Running with horses: Bearing secrets

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Bearing secrets

John

I have been working around street people, mostly homeless, for twenty-five years now. I help run a coffeehouse where they can drop in, and then on Sunday we hold a small urban church service upstairs. We never know what will happen there. Some of the people smell bad, disturbed people pray too long, and visitors wander in and out of the service. The other week one person prayed, "Thank you, Lord, for Metamusil," and another chimed in, "That's a 10-4, God."

I was surprised to learn how many street people are fundamentalists, at least those who claim any kind of faith. No wonder: the missions they go to preach a steady diet of hellfire and brimstone, and many street people carry around some notion of a mean God from their childhood. There is plenty of shame and worthlessness to go around.

I have a theory that both street people and fundamentalists suffer from attachment disorders. Somehow in childhood they never learned to bond with parents and never learned to bond with God either. How can you trust another person with who you are, much less God?

My friends in Alcoholic Anonymous tell us that we are as sick as our secrets. I know many folks with dark secrets, and nowhere to take them. Sometimes they go crazy, literally insane, because they can't stand being alone with their dark thoughts and secrets. Or they get loaded, or get high.

An acquaintance of mine ran a street ministry just a few blocks away. He had secrets about failures in the past and financial pressures in his present that he never told anyone. They bottled up inside him. One day his walked in the front door and found his body swaying from a rope. I cannot tell you what a blow that was for the people he ministered to. They barely hang on to life themselves, and then to have their pastor commit suicide...

We all bear secrets. Those of us fortunate enough to have a spouse, a friend, or someone we can trust, have someone to share our secrets with. If not, at least we have God, who knows our secrets before we spill them. The fact that we are still alive shows that God has more tolerance for whatever those secrets represent than we may give God credit for.

If i am right about attachment disorders, the best ministry i can offer is a long-term relationship. I tell people that I hang with the poor all day, and that sums it up. I hope that over the years and decades they learn to trust me as someone who can handle their secrets. I hope that trust will gradually spill over to God. And i tell people who encounter the homeless on the streets and are confused about how to respond, that eye contact and a listening ear may be more important than food or money or Bible verses. They need to connect in some way with another human being.

A German poet wrote a poem about the poor. It's really a prayer:

Make it so the poor are no longer

despised and thrown away.

Look at them standing about -

like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.