Dung Heap Chaplains

Platitudes, Dogma, and Empty Plates

Back in the 60s, I had compassion on the homeless and street people when it wasn’t fashionable in our church. I was accused more than once of preaching a social Gospel. I railed at and about the suited, cologned congregation I attended. I spoke passionately at Bible studies, in Sunday school classes and with my friends about them. But I preached from a comfortable distance from the homeless and the hungry. True, I handed out spare change to vagrants when I happened to be downtown. Over the years my wife and I took in a few questionable characters until we had our own children and found out that once we had housed a child molester. I was a little more careful in the future, but not much more . . . but that’s another story.

It was January in Phoenix, 1982. As usual, the city was swollen with jobless, homeless people who migrate here because of the mild winter. I, too, was job hunting. My elders and I had come to a mutual agreement that I was not “effective” as an associate minister. They graciously gave me six months to find another job. Before I ended up owning my construction company, I had looked at nearly everything else under the sun that pertained to my self-perceived skill set and education. I almost took jobs as a juvenile probation officer, a treatment program manager for a prison, a representative for a blood bank, a pharmaceutical rep, and a director of a foster care program for the aged. The help wanted ad that really caught my eye was for a chaplain for a downtown shelter for the homeless. It was a soup kitchen, tent city, and social service center with a spiritual commitment. I was ecstatic. My degrees in theology and counseling, together with my five years of treatment program social work experience—all my personal commitments to the outcasts of society—focused at last in one job. I called and set up an interview.

On the day of the interview, I put on my interviewing suit—a dark blue, pinstriped job. And my red “power tie” (it was the ‘80’s…). I drove downtown. Deep downtown. As I neared the address of the shelter, the cityscape began looking more and more tired and beaten down. The people began looking more and more weary, more hardened, more threatened and threatening. To my left, I saw a line of people on a sidewalk leaning against the side of a building, a human bar graph of pain, some standing, some squatted down, some lying down, and some hunched over.

As I drove by them looking for the address, I discreetly punched down the lock on my car door with my elbow. I found the building and realized they were all in line for the shelter I was applying to. Over 100 people standing in line at two o’clock for a few beds and a meal offered first-come-first-served when the doors opened at 5 p.m.. I drove back around the building looking for a parking space. From this direction I was staring into their faces. And some of them stared back at me.

I never made it to the interview. I never even parked my car. I just drove on. I did not unlock my doors until I got home. I was afraid of them. I looked upon them with their matted, greasy hair and their mismatched, thrift store clothing. I looked upon the robotic drunks with their empty stares. I saw the fearful hugging themselves, embracing filthy blankets and trash bags full of rags to their empty stomachs. I saw their shopping carts with bags of cans guarded like they were armored cars full of gold. I saw the Jonahs running from God, the Jacobs running from their own doing, the Jobs suffering without cause, the Onesimuses escaping responsibility, the prodigal sons, the Gerasene demoniacs covered with self-inflicted wounds. Most disturbing were the children so young yet unintimidated by the fearfulness around them. I saw sheep without a shepherd—lost, hungry, dying, helpless, wounded and tired. I saw the psychos, preying like wolves on the weak, the fearful and the alone. I saw the timid crazies trying to blend seamlessly into the wall to avoid being victimized. I saw them, and I was afraid.

I think I feared what they would do to me. Not physically, but emotionally and spiritually. I would be a chaplain, a man of God, a priest, a comforter, a teacher of God’s will and purposes. You ask what could they possibly do to me that would fill me with such terror that I would walk away from them? Well, I’ll tell you: I was afraid they would ask me, “Why?”

Why am I suffering?

Why am I hungry?

Why am I lonely?

Why can’t I find work?

Why can’t I get the help I need to get back on my feet?

Why did God do this to me?

Why has God done this to all these other people?

Why are my children suffering?

Why have I been forsaken?

Why are you sitting there in a suit with a full belly telling me to trust God?

Why do you believe that there is a God in the face of this?

I was afraid of them because they had the right to ask me why, and I would have no answers for them. Then they would ask me why I had no answers. Then they would ask me if there even was an answer. I suddenly felt like all my college degrees had not imparted wisdom, but rather platitudes, words with the substance and the weight of fog.

They would ask me how it is I can serve God without answers; perhaps I serve only because I am comfortable, because I have a house, a car, and a job, and because my children go to bed with a full belly every night. I was afraid all I could say would be, “Where were you when God created the world?” (Job 38:4). I was afraid because that answer never really seemed good enough to me either.

I was afraid they would ask me to pray, and then they would leave, prayed for but still hopeless, crazy, jobless, and hungry.

I was afraid they would ask God’s will, and I could not tell them what it was.

I was afraid they would seek God, and He would be silent.

I was afraid I would be found out for what I was: a man of God. A man. Just a man. Fed, clothed, and in my right mind by all earthly standards, but just as desperate for answers and as much in the dark about God and His ways as the least of these were.

So I went home and wept. I did not weep for them. I wept for myself. Their Job-like lives ripped my formulations of faith in God from the intellectual realms of theory, doctrine, and church dogma. Faith was suddenly no longer about whose church dogma is correct, but rather about who can believe at all while sitting on an ash heap, covered with boils, and not knowing why. I realized that my theology was, first and foremost, propositional: believe correctly and you will live. Their theology was interrogatory: can I believe that there is a God who is love? It was not that I had never asked questions; it was just that I had never been so violently forced to stare them in the face and confront them.

Perhaps Satan could rightfully accuse me of serving God gratuitously because I am blessed. Perhaps, given the ash heap and boils, I would curse God and die. Perhaps in my pride I had railed at the wrong people. I had fancied myself a prophet like Jeremiah, calling for justice, mercy, and compassion from a stiff-necked people. I suddenly realized that role was too easy on me to be real; my words were just self-righteous rhetoric and an intellectualized, theologically-arrogant social worker’s tongue-lashing. It came from my inflated spiritual ego.

There was a piece missing that I only recently came to understand. I had railed against God’s people. The homeless made me realize that it was God I needed to rail at. I had questioned God once in a while—we all do—but I had never railed at God. But I realize now the reason I never railed at Him was not because of my great faith and love for Him. It was because I never truly allowed God to touch me wholly, to enter the very darkest and deepest places of my world and existence. I held him superficially, conveniently. All the great men of God railed at God, questioned God, challenged God, and bargained with God. They cursed their anointings, they resisted their calls. Moses, Abraham, Jacob, David, Job, Jeremiah, Jonah. God moved in on them; He grasped them with a love that would not let them go, they wrestled with God, and they squirmed and cursed at Him.

And that was counted as faith: they were friends of God, men after God’s own heart, prophets, lovers of God, loved by God. It was through this that they could say with Job, “I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You” (Job 42:5). He was the God of experience, not theories. I realized I had never believed in God through a veil of tears. I had never heard him above the sound of my own shrieking in pain or terror. I had never sat in the dark and found light in Him alone. He was the God I had heard about but not seen, that I could talk about but not feel a passion for. I had belief perhaps, but little faith. I didn’t have the kind of love that comes from knowing God who is here, right here, in all of this, my own terror, hunger, craziness, sin, darkness, and weakness, and not out there silently watching His creation slowly die in torment.

Over the years I have let God in. When I have, I’ve railed against Him, begged, bargained, pleaded, and resisted Him. But I’ve come to know the love that will not let me go, even though I still do not know where I was when He created the world.

I thank God for the line of shabby, stricken, lazy, crazy, sad, and hopeless street people in need of a chaplain. They were the ones, covered with boils, sitting on the ash heap to whom I went, like Job’s friends, to minister to with my God of religion. Instead, they were one hundred-something chaplains to me. In the end, like Job and his religious friends, it was they who were qualified to pray for me and restore me to the God I did not know.

I tell you: be careful. The next person you meet who you think needs your help because he is resisting God, questioning God’s integrity and justice, or railing against the judgments of God, that person may be the very one you need to restore you to God. He may be a Job, or a Jacob, or a Jeremiah. His ash heap life may, in the end, have more profound influence on the whole world than all the religions in the world put together.

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From my book “Lord of the Hunt and Other Tales of Grace” (available on AMAZON)

Illustrations by me.