ESSAYS INSPIRED BY THE SHELTER

Writer Index:

1. Sara Groves
2. Anne Jackson
3. David Dark
4. Jim Hancock
5. Nate Larkin
6. Padraig Otuama

SARA GROVES

In Rwanda they say you need to have at least four good friends because if you get injured, your ‘ambulance’ is a stretcher carried by four people.  In addition to forgoing a couple days’ wages to carry you to the nearest clinic, these friends will also most likely pitch in to pay your bill when you arrive.  In America we say you don't need friends if you have good health insurance and a great retirement plan.

But I get tired of sustaining an independent mini-kingdom, and I want to lie down in that cot and let a few friends carry me.  It is hard to be proud when someone is carrying you, but I’m also tired of being proud.  ‘Imposition’ has such a negative and lazy connotation, but my deepest friendships have not grown in the confines of self-sufficient interactions.  They went deep when, broken and unable to contend with life, I called for help in the middle of the night, or when a perceptive friend lovingly confronted me about a destructive choice.

The other side of imposition is to live unburdened, ready to drop what I’m doing to carry a friend.  In these honor-filled moments, convenience is no god, and personal comfort no heaven because in these moments, in one more small way, I know Christ.

I am deeply grateful for my stretcher-bearers, and even for the time I've spent in the cot.

ANNE JACKSON

Fear.

That’s the first emotion that is thrown out of my soul when I think of The Shelter.

“Sure,” I think to myself as I see it slowly taking shape, “it should be a safe place.” 

But for most of my thirty years of life, The Shelter has been misrepresented by false sanctuaries. Instead of a place to heal or help others, these places of refuge have been more like battlefields full of friendly fire. Memories of betrayal, judgment, and religion fill my mind.

So when I see The Shelter, I become afraid.  I don’t want to take another chance. I don’t want to be hurt. I don’t want to show my scars from the past or my fresh wounds.

And I run.

I’ve spent so many years running from The Shelter that recently, I found myself exactly where I thought I wanted to be.

I’m alone.

Nobody can hurt me here.

I can take care of myself.

When I arrived in this desert of self-sufficiency, my demons no doubt found me there as well. With only my pride to fight them off, I found myself becoming weaker.

Defeated.

I collapsed into the ground, fully understanding David’s plea for God to end his life. Truth became crystal clear and I realized how vulnerable I was.

I’m alone.

Everything can hurt me here.

It’s impossible for me to take care of myself.

With the small amount of strength I had left I reached out my hand and was touched by grace.

The Shelter had followed me into the desert as well.

Voices familiar to me climbed inside the hole I was in and lifted me out. The touch of their skin strengthened my heart and helped restore my failing hope.

Wendell Berry wrote, “We are too tightly tangled together to be able to separate ourselves from one another either by good or by evil. We are all involved in all and any good, and in all and any evil. For any sin, we all suffer.”

The Shelter is not a static building or a list of rules. It is a living, breathing spirit inside each of us that gives us the grace to carry each other during the times when we walk through the valleys of our lives. The Shelter is a gift to us in the most desperate times of our lives, and it’s a gift we also have an opportunity to offer to others freely. 

DAVID DARK

I’d like to share a serendipitous slip of the tongue vouchsafed unto me via the testimony of a four-year-old concerning an image many might recognize, an definitive image within the Hanna-Barbera tradition.

Having spied a certain pattern, the child described the standard operating procedure whereby the figures of Scooby and Shaggy would respond to duress (a man in a monster costume, for instance) by leaping into one another’s arms and quivering together. They hold each other, we might say, but the child put it better: “They hold their ‘chothers.” And with the enunciation of this concept, that of the ‘chother, I believe we’re sitting squarely within the glow of a religious insight.

Drawing on the Buddhist principle of anatta (no-self), Harold Oliver once proffered the following paradox: “There is no-self, and it is the relational self.” According to this wisdom, the idea that any of us can have meaning alone or be the authors of our own significance or have joy for which we only have ourselves to thank is a death-dealing delusion, a psycho covenant that implies that a strong, successful few of us might somehow gain our lives without losing them. If we hold to the ‘chother principle, our sustenance comes to us via the fact of relatedness or not at all. Whatever self I can be said to have is the gift of self I receive from my relation to others, the groundless ground (think of the way Shag and Scoob almost levitate) of the ‘chother.

When we’re confronted with crisis, when we join together in song, or when we experience (or receive) a vision of soul, the question of where one person starts and another stops begins to dissolve; individualism takes on an unreal and nseemly quality. In such moments, we’re summoned not so much to act as if the road to life, loveliness, salvation and—possibly--sanity can only be entered into where two or more are gathered but rather to proceed in recognition of this sweet, scandalous, embarrassing fact.

We have to find, hold on, and let go within the circle of our ‘chothers. It’s the only life available. Within it, we live. 

JIM HANCOCK

Killing time at the Art Institute of Chicago I view renaissance paintings of Jesus—all quite remarkable without seeming quite right.

Eventually it occurs to me the not-quite-rightness of those images is this: There’s not a Jew among them. I see Spanish-Jesus, Italian- and Dutch-Jesus; but not Palestinian-Jesus. 

Later, at a church in Houston’s Greater Third Ward I encounter East African-Jesus—which reminds me of Indonesia and Southeast-Asian-Jesus.

Of course none of these is accurate. I know this from my childhood Bible featuring Anglo-American-Jesus. 

I’m no genius, but a pattern’s a pattern.

The cynic who sublets a space in the back of my brain recites Voltaire: If God has made us in his image we have returned him the favor. I don’t think the cynic is wrong about this. Nor entirely right.

The incarnation story makes it easy to see why artists render the Messiah in reassuring skin tones. Is anyone shocked when most of the people in the sanctuary look like most of the people in the sanctuary? But there’s more to it.

In the shelter of each other the people live. That church in Houston features brass doors salvaged from the neighborhood movie house where dark-skinned patrons were pointedly unwelcome. Those doors are a portal between shelter and storm. I think I get that.

I also get that our story can’t just be about going to church; worshipping a familiar God in the company of familiar companions.

Our shelter lives and breathes and moves with the people because it is the people, set loose in the world to show how much God loves us. Beneath the skin tones and sympathies that distinguish one from another, a common blood secures us; however we look, wherever we go. 

NATE LARKIN

I staggered into The Shelter when I was 42 years old.  Exhausted, half-crazy, riven with shame and driven by fear, I was trying to escape from my collapsing life.  Without shelter, I would die.

I found The Shelter in a church — which was ironic, because I’d been going to church for years.  Well, not going, exactly.  Sending.  I had been sending a religious version of myself to church for years, and I had never found The Shelter before. 

My church persona, whom I would later name ”Saint Nate,” was a devout Christian, and an admirable one.  He could sing and pray, recite scripture, teach, and testify.  He had qualified early for the Pro Tour.  His resume was impressive and his reputation was intact.  Saint Nate was always in great shape.  I, on the other hand, was dying.

The church was closed when I arrived.  Even the janitor was gone.  But someone had propped the basement door open, and in a musty room at the bottom of the stairs I found a dozen people sitting in a circle, telling the truth to each other.

The people in that room were not shiny — some of them were Samaritans — but their sharing was suffused with a strange light. Humbly, and with directness I had never heard before, they were confessing to each other, telling tales of failure and redemption, sharing wisdom, exchanging hope. 

These broken people opened their circle and made a place for me.  When I spoke, they listened, and when I was done, they thanked me.  At the end of the meeting we joined hands and prayed: “Our father, who art in heaven...”

A dozen years and a thousand meetings have passed since I first entered The Shelter, and I treasure every one.  In The Shelter, I found my life.

PADRAIG OTUAMA

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireas na daoine.

I am remembering a time when I needed shelter. I am remembering it with my mind. But, even more, I am remembering it with my body. 

Where is it that we feel loneliness in the body? I feel it as a particular kind of hollow in the heart, I can feel an echo of my own heart in my own chest.

Once when I was sixteen, a man at a music festival laughed at something I said, and said that he liked me. It was the first time anyone had said to me they liked me. Another time, following a long week of work, friends came to my house and said they’d decided that we were going to a film so that we could laugh together. Another time, a friend knocked on my door, and before I knew it, he was crying in my kitchen. Sometimes we can’t even put a name to our loneliness, but we know that shelter is needed.

Once, in fact, for a long, long time, I was frightened – so frightened, I could not even be my own self, I could not show kindness, I had forgotten how to show love. I was a human in need of shelter.

When I remember these things, I remember with my body. I feel that lurch of exposed loneliness.

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireas na daoine.

Try as I have, I have not been able to find which part of Ireland this old saying comes from. It is possible it comes from the Islands off the West Coast. It means:

It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.

The Lakewalker knew about shelter. He seemed to find it in a house in Bethany. And he gave it, when in the house of Simon, to a woman who feared, and because she was feared, she was judged. Even though the man of Nazareth’s sheltering meant that he too was judged, he still gave shelter.

Us people have often lived unsheletered and unsheltering lives. We feel raw, we feel fear, we expose and humiliate others in the hope of finding belonging and validation. We scapegoat the other in the hope that our own cowardice and fear will not be named.

And in the midst of it all, in the midst of the mosaic of human beings excluding other human beings, I am thinking of a woman I knew who did not consider herself a great person of words, learning or insight. She thought modestly of her talents, abilities and potential. When her neighbour’s mother died, the woman cooked a houseful of food. She gave the food, she offered care for the dog and for the plants. She brought her own self and she cooked and listened. She wrote a card after a month. She wrote another card the next month. The month after that, there was another dish of casserole.

She knew that grief is measured in years, not days.

She provided shelter.

It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.