A few days ago, I stood in my first bread line. Glide Memorial Church, my Beatitudes Society Summer Fellowship site, serves over 2,000 meals a day, 364 days a year. Serving 700,000 meals annually requires a stream-lined operation and Glide has been placing me in all the different positions that contribute to this gargantuan endeavor. I have been placed in the dining room, the kitchen, the hallways where people wait, the line outside where people receive their meal tickets, the ticket collection area, and so on. What I did not expect was to be placed in the line itself.
I had interacted with the food line before, but I’d always had a job to do and never had the time to really take in the atmosphere, the sensory stimuli, or the faces and words and ways of waiting of the people. Now I had the time. In fact, that was all that I had. There was nothing to do but wait and look around and hope that the line would move a little quicker because I was getting hungry and I heard someone say that they would only be serving for 20 more minutes. On the other side of the street there were drug deals going down. On the wall to my left someone had scrawled, “Crack smokes you.” At one point a very thin woman in line bent over and put her hands on the ground and began shaking her whole body. A man in line blurted out, “What’s she doing?!” and seemed ready to make some fun out of this. But, before he had the chance, another woman in line shouted back at him: “She’s wigglin’” (subtext: “lay off her, she wouldn’t be doing this if she didn’t need to”). I’ve gotten used to a lot of the smells that arose from the line, but at one point the line was stopped for in one place for a while and a few minutes into the pause I realized that I could hardly breathe. That is when I looked down and noticed a large pile of feces (probably human) on the ground a foot from my shoe. I tried to be strong and not let it bother me, but by the time the line finally moved (at least 5 minutes later) I had begun wondering if I was going to pass out or have to quit the line.
My Beatitudes Society Summer Fellowship has landed me at Glide Memorial Methodist Church, a wild, passionate, engaged, liberating church/social services network that grounds its ministry on the principles of “Unconditional Love” and “Recovery is for Everyone.” Glide is in the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, the neighborhood with easily the highest concentration of homelessness and addiction in the city, so these principles are vital to their work in that community. The vast majority of those who receive the array of social services that Glide offers are from the extreme margins of society. They are those with the most visible addictions, disabilities, diagnoses, and scars of oppression and isolation. For many at Glide, the conditions that mainstream society places on acceptance, much less love, must seem hopelessly distant. This is why removing the conditions on love is so vital for an organization that seeks to be in supportive community with the most disenfranchised.
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