. He had been hounding me for months to find him a place to live. For months I had been telling him at the Kitchen to come down to my office so we could make phone calls to register him with the Project Match senior shared housing program. "I can't do it wi