Our Story: St. Joseph's Hospitality

This is one version of a story of getting to know a group of homeless men at St. Joseph's Episcopal Church in Durham, NC.

It all starts with prayer. In 2006, I came to Duke University for doctoral studies in theology, and decided to start praying Morning and Evening Prayer at St. Joseph’s with whomever I could get to come. We were a tiny little struggling church, so this seemed prudent. For a while no one showed up, except occasionally my wife Lisa. After a while an Independent Catholic priest named Chris started attending here and there. Then JR Rigby came by for EP one day, and he came back in the morning, and then in the evening, and so on, until I expected him. (JR is a Ph.D. student in engineering at Duke). We quickly became friends,
praying the Office and chatting together consistently throughout the week. Since then we’ve established several other regular and semi-regular attendees, the majority of whom are members of other Episcopal parishes in the area.

Fairly quickly we discovered that, since we were around the church a lot, we were slowly getting to know a group of homeless men taking refuge on the church grounds (which we found out they called “the Hill”). This was and is a semi-permanent community of homeless men (that we creatively named “the Guys”), the core of which consists of about five guys in addition to a rotating squad of about a 12-15 people, any number of which may be found in the group on a given day. From time to time the police would pay our friends a visit and we’d have to repeat in other words our priest Mother Rhonda’s dictum that as long as she was the head of our church the poor would be as welcome as anyone else. She had to tell the police more than once that they were not welcome to run the Guys off the church grounds.

So at first JR and I would just stop by the Hill to chat for a few minutes while walking to and from the church for prayer. Eventually we decided that those conversations in passing were not really making us into a community, the goal to which we figured the Gospel called us. Rather, we were just a couple of Duke students that these folks happened to know better than your average middle-class fellows. So, we decided to eat breakfast at the church, after Morning Prayer, five days a week. Nothing special. Cereal. Sometimes bacon and eggs. We invited anyone around to join us. Then a couple of ladies at Blacknall Presbyterian said they wanted to do something for the homeless but they didn’t know what. They offered to make us a breakfast casserole each week. Whether the Guys showed up or not, we'd be there eating breakfast. Some slept through it, some came to the table, some preferred a glass of juice or the rest of last night’s beer. Sometimes they would even come to prayer. It didn’t matter. We just made friends.

And so we did things that friends would do. We’ve bought bus tickets for guys passing through, and we have intervened when a young homeless woman fell into the company of our friends. We sometimes buy cigarettes for our friend called Concrete and (through him) for other guys (he’s scrupulously communistic), as well as food, clothes, blankets, and other odds and ends. We’ve helped them apply for social services or get into rehab programs. We've visited them in the hospital, and tried to track them down in jail. On the other hand, we've been lied to, cheated, scammed, cursed, and made fun of. We’ve seen drug addiction, pervasive alcoholism, violence, hatred, self-destruction, and despair.

This basic relationship with the Guys, trying to be a community, continues and evolves to this day. Saint Joseph’s body itself, including its clergy and vestry, has over the last three years labored long and hard at its response to the Guys and at knowing how exactly they fit into the mission of the church.

About a year or so after starting the breakfast fellowship, I started asking Lisa if she would ever be comfortable letting someone like Concrete (“Crete” for short) sleep in our spare room. This was especially pressing in the winter when it was cold. These were, in some way, our friends after all. Her initial reaction was that she’d have to work on it. So she too spent some time hanging out in the parking lot, coming to breakfast, with the goal of making friends. At the same time JR finally cajoled his friend Adam (also a graduate student in theology) into coming to the Office and breakfast. Sucked in by holy pestering, he rather quickly found his place on the Hill. Adam’s wife Megan and son Kale (3y/o), and JR’s wife Hannah, have also become regular faces. One day at breakfast Kale demanded, rather frustrated, “Where is Mr. Concrete?!”

This man who calls himself Concrete deserves comment. His constant presence and notable virtue meant that over time we became quite close to him. This man sounds like a lunatic, has been involuntarily committed to an insane asylum at least twice, but might just be the closest thing to a prophet that any of us will ever see. It takes a while of listening to him and learning his language to realize that he is far from crazy, quite cogent, and has a radical vision of people’s hearts and the forces of evil that enslave them. After a while he’d sleep most nights in the back seat of my car. If JR, Adam or I missed a day or two from saying the Office, he would walk to our houses to visit and check on us. He’d drop in for dinner, or join us at Adam’s pad for a basketball game and a beer. Slowly, very slowly, Lisa and I decided that we could offer him our spare room. Then, even more slowly, he began showing signs of taking us up on our offer. He’d come in about 9pm and leave about 7am. His room was always scrupulously clean and he is the most polite and considerate person in our house by far.

Then one night our landlords saw Crete in our apartment. They emailed and said that while its fine for him to sleep in the car, there is absolutely no way that he could be allowed in the apartment. They cited him as a safety hazard. This forced Lisa and I to move out in order to live in a place where Crete was welcome. So we rented a bigger house in the Walltown neighborhood of Durham (where its cheaper). There’s plenty of space, an extra bathroom, a gigantic kitchen, and a fenced yard for our dog Samantha. Crete has his own room that is of course the cleanest in the house. Many of us celebrated the move with a house blessing and Eucharist.

Barely a week after moving, I walked back to the Hill from the church to find another of our closer homeless friends, William, stumbling back towards the Parish Hall holding his face. He’d been punched and knocked out. So after a hospital visit, JR dropped him off and my place to recover for a couple of days. Will and Crete got along very well together and so eventually we decided to put another bed in a spare room for him. Having two guys is actually somewhat easier than having one. They take care of each other. They cook, clean, buy each other smokes, and keep each other company. They both still make daily trips up to the Hill and see their other friends.

And that’s where we are now. There’s still a steady flow of guys up on the Hill. We meet new people as they come through, and we keep up our friendships with the regulars. Lisa and I offer nightly beds and daily shelter to two of those regulars that we know from praying and ministering at St. Joseph’s. But things, as ever, continue and, we trust, will continue to evolve. Recently Lisa, Sammie and I have taken a separate apartment to make some much-needed space for ourselves, while continuing to rent the Walltown house for our guests. This means that Will and Crete gain a bit more independence. We frequent this house of hospitality on a daily basis, but we also hope to involve other members of the church. One short-term goal is of finding one or two single divinity school students who are looking for a cheap room or a communal living situation to live-in and “man the place.” To fund this hospitality house we are entirely dependent on the generosity of others, and we do not yet know where the money is going to come from. We will beg and we will pray.

Several of us keep up a steady conversation about the rationale for our actions. We agree that the goal is communion (both social and sacramental sorts), and we spend a lot of theological contemplation (theoretical and practical) on what the barriers are and how they should be overcome. Our inspiration and guidance has come largely from Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, John Chrysostom, William Stringfellow, St. Francis, Teresa of Lisieux and Mother Teresa of Calcutta - to name a few of those often on our minds. We’ve sought help and camaraderie at Catholic Worker Houses and New Monastic communities and there found holy souls far wiser than we. Stanley Hauerwas is a generous friend who continually points us to his guides (Aquinas, Barth, MacIntyre, Yoder, Wittgenstein), and with whose theology in many ways this whole venture started. With these Saints past and present, we struggle against the notion that interacting with the poor should be done primarily through institutional giving - that the congregation should give money to the shelter rather than invite the guys to a meal. We balk at embracing the Guys in any way that preserves some safe distance, be it spatial or socio-economic or institutional. It seems clear to us that the Gospel does not leave us the luxury for that distance. We are guarded against the temptation to paternalism, and especially any patronizing urge to help our friends to become middle class. We seek (and often fail terribly!) to make ourselves vulnerable to them as we would to any friend. We try to venture into new territory (often not having any clue what exactly we are really doing) consistent with the Gospel. Our most basic conviction is that in the poor we find Jesus himself in his distressing disguise, since “in as much as you did it to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”

At St. Joseph's we're not trying to become a rescue mission, or a homeless shelter. Skeptics have occasionally objected to Vicar Rhonda by saying “But we’re not a shelter!” “That’s right!” she says. We are the church trying to bear witness to Christ by receiving the gifts that we have been given. Those of us who pray the Office see those gifts as being very much embodied in the group of men that live at the church. We believe that these men and women (Concrete, William, Reuben, Leroy, Mike, Greg, Charlie, Red, KT, Traver, Terry, Paul, Mike, Billy, Robin, Yasmin, and Jimmy among others) have legitimate claims on our lives, that their requests for a ride or a meal, or just spending time with them, are not optional do-goodery.

Those of us who regularly seek this fellowship have had our lives changed and deepened. But we're still plodding along, trying to make sense of it all, always looking for any friend who might offer some insight.

May the Lord Jesus guide us as we grope around in the dark trying to do his will.