Resolution

Almost exactly six years ago, I started working at an overnight shelter for homeless men run by JPUSA, (Jesus People USA, a Christian commune in inner-city Chicago). In a lot of ways, it still feels like one of the most affecting and defining experiences of my life. And yet, if also feels like I have done nothing with it - even just in terms of talking about it, or even personally assimilating and processing it into my brain and heart. I wrote a long paper about my experience living at JPUSA, (partly, frankly, to record and deal with some of my experiences and memories), and have had a fair number of conversations with people about it, but nothing like that has taken place with the shelter.

It is easy to talk about living communally with five hundred people in an old hotel, apparently, but not about working at a homeless shelter.

I joke, but it's true. (And it's a special band of brothers, those of us that worked there. All of us walk with a limp, is the best way I can think of expressing it.)

The whole thing seems so far out of the frame reference of the rest of my life - and the lives of just about everyone I know - that it seems impossible to do them justice - and by 'them' I don't mean the disembodied abstraction that is a set of experiences, I mean Them, the men whose lives I witnessed and got to be a part of.

But I'm starting to forget. Names are slipping away, and the details of stories are getting fuzzy. The least I can do is bear witness to the pain and tragedy and beauty, more and bigger and blacker than anything I've ever tasted.

Until now I have mostly just bore witness in my head. But I can externalize and objectify, so that these memories of interpretations of experiences and of statements people make about their experiences become a little more concrete than fading electrical signals passed through the network of my brain. Yes, they can become electrical signals passed between networks of computers - and by undergoing this transmogrification they will be subjected to the violent inadequacy of language and communication. But maybe they'll light a spark in another neural net halfway around the world.

Maybe if I write one story a month (this is my resolution - I've never set goals for posting on this blog yet), each an attempt to remember one of the people I met, annd keep doing this until I can't remember anything more... well, maybe by then, I'll know what to do with those memories, how to be faithful, and live something out of them that means something.

(I left in September to go to university. The shelter closed a few months afterwards, a victim of local politics and NIMBY-ism. I don't know where any of the guys are these days, aside from one whom I know died shortly afterward).

It's not enough, but I'm going to start sharing their stories.