Soup Kitchen

Once a month I have the opportunity to staff a soup kitchen in a nearby church. I will go there in the morning and make two large cauldrons of beef stew, which at noontime are ladled out to the (mostly) homeless people who come there for lunch. There used to be a hundred or so at lunch; nowadays there are about twice that number, and more all the time.

I always wonder about myself if I expect a change in the behavior of these people as a kind of recompense for the effort we are all putting in to feed them. For those of you who haven’t seen the play or movie of the Shaw work, “Major Barbara,” there is a lot of discussion of what the Salvation Army or do-gooders generally expect in return when they ladle out the stew.

In reflecting on this question, I began to realize that the real opportunity for transformation does not apply to the relationship between the dispenser of sustenance and the person standing there with an empty plate. The real change came for me when I looked to one side or another of myself, standing there at the long table, and I realized that I had entered into a new kind of bond with the other people that were trying to do good work.

Aaminah’s recent article in the Crescent Times presents a simple and varied template for actions that we might take to help people in need. If people from different faith backgrounds can stand side by side, obeying the more comprehensive imperative to feed the hungry, care for the sick, visit the lonely, comfort the afflicted, perhaps the apparent distinctions between the religions will blur, and evaporate like a mist. I certainly hope so.

One of the most distressing things to me about the conflict in Gaza is the way that all the power appears to be in one set of hands. The owners of these hands say: “We have the right to build walls. You may not leave the enclosure of these walls without our permission. Now that some of your number have lobbed weapons over the walls at us, we will lob more weapons (a lot more) back. We know some bystanders will be hit. So be it. When the time comes we will stop with the lobbing and let some relief agencies come to you. We are so compassionate, we will allow our own relief agencies to come and relieve you. We are compassionately conservative.”

In their assertion of control over who, and what, and when the relief will be extended, they harm their own souls, and prevent themselves from standing side by side with others who obey the higher imperative, the imperative of mercy.

 

Friendship

Bismillahir Rahmaanir Rahiim

 

This is, perhaps, a departure from what you are used to from me. Today I am thinking about friends. Today it is cold and dreary, and all the local schools are closed but I must still go into work, but I’d rather stay at home in bed and am wishing someone I love could be here with me.

My best friend is out of the country for the next month-and-a-half, and I am lonely. It isn’t that I don’t have friends, though it is fact that my “closest” friendships are with people who live nowhere near me. What a blessing to have friendships with people you can call, email or chat with, and indeed it is special to find someone you can connect and be “real” with at all. But there is something to be said too for the friendship where you can feel the healing touch of a hand on your shoulder, a hug, or a shared look across a crowd.

One issue that comes up is “what are we expecting?” Several times I have felt that I put myself out for friendship and not had it reciprocated. On other occasions people have told me that they felt that way; they had tried to build a friendship with me and didn’t feel that I was responding as they had hoped. I’ve long ago learned to not expect anything. It isn’t really friendship anyway if one side is looking for response to it. Friendship is give and take, but it also selfless, without those expectations. Not having preconceived hope means I am pleasantly surprised when a friendship grows, and not quite so hurt when it does not.

 

‘Tis the Season…

For the past two days, in order to raise money for the choral society, I have driven a few miles from my house to an enormous, sprawling, business park, and met with a dozen like minded souls to sing in lobbies.  The property management company hires us as a kind of gift to their corporate tenants.   There we are, men in tuxes, women in formal black, standing in the corners of huge cavernous spaces, and reiterating for the hundredth time a half hour program of a cappella Christmas favorites.  On the other side of the lobby is a long table covered with pine and holly branches, coffee urns, pastries, and perhaps twenty hardy souls from the warren of offices that surrounds us, beyond the glass walls, ficus plants, elevators, and terraced balconies.

It’s kind of surreal.  We sing about the baby Jesus, King Wenceslas of Slovakia making footprints in the snow, the slaughter of the innocent firstborn children in the book of Matthew; then, after a half an hour, “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.”  Then we put on our coats and scarves and walk across an exterior courtyard to another lobby, where we more or less repeat what we just sang.  What changes is the faces on the people.

There were far fewer people listening this year than last year.  Actually, I noticed that there were far fewer cars on the highway to the office park, both going and coming, than there were last year.  One of our singers, an accounting executive for a big corporation with its headquarters in one of the buildings in this park, (Avis Rent-A-Car), said that she was glad she was with us because back at her office they were laying off 300 people today, which is about 40% of the total that works there.  She was pretty sure she would survive the onslaught (but not 100% sure.)

The ones we saw, appearing in twos and threes as we worked our way through the program of carols, often smiled at us gratefully.  The eyes of some of these people probed, with a kind of yearning expression, as if they were wondering if we might be able to help them decide what to get their kids for Christmas.  As I sang the old favorites, Hark the Herald and so forth, I thought about the way the people on Good Morning America still talk about the “recession” as if it were just a rough patch, and that in a few months “things will be be back to normal again.”  That reassurance is not what I saw in the eyes of our listeners today (or for that matter, in the eyes of Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts.)

Singing the old songs, I felt curiously safe.  The entire activity seemed more dependent on whatever authentic good will and seasonal sentimentality we singers could realize in the treated corporate air and implant into the sensibilities of these complete strangers before us.  None of gets any money for this; just a chance to dress up and sing on a weekday morning.  The only sense of payment I got was when one or two of the audience would come up and thank us; and I always felt more thankful to them, just for coming to hear it.

 

Finding a Place for Shared Spiritual Reckoning

At this point in dealing with the requests of the computer, I always feel as if I were welcoming myself: “Come in, sit down, enjoy your soup, whatever.” And in a way, I suppose I am, because I am looking for a way to find that part of me which is already you, and that part of you which is already me.

This blog originates from a passage in The Alchemy of Happiness, by the medieval Muslim theologian al-Ghazzali:

He, therefore, is a wise and prudent man,

Who, after morning prayer, spends an hour

Renewing his own spiritual reckoning,

And says,

“My soul, you only have one life;

No moment that has passed can be recovered,

And in God’s mind the number of your breaths

Has been set down and cannot be increased.

When life is done, no spiritual highways

Will hold the traffic of your freighted soul,

Therefore what you would do, you must do now;

So treat this day as if your life were spent,

And this, an extra day, was granted you

By special favor of Almighty God.

What folly greater than to lose this chance?”

From reading this, and meditating on it, I arrived at the idea that it would help us in our poor human condition if we understood more about the process of spiritual self-evaluation that each and every person finds, to a greater or lesser degree, in the transactions of this life.

And so, I am seeking ways to arrive at a purer form of sharing.

I hate words like ecumenism, and syncretism. Why should I use a fifty-cent word to express something so simple as saying, “trust.”

Somehow ordinary people who believe in good things have yielded authority for trusting to clerics and councils and politicians. And the world is an echoing babel of spiritual distrust; and the politicians sell themselves to corporations and make their voices into instruments of commercial interest.  The purpose for a shared blog is to share. I consider myself a seeker after the truth wherever it is to be found. If we have differences, I am more interested in seeing what it is that we share, rather than what differentiates us.

Let each of us try to make an entry that reflects our own process of self-evaluation, and invite others to comment by doing the same. I think at the outset it will work best if we do not comment on each other’s self-examinations. I want to focus on what I have to say about my own spiritual welfare, not on the differences and similarities between our viewpoints.

Did you see the video of Colin Powell describing his reasons for endorsing Obama? He didn’t say it  completely in the interview, but he was inspired by a photograph he had seen in the New Yorker magazine of a Muslim mother embracing her son’s headstone. After he saw this photograph he just meditated on how it made him feel, for over an hour, then he decided to endorse Obama.

I would aspire to have a blog that held moments like this up for the readers to contemplate, and to communicate the value to each reader of having a daily moment of sincere and unvarnished introspection. I believe that if we did this for a while, perhaps more people would see that we have more in common than we have in opposition.