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.
I write about all this, in somewhat graphic form, because as much as I have helped out in shelters and the like I had never seen things from this perspective before. Many times when a panhandler has asked me for money to buy food I have responded grudgingly, because I knew there were a number of places in the area to receive free food. Now, however, the fact of free and available food for the poor has taken on a new and nuanced set of connotations in my mind. To be sure, many of the realities of what it means to wait in a bread line are beyond my ken because I have never stood in one out of physical necessity. Still, the sensory realities remain the same and the difficulty of trying to overcome an addiction or any other block to flourishing in an environment rife with drugs and bubbling over with stress and suffering seems all the more difficult to me now. I believe that love requires understanding. Every time I experience a lesson like this I realize I still have such a long way to go.
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Kudos!
Thanks for sharing. I didn't have nearly as dramatic an experience, but I also went through a food line in Detroit not too long ago on a street retreat led by Alex from Faithful Fools (also from the Tenderloin.) I remember giving my sacked lunch to someone at a bus shelter who was giving me a sob story. When he looked into the bag and I explained where I got it his attitude brightened a bit and he thanked me, holding out his fist for me to bump with my own. It was touching in a transformative sort of way. I also noticed how the streets led into the neighborhood but not out and how the advertisements were for products so far out of reach of the residents, stuff like AIDS medication. It helps to grow compassion within us like the Grinch's expanding heart. But a heart hurts in breaking by expanding as it does breaking by being crushed.