On Living Within the Questions

The last 24 hours at St. Joe’s have been particularly interesting ones for JR, Colin, and I; more on that below. In the meantime, however, I must say that having had the great privilege of being able to bring an out-of-town family member to Evening Prayer the last couple nights has unwittingly forced the return of my frequently forgotten sense of the incredibly oddity that is …well, whatever it is that we do at St. Joe’s. For given the general consistency of those participating in the Daily Office there, it is easy for me to go through each day with a relative sense of normalcy in terms of all that goes along with that practice and the location of its particular enactment. More specifically, I guess rarely having to explain ourselves and our relationship with our neighbors on “the hill”, allows for a certain unconscious experience of the day’s events paralleling something akin to a routine banality. I’ve simply been habituated into what doing the Daily Office at St. Joe’s means, and rarely think much about it, at least by way of explanation. The questions that would and did inevitably come from the above-mentioned family member’s recent exposure to that routine, however, left (and still leaves) me stricken with a sense of the utter strangeness that is our life there. Just what is it, after all, that we are doing, exactly?

To illustrate by way of example, last night’s conclusion of Evening Prayer involved our being graced with the opportunity of meeting R. What quickly became apparent from our interactions with R, however, was that he presented a textbook case of Schizophrenia of the Disorganized Type (sometimes referred to as “hebephrenia”). After a rather confusing and lengthy bit of conversation, JR and I convinced him to stay the night at St. Joe’s with the promise of breakfast and whatever continued assistance we might be able to provide in the morning. Now, having worked in the mental health field, I have a sense of what would traditionally be done to help folks with psychological conditions similar to R's, but given our promise of aid in the morning (and perhaps sinfully feeling a perceived lack in requisite resources), I had to ask myself about what it is that we, as church, are to do exactly for such a one?

Jumping forward a little, somehow or other it seems I have been so privileged as to be typecast among our neighbors on “the hill” as the go to guy when it comes to meeting their ongoing need for cigarettes. And under the tutelage of my more pious and faithful brothers, I’ve begun (though only begun) to better learn just what it might mean to follow Jesus’ instructions to “give to him who asks.” (Matt 5:42) At any rate, this evening replayed Concrete’s increasingly common (and certainly not undeserved) request for Marlboros for he and the guys. When observed by O and the above-mentioned family member in handing over the boxes of smokes, however, and later confronted by O on my “rationale” for so doing, again, I was taken aback at the ambiguity and utter strangeness that life at St. Joe’s entails. For how does one negotiate the fulfilling of a request that one knows will bring eventual physical disruption as well as the immediacy of the desired comfort? Just what exactly are we doing in buying cigarettes for these friends, after all?

Perhaps here, in our final paragraph, you might expect the attempt at profundity by way of some sort of concluding and salutary answer to the questions posed above. But I must confess that both in the case of R’s disorder (that term being meant Thomistically) and in that of Concrete’s communal cigarette requests, I have nothing of substantive value to offer. Indeed, I have virtually no idea how to respond to such queries (leaving little to assuage my family member of her puzzled concerns). I suppose various answers could be proposed but I strongly suspect that these might mutually contradict each other and, at any rate, fail to capture, let alone explicate, the oddity of it all in its fullness. I’ll leave the telling of the rest of our story with R to JR or Colin, but I guess all of the above is simply an expression of my newly discovered gratitude, both to the inciting family member (and O) for her questions and to our Savior, our neighbors on “the hill”, and my partners-in-crime for the opportunity of their being asked. These, it seems, are questions in which we are meant to dwell. And I’m thankful for the chance to have entered that space, strange and difficult though it is.