What people are saying about …
“Greg Paul writes about personal experiences beyond the imagination of most of us. This book won’t just challenge your thinking; it will deliver a punch to your emotional gut. And it is the kind of punch we believers need. Read it at your own risk.”
Mark Sanborn, speaker and author of The Fred Factor and You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader
“Nobody haunts the house of God more with those who are missing and must be there—the poor—than Greg Paul. His writing proves that being a great stylist doesn’t mean any diminution of substance. The church is only a holy haunt when its members are being enriched every day by poverty-haunted lives. Love this book.”
Leonard Sweet, author of 11 and Soul Salsa and professor at Drew University, George Fox University (sermons.com)
“The Twenty-Piece Shuffle dares to declare a profoundly human, theological reality—that not only are we all irrevocably connected, but also we need each other in order to become more truly human! With all his heart and his life, Greg declares that these mysteriously transforming relationships connect to our deepest heart’s need. Greg’s personal, experiential, gospel-based theology is refreshingly sound, while the gifts of his remarkable friends inspire the human, spiritual journey.”
Sister Sue Mosteller, international coordinator of L’Arche and author of My Brother, My Sister; Body Broken, Body Blessed; and Light Through the Crack
“While lectures and sermons have their place, they often have a harsh edge because they can quickly become prescriptive and pragmatic. Stories, in contrast, are often more gentle and invite us to experience reality as it is. Greg Paul is a master storyteller, one who quietly expands our understanding of the gospel and kingdom values in a way that is both disarming and convicting.”
Rod Wilson, president and professor of counseling and psychology at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada
“Brutally observant, painfully gracious, annoyingly perceptive, awkwardly patient. This is Greg Paul. His book is even worse!”
Drew Marshall, host of The Drew Marshall Show
“With stories lovingly told but with neither sentimentality nor sensationalism, Greg Paul invites us on a journey home toward God. And the guides for this journey are none other than those who have experienced homelessness in its most devastating and violent forms. Paul receives these stories as gifts, and exercises a caring and respectful stewardship of them. When a crack addict scores a twenty-dollar piece of crack he or she walks away from the dealer with what Paul calls ‘the twenty-piece shuffle.’ It is a walk towards a high that will dull the pain and is an attempt to achieve an experience that is unachievable. It is a walk away from home. In this book we discover that we are all walking ‘the twenty-piece shuffle.’”
Brian J. Walsh, coauthor of Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Dislocation and Christian Reformed campus minister at the University of Toronto
“In The Twenty-Piece Shuffle, Greg Paul dips the nib of his most writerly pen into the recesses of his heart and tells us stories of redemption within pain and God’s glory in the dirt. Paul’s firsthand accounts of working with those in need in inner-city Toronto will break your heart. But his hope in God will knit it back together, hopefully in ways that will enable you to love as God loves and distribute that love to those who need it so desperately. In any case, The Twenty-Piece Shuffle helps us to see that in each destitute person resides the image of God, truly a human being just like you and me, and believe it or not, there’s something we can learn from them. A beautiful book.”
Lisa Samson, author of Justice in the Burbs and Quaker Summer
“Embedded in these supremely well-told stories of various encounters with the weird and wonderful is the deeply subversive message that we the middle class really need the poor and marginalized because they show us the depth of our own poverty. This book is just the kind of medicine that the missionally challenged Western church needs.”
Alan Hirsch, author of The Forgotten Ways and The Shaping of Things to Come and cofounder of shapevine.com
“In Matthew’s parable of the sheep and the goats, Jesus creates a startling scenario in which the world’s losers become the judges of its winners. Jesus’ upside-down kingdom aligns itself with the last, the lost, and the least and challenges his followers with the hard truth that we are all connected and that the quality of relationship that exists between the rich and the poor, between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” is a defining measure of the authenticity of professed faith. The Twenty-Piece Shuffle fleshes out this idea in the context of Greg Paul’s life and ministry in Toronto. It does so with the gentle graciousness and deft lyricism that is the hallmark of Greg’s writing. Unlike every second film that Hollywood produces these days, The Twenty-Piece Shuffle is not based on a true story or even inspired by true events …it is both a true story and truth to boot.”
Geoff Ryan, major in the Salvation Army, author of Siren Call of a Dangerous God, publisher of www.therubicon.org, and coordinator of the 614 network of urban communities
“It is a tall order to speak truth with both tenacity and warmth. It is an extraordinary feat to dig deep into true-life stories without exploiting those who’ve led them. And it is a profound gift to see God in all peoples, rich or poor, in a world that habitually designates souls into one of three categories: heroes, villains, or uneventful pedestrians. But Greg has led a life and found a voice that remarkably delivers ‘the best of’ on all counts. The Twenty-Piece Shuffle not only exposes why the poor and rich need each other—it erases the lines in the sand that categorize and divide them.”
Tim Huff, author of Bent Hope, author and illustrator of The Cardboard Shack Beneath the Bridge, and director of Youth Unlimited, Toronto
“Greg unfolds the story of a sojourner’s community wounded and scared by the gods of affluence and poverty. At Sanctuary the homeless, both poor and rich alike, have learned to journey well together, found safety in belonging, and discovered that each possesses wisdom to guide the other on the long road to home. A truly marvelous and insightful read. This is holy ground.”
Rick Tobias, CEO of Yonge Street Mission, Toronto
THE TWENTY-PIECE SHUFFLE
Published by David C. Cook
4050 Lee Vance View
Colorado Springs, CO 80918 U.S.A.
David C. Cook Distribution Canada
55 Woodslee Avenue, Paris, Ontario, Canada N3L 3E5
David C. Cook U.K., Kingsway Communications
Eastbourne, East Sussex BN23 6NT, England
David C. Cook and the graphic circle C logo
are registered trademarks of Cook Communications Ministries.
All rights reserved. Except for brief excerpts for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form without written permission from the publisher.
The Web site addresses recommended throughout this book are offered as a resource to you. These Web sites are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement on the part of David C. Cook, nor do we vouch for their content.
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible. (Public Domain); and esv are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Copyright © 2000; 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Italics in Scripture quotations have been added by the author for emphasis.
LCCN 2008929269
ISBN 978-1-4347-9942-5
eISBN 978-1-4347-6578-9
© 2008 Greg Paul
The Team: Andrea Christian, Amy Kiechlin, Jack Campbell, and Karen Athen
Cover Design: Disciple Design, David Terry
Interior Design: Disciple Design
Cover Photo: Phillip Parker
First Edition 2008
For the prophets of the parks, streets, alleys, and stairwells
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: The Long Road Home
Chapter 2: Defining “Home”
Chapter 3: Doing the Twenty-Piece Shuffle
Chapter 4: Guides for the Journey
Chapter 5: On the Way
The First Leg of the Journey From Isolation to Intimacy
Chapter 6: Intimacy and Isolation
Chapter 7: From Independence to Communion
Chapter 8: From Impregnability to Vulnerability
The Second Leg of the Journey From Productivity to Fruitfulness
Chapter 9: Productivity and Fruitfulness
Chapter 10: From Accomplishment to Essence
Chapter 11: From Wandering to Journeying
The Third Leg of the Journey From Suffering to Glory
Chapter 12: Suffering and Glory
Chapter 13: From Anger to Sorrow
Chapter 14: From Death to Resurrection
Chapter 15: Arrival
Appendix
From the Giggle Shack to the Apollo in One Week
By George, I Think they’ve Got It!
Notes
Sanctuary
Sanctuary…A Place of Refuge
It seems odd to me that a book like this, which on the surface is the product of the efforts of one person working in (usually) rigid solitude, is actually the fruit of at least dozens and probably hundreds of lives lived in messy, complicated, but ultimately fecund community. When I was a boy, I had a paper route, delivering to twenty-odd homes a daily compilation of stories from around the globe—a tiny, erratic sampling of the unknowable breadth of human drama. I feel that my role is much the same now: I deliver a narrow slice of the costly wisdom, the prophetic utterances and actions of my people. It’s humbling and a great honor to do so.
So, first and foremost, all the people mentioned herein, whether by their real or assigned names, plus the whole Sanctuary community, including staff, board, worshippers, a slew of people who would usually be described as volunteers but for whom I prefer the more exalted, godly term “servants,” hundreds of community members who live courageous lives amid deep darkness, partners who give generously of their money, time, and other resources—all these must be acknowledged as the true authors of what I am privileged to “deliver.”
I’m grateful, too, for the inspiration and support offered by colleagues across the nation who are also engaged in seeking justice for people who are poor or excluded. These include people of many faiths (or none). Most particularly, my brothers and sisters who are part of StreetLevel, a national roundtable on poverty and homelessness (www. streetlevel.ca), are a source of constant encouragement.
Miller and Terri Alloway, of the Maranatha Foundation, provided both the time and the space (very beautiful space!) in which the greatest part of this book was written. It’s anybody’s guess if or when it would have been finished otherwise. Tim Huff shared that experience with me while working on a book of his own—it made a huge difference having such an encouraging, compatible writing buddy in the next room and with whom to hash over the day’s work in the evening.
Don Pape, friend and publisher, championed this book from the start, as he did with God in the Alley. Andrea Christian, my editor, made it better and more concise.
Finally, my sons and daughter (Caleb, Jesse, Rachel, and Kelly), have, in ways that they won’t begin to intuit until long after they’ve started having kids themselves, held me and kept me grounded during the difficult period in which this book was conceived. They’re incredible people.
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.…
—Wm. Wordsworth
I have to admit, I never liked Hanson1 much anyway, but I cared for him even less when he walked into a Sanctuary drop-in one perfect June morning and remarked, “Somebody better go check on Arthur. He’s squirming around on the grass outside, and he says he’s gonna die.”
A few months ago, I’d had to escort Hanson out of the building and inform him that he’d be barred for a month or so. Our rules are few and simple. I don’t recall what the infraction was—knowing Hanson, it likely had to do with him beating or threatening to kill somebody—maybe both. Hanson was a big, handsome Ojibwa guy with a broad chest, long black hair, and a picturesque scar at the side of his mouth. He was a bully and a poser who threatened people he knew couldn’t or wouldn’t respond. Once in a while, I’d find myself daydreaming about going toe-to-toe with him. It’s a good thing my Christian principles kept me from following up. He’d have wiped the floor with me.
The day I ejected Hanson, he had been drinking mouthwash or rubbing alcohol, and he was raving. When I told him he’d have to go, I stood in front of him with my arms out wide so he couldn’t go after whoever it was he had threatened (and so he’d know I wasn’t threatening him). He stepped up to me so we were chest to chest and bumped me a couple of times, like baseball managers do to umpires when they want the folks in the bleachers to know they’re sticking up for the team. His eyeballs were vibrating—yes, vibrating, as if he were a sugar-jacked ten-year-old with a new video game—and he was foaming at the mouth. He spit in my face once and took a little step back, waiting, I’m sure, for me to take a swing at him. I stepped right up close to him again, arms still sticking straight out to the sides, waiting for him to take a swing at me or head-butt me or, worse, ram his knee into my crotch; but he backed up. I stepped forward, we gained some kind of modest momentum, and in this herkyjerky two-step, I backed him up the length of the drop-in room, up the stairs, and out the front door. He threatened me, snarling and spewing all the way, but never laid a hand on me.
Other people in the drop-in, particularly those who knew Hanson from the street, said the situation was virtually miraculous. Hanson, I think, was a little disconcerted. I was just plain grateful. After that, he treated me pretty well—at least when he was sober. When he was drunk, it was another matter.
The day Hanson came in and announced Arthur was dying, he seemed to be sober. I didn’t doubt there was something seriously wrong, but Hanson’s nonchalance and unwillingness to do anything about it himself bugged me—after all, Arthur was his older brother. I called for Keren Elumir, our parish nurse at the time, and the two of us rushed outside.
Sanctuary is housed in a little old brown brick church building at the north end of Toronto’s downtown core and just a stone’s throw from Yonge Street, the city’s traditional “Main Street.” We don’t have much space. Almost the whole front yard is covered with paving brick, and with some careful planning, we can squeeze as many as eight compact cars onto it. The grass Hanson had said Arthur was squirming on was (still is) really a small patch of hard-packed dirt with a few hardy blades poking through a fulsome crop of cigarette butts.
And sure enough, there’s Arthur on his back amid the butts, with his head thrown back and his knees drawn up to his chest. Skinny, filthy fingers clutch his shins as he rocks back and forth, moaning. The cuffs of his jeans are frayed, and the legs are torn and dotted with cigarette burns. The rocking and moaning stop abruptly. His back arches, head lurches forward.
“I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die.”
Keren kneels, lifts his head gently, and places it on her knees. She is trying to keep him from choking on his tongue or vomit. His eyes roll wildly up at her, disappearing momentarily behind the lids as if, once they’re started in a given direction, he can’t stop them. The pupils flutter back down into view, although they continue to dance and jerk around. His face twists and twitches. It is an ugly face—its nose poorly placed, the wrong size and shape, a wrinkled forehead, a wide, crooked mouthful of rotten teeth. The hair spread on Keren’s lap is a mess of greasy black string, laced with monster flakes of dandruff that have come adrift of the islands of angry red psoriasis that dot his scalp. She gently pushes the hair away from his forehead and pats the sweat away with a wad of Kleenex.
“911?” I ask and, getting the nod, dial the number on my cell phone. Once I have navigated past the initial questions, I hand the phone over to her. Keren speaks calmly into the receiver and gently strokes Arthur’s head each time he is hit with a spasm.
“S’wrong with him?” asks a street guy who has just arrived for the meal that is about to be served at Sanctuary. “Food poisoning?”
“Nope,” says another voice. Turning, I realize Hanson has joined the handful of silent gawkers and is standing to the side at a respectful distance. His hands are folded in front of him as if facing a judge. “Arthur is dying now—from drinking the rubby.”
Rubbing alcohol is what he means, or mouthwash, and he may be right. I kneel beside Arthur. Keren is relaying symptoms to the emergency operator as though dictating a particularly fussy recipe to a friend.
Arthur may be ugly, but he’s a good guy—as decent as Hanson is nasty. Booze and street life have hollowed him out. His chest, almost covered by a ragged checked shirt crusted with what looks like dried excrement and blood and puke, threatens to cave in on itself. There seems to be no particular rhythm to its rise and fall. His arms are spindly, spotted with small scabs amid the blurry green jailhouse tattoos. The fingers that release their desperate grip on his shins to clutch his stomach every thirty seconds or so are discolored and split at the tips, like grapes gone bad.
“Hang on there, old-timer, the medics are coming.”
A deep unnnh!, another rolling spasm, and his eyes veer away from me again. It sure looks to me like alcohol poisoning, which I imagine could kill him, given that Arthur’s liver must be about the size and absorbency of a golf ball after the years of drinking. His brother Al died, just a couple of winters ago, stoned on cough medicine: a couple of quiet seizures in the middle of the night, while packed head to toe with a bunch of other men in a shelter. A week or two before he passed, Al had posed in the basement at Sanctuary to have his silhouette painted on the wall. He stood with his head cocked and hands raised, half reaching, half supplicating. He was asking the Great Spirit to receive his soul, he had joked, to carry him away from this hell.
Suddenly, I am pierced with sorrow for Hanson, still standing in quiet, impassive reverence, watching his brother’s withered body and soul being wrenched apart. Two older brothers gone or going. He can’t help but think that the prophecy of his own future is being played out before him. He stood exactly this way, at the back of the Sanctuary auditorium, throughout Al’s memorial. At the time, his lack of emotion seemed callous to me. Now it seems impossibly courageous.
“Arthur.” I place a hand on his weak chest and bend over his face, which is now the greenish hue of a tornado sky. “Arthur. The ambulance is on its way. Do you want me to pray for you?”
I know this is risky—most of my aboriginal friends have good reason to be, at the very least, suspicious of anything Christian. But most also have a strong sense of connection to the Creator. Arthur squeezes out a painful but definite “uh-huh.”
So I pray. Platitudes, mostly. Imploring the Creator to be with his child Arthur now in the midst of his pain and fear. To take that precious life in his hands. To protect his spirit. To be with Arthur in a way that he will know and feel, in a way that will grant him peace.
Although I believe that God is always close enough to touch, he never feels very near to me at times like this. And though I have known such prayers of mine to be, once in a while, comforting to the one being prayed for, to me in the moment they seem most often like empty, faintly silly words. Mostly they remind me of how completely helpless I am in any situation that really matters—and that, I suppose in my better moments, is the point.
The ambulance arrives with a skirl of sirens. One paramedic steps quickly from the cab, assesses the situation and the crowd of street people that has gathered, and turns back to get his gear. Two people appear, masked and gloved, and begin ordering people to stand back. Hanson is slow to move and receives a rude bark and a peremptory shove. He stumbles a bit but regains his balance and steps back, never taking his eyes from Arthur. Keren tries to brief the paramedics, but they aren’t listening, and they clearly think the two of us should move away from Arthur too. Keren brushes the hair from Arthur’s forehead and stays put.
I begin to stand up, but Arthur’s eyes suddenly lock on mine.
“It took me two hours to get here,” he says, clear as a bell. I nod and stand up.
Within minutes, the paramedics have bundled him onto a gurney and stashed him in the back of the ambulance. They motor off, no siren, without a backward glance. The crowd drifts off. Hanson is gone already. I catch a glimpse of him half a block away, turning onto Yonge Street, his black hair covering his proud shoulders.
I doubt that Arthur really remembers the event I’ve described here; he had so many others like it. For a few years, I expected almost weekly that I would hear that Arthur had finally died, but he’s outlived several who seemed sturdier, less entrenched in the patterns of self-destruction. These days, when I ask his old street brothers how he’s doing, they say simply, “Arthur’s doing good,” and change the subject. Arthur is sober and healthy, working for a center that provides services to the city’s aboriginal street community. They keep their distance from Arthur, and he from them. This is the painful price of his sobriety. Although they honor it, they can’t afford to look at it too closely.
It was only later that I thought about Arthur’s “final” words to me. He and I both thought it was the last thing he’d ever say to me, and getting back to Sanctuary took everything he had. But what did it look like?
I imagine it like this:
Arthur wakes up in an alley somewhere. He is huddled in a doorway on a piece of soggy cardboard—he’s pissed himself again—and his legs are tangled with those of one of his street brothers. Kevin, say. He can taste the bile in his throat, smells it in his hair, and thinks groggily, Whoa! Lucky I was lyin’ on my side.
He lies there, looking at the empty Listerine bottles, remembers talking with Kevin about fishing back on the rez as they drank, but isn’t sure who passed out first. He wonders why he’s even awake, since the sun has not yet risen high enough to peek over the buildings.
A wave of pain rips through his stomach—the same pain that hunted him in his dreamless sleep and dragged him groaning into consciousness. He yelps and curses and wraps his arms around his stomach. The pain subsides slowly.
“What was that?” he croaks to himself.
Seizures he’s had before. They’re scary because you’re so helpless, but they don’t hurt like this. The thought is hardly complete when the pain attacks again, like an angry raccoon trapped inside his stomach. He kicks his legs free of Kevin’s, wondering if they drank poison somehow and if Kevin is already gone. He struggles to his feet as quickly as he can, pushing his back against the brick behind him, and walking his shoulder blades up the wall.
“Kevin!” he shouts, but hears only a dry whisper. He boots the other man in the thigh, barely nudging him the first time, hard enough on the second try that Kevin rolls a bit. Enough to see that he’s still breathing. He calls again, sure that he’ll have another attack momentarily, but Kevin is comatose.
The pain returns and gets worse. Wave after wave, until there are no more waves, just one massive tidal rush of pain. He knows then that this is how he will die—here in this alley, amid fast-food containers and syringes. He has waited since he was a boy among drunken, dying adults for this drunken death to find him. He is only mildly surprised that it has appeared so soon: an invited guest who appears half an hour before the party is supposed to start.
But he will not die in this alley, he tells himself, hidden from the world and the sun, a human pile lost among the Dumpsters and stacks of plastic milk crates. The end of the alleyway seems far off. He does not yet know where he is going but trusts his spirit will lead him. He pulls himself along the length of a car, grabbing the door handles. He shuffles feet of stone through a cluster of used condoms, dry and wrinkled brown like shucked skin.
“Whoa!” he wheezes out loud. “Must be the Sacred Penis Burial Ground here.” He laughs to himself but pays for it immediately.
Out of the alley, the sun is blinding, a white light that washes the people and buildings thin. He has no sense of where he is. Nothing looks familiar; nothing makes sense. Everything he sees appears to him as a bad collage of mismatched elements. Somewhere high up, a flashing message: 9:13, and a second later, 26°C. Strange faces looming in and out of view. Distant voices asking something unintelligible.
At one point, Arthur realizes he is curled up in a doorway and wonders if he has actually moved at all, but Kevin is not here, the sun is bright, the sound of traffic is only a few feet away. An ugly white woman holds her face a foot away from his, yammering some nonsense at him. After she goes away, he tries to clamber to his feet again, but the pain in his stomach has commandeered all his strength. His legs fold up, knees to his chest, under a power that seems to come from somewhere beyond his body. Some time later he finds he is up and staggering, bouncing off shop windows—Yonge Street?—but has no idea how this came about. It’s as if this pain were a thick fog obscuring everything but an occasional and random sight or sound.
When it parts next, he sees his feet, at a great distance, shuffling along below him over reddish paving brick that is oddly familiar. There are faces, too, that he recognizes: street faces, not suits or shopgirls. They are smoking, looking at him but saying nothing. Beyond them is an arched limestone doorway, battered plank doors propped wide open. And he understands, then, where his spirit has led him.
He wants to mount the three steps to the doorway but finds he can’t lift his feet far enough. Ah well. He has come far enough; this is close enough. His legs collapse, and he settles on a bed of hard-packed dirt and cigarette butts. Another spasm yanks his knees up to his chest.
A pair of formerly white cross-trainers stops beside him.
“Arthur? What’s wrong with you?”
Arthur never liked Hanson much, although you’re really not supposed to admit that about your own brother. Too proud, too disrespectful. Hanson is too strong now, too, Arthur admits to himself, thinking of the many nasty things he did to Hanson as a child and how weak he himself has become.
“I’m gonna die,” he says, and saying it out loud sets free a fear that rides his pain like a boy on a wild horse. This is the place. He is terrified, but he is safe. He is finally home.
The home should be the treasure chest of living.
—Le Corbusier, recalled upon his death
Arthur’s journey from alley to Sanctuary is, as I’ve related it, only what I have imagined, but it can’t be far from what really happened. He woke up somewhere that morning in great pain, became convinced he was about to die, and spent the next two hours staggering his way to our front door.
“Imagine what I’ve been through just to find my way here, just to lie in this dirt with my head in Keren’s lap and your hand on my heart,” he said to me. It was only in imagining what the journey cost him that I came to realize how important it was and why he wanted me to know that it was important.
Because if you’re in pain, you want to be welcomed, comforted, cared for.
Because if you’re dying, you want to be somewhere safe enough to fight it or to let go.
Because when you’re out in the big bad world and things go terribly wrong, or wonderfully right, you want to go home. To mourn or to celebrate. To not have to be strong or reserved anymore—to give in to the need to tremble with fear, or be giddy with joy. To be able to do all of that without being humiliated or alone.
Because when you’re not welcome anywhere else, home, as Robert Frost wrote, is where, when you go there, they have to take you in. You can really live there—grow, dream, create. For a child growing up in a healthy, loving home, anything seems possible.
I have always had some version of a healthy home. I grew up in a Christian family with two brothers and a father and mother who loved me and still do. We were wealthier and more privileged in every way than I could comprehend at the time. Karen and I married when I was twenty-two, and we started our own home. Ten years later, I also had four kids and a house of my own (although, to this day, the bank owns a substantial chunk of it). My children are older now, and two live elsewhere, but they still come home often. And although our marriage staggered through a number of difficult years to a painful conclusion in 2006—a wrenching negation of “home” that was the bitterest experience of my life—we had years of mostly peace and stability that are still a precious foundation for who and what I am now.
I had a church “home” where I was appreciated and supported—so much so that the congregation and leadership commissioned Karen and me as missionaries to the downtown core of Toronto. They trusted me enough to let me root that ministry in playing rock ’n’ roll in smoky bars. And now, years later, many of the people of Richvale Bible Chapel still support the ministry that became Sanctuary to a degree that is humbling.
Sanctuary is home to me in so many ways. Although many in the community refer to me as the pastor of the Sanctuary church, I go on Sundays to be fed—and I am, without fail! This, I think, is a rarity for leaders in conventional churches. Our drop-ins, and the streets, alleys, bars, and coffee shops of the neighborhood are as familiar to me as my own bedroom; I am surrounded by friends, some of whom feel almost like family to me. I can hardly walk a block from Sanctuary’s front doors without someone calling my name, bumping fists, asking, “How’s it goin’?” (Or, “Got a quarter?”) My “colleagues” on staff are true brothers and sisters.
The band, Red Rain, has been a kind of home too. Since 1985, I’ve practiced, performed, and prayed with Dan, Les, and (since ’94) Doug. In ’06, Phil arrived, bringing the big fat gorgeous sound of his Hammond B3 organ with him. We’ve been through all kinds of deep water together. No doubt we’re headed for more. We’ve played together in many dark places, but we’ve also had the best seats in the house at some gloriously wild celebrations.
I have been profoundly and richly blessed with “home.”
But it’s never enough—I always hunger for more.
Actual material homelessness is a rising problem in the Western world. In some cities homeless people are policed into one area, and in others they are policed into hiding, but it is never difficult to find the mysterious figures with tatty beards and haunted eyes, wearing multiple layers of ragged clothing and huddling beneath bridges, in doorways, on subway grates, around fires lit in steel drums, in lean-tos of cardboard and plastic sheeting. Men prematurely old. Young girls who know too much too soon. The flotsam and jetsam of the wealthiest society the world has ever known.
These are the people who are at the heart of the Sanctuary community—men and women and transgendered people who struggle with addiction, mental illness, traumatic histories, and present circumstances that are an impossible mix of poverty, violence, continual danger, exclusion, systemic oppression, abusive sex, and more. Even those who have a roof over their heads, often in rooming houses that plumb the depths of the term “grim,” are, in the most essential way, homeless. They have never experienced the kind of warm embrace summed up in that simple word “home.” Where they should have been nurtured, they endured violence; the very relationships that ought to have taught them to trust were characterized by betrayal of the meanest sort.
Is it any wonder, then, that most people in most places view my homeless brothers and sisters as “them”—burdens on society, hopeless, perhaps dangerous? But how can “they” display respect for themselves or others when they have been raised on a diet of contempt? Some Christians might say, with that peculiar mixture of smugness and relieved resignation, “The poor you will always have with you.”1
I have so much to learn from my homeless friends. They teach me how much I take for granted and how sweet and rare safety and a true welcome are. My friends who have been outcasts all their lives because of mental illness reveal how deeply I still long to know that I really matter, that I am precious. My friends who struggle with addiction show me how rapacious my hunger is for ecstasy, for fulfillment—in a word, for glory.
My life, as blessed as I am, is filled with longing, pierced by a hunger that has never truly been sated. I’m like the prodigal, adrift and ravenous in a distant land, disappointed by most of what I have so eagerly sought, often disappointed with myself. My every experience of “home” has been fractured, ephemeral: scraps of rich meat thickly marbled with the indigestible gristle of failure, disillusionment, and broken relationship.
Like Arthur, I want to find a way home.
Hunger is insolent, and will be fed.
—Homer, The Odyssey
I recognized Benny from behind and halfway across the drop-in room. I don’t know how, given that it had been ten years since I had seen him last. He had lost that hungry, skulking look—lost a little hair too, but gained weight and a certain presence. I called his name. As he turned toward me, I could see that the pounds filling out the tight white T-shirt were mostly muscle.
“Well, look at you!” he said, stepping forward to shake my hand. “You look like you joined the marines.”
It might have been the khaki tank top I was wearing, but it was probably, I thought ruefully, the hair, which used to be brown and shoulder length, but was, by now, reduced to gray stubble.
“Benny, you scamp!” I had said, ten years earlier, when I heard his voice over the phone. “I saw you in the papers, man. You been doing banks in my neighborhood! The Scotiabank at Pape and Dan-forth is my branch—if you do that one too, I’ll have to hunt you down myself!”
He had laughed; a giddy, happy kind of laugh. “You can relax, bud. They caught me already.”
His phone call had been a surprise. For an uncomfortable moment I had thought that he was still on the run and looking to me for some form of help that I wouldn’t be able to give, but he was just calling to say hi. He had no one else to call, I guess.
Benny had originally been sent away on an assortment of small-time beefs—simple assault, shoplifting, b & e, the inevitable “failure to appear”—and was weeks from being released when he and a buddy decided they’d had enough and escaped from the minimum security facility. They stole a jail guard’s car, then held up a gas station for fuel, cigarettes, pop, and chips, before booting it straight back to Toronto.
Once back in the city it took him no time at all to boost a couple of defused hand grenades from an army surplus store. He and his running mate knew it was probably a matter of days before they got nailed by the cops. They determined they’d go back to the joint with some status and have some fun in the meantime.
Over the phone, he’d told me they had held up a dozen banks in less than a month with those bogus grenades, netting more than a hundred grand, and never bothered to cover their faces or even wear hats for the cameras. When I asked, half-serious, where they had stashed the money, he claimed they had spent every dollar. They were broke when they woke up in a room at the Sheraton at four o’clock in the morning, in the center of a pool of light cast by a dozen flashlights mounted on police assault rifles.
“Ooo-ee!” Benny crowed down the phone line. “That was an adrenaline rush!”
“So when are you in court next?” I asked, thinking of the usual round of five or six appearances necessary to get to an actual trial.
“Oh, I pled already. Got another fourteen years.”