hands up

March 10, 2009 in getting over myself

Picture this: you’re helping serve Sunday breakfast for homeless men and women. There are other Christians there too, drawn from churches around the area. Like the breakfast you’re serving, the team of improvised cooks is an odd affair; a little over cooked in places, perhaps a tad quirkily-presented at times, but together you think you’ll manage to pull it off.

Before the doors are opened there is a time for prayer. Someone pipes up; all passion and furrowed brow and eternal angst. There’s no doubting that the feelings are genuine, but it’s the presentation that, well, bugs you. You can feel the old cynicism begin to flow, tempting you to label him a nut job, a Christian fundamentalist but without any of da fun.

Things continue and you follow the script. Someone gives a talk to the diners, you can’t hear because you’re trying not to burn the beans, but you can see enough to confirm your assumptions about the Earnest One: he’s there, slightly stage left, praying again with massive intensity while the speaker’s explaining what part faith plays in his own life. It all looks a little odd from where you’re standing, prompting your cynicism to give way to wearied embarrassment and jaded questioning. Why is the church made up of such people? Why do we give such credibility to these oddballs? Is this really what it means to be ‘on fire for Jesus’? Can’t someone put him out? You decide to be kind and humour him, but inside you know the truth – you think he’s missed the point.

It’s nearing the end, and something occurs to you: the fact that there has been pretty much no interaction between volunteer and client. Some of the apron-wearers are sat in the office, munching back egg sarnies, while others are just standing around looking awkward. And that includes you. The only one who isn’t hiding is the guy you pretty much wrote off earlier on. Play back the tapes and you conclude that he’s never once been in the kitchen, but has spent the entire time out front, serving, cleaning, smiling, talking and listening. It’s time to join him.

It takes just one comment for your cynicism to be exposed for the shallow, arrogant, selfish scam that it is. It comes from a 40-something ex-heroin addict whose face tells two distinctly different stories; years of abuse and struggle combined with a hint of optimism and newly nurtured self-belief. He tells you a little about his life, and it doesn’t take long before he reaches the climax:

‘It was this man,’ he says, pointing at the one sat next to you, the one you wrote off so swiftly, ‘he pulled me through. Every week he’d bring me this beautiful spicy soup and homemade bread when I was living on the street. Every week for well over a year. Never failed.’

It’s one of those moments where a choice has to be made. Do you accept that you got it utterly wrong, that your judgements were completely bogus, or do you continue to patronise and discount?

It wasn’t hard choice to make. I knew I’d been wrong, that I’d been an idiot. But what surprised me was the way that instead of leaving with a feeling of conviction and what-a-fool-am-I, something else was added to the mix. Sure, I still felt like an idiot, but one whose idiocy does not bar him from inclusion. As we sat and talked, me and the man and some of the diners, we disagreed on more topics than most, but yet again I was struck by the sense of being utterly alive in the moment. My bullshit was momentarily dismantled and together we were doing something good, something right. Is this what the kingdom looks like?

I suppose grace is one of the most intoxicating things of all. Just a hint of it, a millimeter crack exposed as you prize back the lid and inhale, it’s enough. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that without it cynicism leads to a dead end. Grace – accepting the input and truth from a wiser, kinder, bolder source (as well as giving it out ourselves) – is surely the destination to which our cynicism should be leading us.