Harsh and Dreadful Love

NB: I am writing about the days I did street engagement work among the unhoused population as a way of dealing with the trauma I experienced there. – HH

A few years into my work among the unhoused, I was making maybe $1200 a month doing this work, and it took all of my time. I was making ends meet (barely) by selling hotdogs on weekend nights on the corner between a porn shop and the leather bar.

When I talked about my work in churches (which was my major source of funding at this point), I was either revered or ridiculed – there was little middle ground. I was dispirited and exhausted.

So when I was invited to contribute a chapter to a book about love by a Christian publishing house, I got really excited. At that point, I was just desperate to be taken seriously.

If you are a creative person, there is no end of people who will want to exploit you for their benefit. For example, this particular project offered no pay for my work (other than the exposure and 1 free author copy). I assume the other 40 some odd contributors also were unpaid, but some of them were big names at the time, so maybe the headliners got paid and I didn’t. I have no idea. I just know I didn’t.

The publishing company would later go out of business, and while the book is still available on Amazon, I won’t link to it here, because when my author copy came in the mail (there is no feeling like holding a book in your hand that holds your words) the first thing I noticed is that it looked and felt cheap. The second thing was that it was full of typos. And then I saw that they had changed my story.

I don’t just mean it was edited – I expect and welcome edits, especially copy edits. No, the editor of this book literally changed the story I submitted, literally giving me interior dialog that suited their narrative, and that made it more “Christian”.

It might have been different if I had made the story up, but this was a real thing I had experienced. The struggles I felt were real. The whole point of my story was that love was hard, and the edits changed that narrative. They changed what I thought, what I believed.

I felt betrayed. I was already sick of a church industrial complex more interested in making things suit their narrative than reality. It was neither the first or the last time the world of professional Christianity would make me feel like I was being used.

Here is the story as I wrote it.


A Harsh and Dreadful Love

I’m not a huge fan of modern country music – but I love Johnny Cash. 

I know, I know, everybody loves Johnny Cash.  Now. But not many people were showing him any love back in the early 1990’s. He was washed up. Forgotten. Out of date. Just plain…old. 

But I was a true believer. I have always loved Johnny Cash, even when it looked like his career was over. I have digital copies of his entire discography. 

Every.  Single.  Album. 

I know the words to all of the songs, even the bad ones (If there were bad ones – a point I am not entirely willing to concede).

I love Johnny Cash. 

And I also love my wife.  But while my wife and I, like any married couple, have our ups and downs, Johnny and I have never had a bad day. It’s always been smooth sailing between Johnny and me. Johnny has never been upset when I forgot the milk. I have never snapped at Johnny because I couldn’t find my shoes. 

But that is because Johnny and I don’t have a real relationship. I never met Johnny Cash. He never knew my name. All I have is his music and the meaning I place on that music and the feelings and emotion I put on him. It turns out, Johnny and I hate the same people. 

 But that’s because I really just love the idea of Johnny Cash

Meanwhile, my wife and I have a real relationship.  On some days it is a lot like heaven, and other days it reminds me of the other place. Sometimes, it’s an act of sheer will to reach the end of the day.  But that is because it is a real relationship, involving real people and real pain and real feelings. 

In the Gospels, Jesus says the entirety of scripture can be summed up in just two statements: 

Love God with all you have in you. Love your neighbor as yourself. 

Love God, and love your neighbor. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? I mean, who can be against loving your neighbor? Hearing this over and over in our liturgies and our devotions for over two thousand years, we have lost sight of the radical nature of what Jesus is proposing. 

Because it’s not just “Love your neighbor”. It’s “Love your neighbor as yourself”. 

What does our loving our neighbor have to do with my love for Johnny Cash? 

Simply this: I don’t love Johnny Cash – just the idea of Johnny Cash. And we’re much better at loving the idea of our neighbor than we are at actually loving our neighbor. 

In The Brothers Karamazov, a young widow is speaking to the wise old priest. She confesses her dream of serving the poor, of tending the wounds of the sick, of feeding the hungry. But she is concerned: What if the poor are unappreciative? What if they are rude? What if they are petty and demanding?

The priest tells her that “Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams”. 

It is into this harsh and dreadful reality that Jesus calls us. 

* * *

Erica is a pain in my ass. 

No matter what spin I put on it, she just isn’t a very nice person. 

Erica is one of the many at-risk people I work with every day. She is constantly on the brink of homelessness and several times a year ends up in a physical relationship where she gets physically abused. To protect herself, she has learned to be the abuser, not the abused. She is rude and angry and, often, very drunk. 

On Saturdays and Sundays, we have ‘Breakfast in the Park’, our little meal sharing initiative where we bring coffee and sausage and biscuits to the park and share with whoever comes. No agenda, other than sharing from our abundance. 

When she shows up, however, Erica always has an agenda.  She breaks in line. She pesters folks for money. She bitches about the color of the free jacket we gave her or that Stephanie got a nicer one than she did. If you don’t watch her, she will get back in line, ostensibly to get another jacket or pair of shoes for her ‘cousin’, which will actually end up on Martin Street, traded for her drug of choice.

If that was not enough, Erica is a first class bigot, too. She yells at the Latino men she imagines are trying to cut in front of her. Since Erica is Black, this adds a delightful bit of racial tension to our little gathering.   

I often wish she would just go away. 

Just before Christmas, it hit a new level. Samir is a delightful Indian man who always lives in that gray area between housed and homeless.  He is always smiling and happy, and I have seen him take shoes we have given him and give them to someone who needed them more. He is not just a guest of ours – he is also a volunteer, helping us set up the tables and unpack the vehicles. I wish I had 100 volunteers just like Samir. 

Erica was at the head of the line. Samir was wrestling the coffee urn from the car when Erica shouts “I don’t want that A-rab touching my food. He looks like a terrorist or something”. 

I blew my top. “Shut up! Just shut the hell up!” I shout at Erica. “Samir is my friend and our guest – just like you are. If you don’t want food Samir has touched, you can leave.”

She mumbled something under her breath – I am not sure what it was, but I am pretty sure it was not “I love you”. She took her food and coffee and marched away, quietly, for which I was thankful. 

The next week, I saw Erica coming down the sidewalk toward where we were setting up. Samir, who was unloading the coffee, saw her first and pointed her out to me.  I thought, “Oh boy! Here we go again…” I had this bad feeling in my gut – like when you see the train wreck coming, but really can’t do anything about it. But she surprised me. 

She comes up to me.

“Hugh,” she said. “I owe you an apology. I am sorry for the way I acted last week. I was wrong, and you were right to chew me out. Are we still friends?”

You can look at this one way and believe that nothing has changed. Erica is still a liar and a thief, and her presence still brings tension to the group when she shows up. On another level, she at least owns up to her end of the relationship, and that is not a small thing at all. And I have come to realize I had not loved Erica as I did myself – I only loved Erica as I wished she was. I loved my idea of Erica. No wonder she kept disappointing me. 

Several weeks into this new aspect of our relationship, Erica and I are not yet pals, but we are civil to each other when we run into each other, which is often. Last time I gave her a biscuit, she said thank you and I didn’t want to punch her, so maybe she has traveled a bit farther than I have.   But we are working on it.

John the evangelist tells us that God is love, and that God loved the world. If the world has any hope of redemption, that redemption is only going to come about because of love. But it won’t be the love of dreams, but the harsh and dreadful love that only comes from real relationships with real people.

Long before we can ever learn to love one another, we are going to have to get to know each other.  

Even when it is hard. Maybe especially when it is hard. 

Frustration

NB: As I wrote about here, I am writing about the days I did street engagement work among the unhoused population as a way of dealing with the trauma I experienced there. – HH

I was frustrated.

I had been working on the streets of Raleigh for about a year, with no budget, no money, and damned little encouragement. How I had gotten there is another story for another day, but it was out of conviction and an honest attempt to reconcile my faith with what I saw happening around me.  

When church folk wanted to talk about homelessness with me at all, they wanted to either pray for folks or get them to heaven.

There was a “street ministry” I encountered early on in my time out there that would take pictures of unhoused people they were praying with, and then post them on their blog to fundraise. No attempt to recognize their humanity, no realization that they had their own stories and pasts and preferences and agency – no, they would post a photo of someone crying with a caption like. “Another of God’s lambs is saved from hellfire!”

The big steeples were more the praying kind. A huge downtown church had announced they were spending 1.8 million dollars on a pipe organ for their sanctuary. I knew several unhoused folks who lived on their property, and so when I met the pastor of that church, I asked if he could help me get some resources so I could provide relational help and pastoral care to those people. He told me the best thing we could do for those folks was to pray for them, and trust God to provide it.

So I was frustrated. I knew people who were dying because they lived outside, ignored, in a wealthy city, in the shadow of huge steeples. Churches with multi-million-dollar budgets were content to ignore them, and hoped they returned the favor. Street ministries used them as pawns and fundraising tokens, their rich inner lives reduced to being extras in a movie about street preachers. And I was convinced they were made in the very image of God, and that Jesus meant all those things he said when he identified with the poor, saying that when we feed someone who is hungry, we are feeding Jesus himself.

Jesus is fucking hungry and these people with all their fucking Jesus talk are content to let him starve. Goddammit.

Have I mentioned how frustrated I was?

So, I did what I always do when I don’t know what else to do; I wrote.

Ashe, who is now my friend but then was not, ran a popular blog (now defunct) called Jesus Manifesto, which sought to be “a clearinghouse for propaganda meant to frustrate and disrupt quaint notions of Jesus”. 

I dashed off a piece and asked Ashe if they would accept it as a guest submission. And they did.

I recently came across it as I began cleaning up my archives. I had been writing for a while about what I was doing on my own blog, but this was the first time I wrote about my work for a wider audience.

As I read it now, even though I would write it differently now, I’m proud of me for being bold, for turning my frustration into action, and for doing both storytelling and preaching in the same piece. The foundations of my personal theology – that it is not we who wait for God to act, but God who waits for us – is there, even in those early days. Later I would learn and then embrace the words of Miroslav Volf, who said that it is deeply hypocritical to pray for a problem you are unwilling to resolve. I did not know those words then, but I already knew the thought.

Anyway, here it is, warts and all. This guy was very, very angry. And it would get worse.


Evelyn and the failure of the church

Content warning – mentions of death and sexual assault, but nothing graphic.

A heavy girl, perhaps 250 pounds, Evelyn’s greasy, stringy hair only served to accentuate her poor skin. Her weight made her shuffle rather than walk and her head was always bowed, seeking not to offend, avoiding eye contact. At 23, most people her age are very conscious of their appearance, but Evelyn’s wardrobe consisted of thrift store finds and cast offs, leaning heavily toward stretch pants and sweatshirts that advertised events she had never seen and places she would never visit.

It was my second month in Raleigh. I was volunteering with a group that fed the homeless in the park on Sunday when I met her for the first time. She shuffled through the line, mumbling thanks for the watery mashed potatoes and chili-mac, eyes on the ground. Several times I tried to engage her, but between my maleness and her demons, it just was not happening. Like a dog that had been struck once too often, she flinched at contact, muttering secrets only she knew to people only she saw.

When there was an open bed, Evelyn would stay at the woman’s shelter, but more often then not she had to make other arrangements. On cold nights, she would trade sexual favors in exchange for a warm bed. To pick up spending money, she would give men oral sex for $5. Because of her weight and mental issues, often the promise of a warm bed was revoked, or the money not paid after the oral sex had been given. Several people later told me Evelyn was often sexually assaulted and raped, unable to resist her attackers.

The last time I saw her was on a Thursday in early November. I remember it was inordinately cold that day, with a sharp, piercing wind.. Evelyn shuffled down the sidewalk, huddled down into her jacket, oblivious to my wave, ignoring me when I called.

That night Evelyn made it into the women’s shelter. In here she could sleep, secure in the knowledge she was safe. In the night Evelyn died of complications from sleep apnea. At age 23, she was another statistic of life, and death, on the streets.

* * * *

I told Evelyn’s story in a church once, and when I was finished they prayed fervent prayers that Evelyn would be at peace in the loving arms of Jesus. They prayed that those who would injure and molest women like Evelyn would be caught and punished. They prayed for God’s kingdom to come and for shalom to rest on our city.

At the end of the talk, a lady came up to me, obviously moved by my story and asked me the question I dread most: “How could God have allowed this to happen to Evelyn? Was this all part of God’s plan?”

If you spend much time working in the inner-city, you try not to ask yourself those kind of questions–not because you don’t know what the answer is, but because you do. Because if you think about it too much you get mad and because if you tell people the answer, you will not be invited back.

What I wanted to tell that lady, but did not, was God did have a plan to take care of Evelyn; God’s plan was us. God’s plan was to put us here to be his hands and feet. We are to show mercy, to love justice. We are to show mercy, as he is merciful. We are to feed those who are hungry, with the assurance that when we do, we are doing it to, and not just for, Jesus himself.

I wanted to tell that lady God did have a plan and we screwed it up. I wanted to tell her that it is not we who are waiting on God, but rather God who is waiting on us and that what Evelyn really had needed was not this lady’s prayers but a safe place to sleep at night. What I wanted to tell that lady, but didn’t, is that it is very obvious that we have the resources to help invisible people just like Evelyn but we simply lack the will to do so.

I did not tell that church lady any of that. But often I wish I had.

It’s not a perfect world.

Content Warning: Mentions of trafficking and sexual assault, but no descriptive content.

It was Maria who made it clear to me that my middle-class sensibilities would not survive working on the streets among the unhoused community.

Maria was a natural leader, attracting the respect of the other folks who were in her circle, and eventually I would learn that when I needed support in that community for something that would be unpopular, winning Maria over would be an essential, early step.

She was attractive, vibrant, and intelligent. Her partner Jake beat her often during the more than three years they had been together. He accompanied her everywhere, constantly referred to her as “his woman”, and I knew of several occasions where he had beaten men who were a little too attentive to her.

I was one of very few men he allowed her to be alone with for any length of time. I think it was that I was a pastor – even people who are unbelievers often grant unearned respect to clergy folks. But maybe he just saw me – someone who taught nonviolence – as no threat to someone as overtly masculine as he was.

One day I ran into her in the park. She was sitting on the bench, alone, scrolling her phone, her bags beside her. I was walking toward the soup kitchen, and she saw me, and flagged me down. I sat next to her.

After some initial pleasantries, we sat there for a few minutes in silence as she worked up her nerve to tell me what was on her mind. Then I notice she has a bruise on the side of her face.

“Are you OK?” I ask, pointing at the bruise.

She sighs. “Yeah. I just got too mouthy with Jake when he was high. I should have known better.”

“Oh, Maria. You should get away from him.”

She looked at me with sad brown eyes – eyes not filled with sadness for herself, but at my naivete.

“You really don’t understand, do you? The first month I was homeless, I got raped twice. Got groped dozens of times. It was hell. Then Jake told me that if I was his woman, nobody else would ever touch me again. And they don’t. Everyone is scared of Jake.”

I was beginning, unhappily, to understand.

“So Jake protects you?” I ask with a bit of snark in my voice.

“Dammit, Hugh. My choice was get fucked by random men who would always hurt me or get fucked by one guy who is mostly nice, and who protects me from everyone but him. And sometimes, it’s really nice. He will bring me flowers he picked in the park, or we will go for a walk in the Azalea garden over by the TV station. And he always smiles when he sees me.”

Sounding meaner than I meant to, I said, “And sometimes he beats your ass.”

She touches her face distractedly and says, “Yeah. But it’s not a perfect world.”

She looked at the time on her phone, and said, “I got to get to the soup kitchen if I’m gonna eat. You coming?”

I told her to go ahead without me, and I walked the other way, head down, lost in my thoughts. Because I still wasn’t sure why she had flagged me down in the first place – what it was she had intended to tell me.

But one thing was clear: I had a lot to learn.

Someone To Call

Two stories, perhaps 10 years apart:

Her name was Peggy. She was in her early forties when I knew her, but I only knew that because I had helped her get her birth certificate. She looked like she was in her late 50s, but life on the street makes you hard that way.

She was a Survival Sex Worker, which just means she sold sex to people – generally men – for money in order for her to have the resources to survive. There are lots of different sorts of sex work, from pole dancer to cover model to call girl to streetwalker, and all of it is actual work, but the distinction is important to the story.

As one might expect, the sort of people who pay people like Peggy for sex are sometimes not nice people. She also had a drug addiction – if I had her life, I would not have wanted to be sober for it either – and sometimes she traded sex in exchange for drugs. Those people tended to be even less nice, and would often refuse payment after services had been rendered, and Peggy, who had a mouth on her, would protest, and more than once she ended up in the hospital as a result.

Perhaps six months or so after I had met her for the first time, my phone rang at 5:30 AM. The caller ID said it was from the Trauma Center, so I answered.

“Hey Hugh!” she said. “It’s Peggy!”

Peggy tended to talk in exclamation marks.

In my groggy, barely alive state, I asked what was going on.

She said, “I’m at the emergency room, I’m getting stitches. I was on a date last night and he beat me up.”

Now, you should know that I knew she was a sex worker, and she knew I knew she was a sex worker, but we maintained the fiction that I didn’t know. It helped her maintain dignity, and I respect that.

So, I knew she hadn’t been at the steakhouse, sipping red wine over dinner when the “date” went south, but anyway, here we are.

I told her I was so sorry, and that I would be up there in about 20 minutes to sit with her. That was a big part of my life in those days – sitting with people.

She said, “Oh, no, You don’t have to do that. They’re about to release me.”

So, I said, “Well, no offense, but why are you calling me then? You could have just let me know when you see me later today.”

And that’s when she told me that the last time this had happened, the nurse in admission had asked her if she wanted to call anyone.

“And Hugh – I didn’t have anyone I could call. But this time, I did. I could call you.”

# # #

Earlier this week, a teenager who was once one of our foster children sent me a text. We had been in touch several times last year, but then her number changed and we didn’t have a way to find her, and so she disappeared. We hadn’t heard from her in perhaps six months.

“Hey, Mr. Hugh. It’s me!” the text said, but also gave her name, which I’m not sharing with you because of boundaries.

“I was afraid we had lost you,” I told her.

“Haha. No chance.”

When she and her sibling had left our care, we made them a scrapbook of their time with us, and she had one of my business cards taped to the inside.

“I’m sorry I changed my number and didn’t tell you. You told me when you gave me your card that now I always had someone I could call, no matter what. So I wanted to make sure you had my number. So you had somebody, too. ”