on the homeless outside the church

It was just another day in the rest of my life. I don’t do winter and winter was still sternly around, despite those promises that are exaggerations and lies whispered by daffodils and jonquils and cherry blossoms and magnolia, flora-version of premature ejaculation. They promise caress of warmth and deliver only frustration, a cold chill, thwarted expectation. I have learned to ignore the false promise of those blossoms. There’s a metaphor somewhere there.  Thwarted promise, anyone?

There’s a lot of thwarted promises I’ve learned to ignore. It goes with greying hair, saggy bits and lengthening shadows, perhaps. As aging Baby Boomers we can learn to forget much that once lit up our world. The times that once were a-changing merely morphed back, the m-m-my generation that hoped to die before it got old by and large decided to cling tenaciously to life if it hadn’t OD’ed or choked on it its own vomit. But not to surrender creature comforts.

Boomers who received their free education ensured our successors had to pay, generated rigorous structures and maintained institutions that protected our own bank vaults. When younger generations X, Y, and Z with increasing passion tried to draw attention to depleted ozones, dwindling resources, and the bitter discomfort of nights spent under the stars with hungry children, then we were eloquent. We Boomers bleated empty promises and retreated comfortably into our secure institutions or private hedonistic liberations. We retreated, and left X, Y and Z outside in the bitterly cold nights that mock the promises made by spring flowers and Baby Boomers. We left X, Y and Z increasingly disillusioned with our edifices, sleeping outside our comfort zones on bitterly cold nights, nights spent under the stars with their own hungry children, our mokopuna.

As it happened I stumbled across a rally, a small public gathering drawing attention to the plight of homeless people. There was passion, compassion, anger. There were a few politicians working their version of the beat. There was rhetoric, and, as feisty local councilor Henare O'Keefe made clear, there was the ever-present risk that after the rhetoric and the pakipaki there would be for many of us, a warm glow, a sense of achievement, and a satisfied trudge home knowing that we had gathered to assuage our bleeding hearts.

We.

Because I know I will, I did, too. I heard the stories, felt deeply sad, spread my magnolia blossom of promise and went home to my warm bed. As I always have, I preach to myself. I walked away, and the only times that were a-changing were the times tick-tocking away to the next election when, if our most vulnerable have not succumbed to the cold, a new government will form with either blue or red hues, and someone else will drag a sleeping bag to sparse hardly-shelter that is home beneath the

Pier, where Napier homeless often sleep

pier or a bridge or a tree or a church.

Oh, but not a church. Because the gate-keepers, as Henare hinted in his impassioned korero, will ring their hands and say tut tut and mouth a platitude or two and move the rough sleepers on because, well you know, not nice, not clean. 

Ah, the church! I have a mate who wanted to implement some changes at a church. Wanted to make the connections stronger between the church and the society it claims to care for. They were met with a vast vomit of Canons (yup: that’s a fancy obscure church-word for rules) that explained why new ideas could not be implemented. Thou shalt not, because Canon 54 sub-clause 2 part a: ii says blah blah blah.

Homeless? Not welcome here, thanks.

Remember Hemi Baxter’s Holy Spirit who squawked and laid an egg? She’s doing it again. With bitter tears. While chardonnay socialists and theological progressives write papers and wring hands and re-arrange deckchairs and ask homeless people to leave the porch please because, well you know, not nice. And besides, we paid for that toilet paper that you might use if we don’t lock it away. 

A homeless man named Major Keelan and a 13 year old named Jack and the redoubtable Councillor Henare O'Keefe (yes, redoubtable,  and reliable too, because this man has put his life and resources where his mouth is), they all made speeches from the heart. And a few blobs of rain fell, and I’m a bit of an ADHD sort so my mind wandered from the public space where we were listening. The grey mind-jelly wandered away. It wandered away from the small crowd, where visible church representation was conspicuous by its absence (and those who were there may have squirmed a little, as I did, as Henare delivered a truth or two about vacuous ecclesiastical promises). It wander-oozed across the small city block to where a large church that I once knew well stood, tall and proud and near-empty (and cold, but not as cold as the empty space beneath a pier on the water front). St Ozymandias, perhaps. 

six hundred or so empty pews

As this tired Baby Boomer mind wandered, and wondered too at the invisibility of visible church presence at the rally, it entered that adjacent near-empty church-building of St Ozymandias. It wondered how many homeless could sleep in or beneath the 600 hundred or so usually empty pews, with or without heaters. It wondered, not altogether tangentially, why Generations X Y and Z can’t be bothered with echoing cold walls of that cubist monolith, can’t be bothered with yet another colossal institution that exists it seems to preserve itself.

My wandering mind realized too that those with theological degrees, those called, set aside to follow the homeless Christ, those with collars on back-to-front to be a (largely meaningless now) sign to the world, with a passion for pressed robes, cultured enunciations, perfected ceremonies and oh yes, Canons (remember Canons? remember Canon 54 sub-clause 2 part a: ii?), all that and above all propriety, those who are called, set-aside, licensed precisely to be the visible face of the church, the human face of God, they were right at that moment ensconced in their building, St Ozymandias. 

They were safe there as the sound of musical magnificence, crescendos of Haydn’s Creation soared to the rafters, drowning out the faint echoes of the speeches of the street people and their advocates, as Henare delivered a deserved serve and Major reminded us that he didn’t enjoy the unwashed state he was in and 13 year old Jack with his love for family and animals told how much it hurt to have no home.  Safe there behind metre thick walls and heavy wooden doors, safe in an edifice that ensures that only the vetted and nice and clean and housed people may gain entry and hear the soaring harmonies of dead white males. 

Amidst the libretti and the recitativi faithful devotees of the counter-god Apollo, effete beautiful god of music and aesthetics and order and dignity, nice god, good god, they were content while Major and Henare and Jack and others told their poignant tale and the rain began to fall and brought my wandering and wondering grey jelly back to the present. The real God who is revealed in the homeless mendicant Jesus was there, nearby, there at the sound shell of public speech, at that that cold public space without metre thick walls (though a dangerous place to sleep because police will soon move you on).  

The suffering God, homeless Jesus-God, was ignoring the fine concert and the dribbles of money that it would raise to facilitate, under the Canons, the aesthetically pleasing work of the church.  The real God who has “nowhere to lay his (or her) head” and who is far closer to the generations that have turned their back on monolithic institutions, the real God who understands only too well the skepticism and anti-institutionalism of Gens X, Y, and Z, she was getting ready for another night, homeless in the rain. The real God with nowhere to lay her head realized it probably wouldn’t be worthwhile, if the rain got heavy, to mooch over to the big empty church of St Ozymandias  for some shelter, because someone would cite a Canon and ask her to have a shower and only then maybe come back on Sunday.

Nearby magnolia blossom and rain fell and washed away in the gutter.