Color Where There Is No Place to Put It

A couple of nights ago I stayed over at church as one of the hosts for an IHN week. If your community has an Interfaith Hospitality Network, then you know it's a program designed to offer a tiny bit of a homelike atmosphere to homeless families. Shelters are usually segregated by gender, which tends to split up spouses and divide parents from children. Through IHN, families stay overnight, in their own rooms as much as possible, in participating churches and synagogues for a week at a time. They spend their days at the IHN center, from which children are delivered to school and where parents find phone banks and other resources for housing and job searches.

Most religious communities host IHN families about four separate weeks each year. It's a high people-intensive committment: volunteers are needed to set up and take down, welcome and say good-bye, provide breakfasts and dinners, act as hosts during the early evening hours - mostly to supervise the younger children so the parents can have some privacy, and stay overnight. I figured I could about manage an overnight, with the minimal interaction it would require with either the families or my co-overnighter.

I didn't miss the irony that I was spending the evening with four families who have no homes at present at the same time that I was writing about extravagant home decorating ideas. An odd thing has happened recently in that several possibilities for serving the homeless have suddenly materialized in my life. A friend and former colleague is taking me with her next week to a huge men's shelter where she does poetry workshops. A man is my spiritual direction program is planning his internship around offering spiritual companionship to the homeless. This Saturday I'll be spending some time at the church where I'll be doing my internship this year, on a day when lunch is provided to the homeless. And if I get my act in gear and send an email today, there may be an opportunity for me involving spiritual direction and the homeless in the city in which I attend seminary.

In the very dark days of last winter, my own former spiritual director, working in another city these days, sent me without commentary a short article about Jean Vanier and L'Arche, the communities Vanier founded in which those who are developmentally disabled and those who are not share homes together. Why did you send me this? I asked. I don't know, he answered. I thought about writing something, but I decided to let it take its own course. I can't say that I felt suddenly inspired to anything beyond my own survival, but it did occur to me then in a vague kind of way that perhaps he was trying to tell me that my own life having crashed and burned did not mean that I was forever lost and precluded from helping others.

It's probably premature even to speculate about this turn of events, since all that has happened is that a few seeds have been scattered into my life. But it does make me wonder whether I am moving in a completely unexpected direction. I have a roof over my head and a loving family living in it with me, and yet in some ways as a consequence of the past year I feel completely adrift and homeless. New qualifications, perhaps.