BREAD AND ASPHALT

c 2000
by Jim Burklo

(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 without you being there at my office. You have time, so you come in and we'll work on it." But since he didn't want to live with roommates, which was the only situation he could afford on his Social Security retirement check, he never came down to talk with me until Christmas. His Datsun 280Z, in which he had been living for 14 years, was like a refrigerator at night where he parked by the 7-11 store. He had a bad cold which he couldn't seem to shake, and his ulcer had flared up again.

Until a few weeks before, Pops was on the Carpenter's Union picket lines, getting a "per diem" check for "expenses". The carpenters local hired street people to picket so that the car- penters could go out on non-union jobs and make money when they couldn't get union assignments. The Missionary Mechanic did it for a while, too; there were about 20 of our Kitchen people who had done picketing to get cash for gas. But with the winter weather, and the slowdown in construction, the carpenters wanted their picketing money for themselves, and the street people were relieved of their duty. Pops got another ticket for sleeping in a vehicle, and had no money in his budget to pay for it. It was a matter of time before his car would be towed away. He was desperate enough to think about putting up with the emotional strain of living with another person.

I got him on the Rolling Estates telephone to Project Match and left to go the the Santa Claus Exchange. A long line of people stood in the rain in front of the building, waiting for it to open. The indignity of it!

Madeline, our cook, dropped in as I was registering people to shop at the Exchange; she was on her way to the Community Kitchen to start the dinner. "Ron sounds bad," I said. "He left a message on my home phone answering machine that I couldn't even understand. Something about being down at El Camino and Bernardo." "Yeah," replied Madeline, "he looked awful at the Kitchen yesterday. I think he drank himself sick." Ron was completely broke. I lent him $70 of my own cash just to pay the fee for the unit where he stored his machinist's tools; he didn't have even the change to pay to get his clothes washed so he could look for a job.

It was a slow day. The line cleared quickly as people went through the Exchange, and I stared at the plastic shiny golden star that flashed obnoxiously from the plastic tree in the lobby. A plastic jolly Santa mask winked at me from the wall: it must have been thirty years old, as many years as the Santa Claus Ex- change had been conducted in Mountain View. We were going to serve 500 families, up from 450 the year before.

A woman came up to the registration table, upset. "Me falto uno. Mi hijo Miguel!" I had mistakenly registered her for only three of her four kids, and when she went on in to "shop", the volunteers wouldn't let her get enough toys. With a quick stroke of the pen I enrolled Miguel for Christmas.

"In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled." (Luke 2: 1) Everyone and everything came home at Christmas, to be present and accounted-for. Students from the ivy-covered colleges came home to Palo Alto and Los Altos. Aguililla people made a run down to Mexico for the holiday break, if they had any time off. Those who lived in cars and under bushes tried to find dry, warm places to which they could present themselves at night. Ron the Missionary Mechanic presented himself and his condition on my phone answering machine: his ghosts had come home to him to harass him and make him crazy. All the bad luck, the broken dreams, the bum choices were coming home for Christmas. The bottle and the needle came home to remind their victims of their bittersweet existences. The rich presented themselves at Stanford Shopping Center to be taxed on their jewelry purchases for Christmas. The poor came forward to be publicly identified as the poor in the line in the rain in front of the Christmas Exchange. Christmas cards accounted for relatives I forgot we had, for friends whose Christmas card lists were longer than ours.

As new parents, my wife and I enjoyed the anticipation of the season in a new way. It was our daughter's first Christmas. While the rest of us announced publicly who we were and what we had, as Caesar decreed, Elizabeth rolled in her playpen, happily fooling with the red-and-green teething toy she got for Christmas. She was four months old, and we were still trying to find out who she was and where she came from. Caesar may have thought he had identified everyone in his realm. But as I looked at my daughter, and at the people I met, I doubted it. We were becoming new creatures, even as we identified ourselves. At Christmas the divine kept turning up in new and strange places, outwitting our expectations of what it ought to be.

My wife and daughter and I were downtown Palo Alto one morning doing some Christmas shopping. Just as we passed by Pudley's Saloon a voice from behind asked "Are you Jim Burklo?" It was Art Copeland. I'd helped him with his rent once, about a year ago, at our Mountain View office. He was one of the many people I knew who worked for a telephone solicitation outfit in Mountain View. They sold garbage bag lin- ers by making cold calls through the phone book; they worked on commission. The guy who ran the operation was notorious for stiffing people on their commissions or not paying on time. Art and the other fellows made, on the balance, about as much as they would have earned dunking fries at Jack In The Box, but with twice the mental anguish. From his friends I learned that he had a drinking problem, as do many of the other people I knew who work the phones. It seemed that denial was a job requirement for telemarketers. But he looked good on the street in front of Pudley's. He was a tall, thin fellow, a young man with a mustache and a serious demeanor. "I want to make a donation to Community Services. Got change for a twenty?" We had to go back in to Pudley's to get change for the twenty so he could give me $5. The bartender, Kelley, was well-known as a caring person among the people of the streets of Palo Alto: he was watching out for Jennie, who also hung out at the Urban Ministry drop-in center sometimes for shelter from her schizophrenic storms. She was sitting at the bar, not drinking; just scribbling something on a tiny piece of paper. Behind the bar, Kelley had been listening to Art, who needed somebody to hear him proudly announce the $75 bonus he had received for the most garbage bag sales this quarter.

"I know it's not much, but I want to contribute something," said Art. We shook on it. "Merry Christmas," we invoked, and we went our ways. He went back up to the bar, and I went out to my family.

Just before Christmas I got dozens of phone calls from people who wanted to help cook Christmas dinner at our Community Kitchen meal. I had to tell them that we had too many volunteers for the Kitchen; in fact, we had an overabun- dance signed up to help a month before Christmas.

Christmas was a bane and a boon. On the one hand, it was not efficient. We had to store Christmas charity at EHP and CSA. We put the extra cans in the jail cells of the former police station in Mountain View and pulled them out to stock our food closet throughout the months of the year when people were thinking about things other than charity.

What happened at Christmas was a confluence of divine and human foolishness and wisdom, both for us and for the people who first celebrated it. No sooner did the Christmas event happen than was it forgotten. The shepherds were deeply impressed with what they had seen and heard, but they kept on shepherding. There was no National Enquirer to which they could sell their story, so it was back out to pasture for them. They had to go back out and count sheep, worrying about wolves and briar patches. The wise men, having hobnobbed with King Herod, visited the holy places, and eaten at the restaurants, went home to the East. There were other stars to watch, other astrological phenomena to occupy their attention.

The only one in the Christmas story who seemed to remem- ber what happened for any length of time was Herod. And of course, he wanted to forget it. He wanted to put the Messiah out of his mind, so he violently tried to stamp him out. If only he had forgotten Christmas like everyone else! A lot of lives would have been spared.

Our Christmas decorations went back into our attic, to be forgotten until I tripped over the box on my way to get the window screens for summer. Our Community Kitchen went back to its normal pace, with some days when we didn't have enough volunteer cook's helpers. But there was a lot to be said for this forgetting. Oh, sure, it would have been nice if everyone remembered to be charitable all year long. But cooking in our Kitchen was not the only important thing to be doing. Forgetting was necessary in order to open people to the new possibilities that the divine creativity was constantly opening. If my baby daughter Liz always remembered the horror of her hunger and thirst, she would not have been open to the world that burst with newness at her on all fronts. As it was, she forgot her unhappiness in seconds after it passed.

Cal could not forget the painful incidents of the early part of his life. Old grudges and hurts lingered in his waking awareness. Aloud and in his lonely silence he repeated the same stories, trying to work them out. If only he could have relegated those stories to his depths, and be open to the new things around him! But he was not yet ready to forget.

I visited downtown Palo Alto to see Lee Schmitt, and in front of the Food Closet I talked to Chuck. I had known him since the first days of the Urban Ministry drop in center. I was amazed to find that he spoke in actual English sentences.

"What happened? Chuck makes sense!" I exclaimed to Lee.

"He was cured by a funeral," she reported.

One of the most beloved of the original circle of the people of the streets at Urban Ministry was a gregarious, wild-haired alcoholic and drug addict named Weston. Weston was on his way out, and everyone knew it, but it was still a shock when he shot a speedball -- injecting heroin with cocaine -- and drank a fifth of vodka and died. Lee put out the call. From the streets of Palo Alto, the community gathered for the memorial, singing, praying, laughing with remembrances of Weston, sharing communion in the circle.

But Chuck had shown up drunk, and the people were furious about it afterward. He had acted the fool, disrupting what had otherwise been one of the highest, if also saddest, moments of the Urban Ministry's community life.

Chuck had been very close to Weston, and his death cut through, cold and sharp, to Chuck's soul. The two of them had spent a lot of time getting stoned and telling their stories. Weston's death was the death that Chuck was dying, day by day. And to be spurned by his fellow street people because of his obnoxiousness at the funeral of his best friend -- this was it, this really was death.

Chuck's death died. After the funeral, he kept clean and sober. His conversation was beginning to be intelligible to people other than folks like Weston.

It was enough to make me believe in miracles.

Tacked on the wall of the CSA lobby, I found this note:

"What a pity to just be surviving. What a pity. Signed, Gilbert."

Marty came in just as I was about to leave the office in Mountain View. He came in for bread; I offered him yogurt, and since he knew so many other people on the street, I gave him two cases of it to give away to our friends. "Give me the plain stuff. I can't stand flavored yogurt." Marty had been around for about 60 years, and had been living simultaneously in at least two worlds for most of them. He did drawings and made jewelry which he sold at the Stanford University quad. Marty had been serious about maintaining an alternative lifestyle for most of his life. He had done just about every drug there was to do. At one time he was a political activist, but since then he spent most of his time hustling for survival. He'd been out of regular jobs for about a year, because he, like a number of other unemployed drafters I met, did not know how to operate modern computer-aided drafting and design equipment. Marty had been replaced by a machine which he had no interest in operating. His hands were meant for his pencils and his fine jewelry tools, implements of obsolete craftsmanship. He lived in a shed in the back yard of a house where an amorphous collection of young people crashed. Marty took care of the yard and kept the house in repair in exchange for his semi-tenancy, and in his shed, when the weather was warm enough, he did his art.

He came in to the office about a year before with two young men with long hair and earrings. As they stocked up on bread I talked with them, and they offered to volunteer. "What can we do to help you guys?" I told them about the need to re-plant the garden in the back yard of the office, to supply the Kitchen with some extra vegetables. With enthusiasm they offered to dig and plant it. We went out back to survey the land, and Marty was effusive with plans. He had been a Missouri farm boy, and already he could see the golden tassels of corn standing tall.

I did not believe that these three fellows would do as they said they would, but I was still curious as I drove to work on the day they said they would be back to plant the garden. They were such an unlikely group, fast-talking and full of seeming bluster. Marty, with his air of complete confidence about the fu- ture of the garden, his attitude of expertise, was an incongruity in the face of his dirty clothes and irregular lifestyle.

But when I got to the office, a garden patch was cleared and dug in the back yard. Marty was directing the planting. He had even planted some seedlings he had brought from the yard of his house. Whenever he came to the office for bread in the weeks afterward, he would weed and tend the plot. I watered it and picked the vegetables all summer and fall, and we gave them out with the emergency food bags and sent them be served at the Kitchen.

One summer afternoon he and I stood awash in sunshine as he opened an ear of the Indian corn he had planted. He ex- plained the way the Indians planted corn in clumps out in Arizona and New Mexico. He had spent a lot of time on the reservations, buying stones and jewelry. He rubbed his thumb against the calico corn kernels, his face intent upon them as if they were polished gems.

Marty looked at our job board after I gave him the plain yogurt. "Gotta get a nighttime job for extra cash. Then I can sell jewelry during the day, and get to the flea market to sell on the weekends."

I drove him, laden with food, up Castro Street to the bus stop, and after letting him out, I decided to head out to the baylands for a long walk. There was time, and it was a bril- liantly clear evening.

I walked two miles out on the levee, past estuaries dotted with coots and gulls and occasional egrets. Birds, dramatically different in form, moving among each other in a tenuous harmony on the surface of the water; the surface reflecting an even more intense blue than the sky had gathered from the sun.

As I walked I knew that there were many worlds in this world, and I was not sure which one was mine, or that I really belong in any of them. Like Gilbert said of himself, my planetary citizenship was in question. Marty darted in and out; I didn't have a handle on the world of his story, and he had nothing but yogurt and bread to remind him of the universe in which we encountered each other. I felt a yearning for what I beheld on the levee: the folded hills glowing pink in the sun across the bay. The yearning in Marty's face for the ear of corn he held in his hand, as if it was in another world he could not really touch even as he stroked the skin of its mysteriously patterned kernels. How many thousand sunsets, and yet in this one, again, I ached for ones past; for something that, in the shafts of light through the trees on the western mountain, I could not take with me before, and could not take with me then.

Every month I had to add up the number of meals we served at the Community Kitchen. Each person who ate with us was supposed to sign in on a sheet by the serving line. I couldn't read half of their signatures, and I knew they didn't always mark their "X"'s by their names like they were supposed to do. Our statistics at the Kitchen were highly suspect, but while I lacked enthusiasm for the task, I tried to get as accurate a count as possible.

I went down the list, adding the number of unduplicated individuals for the month of February, and on one line found, instead of a person's name, the words "Ask and ye shall re- ceive" printed in the roster. There were several "X"'s next to it. I wondered how the United Way would have liked me to describe "Ask and ye shall receive" in its statistical report form. Was"Ask and ye shall receive" white, black, Hispanic, Asian, over 65, single, male, female, or a family? How many units of service did "Ask and ye shall receive" receive? Was "Ask and ye shall receive" disabled, unemployed, a veteran, or on welfare?

I was quite sure that "Ask and ye shall receive" was a young man known to everyone at the Kitchen as Praise-the-Lord. He came with a large black Bible in hand and at the tables he approached people to talk about Jesus, whether they were willing to listen or not. Several people complained to me about his loudness and rudeness toward them. One of our most re- liable and personable volunteer cooks left early one evening in frustration because Praise-the-Lord wouldn't stop preaching at the top of his voice to the Kitchen crew.

Dirty Bill eagerly approached me at the Kitchen to tell me what he had just observed. It seemed that Praise-the-Lord had been outside evangelizing to some Mexicans:

"Do you know the Lord?" he asked one of them.

"What do you mean, know him?" replied the Mexican.

"Well, if Jesus came up to your door, if he came walking up on your lawn toward you, would you recognize him? What would you do?"

"I'd say, 'Hey, beat it. You are walking on my grass, man! Nobody invited you, man, so go away!'"

Praise-the-Lord couldn't find a comeback to this straight- forward answer, and Dirty Bill chuckled about the incident.

One night, Praise-the-Lord began preaching loudly to a group of people who were trying to eat dinner at a quiet corner table, and I had to ask him to stop it. I went with him to the front door for a few words.

"You can preach as loud as you want outside, but in here, it won't work. You need to find another way to witness inside the Kitchen."

"But look." He flipped open his big, limp Bible to Matthew 5: 15-16. "It says we aren't supposed to hide the light under a bushel. These people are upset at me because they are devil worshippers. I used to be one myself. I used to be on drugs, I used to drink like crazy . . . "

"I'm sure that your conversion is very real. I don't question you or your intentions. It is simply a problem of eating dinner; it is hard to get the food down while someone is yelling. People are complaining to me about your rudeness. You can't carry on like this at the Kitchen. As for the bushel, part of the punch line in that story is that if you put your light under a bushel basket, the basket will catch fire. I think the point of the story is that once the light is burning it is going to be obvious no matter what you do with it. Like a city on a hill. You can't hide it. Even if you behaved politely, and didn't preach loud sermons here, people would quickly be able to tell whether or not the spirit of God was alive in your life. It is possible to witness without saying a word. It is possible to witness here without making people want to punch you out just so they can finish their dinners in peace and quiet. You're going to start a fight, whether you mean to or not, and we can't tolerate it."

"I'm not afraid of them. I've got on the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the spirit."

"You may think of that armor as defensive, but to me and the rest of the people here, it looks offensive." I said. "The people here think you are wearing the armor to attack them instead of to save them. I'm sorry. I would like to have you eat with us, but if I get any more bad reports, you'll be 'eighty-sixed', out the door."

"Well, don't you want them to hear the word of God? Don't you want them to be saved? Whose side are you on?"

"I'd like to think that we are very effectively witnessing the love of God just by putting on this dinner."

After he left, I regretted that in my effort to solve the problem of his disruptiveness, I had missed the chance to hear his own personal conversion story. What had happened to inspire this zeal?

Praise-the-Lord never came back to the Kitchen. Perhaps he dusted his sandals against me and the rest of us, and moved on to the next place to announce the nearness of the Kingdom. In his own way, he ministered to us. In his own way he revealed the tremendous change that had come over him. He had been lost in the world of drugs and crime, and had seen the light. There was no doubt of his sincerity, of the power of the conversion he'd experienced, even if it had not yet revealed to him the basic virtues of humility and forbearance. Praise-the- Lord hounded me out of the everyday world I take for granted as the only reality, and harassed me into remembering the realm of the divine that surrounds me. He burned up the bushel basket of obnoxiousness that he put over the gospel, making it blaze all the brighter in spite of itself. Even if he did annoy me and the others, he left me warmed by the flaming divine presence.

"Ask, and it shall be given you." (Matthew 7: 7) What was my secret prayer to which Praise-the-Lord was the answer?

At home I got a collect call from Ron the Missionary Mechanic. I hadn't seen him for months.

"Where are you?"

"Valley Medical," he said. "Broken heel, sprained wrists, broken elbow, concussion."

He had fallen from the roof of a house he was shingling in Sunnyvale. The Baptist church there had found him the day- labor job. He had improvised a harness to keep himself on the roof as he worked, but it broke and down he went.

He was heavily doped but he managed to give me a long list of complex instructions about how to deal with his car, his storage unit fees, his incomplete auto repair jobs for other homeless people, and how he could get cigarettes while in the hospital.

I recalled his previous visit to a hospital a month before. At 10 p.m. on a Saturday night I got a call from the Stanford Hospital emergency room. "We have a Mr. Ron Hochschild here and we found your business card in his wallet. Thought you might have some background on him." I feared the worst, but he was only sleeping off a drunk. He had been repairing Art Ramirez' Pontiac's front-end, and as he worked he drank a fifth of whiskey on an empty stomach. He passed out under Art's car in a public parking lot in Mountain View. Someone called the paramedics, and he woke up in a hospital bed as a nurse was about to draw a blood sample from him.

"No ____ing way!" he howled, and he grabbed the belt of the big orderly next to him and lifted him off the floor. They zapped him with a needle and he was out.

I got to the emergency room just as he woke up again with a terrible headache, and after I convinced the doctors and nurses that I could deal with him, he hobbled out to my car.

I gave him a ride to Art's place, where his station wagon was parked. We sat in my car past midnight, talking. We talked about our relationships with each other and with the people we both knew. I told him I was learning in my job that my motivation for being with people on the streets might have been to find a way to loosen up my judgementalism toward myself and others, and to give up my tendency to be a social engineer. And as he sobered up further, we talked about his relationship to Jack Daniels' Whiskey. He recognized his alcoholism, but as he talked I noticed that he did not make any connection between it and his lifestyle and his circle of friends, most of whom were alcoholics.

"Ever thought about a vacation, Ron? A vacation from Ralph and Dirty Bill and Cowboy Dick and the rest of the gang? A vacation even from me? You know, I would miss you, and the rest of the guys would have broken cars for a while, but staying in this scene is keeping you stuck where you are." I suggested that it might be time for a trip to the drunks' drying-out ranch, or to a menial job in another town where he could live simply and save up the bucks to make the next move.

"Yeah, you're right. I suppose everybody around here could live without me for a while. Something has got to change. And it's crazy of me to think I'm going to get the high-paying job I used to have."

But nothing changed, at least nothing I could notice. Ron, in the following weeks, continued his reports to me about the latest news of the people of Rolling Estates, always saying to me as a preface, "Well, I haven't taken my 'vacation' yet, but in the meantime I saw Ralph yesterday and his car is broke down in Sunnyvale . . . " Ron's way of dealing with his own crisis was to immerse himself in the crises of others, and I had to confess to the same pattern: it was one of the darker meanings of ministry in my life. Like Ron, I projected my own issues onto the people whom I was serving. "I should have your job," he laughed at me. And indeed, he knew far better than I the current situation of the people of Rolling Estates. His weekly briefing was a major source of my information about their states of minds and bodies and automobiles.

So finally Ron got a little vacation at Valley Medical Center, but it would be brief. Even that night he gave me the rundown on the argument Ralph and Cowboy Dick had about the car battery Ralph borrowed from Dick and wouldn't return. Ron thought Dick was justified in smashing Ralph's windshield in revenge.

The night we talked in my car, we revealed his relentless quest for justice. The great issue of his life was how to deal with the unfairness within and around him. He was not self- righteous; he didn't point the finger only at others. But he was consumed by his need for justice. He was a defender of what was right and good, and this led him into many acts of kindness for other people. But it seemed that ultimately he was in a con- flict with God; he said as much that night in my car. How could the universe be so fundamentally unfair? His life was a drama- tization of the losing struggle of a human being against cosmic irrationality and unrighteousness. He took it all the way up to the roof, and he was pulled down to the painful earth again. But his striving for justice, in his body and among his friends, was revealing itself as his instinct for survival. It kept him alive and kept his head together. Even the trip to the hospital was not to be the time for him to learn any other reason for recovering from his breaks and sprains.

I had to learn the difference between a Mini and a Class A motor home. I had to gain a basic understanding of propane- electric refrigerators, sewage tanks and drains, and 12-volt and 110-volt electrical systems for recreational vehicles. As I shopped for motor homes I was educated about the relative faults and virtues of Chevy and Dodge engines. Rolling Estates was about to incarnate in rolling form in Palo Alto as the Urban Ministry's homeless drop-in center. When Lee Schmitt decided to leave Urban Ministry to go into church work, I decided to continue my career with homeless people by accepting the offer to replace her. I resigned from CSA and EHP and started as the new Minister/Director of the Urban Ministry of Palo Alto. But I inherited a job with no office. The Ministry had outgrown the little room at All Saints Church, where the Downtown Food Closet, serving groceries to the homeless, was already located. The sheer number of people on the property led the church to cancel the lease. By the time I began the job, I was working for a homeless ministry serving homeless people.

I immediately began to search for a site for the drop-in center, but landlords refused to rent to us because they believed our clientele might reduce their property values. Even the churches that supported us weren't willing to offer us space. In upscale, high-rent Palo Alto, no one was ready to open a door for us to welcome the homeless, the drug addicts, the alcoholics, the mentally disturbed, the unemployed, and the marginalized.

Time had taken some of the tang off my anger. Since those first days eating breakfast at Crystal's in East Palo Alto, my career had been a series of major real estate problems. In Mountain View, the Community Kitchen was asked to leave by the church where it started, and we had to serve meals in paper sacks out of the back door of the office for three months until another church stepped forward with an offer of space. In East Palo Alto, I spent my entire tenure at Ecumenical Hunger Pro- gram trying to locate a bigger building, and only after a difficult political struggle did we move it into an appropriate site: a gay bath-house shut down by the AIDS epidemic. In Menlo Park, the shelter for homeless families generated the biggest political storm in the city's memory. We got a use permit, but only for five years, and a new city council was elected on the platform of bulldozing the shelter at the end of the permit term.

The message from the community was this: 'We like what you are doing, we support it, here's some money to do it. Just don't do it here -- no matter where "here" is.' This was the great flaw of local democracy. The great majority of people in the area wanted our ecumenical services to exist in the community. But because of the political boundaries and the inordinate influence of neighborhood associations, which tended to decide city council elections, the most powerful local political voice was the person next door. If immediate neighbors didn't want it "here" -- wherever "here" was -- the proposal was in trouble, no matter what the will of the majority in the wider community might have been. Before we found the motel, we informed the Palo Alto City Council of our plans to start a shelter for home- less families in the area. "I'm sure you could find appropriate sites in East Palo Alto," one of the council members said at the time. Although it angered me, I had to respect the directness of her answer. "Keep up the good work somewhere else": such was the message, and I heard it so often that I became numb to its injustice.

I smiled at the image of Urban Ministry operating out of a motor home. When I told the folks who got food at the Palo Alto Downtown Food Closet about this plan, they smiled, too. They got the joke: they were homeless, and so was Urban Ministry. They lived in bushes or on wheels, and so it was appropriate that their Ministry did the same.

It might have been a joke, but it turned out to be a practical one. The First Methodist Church in downtown Palo Alto offered us space for it in their parking lot. Because it was a motor vehicle, it was exempt from the zoning ordinances. The police didn't care as long as we parked it legally. With our post office box, a cordless phone, and a phone answering machine, Rolling Estates could roll on, literally and figuratively, in Palo Alto. We'd own it, and if the politics got too hot in one place for us to stay, then we could park it somewhere else.

The people at First Methodist Church of Palo Alto put up with Longcoat as long as they could. But when the members of one of the church boards came into the Fireside Room for a meeting one evening, they found him scowling at them for disturbing him as he watched his beat-up portable television in the middle of the room. Longcoat moved into First Methodist after being evicted from All Saints Church up the street. A tall fellow of about 45 years with a ponytail and a dark demeanor, he puttered about the church during the day, being helpful with the building maintenance, revealing his handyman skills with plumbing and electrical work. At night, he slept under an over- hang in a corner of the outdoor patio. He had found some foam rubber and lots of heavy bedding, and tucked it away out of anyone's sight. "What you do when you are cold is to find yourself a moving van and cop some of those quilted blankets they use to wrap furniture," he told me one day with a definitive air. Longcoat pulled out his keychain -- he had secret stashes of tools and belongings between Palo Alto and Redwood City which he kept locked -- and revealed his universal spigot key.

"That's brilliant," I said. "I want one." It was a key that en- abled Longcoat to turn on the water anywhere he went. Most institutional buildings did not have permanent handles on their outside water spigots; the maintenance people had universal keys that open them. Longcoat's key was his key to cleanliness, a key to that quality closest to Godliness. A key to the homeless kingdom of heaven.

People at First Methodist were growing uncomfortable upon finding him in the men's bathroom on Sunday after worship, washing his ponytail in the sink. They were finding it uncomfortable to experience a looming, gap-toothed apparition behind glass outside the choir rehearsal room on rainy week nights. One night I found him sitting in the lobby of the office wing of the church in the pale light, his legs up on a chair. "What happened?"

"I was on my way to Redwood City with a friend of mine. We were going to tear down an engine. I was on the back of his Yamaha, and he dumped it going too fast on the Whipple Road off-ramp. Didn't quite make it into the landscaping."

He was bruised, scraped, raw, and sore. Longcoat looked pitiful, and the church staff was more conflicted than ever. How could they call the cops on him now? Where could he go? Could they bear to see him limp away into the rain?

Longcoat lived on a Social Security psychiatric disability check that would have paid for a hotel room or food and bus money, but not both. He was a master mechanic by trade. Next to his foam rubber mattress and moving van quilts was a box full of tools, nuts, bolts, wires, and law books. He refused to deal with psychiatrists who might treat him for schizophrenia, and he kept the law books with him to make sure nobody tried to make him deal with such people. He and I had freely-orbiting discussions about Immanuel Velikovsky's theories of cosmic collision. He believed that the rain was full of toxins that get into the body through the skin. Longcoat explained to me the techniques that "they" used to control people's minds by transmitting brain waves that change patterns of thought. And he gave me some useful advice when I was shopping form the Rolling Estates motor home. "Broken exhaust manifold? Forget the whole vehicle," he advised about one of the motor homes I had seen. "When one thing goes loose, everything starts coming loose. Let me tell you the story of my Chevy when the motor mount came a little loose . . . " I took his advice: it made sense. I went shopping for another motor home.

With a socket wrench in hand, Longcoat was a smoothly functioning cog in the social machine. But lurking around First Methodist Church, he became a leper that wouldn't keep distance.

One of the ministers of the church and I went to his sleeping corner where he sat up in his bedroll and we told him that bruises, cuts, or no, he was going to have to leave the premises. "I'll come back to take you wherever you want to go, but the church people are going to call the cops if you don't leave by tomorrow." Longcoat swore as hard as his bruised ribs would let him, and the obscenities echoed against the windows on the patio. The rest of the church staff watched the proceedings from their offices.

"Now, we let you stay here for four months. I think that was a pretty long time to let someone camp in our church. If I were you, I'd go to one of those shelters Jim told me about," suggested the minister, eliciting another round of random ranting.

I wished to myself that the phrase "If I were you" could be abolished from the language, even though I had used it hundreds of times. The minister and I were not Longcoat, but if we were, we would have been in that dirty bedroll of moving van quilts, swearing against God and man.

I found Longcoat on his way to All Saints to visit the Downtown Food Closet. "Can you pick me and my stuff up this morning, Jim?" he asked, as if the previous day's encounter had never been. "I got a place to go in Redwood City."

It took about two hours to sort through his belongings amassed over four months of squatting at First Methodist, but with no incident other than his groaning about his motorcycle wounds, we got into my Pinto, stuffed with smelly moving van quilts and sundry stuff, and drove away, much to the relief of the staff of First Methodist Church.

"That's it." Longcoat directed me off El Camino Real at the border of wealthy Atherton. It was an empty restaurant building next to a vacant lot. I drove behind it, hoping that we were not seen by anyone. We emptied his stuff into a storage shed be- hind the building, out of view. He pulled a lock out of his pocket and put it on the latch of the shed. He stuffed his roll of tools into his long black raincoat, and with a goodbye hunkered off to Redwood City to do another engine job for a friend.

The morning I arrived at the First Methodist parking lot to open the Winnebago's door for the first time as the new Urban Ministry drop-in center, I discovered that there was nowhere to park my car. I had set up a barricade the previous night to reserve a space, but one of the stockbrokers across the street ran over it. The brokerage used the church lot during the week, but they had been notified that we would be using some of the spaces. I left my car running in the driveway and got out to look at the car that had usurped my space. I stared at it, fuming, until I realized that I was staring at it and that it was not going to go away by itself.

It potentiated anger that had been building up in me for months. Not only couldn't we find a place to rent for Urban Ministry, and were driven to move into a Winnebago -- I couldn't even get a parking space in Palo Alto!

Jim Burklo at "Rolling Estates"

I parked in the two-hour city lot across the street and decided to wait before writing the culprit a complaint about taking my space. Had I written it then, it would have been too negative. I opened the Winnebago and started sorting the clothes donations. Then, when I was calmer, I wrote a note asking that my space be left clear in the future, and posted it on the offending car.

Marian dropped in for a visit. She had been squatting in an empty condominium that could not be sold because it was not built up to code. In a perfectly normal, friendly tone of voice, she said she believed that the radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Soviet Union had turned everyone in Menlo Park yellow, and that she had been exposed to numerous deadly chemicals, and that there were bombs planted in the trunk of the dead Buick that she parked in the driveway of the condo. In my pocket diagnosis, she would have been considered by a psychiatrist as a schizophrenic, but she refused to deal with the mental health system. She wore clean, normal clothes and car- ried a briefcase. She lived in a condominium, after all; who would have known that she did not pay rent? Marian immedi- ately set to the task of helping me sort out the clothes.

The driver of the car that took my space knocked on the Winnebago door.

"Sorry about that. The barrier was already down when I got here this morning." Yeah, sure.

"No problem, I found a place to park today. You can leave your car here today," I replied, having found my lost temper. He was curious about our operation, so I gave him a tour of the Winnebago. "Sure is great to see the private sector dealing with the problem of the homeless like you're doing," he said. "You know, the government always screws it up when it gets involved."

"Yeah, sure, but look who's running the government," I said, but I cut it short, not wanting to carry on an argument with him about his Republican social theory.

"I suppose all these homeless people you see just need jobs, right?" he suggested.

"Well, some of them, yes. In fact even our volunteer here, Marian . . . Marian is between jobs herself."

"Really?" he asked. "What kind of work?"

"I'm in the telemarketing field," she said. She did telephone marketing jobs, many of them on commission only, which accounted for her dependence on the Downtown Food Closet and the Winnebago clothes rack. But I wanted to see how the stockbroker would respond.

"Really?" replied the stockbroker, enthusiastically. "Come over and talk to me this afternoon."

He hired her that same afternoon to do telephone sales of mutual funds in the evenings, paying wages plus commission. Not bad for the first day at Rolling Estates in Palo Alto.

Marian was raised a Mormon, and although she did not participate now in the Mormon church, she still believed in the tithe. One morning as she ate breakfast in the Winnebago she slipped $5 into my notebook. I would have given it back to her, but she said, "No. Keep it and use it as you wish for the Min- istry."

Later I found Hilario on the Rolling Estates telephone, making calls to employers. "I know I can't ask you for it, be- cause you people have already helped me too much. But I'm going nuts because I've got a job interview this afternoon and there is no way I can get there on the bus, and I need $5 worth of gasoline to make the appointment."

I smiled as I reached for the binder as he told me his story. Hilario was living in his car again. He was a mechanical design- er, another of the several drafters I knew who never were trained on the new computer-aided design systems. When his last con- tract ended, he had no new one to begin, and he went broke again.

I gave him the $5, telling him the story of a homeless woman living in a car who gave me the money to use in the Ministry. Hilario, who had just started going to Catholic mass again for the first time in his adult life, was touched by her story. "A lot of things like this have been happening to me lately," he told me with an attitude of divine gratitude.

I told Marian about my disposition of the $5 bill.

"It's to be secret," she politely corrected me. "Tithing is to be between a person and God alone. It's fine that you told me, but really I am not to know what finally becomes of my tithe, nor is the recipient really supposed to know where it came from."

For months he came to Rolling Estates to get a bite to eat, bus and shower passes, and razors. He was always polite and straightforward. He kept himself remarkably clean and groomed for one who lived outside and carried his earthly goods in a gym bag. He wore a long-sleeved polyester workout uniform and a pair of brilliantly-clean athletic shoes. He was black, with a heavy accent from his home in Alabama.

He was Jesus Christ. There was nothing new about that. I believed the way Mother Teresa practiced: that to encounter a person and serve them was to encounter and serve the Christ. But it challenged the strength of my belief to encounter and serve someone who vividly believed that he was the one-and-only Jesus Christ in the flesh.

For months he paced the parking lot in front of the Win- nebago after eating his morning oatmeal inside, and as he walked he read his pocket Gideon's Bible to himself out loud. At first he told me he was in the ministry. "Where do you do your ministry?" I asked, thinking that he had been or hoped to be a minister in a church. But how would Jesus answer that question? Was Jesus enrolled in the United Church of Christ's clergy pension plan, as I was? "Everywhere I go, I do my ministry," he answered.

After he made several visits to Rolling Estates I asked him how he was doing. He said he was looking for work in fast- food restaurants. Did he have any job prospects? "You keep yourself looking so good while you live outside. Seems like it might be easier for you to get work, because you are so pre- sentable. But how are you dealing with it emotionally? How do you feel when you go out to ask for work?" But did Jesus have a job? Who would be so presumptuous as to expect Jesus to conduct a career search? "Oh, don't worry," he replied. I'm gonna get me a job. It is just a matter of time."

Months passed, and still he had no job. Still he was living on our meals and Food Closet groceries. I noticed that he talked to himself even when he wasn't reading the Bible. He would suddenly become agitated, and pace around aimlessly in the parking lot.

I confronted him one day with my observations. "You talk to yourself, you can't find a job even though you try and you look presentable, you seem to have no friends or relationships, you say you are a minister but you seem to be isolated from other people. I suggest you see a counselor or a psychiatrist."

"Psychiatrist! As long as I'm doing the will of my Father, long as I'm obeying his Word, I don't need a psychiatrist." He shook his head vigorously as he fingered his Testament and Psalms.

He visited again one late afternoon. He was the last visitor to Rolling Estates for the day. Inside Rolling Estates he talked to himself as he searched in the back for a towel and washcloth.

"You seem to be stuck," I said. "You're in the same predicament you suffered five months ago. I think you are getting isolated, out of touch with other people, in a way that makes it harder and harder to survive."

"I'm going home soon. Home to my Father. I'll be all right; don't you worry about me."

At first hearing I thought he meant he was going back to Alabama. "Sure," I agreed. "It's cheaper there, but fewer jobs, I guess...."

"My Father in heaven, that's where I'll be, at his right hand."

My ears heard, but I did not hear. My eyes saw, but I did not yet see.

"I'm doin' my job, my ministry here on this earth. Then I'll go and be at His right hand, as His only beloved Son."

"So you think you are Jesus Christ?"

"I told you once, I ain't telling again. I ain't gonna repeat myself, ain't gonna tell anybody else; that's the last I'm gonna talk about it."

"Well, maybe your ministry here on earth would be helped, made more complete, if you saw a psychiatrist."

"I ain't going to no psychiatrist."

I fell silent for a while. I could see and feel how absolutely vivid his self-identity as Jesus Christ was for him. For him, there was no question about it, though the world should be unanimous in declaring him a schizophrenic.

He sat outside, eating oatmeal by dipping French bread into it.

I pulled out the Bible and read him the passage in which Jesus is tempted in the desert. After his ordeal, angels minis- tered unto him. (Matthew 4) "Even Jesus was ministered unto. Even the Christ needs help," I suggested. He listened in silence, and when done eating, he walked down the alley toward town as I watched him.

Halfway down the block, he suddenly leaped two feet in the air, landed, and continued walking normally, on his way home to his Father.

Earl told lies, and he made little effort to prevent people from discovering them. He was dramatically detached from concern about being caught at lying; it was as if he did it for its own sake. Few of his falsehoods were directed at gaining any advantage for himself.

I was tempted to believe that his lying habit was the result of his criminal life and his cocaine habit; that he began by lying for the sake of conning people, and the lying habit remained. But after hearing so many blatant lies from him, I saw otherwise. I understood that his lies were his own arcane way of telling the truth.

His lies tended to be elaborations or exaggerations of "true" events. A passing conversation with someone about a job op- portunity turned into the lie that he took the job and was getting great pay for it. After he sold his car at the junk yard for $50 or $75, he said the car coughed and sputtered to a stop by the junk yard, and he wanted so badly to be rid of it that he gave it to the wreckers for free. When he was in jail, each person he told got a different story about why he was there and how heavy of a rap he faced. All the stories had something to do with fraud, but beyond that, the similarities ended.

But he told the truth about himself in the course of his fictions. His lies were alternative outcomes for his life. But he was not making his own choices, and he felt no ownership or direct participation in their outcomes. He was out of control of the events in which he was involved. Since any of his lies could have happened because he wasn't in control of what really occu- rred, his lies were no more or less "his", no more or less true to life, than the truth. Since he had no experience of being personally involved in what really happened, a fictional account of what happened made as much emotional sense to him as did the truth.

When the liars we met lost their sense of being choice- makers, of being participants in making reality, the possibilities of the past were not fundamentally different for them than the possibilities of the present or future. What actually happened was for Earl the same order of thing as what might have happened or what might later happen. What made me care whether or not something was "true" was the same drive that made me an active, choice-making creator of the truth.

I knew that the truth was something I took personally because I took personal offense when someone told me a lie. After chaos and cocaine took over, Earl tried not to take much of anything personally, a situation that he needed to express by telling lies. He told himself about his lack of control by listening to himself telling other people lies. Then other people took offense and lost control at him, which confirmed to him that, yes, things were out of control! What he might have been seeking was for other people to take the truth of his lies personally and without offense. Because he was not lying "to" us; in fact "he" was not lying to us at all! He was not choosing to tell a lie, because he had lost his ability to make choices. Since he could have told lots of possible outcomes of events, he naturally manufactured differing versions.

I became convinced that the lies I heard were full of truth about the liars' lives. My job was not so much to call people on their lies, but to interpret them as means of telling a more subtle level of the truth.

Hank and Margo were regular visitors to Urban Ministry's Rolling Estates drop in center. They would come to the Winnebago and carry out the dynamics of their relationship. They were both heroin addicts who supplement their habits with methadone. They lived on the porch of a stately home owned by a rich widow, Mrs. Watson, who , to the great annoyance of her neighbors, allowed her home to be a haven for many of the people of Rolling Estates. As the months passed, they said the following lines about each other to me, each when the other was not present:

Hank: "The dumb bitch, she picks on Mrs. Watson's dog, yells at it, and then wonders why the dog bit her nose."

Margo: ((Her nose covered with a bloody gauze pad)) "I don't want to sue Mrs. Watson, but then, the dog is vicious and ought to be put to sleep. I'm going to have to have plastic surgery ((Margo already had a scar on her nose from a previous fist fight)). You know I'm getting older now, and I got to protect what looks I have left. But you know, Hank, he wouldn't even take me to the hospital. 'You'll be all right,' he says, and here I am, bleeding all over the porch. Yeah! When we had that fight when he broke my back five years ago, he wouldn't take me to the hospital then, either."

Hank: "Margo keeps screwing up my window washing ac- counts. She says she's just trying to help me, but then she doesn't tell me which jobs she's done, and whether or not she's collected. So I go to these businesses and have to look like a fool because the job is already done or we're off schedule."

Margo: "I called the cops on Hank because of the wind- shield. He smashed it, because he was mad because I had to drive someplace and he wanted to use it to go to his dope con- nection. The cops came to Mrs. Watson's and took a report. Well, he doesn't have a driver's license anyway, but he says since he bought me the car that he has a right to drive it. But he bought me the car to pay off a bunch of money he owed me when he paid off that junkie ex-wife of his to prevent his son from being taken by Children's Protective Services. That woman is a sleaze; she sells dope, you know, and steals needles from the hospital when she goes in for her kidney dialysis. Her apartment is like a drug supermarket. She was the apartment manager, you know, and Hank and I lived next door to her until the landlord kicked us all out."

Hank: "That broad, all she does is talk; you have to practi- cally pry her off the phone with a crowbar. All that is in her purse is a million little pieces of paper with names and addresses and old warrants and unpaid bills. I can't associate myself with her anymore; her business is her business, and mine is mine."

Of course, Hank's and Margo's bickering was so extreme that it helped me forget and ignore my own tendency to bicker with the people closest to me! It was human nature for me, like everyone else in helping professions, to try to help people who would live out my weaknesses in extreme ways, so that I would forget that I shared them.

"My friends, they all tell me to keep on looking hard:
'Something's bound to turn up!'
But when you're out of work,
Sometimes it's hard to get out of bed . . ." -- Alice

In the Rolling Estates motor home we maintained a three-ring binder called "Things We Like". Members of the Rolling Estates community wrote down poems, comments, bright survival ideas, and one-liners on the blank pages at the back. The book grew into a source of entertainment and initiation for new people, a means of passing on Urban Ministry lore. At breakfast one morning under the awning I asked for people to write about what it was like to be unemployed.

Their comments and poems revealed that unemployment was a state of the soul as much as it was a financial disaster. It was a spiritual Catch-22. When faith was needed the most to keep up the attitude and energy to find a job, the lack of a job made it hard to keep the faith.

"Sometimes you pray,

Sometimes you cry!

But you can't cry too much

'Cause your eyes will swell up

And that will cost you a day of searching for a job!" -- Rita

I observed that after a person was on the streets for a significant period of time, the interpersonal skills needed to find and keep a job began to erode and be replaced by the social skills needed to survive among the homeless. There were special soci- al skills required for the working world, but these wouldn't be listed on applications or even asked about in interviews. They were skills that were hard to describe because they were taken so much for granted. Employed people knew what to talk about with fellow employees, and what not to discuss, and they knew the acceptable voice level in conversation at the work place. They knew how to moderate their emotional expressions in order to "fit in". But it was normal for the unemployed, particularly those who were homeless, to forget these unwritten rules. It was a natural process of adapting to the new situation of being homeless and jobless. Ways of relating in society changed; even body language changed, and it was natural to feel awkward and stiff when trying to fit into the working world again:

"I like not walking like an Egyptian." -- Brett

Rejection and continuing unemployment fed into a cycle that perpetuated unemployment or repeated loss of jobs.

"You panic, then you get grief-stricken:
It gets harder to pull yourself up,
To take that step out your door,
To see about another job;
You wipe the tears from your eyes and try once more;
After a while, you really start to doubt yourself;
A little part of you starts to die . . . " -- Rita

It should have gone without saying, but it was easy to forget that the people who came to us were unique individuals. There were Urban Ministry community members who, after years of unemployment, went back into the working world with definite but almost imperceptibly slow steps. One man took a month just to put together the rough draft of a resume, and another month to get a good set of work clothes together. Another member of our community got two jobs after searching a very short while, and in no time was working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week! Both of them got support and encouragement toward employment from the Ministry, but we didn't expect them to respond to that caring in the same manner.

At the Urban Ministry, the first and best we could do for un- employed people was to be personally receptive to their frus- tration, their paralysis, and their small and their great successes. To be sure, we did well in finding day-labor jobs for people in need of immediate, temporary work. Our drop-in center volu- nteers continued to keep a good listing of jobs. We continued to produce resumes for our community members who needed them. But none of this help was of much use if the unemployed had silently fallen into dehumanization.

Our first job was ministry, that divine act of discovering to- gether our humanity in all its joys and trials. One of the paradoxes of ministry was that in sharing with each other the ways we had become dehumanized, we rediscovered our human dignity. The inhumanity of the cross divinely revealed our humanity. How did it feel to lose a job, not have a job, search for a job, and find a job? The sharing of these experiences was the divine gift out of which hope for the unemployed could grow.

"How to find a job out of the newspaper? Get the Sunday paper, then get the Monday paper first thing in the morning (5 am). Circle the Monday ads that were not in the Sunday paper, and call them first!" -- Verne

As I drove by Rolling Estates after hours, I saw Marian and another woman standing by Marian's car in the parking lot, so I stopped to visit. Marian had been living in her Buick in front of the Winnebago motor home ever since she got kicked out of the condominium where she squatted for so long. I was nervous that the Methodist church people would get upset at having a colony of homeless people on their property, but Marian was so benign that I hoped no one figured out that she lived in her car. She went to the classical music concerts at the church, and I doubt anyone could have guessed that she had such a short walk home afterwards!

The other woman, Ruby, lived on Social Security psychiatric disability, but she had run out of money for the month and spent the previous night sleeping next to Marian's car in front of the Winnebago. I wished I could let both of them use the motor home as a shelter, but my agreement with the police was that it would not be used for housing.

Ruby was a huge woman in bright make-up and brightly- colored, unmatched clothes, wearing her hair in a topknot of tight kinks. I unlocked Rolling Estates and invited both of them to come in, and Marian offered to cook dinner for us. A member of First Congregational, who had held a party at her home on the weekend, had brought us a big pan of deli cold-cuts of cheese and meat that morning, as well as some jugs of orange juice. With Marian's cans from the Downtown Food Closet and a pot of our famously strong coffee, we shared a feast as the sun set over downtown Palo Alto on another warm and clear evening. The sunlight spread on an inside wall of the Winnebago and I noticed it. The light of the sun had been saying the same thing for billions of years but only then did I pay attention to it after having been in the light all day.

Marian, as she often did, told us one of her recent dreams. She dreamed that she owned a mansion filled with books that were sealed around the edges, full of precious knowledge which she was responsible for preserving and maintaining.

Ruby carefully picked over her plate of cold-cuts and chili. A big smudge of her bright lipstick spread over the lip of her plastic cup. Thoughtfully she listened, staring outside into the light.

Marian continued. "I saw an old friend in my dream, a friend I lost; a person I have not seen in years and miss very much." She cried softly as she described meeting him in the library of the mansion in her dream.

Ruby held a small chunk of cheese in her fingers and trimmed it a bit before eating it as if to make absolutely sure it was safe. Jesus' words of institution of the eucharist repeated in my thoughts:

"Take, eat; this is my body."
"Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood . . "

At Rolling Estates we accommodated, over time, to the physical difficulties of running a drop in center for homeless people out of a Winnebago motor home. With everyone else's, my fingers ached in the winter cold when we opened up and turned on the coffee on the stove inside the motor home. Our awning had a way of blowing down at the worst possible times. When the wind was blasting and the rain was pouring one stormy day, the awning finally blew off completely, collapsing on people and on our picnic table in a heap of soggy canvas.

With a volunteer group from Stanford University, we dug a pipe into the ground to drain our dishwater into the dirt by in the bushes next to the parking lot where the Winnebago sat. It was an entertainment for me to watch the dean of the Stanford Law School with a shovel, digging an illegal septic field and filling it with gravel. Another volunteer group of computer programmers and electronic engineers painted the Winnebago and rebuilt the awning. A retired math teacher rebuilt the inside of the motor home to make shelving for supplies.

Breakfast at Rolling Estates: a culinary wonderment awaited the people of the streets each morning. A psychiatrically disabled Vietnam veteran on Mellaril, whom we dubbed the Ragin' Cajun because he had once served as the cook on a Louisiana offshore oil rig, became our chef. He could, with liberal doses of the right spices, make Cajun food out of anything that was donated to us. With "Roy Roy" Johnson, who believed in double-dosing the grounds into the coffeepot, as his partner, the results were at times spectacular. We gained a strong team of volunteers who lived indoors, as well; Marge and Helen became beloved fixtures of our mornings, as did "Mama Celeste", a large woman who loved to deliver us huge, home- cooked, full-course dinners for breakfast. Soon we were producing 50 breakfasts every morning on a tiny motor home stove. New people as well as the original circle of long-time Palo Alto street people began to appear at Rolling Estates.

A visitor enjoying a morning cup of coffee at Urban Ministry

Once each week we held a community meeting after breakfast, when the people could share their prayers, their information about what was happening on the street, their concerns or suggestions about life at Rolling Estates. One of the most respected and sagacious voices was that of Running Deer, a full-blooded Sioux Indian. He would gravely raise his "talking stick" and inject deep but straightforward wisdom into our deliberations. At community meeting we kept up to date about who was in jail, who was sick, who was missing and not accounted-for. We made decisions about how to serve breakfast, how to hand out bus passes, how to distribute clothes and blankets. Sometimes the meeting collapsed into an opportunity for a drunk to preach a rambling sermon, or for a mentally ill person to hold up a Bible and begin to speak in tongues. We had to make decisions together about how to run the community meetings, and this itself was a lively topic for the meetings.

We celebrated birthdays; we put candles on cakes and sang, and let each other know that we were glad that each other had been born. As I celebrated those birthdays of street people I thought of all the people who lived indoors and had fancy jobs but didn't have the Ragin' Cajun or Roy Roy or any one else to make them a cake and praise God for their lives.

One of our regulars came to Rolling Estates to tell me a story. "Jim!" he laughed. "Yesterday I was panhandling, and a guy came up to me and gave me a $10 bill. 'Here,' he said with a smile, 'Go buy a good bottle of wine.'" The panhandler appreciated the realistic attitude of the donor.

In local churches, after preaching or giving a talk about our work, I was often asked by people if they should give money to panhandlers. I answered that I could not tell them whether or not to do so. Panhandlers put us between a cross and a hard place; they held up the reality of the human condition in a way that I, and most others, would have preferred to avoid. There was no right response to a panhandler, except to let go and confess that there was no right response. When giving money to a panhandler, one needed to let go of any attachment to the outcome. Of the panhandlers of Palo Alto, all those I knew were using their hard-begged money to pay for alcohol, cocaine, and heroin. But when refusing to give panhandlers money, one needed to let go of any attachment to that refusal. Just running out of panhandling income would not have put an end to their diseases of addiction.

I learned that this kind of liberation from attachment to outcomes was constantly necessary at Rolling Estates. We found that it was spiritually, as well as physically, unhealthy to concern ourselves if our people sold the bus passes or food or clothes that we gave them. It didn't do street people any good for us to worry about whether or not we were doing them any good. We could only do the best we could do, accept the outcomes, whether for good or ill, and learn from, and later avoid, our mistakes. Being confronted daily with dozens of people in dire need of everything basic to life forced me to choose clearly and cleanly between spiritual freedom or an unbearable load of guilt which would have burned me out in a matter of hours. "Forgive us our debts" had to become my subliminal mantra in order for my work at Rolling Estates to carry on at all.

Joe Haletky, our associate director, sorted out the daily mail for the people of Rolling Estates, and handed a letter to Ellie and Carl. Ellie opened it, blanched, and she and Carl approached me in front of the motor home. "J-J-Jim. Deal with this. Please."

Ellie and Carl were heroin addicts. They wandered the streets. Ellie turned tricks, with Carl's knowledge, and Carl did petty thefts and gardening jobs to support their habits. Both of them came from middle-class, educated families. Ellie's father was an English professor in a well-known college in the East. Drug and alcohol abuse, fed by emotional brokenness, fueled by family dynamics experienced in childhood, led them to the streets. One day, Ellie came for breakfast at Rolling Estates, her arm swollen almost to bursting with a needle-infected abscess. She was so "pinned back" -- so groggy from the heroin -- that it took a while for her to register our demand that she go to the clinic at once, or lose her arm. We made the call immediately, gave her a bus pass, wrapped her breakfast in a bag for her later consumption, and walked her to the bus stop. Other days, the two of them would come in together, bitterly bickering about the latest impossible circumstance.

I looked inside the envelope. It was a check to Ellie for $22,000. It went without saying, but they said, almost in unison, "We can't handle $22,000."

Joe walked with them to our bank. It must have looked a bit odd to enter the lobby of the upscale University National Bank, whose depositors are only the rich and a few non-profit agencies like ours to whom the privilege was extended. Joe set up a certificate of deposit in her name, to at least dampen the likelihood of the money being spent too soon.

Ellie and Carl were homeless and penniless and eating breakfast at Rolling Estates again in less than three months: $22,000 into the needle and up the arm. A few months after that, Ellie was arrested for possession and I visited her in jail. Carl was on the run from other warrants.

"I can't believe we did it. But we did it. $22,000 in three months. Can you believe how powerful addiction is?" She shook her head at me, clear-eyed, sober, from behind the glass in the visiting booth of the Elmwood Correctional Facility.

Two years later, both of them were sober and in recovery programs. By the grace of God, they both tested negative for AIDS. $22,000 was a small price to pay for a start on the road to recovery and to a new life.

The Urban Ministry grew. We started a shelter, using church social halls at night, which we named "Hotel De Zink". In the 1930's, Palo Alto had a shelter which the chief of police, Chief Zink, was instrumental in establishing. The homeless guests nicknamed it after him, much as, to this day, inmates nickname the jail after the sheriff. We revived the name and began sheltering 20 people per night. Later, we started a clothes closet in yet another church. Our soup kitchen program grew to 5 church sites on a weekly schedule, serving over 400 meals a week entirely with volunteer help. Joe and I found ourselves more and more occupied with administrative tasks, but we still spent about half our time directly with people on the streets.

As our services grew, and as the numbers of people swelled at Rolling Estates, we also attracted more volunteers. Jeanne Toal was one of them. A writer and an artist, she wanted out of the solitude of her occupation. She certainly found the antidote with us! She spent more and more of her time with us, simply listening to people at Rolling Estates. She was a quiet, patient, compassionate presence who felt little temptation to "take over" and intervene forcefully in people's lives. She had been spared my own acculturation; I constantly had to resist my need to "fix" people, while she tolerated long silences in conversations and liberated people by lovingly letting them go, to fall or fly as they might.

We hired her. For lack of a better term, we called her our caseworker.

Shortly after Jeanne joined our staff, she found herself taking over a room as her office in a hotel with 17 mentally ill and otherwise disabled people. She decorated the room with her artistic abstractions and collages. "How did I wind up here?" she asked me, rhetorically, when I would come to visit her "office" in the hotel room.

The Barker Hotel was built in the 1920's and when we started our work there, it seemed that it had accumulated at least 70 years of yellowed cigarette tar on its walls. We had known for a while that things were going to change at the Barker. It was the most run-down and the cheapest of the four downtown single room occupancy hotels in Palo Alto. People on the streets informed me that it had become a shooting gallery -- a dope den. A few of the tenants, people I knew, had so terrorized the manager that they had been living in the hotel rent-free for years. I and the head of the local nonprofit housing agency approached the owner to see if we could buy or lease it. He refused. A while later, he abruptly sold it to developers who announced their intention to convert it to office space.

We gathered the people of Rolling Estates, residents of the Barker, and residents of the other hotels, and held a series of meetings at night at All Saints Church. Our discussions in the circle were hard to focus. Sometimes the participants came drunk, and the meetings disintegrated. But I could always feel positive energy building in each of them as we proceeded. They filled with strength and pride as they realized that they were powerful people and not mere victims or nameless faces. Some Stanford students helped us research the legal options available for the city to prevent conversion of the hotel, and we discussed which ones were best for our cause. Finally we were ready to turn out the people of the streets at the meeting of the city council. "We live in the hotels. We aren't talking about Holiday Inns or the Hyatt Hotels. The Barker is home for us. Do something to save it!" The empowerment that came with exercising citizenship was palpable in our people as together we addressed the council.

Through other agitations we got a lot of press coverage about the fate of the Barker, making the developers very nervous about the political consequences of kicking poor people out of the hotel. The head of the housing agency called a wealthy, sympathetic investor and asked him to buy out the developers and save the Barker.

The investor bought the property and gave us a room in the hotel in exchange for our informal agreement to help maintain the place and to keep it peaceful and stable. Jeanne proposed tenants from Rolling Estates who were eligible for disability benefits. She paid their rent with vouchers we were given by the Salvation Army, until their disability benefits began so the rent could continue to be paid.

Jeanne Toal in her office at the Barker Hotel

Within a few months a miracle happened at the Barker Hotel. "I'm getting used to miracles," Jeanne told me. She had no religious background, no feeling about spirituality, until coming to us. Without taking on a sectarian identity, she experienced a profound conversion. She was convinced of the reality of the spiritual through her everyday practice of love, hospitality, and acceptance. The Barker Hotel was part of it.

The Barker became a community. It had the services of a mental health facility without having the identity, the stigma, the flavor of one. It was just the Barker. If Jeanne had no tenant to propose, which occasionally was the case, anyone could rent a room in the hotel. And the people without diagnoses who moved into the Barker discovered that they had as much place in the community as the rest of the tenants. Most of the people Jeanne introduced to the Barker as tenants were chronically homeless and mentally ill. The hot water, the clean sheets, the freedom: all of it amazed them. They didn't have to go to therapy. They didn't have to take medications. And they didn't have to go to Jeanne's room and look at the fascinating artwork and sit on the couch and tell stories while Jeanne quietly smiled . . . but they did.

If I was tired, if I was uptight, if I was cynical, all it took to get over it was a trip downtown and a walk up that nicotine- stained stairwell to get some hugs and smiles and stories from the residents of the Barker Hotel.

One of the first people we introduced to the Barker was Boone. He would lope into the parking lot of Rolling Estates, and it would seem that eternal life itself, with an aura of subtle light, would approach us with him. He couldn't feel his left arm or leg; AIDS had progressed so that his brain suffered from lesions. When he came for morning coffee and fellowship one morning and couldn't speak, we'd taken him to the hospital, thinking he'd had a stroke. When I went to visit him, a nurse let it slip that he had AIDS, which was how I learned of his condition. Once he was willing to talk about it, after recovering his speech, Jeanne connected him with a variety of services for people with AIDS, and she invited him to move into the Barker. There, she helped him with his Social Security paperwork so that he could stay and pay the rent month to month.

"I didn't live a very careful life," he told me one morning over coffee at Rolling Estates. His reflections about himself were already in the past tense. But his bright eyes, his beatific toothless smile, his absolute acceptance of me and everyone else served us by bringing us into the present tense of divine infinity.

One winter day a woman drove up to Rolling Estates in her van. Wordlessly she began unloading lots of blankets and sleeping bags to donate to us. As she left, I thanked her. Her eyes singed the back of mine with their intensity. Tears welled in her as she silently turned and drove away. It was quite obvious to me that her visit was only secondarily about blankets and sleeping bags.

I began to make a point of paying attention to the motives and feelings of people who donated food and clothes to us. Over time I began to notice their sacramental intentions. The socks they brought us were holey in more ways than one. Donations of canned tuna and used overcoats were not merely transfers of wealth, but were intended as elements of spiritual communion between those with and those without. Donations were the sacerdotal means of lifting up the human condition in its entirety, integrating the experiences of wealth and poverty, ease and misery, into a meaningful unity.

As I began to appreciate the sacrament of giving, I realized that it was inappropriate for me to concern myself much with the quality of the donations. As the wafer and the sip of wine were food indeed, but not enough for dinner, so mismatched gloves were effective media for communion, if not for keeping a homeless person's hands warm. I had to gain a deep respect for the donations that were useful only for their spiritual purpose, and trust that other, more completely useful, donations would come later. And they did. Thus I lost my anger at well-meaning donors who brought us junk. They were bringing me the gifts of God for the people of God. My job was to receive and bless the gifts, with deep respect and sincerity, even if later I tossed them into the dumpster.

It was in this sense that I began to see the unity of what had once been, for me, two meanings of service. For me, the religious worship service had been something totally apart from doing service for people. Holey clothes and sanctified leftovers proved to me that, on the contrary, I and our volunteers were performing the sacraments every day, mediating divinity and humanity with plastic bags full of donations.

The building inspector of the City of Palo Alto came to visit us. Politely he informed us that we were in violation of the zoning laws and health and safety codes. There was a tenant living in an apartment at the back of a medical office which faced the fence separating him from the Rolling Estates parking lot. The tenant didn't appreciate the sounds of friendly banter emanating over the fence at 7:30 am; he was not otherwise an early riser. So he called City Hall without telling us he was going to do so.

I informed the building inspector with equal politeness that in fact he had no legal grounds for this evaluation. He politely asked, on behalf of the City staff, that we move elsewhere. I politely responded that we didn't want to move into a Winnebago motor home in the first place, and that as soon as we could find a landlord to rent to us, we would be quite eager to move.

As he walked away down the parking lot, I found myself filling with righteous wrath. Once again we were being subjected to the Not In My Back Yard syndrome. My career, from the beginning, had been punctuated regularly with encounters such as this latest one with the building inspector. But it was not, and never had been, a simple matter of good guys versus bad guys, of servants of the poor versus their curmudgeonly detractors. I had visions of smearing the tenant's name across the headlines, or of embarrassing the City by confronting its squeaky-clean, picture-perfect image with the faces of the homeless people who camped in it. But when I followed these fantasies to their imaginary conclusions, I found them unsatisfying. On the contrary, it became obvious to me that there were ways that this challenge to service could be put into service.

To myself, I had to grudgingly admit that this latest case of NIMBY could work strongly to our advantage. The City would have preferred to have ignored our presence on the parking lot. They believed we were in violation of the codes, but they didn't want to have to enforce them on us: we could have challenged their request, and we might have prevailed; but even if they succeeded in kicking us out of the parking lot, it would result in very unfavorable press coverage for them. So there would be a very great motivation for them to help us relocate. This "eviction" was an opportunity for us to escape the winter cold and wet that ached in our bones and the summer heat that cooked us inside the tin box of a motor home called Rolling Estates.

Self-righteousness may have had a place, but I had not found it yet. Before the building inspector's visit, I hadn't found a time in all my work of service when melodrama was appropriate: this was no exception.

I felt emasculated by his handshake. He had shoulders so huge that they turned in on themselves, hanging off his bulging neck like huge weights on a sagging bar. His hand was so huge that I could not imagine how he could have tied his little necktie and buttoned down the little buttons on his dress shirt collar. He showed me a old building downtown that was for lease at an exorbitant rate.

This commercial real estate salesman, like the several others with whom I came in contact as I searched for a place for Rolling Estates to move, did not assume that I could read his mind. After years of working with mentally ill people, alcoholics, drug addicts, and a wife who telepathically revealed my state of mind on a daily basis, I simply assumed that everyone had such an ability. As I spoke with the realtor, I realized that I had lost contact with the world of people who believed that their thoughts were opaque. I had forgotten that there were people who assumed that people were really separate from each other. This realtor really believed that he could tell me that he was taking me seriously, and that I would believe him. He wanted nothing to do with a client who wanted to rent space for 75 homeless people to hang out all morning.

Sometimes people on the streets lied to me, but often their lies were tests to see if I was tuned in to their hearts and minds. When I made it clear that I saw into, through, and beyond their lies, they would decide I was worth their conversation, and would often proceed to tell their true stories. The challenge was to attune my subtle faculties with theirs, and to shrug off the lies like coats no longer needed in the warmth. I tried to do this with the realtor. "Thanks. I'll be calling you in a few days."

Erika wrote me another letter. She was a well-known figure in downtown Palo Alto, pushing her shopping cart and filling it with cans and bottles, sipping beer on the bench at the plaza downtown until the cops came to cite her for an open container. Erika wrote me to call to my attention the deteriorating condition of Marica, daughter of a wealthy but troubled Palo Alto family whose spacious home had become a campground for a dozen or so heroin addicts and alcoholics. I walked past the house on my daily route to and from work; surrounded by stately houses, its curved driveway was filled with plastic garbage bags of moldy clothes and garbage and broken-down cars that served as extra bedrooms. Marica, who had emotional problems but had never lived on the streets herself, was now starting to behave like the people she had befriended and adopted. "She ate the salad from the plate she found in the trashcan in front of Liddicoat's Restaurant Plaza when she was picking cans and bottles. Disgusting! She is getting to be more of a bag lady than I am. You can't trust old mayonnaise, you know." But I saw Marica the day after I got Erika's letter, none the worse for the mayonnaise.

Erika, Marica, and I each avoided our own darkness by focussing on that of others. I was captivated by the fact that Erika, a severe alcoholic paying for her booze with psychiatric disability and the proceeds of recycling, was becoming exercised by the condition of Marica, who in turn had used up her entire adult life in an effort to serve homeless people. Marica's path was, for me, a bizarre caricature of my own. She had spent her family's financial legacy by making loans to dope addicts, which of course were never repaid. She had trashed the family home by letting street people live or camp in and around it. What had I and the rest of us done at Urban Ministry? We had fed, clothed, and housed street people. We had "trashed" the community by placing our weird and wonderful Winnebago -- hardly a visual amenity -- in the middle of an upscale neighborhood. The majority of people in the community might have defined me as a responsible person doing a great service, and Marica as a flaky one, but at the level of the soul, was there any substantial difference between us? Both of us were, to varying degrees, using homeless people as a way of diverting attention away from our own needs for growth and change. Erika's letter reminded me that she, Marica, and I shared the need to turn inward and face our own demons directly.

Eddie "Full-Tilt" Davis told us. "Boston Bert is dead. Shot a speedball."

Boston was a big guy with a New England accent, an intensely engaging fellow who was hard to hate even after a fight. He drank a lot and could never shake the heroin, but it was still a shock and a surprise. It seemed out of context, it seemed unreal, for the people of Rolling Estates. He was one of the originals, one of the first to show up in the early days of the drop in center. He was too alive to be dead to us.

A few of his friends and his mother and I made the plans, and on a cold, rainy day we gathered in the social hall of All Saints Church to celebrate his life. We gathered in a circle around a little altar. I passed the basket of bread: each in turn took a piece and said their piece. Margo wrote a poem, read it, and put it on the altar. Running Deer put a medicine braid of twine on the altar. Two of Boston's old girlfriends, breaking down with tears, put flowers on it. Indian Pete, already drunk, offered a prayer. Boston's mom remembered all the good things, and let go of the tragedies; Boston's grandma sobbed uncontrollably, and Betsy, though a little drunk herself, hugged her and rubbed her hand. Thirty soggy people from the streets had turned out because they loved Boston Bert, and in the candle glow they were more beautiful to me than ever. In that circle I felt completely fulfilled in my vocation, and likewise the others in that circle shared that feeling of completeness, of belonging, of rich and meaningful -- if also tragic -- life.

Colette, one of his old flames, took the basket at the end. "Boston was a loud guy. A loud, funny, wonderful, obnoxious guy. We loved him to the death. Remember how he used to yell our names when we were in El Camino park together? Remember that voice, calling your name? Didn't you love it? How could you not love it? Well, it's his turn. After me: BOSTON!"

"BOSTOOOOOON!" We yelled, we laughed, we cried, and we blew out the candle.

How long does it take to make up one's mind, to follow through on one's intentions?

Running Deer showed up at Rolling Estates for his mail, which came in the name of Roland Johnson. "The Post Office is part of the government. I will not let the government of the United States use my real name," he once had declared.

His face was bloated from alcohol; his eyes were bleary. "Jim. They're going to put artificial lenses into my eyes. Surgically implant them."

"You'll be a bionic Indian," I answered. His eyes, liver, and knees were going bad. He told me he had stopped having shamanic visions when he hit the tequila. The only times he could stay off liquor were those he spent eating peyote with the Indians in southern Arizona.

He opened his mail. It was his Social Security disability check. This was the critical moment of the month. How quickly would the money guzzle away down the throats of booze bottles?

"Jim. I'm going up to the Hoopa reservation for a circle," he announced, leaning on his talking stick, his braids hanging a frame around his puffed but still magnificent face. "And this time I'm going to stay up there and keep to the Red path."

An earnest young man on the staff of a nearby evangelical Christian church came to visit Rolling Estates. Lots of young people from his church had been volunteering for us, and he wanted to see what it was all about. After drinking coffee and talking to the people, he approached me.

"I'm impressed with all the service that goes on here, but tell me. How do you impart Christ to these people?"

I took a breath. I had always suffered from an severe allergy to attempts by zealots to ram religion down my throat or anyone else's. I had never believed in the exclusivism of my religion or anyone else's. I was evangelical about being anti-evangelical. I had to fight my tendency to argue dogmatic people into becoming universalistic and open about religion. My anti- dogmatism was just as inappropriate for them as was their need to stridently "impart Christ" to others.

The young evangelical Christian understood that indeed, much of poverty is the result of spiritual crisis. Salvation of the soul, through Christ or through some other means, would certainly have made the critical difference to many of the members of our homeless community. Our food, shelter, and other assistance just kept them going on their treadmills of despair, when it was the spiritual despair itself that had trapped them as much as economic and social factors. Serving someone in spiritual despair, in my opinion, called not for preaching or teaching, not for lectures on how to think, talk, and pray, but for creating and sustaining a community of hope. Salvation was encouraged not through the exercise of theological or psychological jargon. It grew, from the smallest of seeds of love, among the body of the people at the Urban Ministry.

My answer to the young evangelical turned out to be only a few yards away, in the parking lot of Rolling Estates.

"How do we impart Christ? It is amazing that you should ask me that question today. Look behind you. See that 6' 5" black man in the jogging suit? He believes he is Jesus Christ. In fact, he is absolutely sure that he is Jesus Christ. Now, tell me. How do you impart Christ to Christ? How do you preach Jesus to Jesus?"

The young churchman had no answer. He stood, frozen in a theological conundrum, coffee cup in hand, on the asphalt in front of Rolling Estates. I didn't know if he was ready for the implications of the question, but I was sure that it was a question he wouldn't forget.

Hank and Margo came to Rolling Estates with a request I could not deny. They asked me to perform their wedding at the beach. The next day.

It was winter. I had no time to prepare. While they had come a very long way, they were hardly the most stable and secure couple that ever had asked me to do the honors. But it was the right time for them, even if I could not explain it to anyone else.

I erased my calendar and drove to the beach the next day. As I drove over the mountain, the clouds cleared and the wind stilled. I greeted them when they and a circle of friends, nearly all of them recovering alcoholics and drug addicts from the streets, arrived an hour late. I had taken the extra time to draw a mandala in the sand and decorate it with shells and driftwood and feathers. We took the wedding flowers and built an altar in the middle of the mandala. And there, wearing clothes which Margo had embroidered in fluorescent colors, Hank and Margo faced the sea in a circle of their beloved friends from Rolling Estates and shared their vows.

We spent a lot of time afterward celebrating life and drinking lots of sparkling cider. We celebrated, first, the fact that all of us had survived. The people from the streets celebrated the grace by which they were, day by day, in recovery. We grieved the ones we'd buried, the ones that would have been in that circle if they hadn't overdosed, if they had been able to stop before their livers and lungs failed them. We had made it to that wedding, to the edge of the great sea, to bask in a warm winter sun, after all.

A young man rapidly walked into the parking lot of Rolling Estates just as we locked up for the day. We had served 60 hamburgers and a lot of other donated food, witnessed dozens of stories, and distributed a load of donated socks to homeless people who took off their holey or decomposed ones, tossed them in the garbage, and put on the new ones. This young man, one of our regulars, didn't make it until the food and socks were gone and the folding chairs were tucked away neatly in the back of the Winnebago. He was a "rockhead", a smoker of "rock" or "crack" cocaine. He got into fist and knife fights on the streets. He was in and out of hospitals and jails. But he was a hard worker; when he was straight, when he wasn't institutionalized, he always held jobs, sometimes two or three at a time. He was helpful at Rolling Estates; he brought job listings for our job board in order to help the others find work. He helped with the cleaning and the cooking. He was a lost soul from the South who migrated to live with his brother and seek a better life. But his brother turned him on to crack, got them both evicted, and introduced him to the world of the streets instead.

"What, no food, Jim? I gotta eat."

"Sorry, but it's all gone. The Food Closet is closed, too, at this hour. But in a few hours our soup kitchen will be open ." "Forget it!" he yelled. "I gotta eat now. I'm starved. I've been working all day at my job, and I'm not going to wait. Don't worry about me, I'll just go and steal something." He spun and raced back downtown before I could finish a plea for patience.

This encounter was an example of the most profound service that we provided at Urban Ministry. We didn't solve his hunger problem. We didn't address his cocaine dependence. We didn't end his homelessness. We simply received and honored his story. We simply acknowledged his experience of the meaning of his circumstances. After all, it wasn't everywhere that a person could feel comfortable about announcing his plans to rip off a supermarket.

He came back the next morning and apologized for his frustration the night before. "I went and ate dinner at the church, and I didn't steal anything." He had lied to me before, and this might have been another one. But his meaning was still clear. He knew that I had heard out his desperation of the night before, and he knew how it looked and what it meant to me. I accepted his apology, but needed it less than his return to Rolling Estates, his certitude that we still belonged together at the same breakfast in the same company.

There were many times when I succumbed to the temptation to blame him and others on the street for their troubles. But it was useless to blame, pointless to point up guilt. And I was tempted to join in the culture of people helping the homeless and the poor in repeating such phrases as "down on their luck", "just having a hard time", or "people like us who happen to be in trouble". Guilt and luck denied the personal meanings of the stories of particular people. Among service workers like myself, there was an unspoken assumption, reflected in the mass media, that homeless people hit the streets by accident or by hapless victimization at the hands of a failed social system. This tacit party line was a defense against guilt. It was a means of avoiding blaming of the victim and blaming those who failed to reform the social system. It was safer and easier to blame bad luck. But I came to disbelieve in guilt or in luck. The events of the lives around me were intrinsically rich with meaning, and to pay attention to those meanings was a high form of service.

Was he a criminal, a drug addict, a mother's loving son, a faithful brother, a good worker, or one of those homeless people whose "plight" was decried in the papers? A person might have been defined as merely homeless, and afforded all manner of charity. The next day, that same person might have been arrested for an old warrant and be defined as a criminal, one of those drunk drivers that mothers are against, one of the reviled dealers or users of dope, one of those awful wife- and child- beaters. The public begrudged feeding in jail the same anonymous people they were glad to feed in the soup kitchen. This irony was not lost on homeless people; they knew when they were not being treated as individuals, that their personal stories were not known and valued.

If there was any generalization possible at Urban Ministry, it was that we served a population that was allergic to being defined as a population. The members of our community of the streets were ill equipped, emotionally and spiritually, for impersonal treatment. They, as well as myself and the staff and volunteers, were meaning junkies. They demanded good stories, even if they were sad. Even the lies were brimming with the true meanings of the lives of our liars.

He scooped up and joyfully consumed a plateful of rice and chicken brought by "Mama Celeste", as we called Carol, our volunteer who brought us huge meals cooked at her home once a week. Back for a fix of meaning with breakfast at home-sweet Rolling Estates.

Karen, one of our soup kitchen volunteers, made me an offer I could not refuse. "How would you like to come with me and a group of dentists and hang out for a week in an alcohol detox center for street people in Guadalajara, Mexico?" She was a dental hygienist who organized dental clinics for people in poverty in Mexico.

The Albergue de los Reyes -- Shelter of the Kings -- was to be found within a locked courtyard in a dusty barrio on the edge of the city. It was the only alcohol detoxification center of its kind in Guadalajara. It had no formal budget, no governmental support, and no regularly paid staff. It was started by a small group of chronic alcoholics who found an abandoned health clinic, occupied it, and through incessant hustling of help from other alcoholics and sympathetic citizens, pieced together a haven for their brothers and sisters on the street. They followed an unwritten code: after you finished your stint in the Albergue, you helped to hustle food, equipment, and money from the outside world to keep the place alive.

While the American dentists drilled the teeth of the members of the Albergue community, I wandered and talked with the people. I watched and waited as the guests attended to each others' needs in remarkably loving ways. The healthier ones learned to put IV tubes into the arms of the sicker ones who lay outside on pads in the shade. Their volunteer caretakers swatted flies and patted their trembling hands. I got into long conversations each day. Many of them were still in close contact with their families. Many had been taken to the Albergue by their wives, and a few by their husbands. All acknowledged the severity of their alcoholism, and expressed a belief that it was an evil force that worked from within them to destroy their lives. "I'm scared," one man told me, visibly displaying his fear. "I'm leaving tomorrow. My time is up. I'm so afraid I'll go back to drinking."

A few hours after a "comida" of tortillas and soup made from restaurant and vegetable-stand leftovers, one of the guests would mill about the courtyard, ringing a bell to announce the AA meeting. The people stopped watering the flowers and vegetables, stopped swapping stories, stopped cooking and cleaning, and gathered in front of a velvet painting of the wounded Christ. From all classes of society, old, young, mentally and physically strong and weak, they pulled wooden benches together and started the meeting. A toothless fellow in a sombrero and poncho stood and leaned on a stick as he listened from the back of the meeting. There was only one activity that continued during the testimonies. Even in the navel of the pit of despair, the Albergue community saw to it that there was a Coca Cola stand, and that everyone had at least a few pesos to buy a bottle now and again. The stand stayed open during the AA meeting, which was punctuated by refreshing pops and fizzes.

Some of the members of the Albergue community had been through the detox program five, six, ten times. Despair and its demons haunted them relentlessly, just as they haunted the people of the streets of Palo Alto, just as they haunted the streets of every country of the world. But the Albergue still radiated hope. It was a place of laughter that illuminated the darkened eye-sockets of the sick ones. It was a place of community created and sustained by the people who needed it and belonged to it. It was full of people who, though poorer in material things, were infinitely richer in relationships than many who lived in houses and had good jobs in Palo Alto. The Albergue was a remarkable demonstration of service by people who needed service. Their rate of recovery was no better, and no worse, than that of the most expensive rehabilitation centers in the United States. But their success was not to be measured in rates or cures. They had already succeeded in creating a world of meaning for each other, and that meaning itself was life for them.

Back at Rolling Estates, Roland came to say goodbye. He was going to Georgia to undergo experimental treatments for AIDS. He did not expect to live through them, and he didn't expect to return to Palo Alto except in an ash urn. So we said our farewells. He asked me for a blessing. In the door of the Winnebago, I sighed and obliged. It was not my usual style to formally bless people. But with the first line of "The Lord bless you and keep you," it became natural and right. He kissed his crucifix. I lifted it up and kissed it.

"I'm scared to hell of the plane trip."

I could only smile at the thought. After all he had suffered, on the streets and in the hospitals, after all the horrors he had endured, one would have thought a jet plane trip would be the least of his worries. But for him it was going to be the first passage on his voyage into death.

We stood on the asphalt at Rolling Estates and recalled his life with us. He had taught so many of us to appreciate the quality and not to worry about the quantity of life. Around the corner, the thin, ash-grey man nervously waved goodbye, then spun and walked away in a fierce stride.

After months of inquiries with realtors, I despaired of finding an alternative site for Rolling Estates. Either the available places were too expensive or their owners were unwilling to rent to a drop in center for the homeless.

Winnie, a staff member of the American Red Cross office in Palo Alto, called me. "Why not move to our back yard?"

With the intervention of the City, which simplified the use permit process, we moved. One of our homeless shelter residents, a tow truck driver, arranged to get the Winnebago pulled over to the Red Cross: its motor quit running shortly after we parked it at the Methodist lot, three years before. Volunteers built a redwood deck behind the Red Cross building, and we covered it with a permanent awning. We put in telephone lines, stringing wire through trees from the Red Cross building to our motor home. It was ideal. We were near the bus and train station, near El Camino Park, the train trestle, and the creek where so many of our people slept. We were still outside, but surrounded by grass, trees, birds, and flowers which we planted along the deck. The Red Cross gave us access to their kitchen, where we had hot and cold running water and a legal dishwater drain for the first time in years.

Running Deer leaned into his talking stick in front of Rolling Estates. "I'm going to the Indian Pow Wow at Stanford University tomorrow," he announced. "Anyone is welcome at the Pow Wow as long as they respect the customs. You can take pictures, but when the eagle feather falls . . . " He gestured gravely with his fingers raising and dropping an imaginary feather. " . . . when the eagle feather falls, then it is like church. Everyone must be silent, and no one can take pictures." He went up to our new deck, where we put the coffee pot on a picnic table, helped himself, and left.

I was frozen in shock. Running Deer had just repeated details from a dream I'd had a few weeks before, which I'd described to no one but my wife. I'd dreamed I was a tourist in Mexico, visiting a model Mexican Indian pueblo in the middle of a big city with a bunch of other Americans. I had a camera around my neck. Chickens and goats and children moved around us as we took pictures. Suddenly a little boy ran up in front of me, picked up a feather from the ground, and said, enigmatically, "This is church!" I didn't know what it meant, except that clearly, for the little boy, the feather had ritual significance.

In a very few words, in a casual conversation, Running Deer had blown my mind open to an entirely new world of experience. I did not know what to do with the fact that he had read my mind, or had shared a common place with me in the subtle and transpersonal geography of the soul. The best I could do was to watch, to pay attention, to be willing to grow from this opening.

She wanted to get into our shelter program, so I asked her to come on inside the motor home for an interview. Sad, beautiful, and nineteen years old, she sat down and told me the story.

She was pregnant by a nineteen year old unemployed alcoholic who had the habit of beating her when he was drunk. The two of them became cocaine addicts together. "I gave it up, and now he only drinks malt liquor." But she was committed to him. "When I get my AFDC welfare, we'll get a place together." I asked her if she could imagine herself making it on her own, without an abusive boyfriend. "You don't understand," she said. Indeed, I didn't understand; I just listened.

I finished the interview with her, and signed her into the shelter. We stayed and talked. "I remembered you from the Ecumenical Hunger Program when my mom used to take us there to get food," she said. "You seemed like a nice guy, somebody I could trust. So I'm going to tell you now. I tested positive for AIDS." The doctors tested her when she was in the hospital for complications of her last pregnancy, which was aborted. "They sent some little social worker into my room to talk to me. I wouldn't hear it, about the AIDS. I kicked her out of my room. I tore down the quarantine sign from the door. I told them all to go to hell." Back on the streets, she got pregnant again. "Bennie doesn't like condoms. But so far he's tested negative. He says he wants to die with me if I'm going to die. He and I want to stay together and have this baby no matter what."

I convinced her to get an appointment for prenatal care; we set up a date with the doctor from the phone in the Winnebago.

As she left, I felt a surge of warmth in my chest. As she had sat in the back of the motor home, she had worn the crown of creation. Glory was revealed in her series of worst imaginable choices. She had written herself out of the calculus of common sense and decency, except for that one overpowering fact of love. It may have been a love unto death, but nonetheless it was a genuine love that defined her life and reflected its meaning.

Running Deer came back a few months later, swollen from drink. "I've given up talking, Jim," he announced. "I'm going to be a listening chief and not a talking chief anymore." He had decided to wander for a while, visiting Indian circles and pow wows, and had vowed to keep silent. "Too many people expect me to speak, to give wisdom. I am empty, I am finished for a while. It is my turn to listen again."

He reached out his talking stick to me. "Take it." I flinched, shocked. He had done it again! There had been another part to my dream of months before, another part I hadn't shared with him: from the pueblo I was ushered in to a gathering of elders, led by Abraham, the patriarch of Israel, who was a big, dark- skinned old man in a robe who handed me a staff. I refused to take the staff, but Abraham insisted, because I was being inducted into the council of elders of the village or tribe, a responsibility I could not shirk. I had a strong feeling of this responsibility. It was clearly not a matter of honor or privilege.

I took the staff, but it seemed too big to hold in my hand. "I can't get my hand around it," I said to Father Abraham. "Yes you can. You must." It was simply assumed that no matter how small my hands were, I would quite naturally take the staff and assume and fulfill my responsibility to the community.

When I woke from the dream, the deep feeling of responsibility lingered. The path of service was part of being a responsible member of a community. I had always believed in this as a principle, but now I could feel it in my heart.

"Take it!" demanded Running Deer, holding out his talking stick. A shiver came over me, but I did as he told me.

I put the talking stick -- a pole with a curved copper wire snaking up to the handle -- inside the motor home, by the driver's seat. I didn't know what else to do with it; I didn't yet know what it meant. I was a bit frightened, but prayed to be alert and awake to whatever meaning and purpose Running Deer's revelations might bring.

Around the corner and onto the asphalt by Rolling Estates walked Roland. We couldn't believe our eyes. He was alive! It had been nearly a year, and he had survived the treatments and the ongoing ravages of AIDS. After a round of hugs came the question: "Now what?"

Within a few weeks, Roland found a permanent place to live and a job. With us, at no pay: but a job nonetheless. We set up a new service, the Help Table, which was an information and referral table at Rolling Estates and at our soup kitchen sites. Newcomers to our world would stop and talk to Roland. From Roland they would find out what was available to them, learn the bus routes, the locations for meals, detox and residential treatment, the sources of medical and mental health care, and the places to get showers. It always came as a surprise to newcomers, homeless and housed alike, to find that Roland was from the streets himself. Indeed, his life on the streets was his credential for the Help Table job; he knew the buses, soup kitchens, clinics, and free showers firsthand. The change in Roland, after having given himself up for dead, after having drifted and despaired for so long, was visible. He moved, he walked, with confidence and purpose instead of scurrying like a hunted animal. As an integral member of our community, he was able, in a unique and obviously valuable way, to serve.

I paid a visit to the Julian Street Inn shelter for homeless mentally ill people in San Jose, and on my tour met the cook, who was making chile colorado out of potatoes and government surplus canned pork. The pork was particularly disgusting stuff when taken out of the can; stringy and congealed with globs of white fat. But the cook had mastered a technique for converting it into something not only edible, but tasty: he broiled and drained the meat first before spicing and cooking it with the potatoes.

At our weekly community meeting, as we passed the basket of bread around the circle for the people of the streets to take a piece and say their piece, I told about my visit. After the meeting, our cook, Rickie, a heroin addict who lives on the streets, asked me for the Julian Street Inn's recipe for chile colorado.

"Our people will never eat it," he said after I told him the recipe. "San Jose homeless are different. Our people don't go for stuff that spicy. But, hey, that is a great idea about broiling the pork."

"Oh," I said, impressed with such a definitive response. But what did I expect? The kitchen was Rickie's domain. It was his, and had been his for five months after our last homeless cook went back to jail for old open-container warrants. Rickie set the menu, directed the volunteers from the community, and gave food and supply orders for me and the rest of the staff to fill. Roast the pork, hold the chile: empowerment of homeless people was our goal, our conscious intention, but I was still shocked when confronted with its incarnation in people like Rickie.

Rickie and another heroin addict were huddled at the edge of the grass beyond the deck at Rolling Estates one morning, transacting in a way that drew my suspicious attention. As Rickie went back into the kitchen, he dropped a roll of bills into the pocket of his apron.

"Whatever you were doing with Tony out in the yard that resulted in you dropping a bunch of money in your apron, I don't like it and we won't tolerate it here," I said. I was angry: my guard was always up against "doing and dealing" at Rolling Estates. I was reacting to my suspicions, without having any real proof that he was doing a dope deal.

"You think I'm dealing! I ain't dealing! I don't deal here. What do you take me for?" A string of unprintables followed.

I backtracked a bit, but let him know that even the appearance, much less the actual act, of doing and dealing was unacceptable at Rolling Estates.

"You think I don't know that?" The arteries on his temples stood out in protest. He was up in my face, furious.

"I'm not going to turn you in, I'm not going to kick you out. I am just telling you, just asking you not to make deals here."

"I wasn't dealing! You think this money is from a deal. It's not from a deal!" He held up the wad of cash. "I stole this money, somewhere else! Okay?"

True or false, his answer worked. In his own weird way, he was right: stealing off-site was none of my business. He acknowledged that it was my job to prevent people from using or selling drugs at Rolling Estates. But off our turf, off our asphalt, it was none of my affair. Grudgingly respectful of his answer, even as I was appalled by it, I gave up and let go of the whole thing.

"All right." Having had the last word, he went into the kitchen to pull out another urn of coffee.

Shelley, cup of coffee in hand, asked me: "Is it really true that felons have to register themselves at the police station whenever they move to a new town?" She was one of our most faithful volunteers; she loved to listen and talk with people from the streets, and most of them enjoyed her loud laugh, her ability to engage the most withdrawn and depressed people in conversation. She'd been there, herself; she'd spent years in a New York state mental hospital. The only thing that pulled her out of acute mental illness, in her opinion, was volunteering to help the other people in the hospital. She kept up her discipline with us. She'd met a man who was just out of jail, and she was amazed at the difficulties and vulnerabilities of ex-cons on parole. I confirmed that yes, he was not lying. Being on parole was like being in a jail without bars; her new friend was indeed subject to search and seizure without a warrant, and to all kinds of sometimes capricious limitations on every detail of living. Even his urine, sampled for drug testing, was a subject of scrutiny.

"What's so special about him, that he has to register at the police station?" Shelley blurted, loudly, in her dreadful New York accent. "I should register at the police station. All do- gooders like me should register at the police station. Half the time, we do more harm than good, after all."

So we mused, laughing, about what it would have been like to register as do-gooders with the police. It made us reflect that intervention in the lives of others in the name of service can often disempower them or injure them outright. Our dependence on having people depend on us at the Urban Ministry was integral to the poverty of the people who came to us. It was hard to admit that, often, the help we offered in response to their problems became part of their problems. Chemically dependent people often needed to "hit bottom", but we were the foam pad - - albeit a thin one -- on the church social hall floor, softening the blow enough to enable them go back to the bottle or the hubba (cocaine) pipe.

If there was any consolation in knowing that we were, to some degree, menaces to society as were the felons registering at the police desk, it was to be found in knowing that all of us -- volunteers, staff, and people of the streets alike -- were menaces together, drinking the same coffee and eating the same breakfast at Rolling Estates.

Rhoda was 93 years old when she began sleeping on the benches in the park at the corner of Lytton and Ramona. We knew she was an unusually tough old lady, but it still bothered us greatly to know that she was sleeping outside, in the winter elements.

She had lived in Palo Alto for 50 years. When her brother died, she was not included in the will; his home, in which she lived for half a century, was sold and she saw none of the proceeds. She moved into a downtown hotel. A packrat by nature, she had to find a way to store her possessions. She went from door to door in the downtown area, asking for space to "temporarily" stash her dusty, mildewed cardboard boxes. She moved them around in a battered, collapsible wheeled shopping basket. Nearly toothless, with a determined smile, wearing the same dirty and worn clothes every day, she rolled her cart from place to place, picking up, moving, and storing her things.

One of her storage places was her hotel room. First one, then another, then a third single-room occupancy hotel in Palo Alto evicted her for not keeping her room free of the bugs and mold and mildew that fed off of her boxes.

We had known Rhoda for years. Downtown merchants would call us and say, "An old lady put all her stuff in our office bathroom. We can't even go to the toilet anymore, because there's no room! What shall we do with her things? We don't want to throw them away!" After at least a dozen of these calls, we tried to convince Rhoda that getting a storage unit would be a better way. But she would have nothing of it. We also suggested housing options other than hotels, but she liked the freedom and simplicity of hotel life, at least until the fourth and last hotel in town evicted her.

She hit the streets, but without complaint. The only thing that really made her mad about the eviction was the fact that they threw away her boxes when she didn't get them out of her room in time. The homelessness of her boxes was harder for her than her own.

Jeanne met her at Rolling Estates and offered to get her a place to stay in a board and care home in Mountain View. "No! I live in Palo Alto, and I'm not leaving." But there were no such places in Palo Alto. So she went back to the park bench, while Jeanne scrambled to convince a local senior housing complex to accept her, giving her special consideration in face of a very long waiting list for units.

After a few months, the day came when Rhoda moved into a spacious, clean subsidized apartment. She was suspicious of the place from the beginning; she was no more interested in sitting in the dining hall with prim, tidy middle-class ladies than they were interested in associating with the only tenant in the complex who didn't believe in regular bathing and who could be seen pushing a shopping cart downtown, full of filthy boxes.

Rhoda, ignoring the deal she made with Jeanne to keep her apartment clean, filled the room with her decomposing boxes of old clothes, swollen cans of food, mismatched, ancient dishes, and forgotten Reader's Digest Condensed Books. A year and a lot of lost patience later, the management threatened to evict her.

Jeanne, with patience and persistence, convinced Rhoda that it was time to rent a storage unit. Jeanne and I seized the day that Rhoda agreed for us to come and haul her boxes away. Rhoda made it clear that she trusted us, and no one else, with her precious boxes. "Those people (the senior complex management) just don't understand. Well, I certainly appreciate what you people are doing. Be extra careful with that stack over there. And this pile of boxes really must stay here." We filled the Urban Ministry's delivery van completely, and crammed the boxes into the storage unit at the edge, but within the city limits, of Palo Alto. It was a storage unit which we chose because it was near the bus line, where she'd be able to visit it as if going to pay her respects at her own drawer in a mausoleum.

She had not opened the boxes in at least 25 years. She would never open them again. How much of her life had she been carrying around, unopened, dusty, rotting inside, for all those years? At great expense of time, sweat, and grime, we had moved a ton of absolutely worthless junk. Yet we had served Rhoda profoundly. Something of her soul had been moved, something of her heart had found rest, and, by and by, the rest of her would one day follow.

Running Deer wrote us from Salinas, California, where he had gone to attend an Indian circle. He checked into a skid row hotel, made some friends, got drunk on vodka with them, and fell out of the window of his room, smashing his ankle.

"I didn't do it on purpose," he wrote to reassure us that he was not suicidal. "But for a moment, I was an eagle."

One of Rolling Estates' dozens of functions in the lives of people on the street was as a hair styling salon. We received donations of hair cutting equipment and a mirror and stool. Our volunteer barbers from the streets would ask for the gear from inside the motor home, and plug in the clippers in the outdoor socket on the wall of the Red Cross building. People would study the abilities of the volunteer barbers, and if they were good, a line of non-paying customers would form.

One day Earl asked Joe Haletky for the clippers. Joe hesitated before giving them to him. Earl was a chronic alcoholic with a gravelly voice with which he talked the free- association blues when he was loaded. Several times, I had "86'ed" -- evicted -- him from Rolling Estates for being loud and seemingly, but not really, abusive. I knew he was harmless, but since he made everyone else very uncomfortable, we couldn't tolerate it when he came drunk. This time he seemed quiet and relatively sober. So Joe gave him the clippers, wondering how Earl could walk a straight line, much less cut one.

An hour later, I looked over to notice that a line had formed in front of the stool. With confident strokes, with a steady hand and a keenly attuned eye, Earl's artistry was displayed. One after another, kinky, straight, thin, and thick heads of hair were presented to him. Earl's clippers, Earl's scissors, Earl's job. I could see the incarnation of his spirituality as he scanned the backs of his fellow street people's hair for uneven spots. At 11:30 a.m., closing time, Earl neatly packed the hair cutting gear into its box and returned it to Joe inside the motor home. He then wandered back out into the streets of the dispossessed.

Earl's sacramental moment of service reminded me of an unforgettable sight during my visit a few months before to the St. Francis Center in Santa Cruz. It was the soup kitchen and shelter program run by the Catholic community and led by a remarkable lay worker named Peter Corota. I came simply to see it after hearing so much about it from people on the streets. Instead, I found myself serving tables and scraping dishes for the noon meal. It was a calm, warm place, a place of worship and meditation as much as of food and shelter. Peter looked like a Russian pilgrim, with his long beard, clear eyes, and sandals, moving among the people and greeting and conversing with them. Out in the courtyard, a light-filled place around a fountain, he engaged in conversation with one isolated fellow sitting glumly on a bedroll. Then he got the scissors and set up a stool by the fountain to cut the man's hair. Standing behind him, out of anyone's view but my obscured line of sight, Peter lifted his eyes and crossed himself. Then he began snipping the man's hair.

Boone died. But not until after having seen his sons and his mother for the first times in over a decade. Not before a quilt was made for him to enjoy, commemorating his life. Not before touching every soul in the Barker Hotel with his sweetness, his perfect openness to anyone who would greet him or talk with him. Boone had been a biker and a dope dealer. He had put his kids to work cleaning marijuana on the kitchen table. He drank a lot, abused his wife, and beat his girlfriends. He shot and smoked every kind of dope. In his days at the Barker, he expressed embarrassment about his life. He sincerely regretted his abuses, but he also tasted forgiveness and reconciliation with his family, and he grew to understand the deeper roots of his emotional, drug, and alcohol problems.

At All Saints Church's social hall, his family and the people of the streets and the Barker Hotel gathered for him. Around the little altar we passed the basket of bread, as we had done for the others. His family let it out. A family that had not come together in many years found it was still a family. In death Boone returned the warmth to a family life that had been left for finished. His stepmother, his sister, his sons, his stepdaughter: they cried, they articulately expressed the anger they'd held toward him and toward each other, and let it go. They found themselves, as the basket came to them, finishing their words with gratefulness that Boone had lived, that they had shared life with him. His grandfather took the basket. He said nothing, and even the tears were too thick to find their way out of his eyes. Shaking, he handed on the basket. The people of the Barker Hotel told about their long visits and conversations with him, about how much life he lived in his last few months. Jeanne took the basket last. She stood up and unfolded a piece of note paper on which she had written Boone's last words, uttered in a semi-conscious state a few hours before he died, as she sat next to him in the hospital:

"Let me go.
Let it go.
Let me go.
Let me know.

He knows.
He always lets me go.
Let me go now.

It works.
I'm really sure.
It works
Like that.
Um h'm. Um h'm.
Um h'm. Yeah.

It's quiet.
Awfully quiet.
I need to go.
I'm scared.
It's okay.
Do it now,
Right now.

Let me go for it.
Let it go.
Let it go instead.
Let it scare.

Everybody's scared of that place.
Let's go.
They're scared all the time.
Why?
I don't know.
Let it show.

They say let it go.
The skull.
They don't know.

Oh shit.
I've got to go.
We'd better go.
Let's go.

Children make me smile.
They always let me go.
They always let me in there.
They let it go.

It's going.
It makes sense.

All right!
I love it.
Let's go!"

She put the basket back on the altar and I blew out the candle. "Let's go!" And with a reception over a table of Food Closet delicacies we celebrated the community that Boone had joined, created and sustained, through the dying in his life.

EPILOGUE

I have learned that service is more about being with than about doing for people. I have learned to ask more questions than I answer. I have learned to let go of my agendas so that more can come into my life and the lives of the people around me. I have learned that service is not a set of tasks that can be isolated from the relationships in which they are performed. Rather it is an invitation to belong to a community, to enjoy the deep satisfactions that come with fulfilling its responsibilities, and to let myself be transformed by the power of love given and received.

The community of Rolling Estates speaks for itself by its very existence. It speaks to me, daily, interpreting the meaning of service in a way that I, in my own words, cannot.

When I am asked to explain my vocation, I find that while my heart understands it more clearly than ever, my mind is much less able to reduce it to a paragraph that would fit in a Help Wanted ad. In the end, in such conversations, I simply extend an invitation to Rolling Estates with a quote from the 21st chapter of the gospel of John: "Come, and have breakfast." This was Jesus' invitation to the disciples when they saw him on the shore of Galilee after his crucifixion. Their vocation of service was crystallized, the meaning of their lives together became intensely obvious when they gathered and shared the bread and fish at the edge of the water. He didn't explain it, he didn't give them detailed instructions, or an elaborate theoretical structure to guide them. He ate breakfast with them, and that was enough to make sense of three tumultuous, confusing years of discipleship.

Instead of merely helping the people of the streets, I became a member of their community. I have matured through this community's life, shaped by it in ways that I could not have predicted when I began this quest. Through the frustrations, the laughter, the shared grief, the surprises, the poignant stories told and heard, my soul has found home and voice along this path of being of service.

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BREAD AND ASPHALT

c 2000 by Jim Burklo

c 2000
by Jim Burklo