I spent today in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco with 8 of our middle school and high school youth. We went into San Francisco to serve lunch and dinner at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church. The youth did an awesome job serving over 700 meals at lunch and close to 800-900 at dinner. If any of you have ever been to Glide and worked in the kitchen, you’ll know they have an amazing food assembly line that gets set up, and things go very, very quickly.
During lunch, my job for 2 hours was to place the plastic cup on the napkin, and pass it down the line. A pretty simple job – but when things were really flying, you had to be pretty quick about it. During one of these rushes, I picked up a plastic cup and happened to notice that it hadn’t gotten thoroughly cleaned by the dishwasher. It wasn’t really dirty, but it was clear that it wasn’t as clean as the rest. But I saw the rest of the trays coming my way, and another was already being handed to me, so I figured it wasn’t that big of a deal. I placed the cup on the napkin, and just kept working.
About five minutes later, one of the clients at Glide tapped me on the shoulder, and asked, “Excuse me, do you think I could get a clean up?”
Wow. I felt pretty horrible. I realized that what went through my mind in that split second as I placed the dirty cup on the napkin was, “It’s good enough.”
Good enough…good enough for homeless people? Good enough for people who are getting a free meal? What was I thinking? If I was at a restaurant, and I had received a dirty cup, I’d make a stink about it. I’d make sure I got a clean cup and probably would be annoyed about the hassle as well. And here was this person in need of a free meal, very politely asking me for a clean up.
Of course they wanted a clean cup – everyone deserves a clean cup. Here I was, having swooped down from the suburbs of Livermore, and I thought I could determine who deserved a clean cup. In my own way, I was being “the man” – being part of the system that dehumanizes these needy people on a daily basis. By denying him a clean cup, I was taking away a part of his humanity.
Everyone deserves a clean cup. Everyone deserves to be respected and shown love, care and compassion. Everyone deserves the basic things in life, like a meal, shelter and a clean cup. How are you enabling people to live out their humanity today? How are you taking away people’s humanity today?
Great post. Appreciate the humility behind it. Reminds me of a essay in a recent Relevant Magazine (the Christmas issue with Thom Yorke on the cover) written by Adam Smith. He’s waiting for the bus, and a young teenage couple approaches him distraught by their miscarriage. Adam Smith laments that he did not want to be involved in their counseling, he just wanted to get on the bus and he feels the shame of his selfishness. I appreciate these stories, they remind of I Timothy 1, where Paul confesses that he is the worst.
As a youth ministry, we’ve been doing things like these. We’re trying to find the balance of serving outside the walls of our church on local levels, further out, national, etc. and also within the walls of our church. So far the most successful idea has been doing service project weekends where we do 3 or 4 projects, including soup kitchens, nursing homes, etc.
I am going to reflect more on your latter question, what are we doing that takes away people’s humanity? Again, good post.
cool experience bro. i loved taking my burlingame kids up to glide. in case you haven’t read my post from last week, i had a similar experience (humanity-wise) here in new brunswick. these types of things are great reminders of that which we are convicted. i’m curious if you got their tour beforehand and if they talked about why they don’t have a cross in their sanctuary.
Adam,
Thanks for the honesty! Your post sounds like a sermon in the making!
Wow! Awesome post. Do you mind if I use it with my youth?
@ Tim,
Here is a paragraph from an article that explains why Glide has no cross in the sanctuary:
Named minister of Glide in 1966, Williams changed his title from “Minister of Involvement” to “Minister of Liberation.” He shocked traditional churchgoers by taking down the cross in the sanctuary because he felt people were coming on Sundays “to worship death, duty, security, and exclusivity.” Some old members left; new ones streamed in. The Black Panthers set up a breakfast program and passed out literature. The prostitutes’ union, COYOTE, put in a phone and held meetings at Glide. When hippies took over the church one weekend for a happening and someone painted on the men’s room wall “Fuck the Church,” Williams took it not as offensive obscenity but as inspirational verse. Exercise your spiritual libido! tickle the tushie of your God-love! impregnate the house of worship with your passionate, orgasmic love for life! Stick it in and wiggle! Just say ooooaaaohhhh!!
Does this jibe with what you were told?
Adam..
Thanks for the post. About 4 months are small faith community began to feed people on Monday nights we have grown from feeding about 10 people a week to now feeding between 75 to 130 a week. This experiences has allowed many in Tracy to see the impact of loving people without expectation. If you and your youth are interested we set up certain Monday’s in the month for groups to come and help.
@Sven,
they basically said that they felt the cross represented pain and suffering, and that the people of the tenderloin, largely, had enough pain and suffering in their life already. i found this interesting, as the cross isn’t solely about pain and suffering. it’s about the pain and suffering jesus endured SO THAT we could be freed from eternal pain and suffering. i would think THAT message would be perfect for people of the tenderloin — to assure them that the pain and suffering they experience in this worldly life will not persist after.
so someone steals your identity, runs up thousands of dollars of debt on your name, ruin syour credit, makes it nearly impossible for you to buy a house and then some guy invites you to a meeting where there is a giant image of a credit card and tells you that you should feel better because they worship a guy who actually died from credit card fraud an dknows how you feel. And that is supposed to make you feel better. Sorry, that theory of atonement, which has only a few supporting Pauline verses to support it doesn’t quite wash. maybe the crucifixion is really a only a mirror on how our exclusivity, our greed and lust for power, and our fear based beliefs continue to crucify God’s children all over the earth. We talk a lot about how Jesus died for us but are afraid to talk about how Jesus was killed due to our fear. Mostly our fear of believing that God has chosen to reside within all and not without.
What a great realization to have that day! But, don’t feel so badly. As Dorothy Day would have said – “The dirty rotten system is full of dirty cups” and the poor often don’t get the choices that others who are privileged receive.
In Duluth, MN, I’m an “adjunct community member” of the Loaves and Fishes Catholic Worker Community. We open our homes in the spirit of hospitality and allow single men, women, and families to stay in two houses with our community. We dedicate our lives to not just “serving” the poor and marginalized – we live in voluntary simplicity, and we share in their struggle with them. We give ourselves and the poor something that social service agencies, social workers, and other non-profits don’t give – the gift of community. It means giving up a lot of the individual freedoms we enjoy, the over abundance of material possessions, and digging in deeper. The rewards are wonderful however, because when you start to peel away the layers and layers of consumer influence in your life, you start to witness a profound personal transformation in yourself as well.
If more folks would just use their spare bedrooms to offer a space in the spirit of hospitality to a person in need, we could wipe out homelessness. “Leave a space in your home for Jesus” is a phrase I’ve heard someone say with regard to hospitality. But, just like Jesus being crucified also through our fears, we marginalize others out of fear as well. The poor can put up a very telling mirror in our faces to show us struggle that we fear, and that the dominant culture gives no rewards, incentive, or even information on how to combat it. The poor are the “dirty secrets” of capitalism, and hence, the “dirty cups”.
What part of you is marginalized and is embodied in that dirty cup? What are you doing to share in the struggles of the poor, so that you might end the “long loneliness” that Dorothy Day stated “cuts through all of humanity”?