(Each of these three entries has been a reflection on a visit to Seattle, where Don and I visited with a group of people experiencing homelessness and then attended services at the Seattle Mennonite Church, which runs one of the few homeless shelters as well as a number of other outreach efforts in North Seattle. This is the final installment.)
Sometimes words fall like fire from a mountaintop.
Her words fell like fire from a mountaintop.
But not the kind of fire that makes you quail in fear; there was no damnation here: only a woman at a pulpit, unadorned, upon a stage that served as an altar, speaking words that burned.
She spoke with words that burned about the people (men, women, children of the living God) who had been swept (they call them sweeps) upon her church’s door and found there what succor she could offer.
She spoke of these, her neighbors, with words that fell like fire upon our burning hearts. She spoke of these beloved and how they were loved with a love that brings earthquake and whirlwind and sheer silence, a love that can hide mountains with nothing but vapor and cloud, and then she cried aloud — guttural groan, Spirit’s groaning — at what we all had wrought upon the children of the living God.
City fines levied every day that they (the church) did not sweep out those the police had swept in.
Citations mounting; official pressure; bureaucrats who’d talked to their wives and washed their hands of the matter. They said, “be fined or sweep or maybe if there’s paperwork you’d like to do, we might, we could, and for a fee — but, of course, no guarantees— ”
They call them sweeps.
And so the church would sweep, congregation gathering at the encampment next day with water and what kindness their burning hearts could hold, to help their neighbors pack and go into the next wilderness.
They call them sweeps.
And she, not the pastor, now but rather the woman in the parking lot from the day before, the one with blond hair and tattoos running down her chest, had seen to the heart of the matter. She said, “They call them sweeps; they sweep us up like dirt beneath their feet.”
They call them sweeps.
I went upon a mountaintop to pray and found a place to sit on a rocky outcropping, watching a marmot a few yards off munching at some scrub bush that had learned to grow from stone.
I thought with some regret that here I was removed from the heart of the matter and willed (a little) self-castigation for being one who could so quickly walk away, go upon a mountaintop to pray.
But that fire (the kind that makes you quail in fear) would not neither light nor burn; it died out in a sheer silence that brought another thought, or feeling, or breathing, or, well, I can’t say, exactly; it brought some knowing deeper than the ordinary kind that there was no, there is no, washing your hands of the matter.
Rise on the wings of the dawn or settle on the far side of the sea, shroud yourself in the darkness of the depths of the deep and find yourself, no matter where you find yourself, deep in the heart of the matter.
Some fire that burns without consuming had wrapped itself around my obdurate soul, was burning away only that which was not whole, was hiding mountains in its smoke, and making that smoke waver and dance and take the shape (even here, upon that distant mountaintop) of those from whom I thought I’d walked away.
In this thinking or feeling or breathing or — well, I cannot say — that marmot a few yards off and the bush that had learned to grow from rock, and the rock itself, and the burning planet groaning with the Spirit’s groans were one in the same with the children of the living God, all of them delicate and beloved, all of them gifts as I myself was a gift, as breathing and feeling and knowing were gifts, all separation, even the height of the mountains and the depths of the sea, merely illusion.
And all that we are called to be I grasped for a moment in the midst of this fire — this fierce and burning love that bids us sweep in like wind and earthquake, that bids us sit with neighbors in the sheer silence of their grief and feed the least of these and mend the wounds of a planet groaning — and then the moment was gone.
I am left weeks later with only the memory of the thing, which I offer now, with what I have, inadequate and incomplete. No fire. Only words.
Leave a Reply