The Holy, Homeless Family

The Holy, Homeless Family

Holy Family Icon by Kelly Latimore

Occasionally I meet a holy family. This is my term for a homeless family with a baby. I call them holy because I always think of the traveling Mary and Joseph, rejected and forced outside, exposed to the elements, with the task of doing something Divine.

Such a family walked into the community meal with a baby boy, not quite a year old, with blue eyes and blonde, curly ringlets. The couple had become newly homeless and were living in their car. I tried many different techniques to help them get into housing, working with other agencies, helping them with paper work, but nothing stuck. Even with all my best efforts, it seemed I was unable to find a solution for this family. The layers of their predicament were thick and seemingly impenetrable. They would appear and disappear with great irregularity.

Randomly, they would come into the meal, covered in grease, dirt, and the fatigue of the streets. I would hold the baby, give them supplies, sometimes put them up in a hotel—and my heart would break again. The church did as much as we could financially to help them but after a year of coming and going, they just couldn’t get on their feet. It was so discouraging.

One Thursday night, one of my new mothers from the church came to the meal and noticed that the baby, now almost two years old, had blackened feet. She took a wash cloth and some soap from the kitchen and washed his feet. I had bought two gallons of milk for the meal that night, and she filled a bottle with fresh milk and fed him. The baby laughed at her, feeling safe in her arms. She noticed the dark circles under his eyes, and how tired the baby seemed. She called me that night after the meal, crying.

“I don’t know what to do, I can’t stop thinking about this baby,” she said through tears. “He just looked at me with his eyes, it was like he was crying for help and I just feel like I have to do something.”

I tried to console her. I knew she had made a connection with the baby boy and that he reminded her so much of her own little boy. Her heart was genuinely breaking over the situation.I assured her I would check further into what some of the options might be, though there didn’t seem to be any great ones presenting themselves immediately.

There was the Department of Children’s Services that we could call to come and investigate options for the baby’s safety. I explained to her that I’d done everything in my power to try and get them to commit themselves to the family shelter, but they would have to split up and they refused to do so.

She wouldn’t let it go, her heart had become involved. “I have some money if you think it would help, I can get together some supplies for them, whatever you think.”

“I’ll look into it this week,” I said, and thanked her for her generous offer.

The next day I made some phone calls, tried to track down the couple, but they were nowhere to be found. They had no address other than their car, no one seemed to know them, they were part of a hidden population and they were hidden well.

After church on Sunday the young mother lingered, sitting in the back of the church crying.

Now there are few women in my church from Africa, they are refugees of war-torn countries like Sierra Leone and Sudan. They knew something about the dangers of being homeless with children in tow. One of the mothers, Sarah, from Sierra Leone was forced from her home during a rebel invasion. Sarah’s baby was ripped from her arms and murdered in front of her. The atrocities they have lived through put our problems in perspective.

These two African now American mothers, Josephine and Sarah, began to comfort her and talk with her about this baby’s condition and what might be done.

“In Africa, we would never let a baby live on the streets,” Sarah said. “He would be taken to an auntie or a cousin. Someone would take him in. I don’t understand how we let this happen here in America. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Like this story? Find more like it here in Sherry’s book, click book cover to go to Sherry’s Amazon page.

The three of us were standing around the young mother who was sitting in the pew, trying to comfort her and come up with a solution. I shook my head. “I guess in America, we are a different kind of village. We have to have the system step in, if we call DCS, the baby will be taken into state custody and then put into the foster care system, it’s not guaranteed that the baby will have one home, it may have many in that system, it’s not perfect, it’s just the system we have, but it does often work out in favor of the child’s safety.”

“I just want to take him home,” the young mother said. “I want to feed him and bathe him and make sure he feels safe. It’s killing me that he’s not.”

“We have to do something,” Josephine said. “We can’t just let these babies live on the streets, we have to intervene.”

The women reasoned through the situation and decided that we should, as a church, call DCS. The only problem: there was no way to locate the couple, and she was expecting another child, due in two weeks.

The next community meal, the couple did not show up. Perhaps they intuitively knew something was going to happen. I haven’t seen them since, and as I asked around—no one knew where they went. I had no words of comfort for the young mother. Only, that these are just the kinds of situations we encounter when we do this type of work. It’s hard, but sometimes all we can really do is pray and keep searching for some kind of miraculous solution, giving what we can give, doing what we can do while we wait. Sometimes, even I have a hard time heeding this advice because my heart breaks, too.

I grew up in a very small town. In a small town, there is a culture of remembrance. People remember your personality—the things that made you unique—and your family. There is a deep well of recognition. Even in this day and age, there are no homeless people in my hometown.

But in the city, people fall through the cracks. I don’t know where they go. There are places to hide, even in plain sight, where no one will ever find you. It haunts me just like it haunted this young mother that a baby did not have what it needed to survive, that a little one so tender could be at risk in a great big world. This precious, new life, in danger of slipping through the cracks.

As an urban pastor, I’ve tried to create a culture of remembrance, but it’s hard because sometimes I feel as if my one, precious life is slipping through the cracks, too. There is something exciting about being in a city with its opportunities, but if you are from a culture of remembrance, it’s difficult to stay in that forgotten place.

I often admire the African refugees in my church because they stick together. They are surrounded by their culture here in the city. Even though they joke with me that they have “left the village behind” to fit into the urban culture, this is not really true. The village lives inside of them like my hometown lives inside of me. It guides them to take care of their neighbors’ children, to look out for one another, to be kind, and to protect the vulnerable. They have always carried the village in their hearts and as long as they do, they will never feel lonely.

I’ve learned so much from them and they have become the very heart beat of my church and ministry here, they have so much to teach us about how to love. They are so grateful to be living in what they call a “great country,” free from the kind of violence that drove them from their homeland. Here, they can use their gifts, pursue their humble dreams, educate their children, and make a life for themselves. And yet, they do not understand why we have so many holy, homeless families.

I’m not sure what will happen to the holy, homeless family but I pray for their safety and for the well-being of the babies. I pray for a new world in which we cherish all the sacred, holy families in our communities. I have learned that the only home we truly have is the one that is carried in the hearts of others.

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Why Loneliness is Killing Us: We Are One Another’s Healers

Why Loneliness is Killing Us: We Are One Another’s Healers

If we were to name a few of the main threats to human existence today, loneliness might not be at the top of the list. We would most likely mention things like diseases, cancer, guns, looming climate concerns and maybe even a meteorite hitting the planet. However, according to the latest research, loneliness is worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness kills.

Recently, the UK cited loneliness as one of the top health concerns of our time and appointed a “Minister of Loneliness” to address the over 40% of adults who report chronic feelings of loneliness. Recent studies link loneliness to heart disease and depression. According to a Huffington Post article, our time has been called the “age of loneliness,” and though we seem more connected through social media platforms, these ways of connecting are often a painful reminder of our lack of tangible community ties and a poor substitute for flesh and blood interaction.

These discoveries illustrate one fundamental truth, our lives really do depend on establishing and maintaining meaningful connections with others. Without these connections, we literally fade. We become cut off not only from the relationships that bring us life, but from our own existence. Loneliness not only cuts us off from others but isolates us from ourselves.

We are wired for connection with other human beings, social endeavors that give us a sense of meaning and purpose. Group experiences that connect us to something greater than ourselves, things like love, compassion, empathy, kindness. These are the kinds of communal experiences that dispel loneliness and give our lives meaning and purpose.

But what is keeping us from connecting with others? Research shows that conditions such as shame and low self-esteem prevent us from seeking out group connections and from displaying the kind of vulnerability that enables us to connect at a deeper level with other people. But how do we overcome such debilitating conditions? A good first step is acknowledging our deep need for love. Dr. Brene Brown, whose work around shame has helped thousands of people begin to heal from the isolating effects of shame says it wonderfully:

“A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.”

As a pastor in an urban parish, I not only observed loneliness as one of the top spiritual sicknesses of our time, but I felt it, too. I developed a kind of chronic loneliness as I kept walls around my own vulnerability. Feeling as if I had to be a rock of strength and power for the community. It wasn’t until I began allowing myself to be seen, to fail, to become human, that I was able to begin to feel loneliness leave me and establish true human connection. I was a great example of how one can be surrounded by people and still have terrible feelings of being alone.

It wasn’t easy, but the walls of my own shame began to be dismantled as I began to work with some of our society’s most chronically lonely, abandoned and traumatized people, the homeless. As I opened up to their wounds, their pain and listened to their stories, I began to sense something greater, an awareness that we were all connected. We became one another’s healers.

Check out Sherry’s latest book: reflections from a pastor on homelessness and her spiritual journey.

Just by sharing the space of human warmth, compassion and kindness, I could see the difference communities can make in the lives of one another and of those who suffer from homelessness. Because it seems we all suffer from some kind of homeless feeling, it’s something we have deeply in common. While the issue is chronic for those who are on the streets, I found that even those who seem to have it all, good jobs, a house, opportunities and families, suffer from loneliness, a deep longing for a sense of home.

It seems we live in a time in which we are cut off from a sense of having a soul home, a spiritual home. The busyness of our lives, social isolation, shame, the lack of being part of a community that connects us to meaningful endeavors, these things create a kind of soul vacuum. I also noticed that when people became willing to risk making a home in their hearts for those who suffer, that their lives began to mysteriously change and take on a lasting and impenetrable meaning. They were able to make a soul connection.

In our communities of faith in which we served the homeless population and made an impact on the hunger in our community, there grew a deeper sense of belonging and even hope in the reality of a darkening world. What was even more miraculous is that I witnessed the lives of homeless people change. It didn’t unfold as I expected it would, my drive was always to do more when what was needed most from me was an exchange of the heart. In order for the homeless to believe that they could apply for life, they needed caring people, communities of warmth and hope so that they could see this mirrored in their own lives. I witnessed people getting off the streets, getting into housing because they felt safe enough to risk living again. They found what they did not have, acceptance and belonging. They found enough of a home in the hearts of human beings that they could risk what had been previously painful, having a home again.

As we are willing to make a home for one another in our own hearts, something mysteriously shifts in our lives, the pain of loneliness, despair, a sense of being cut off from companionship, these things begin to leave us as we risk loving those who have been labeled as rejected members of society. Because there is love inside of all of us that we have rejected as a basic need, as if it is dormant until we decide to risk loving.

When we make a choice to accept rejected people, something inside of us begins to shift, our perspective changes, we find a deeper level of self-acceptance. It is as if what we are giving to others becomes mirrored in ourselves. A light inside begins to come alive and warm us, teaching us that we are part of something much bigger and greater than our solitary pursuits. Love blooms and we begin to feel our worth. As the old hymn says about the birth of God’s flesh in the world, “Christ appeared and the soul felt its worth.” Something essential is born in us, God made flesh in the world, when we decide to connect to the greater love, God’s love in the world.

Our sense of self-worth blossoms when we reach out to offer love and kindness to others. There is something necessary about the act of loving others to a self-love being ignited in our own hearts.

Maybe there is no cure for loneliness, it’s certainly part of the human condition. But there is healing available to us all. Loving, especially those who are at risk and in need, makes us real and it’s a risk that we can’t afford not to take, our very lives depend on it. There is no shortage of the need for love in the world and that need is often the key to our own becoming.

 

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The Holy, Homeless Family

The Holy, Homeless Family

Occasionally I meet a holy family. This is my term for a homeless family with a baby. I call them holy because I always think of the traveling Mary and Joseph, rejected and forced outside, exposed to the elements, with the task of doing something Divine.

Such a family walked into the community meal with a baby boy, not quite a year old, with blue eyes and blonde, curly ringlets. The couple had become newly homeless and were living in their car. I tried many different techniques to help them get into housing, working with other agencies, helping them with paper work, but nothing stuck. Even with all my best efforts, it seemed I was unable to find a solution for this family. The layers of their predicament were thick and seemingly impenetrable. They would appear and disappear with great irregularity.

Randomly, they would come into the meal, covered in grease, dirt, and the fatigue of the streets. I would hold the baby, give them supplies, sometimes put them up in a hotel—and my heart would break again. The church did as much as we could financially to help them but after a year of coming and going, they just couldn’t get on their feet. It was so discouraging.

One Thursday night, one of my new mothers from the church came to the meal and noticed that the baby, now almost two years old, had blackened feet. She took a wash cloth and some soap from the kitchen and washed his feet. I had bought two gallons of milk for the meal that night, and she filled a bottle with fresh milk and fed him. The baby laughed at her, feeling safe in her arms. She noticed the dark circles under his eyes, and how tired the baby seemed. She called me that night after the meal, crying.

“I don’t know what to do, I can’t stop thinking about this baby,” she said through tears. “He just looked at me with his eyes, it was like he was crying for help and I just feel like I have to do something.”

I tried to console her. I knew she had made a connection with the baby boy and that he reminded her so much of her own little boy. Her heart was genuinely breaking over the situation.I assured her I would check further into what some of the options might be, though there didn’t seem to be any great ones presenting themselves immediately.

There was the Department of Children’s Services that we could call to come and investigate options for the baby’s safety. I explained to her that I’d done everything in my power to try and get them to commit themselves to the family shelter, but they would have to split up and they refused to do so.

She wouldn’t let it go, her heart had become involved. “I have some money if you think it would help, I can get together some supplies for them, whatever you think.”

“I’ll look into it this week,” I said, and thanked her for her generous offer.

The next day I made some phone calls, tried to track down the couple, but they were nowhere to be found. They had no address other than their car, no one seemed to know them, they were part of a hidden population and they were hidden well.

After church on Sunday the young mother lingered, sitting in the back of the church crying.

Now there are few women in my church from Africa, they are refugees of war-torn countries like Sierra Leone and Sudan. They knew something about the dangers of being homeless with children in tow. One of the mothers, Sarah, from Sierra Leone was forced from her home during a rebel invasion. Sarah’s baby was ripped from her arms and murdered in front of her. The atrocities they have lived through put our problems in perspective.

These two African now American mothers, Josephine and Sarah, began to comfort her and talk with her about this baby’s condition and what might be done.

“In Africa, we would never let a baby live on the streets,” Sarah said. “He would be taken to an auntie or a cousin. Someone would take him in. I don’t understand how we let this happen here in America. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Like this story? Find more like it here in Sherry’s new book, click book cover to go to Sherry’s Amazon page.

The three of us were standing around the young mother who was sitting in the pew, trying to comfort her and come up with a solution. I shook my head. “I guess in America, we are a different kind of village. We have to have the system step in, if we call DCS, the baby will be taken into state custody and then put into the foster care system, it’s not guaranteed that the baby will have one home, it may have many in that system, it’s not perfect, it’s just the system we have, but it does often work out in favor of the child’s safety.”

“I just want to take him home,” the young mother said. “I want to feed him and bathe him and make sure he feels safe. It’s killing me that he’s not.”

“We have to do something,” Josephine said. “We can’t just let these babies live on the streets, we have to intervene.”

The women reasoned through the situation and decided that we should, as a church, call DCS. The only problem: there was no way to locate the couple, and she was expecting another child, due in two weeks.

The next community meal, the couple did not show up. Perhaps they intuitively knew something was going to happen. I haven’t seen them since, and as I asked around—no one knew where they went. I had no words of comfort for the young mother. Only, that these are just the kinds of situations we encounter when we do this type of work. It’s hard, but sometimes all we can really do is pray and keep searching for some kind of miraculous solution, giving what we can give, doing what we can do while we wait. Sometimes, even I have a hard time heeding this advice because my heart breaks, too.

I grew up in a very small town. In a small town, there is a culture of remembrance. People remember your personality—the things that made you unique—and your family. There is a deep well of recognition. Even in this day and age, there are no homeless people in my hometown.

But in the city, people fall through the cracks. I don’t know where they go. There are places to hide, even in plain sight, where no one will ever find you. It haunts me just like it haunted this young mother that a baby did not have what it needed to survive, that a little one so tender could be at risk in a great big world. This precious, new life, in danger of slipping through the cracks.

As an urban pastor, I’ve tried to create a culture of remembrance, but it’s hard because sometimes I feel as if my one, precious life is slipping through the cracks, too. There is something exciting about being in a city with its opportunities, but if you are from a culture of remembrance, it’s difficult to stay in that forgotten place.

I often admire the African refugees in my church because they stick together. They are surrounded by their culture here in the city. Even though they joke with me that they have “left the village behind” to fit into the urban culture, this is not really true. The village lives inside of them like my hometown lives inside of me. It guides them to take care of their neighbors’ children, to look out for one another, to be kind, and to protect the vulnerable. They have always carried the village in their hearts and as long as they do, they will never feel lonely.

I’ve learned so much from them and they have become the very heart beat of my church and ministry here, they have so much to teach us about how to love. They are so grateful to be living in what they call a “great country,” free from the kind of violence that drove them from their homeland. Here, they can use their gifts, pursue their humble dreams, educate their children, and make a life for themselves. And yet, they do not understand why we have so many holy, homeless families.

I’m not sure what will happen to the holy, homeless family but I pray for their safety and for the well-being of the babies. I pray for a new world in which we cherish all the sacred, holy families in our communities. I have learned that the only home we truly have is the one that is carried in the hearts of others.

 

About the Author: 

Sherry Cothran, M.Div., is a speaker, musician, author and ordained minister. In addition to her ongoing work as senior pastor, Sherry has been featured in USA Today, UMCorg, been the keynote speaker at several conferences and performed her songs and stories on many stages. She has received two grants from the Louisville Institute for her creative projects in Bible, faith and spirituality. She was the Artist in Residence at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. Her sermons and blogs have been featured in Good Preacher, Abingdon Women, Interpreter, Ministry Matters, Alive Now. An award winning recording artist, her most recent collaboration with indie film maker, Tracy Facceli, “Tending Angels” can be viewed on Youtube.

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Feeling Rejected? The Surprising Pathway to Acceptance, Love and Healing

Feeling Rejected? The Surprising Pathway to Acceptance, Love and Healing

In the bubbling hostility of our social climate today, you may be among the growing number of people who feel, simply, rejected. Perhaps it is not the emotion that you lead with in your day to day relationships, maybe it brews beneath the surface like volcanic magma. Rejection is painful.  Maybe you’ve tried all kinds of seemingly positive approaches and though you may have felt a little immediate relief, as time passed, you may have sunk even deeper into despair, thinking you will never find a way out of the soul trap of rejection.

We often accept the false belief that rejection lies in things we simply cannot change such as  gender, ethnicity, disability, social class or sexual orientation. Certainly, these realities are often cited as reasons in which people and systems reject people. Discrimination is very real and should be resisted and transformed. But rejection itself is not rooted in these things.  Rejection is kept alive by a constant diet of pain and fear.

Strangely, this is good news. Because we certainly can’t change the gifts of our DNA, in fact, we want to learn to celebrate them. And we can’t change other people. But we can change our lives and the way we feel. We can recover from feeling rejected. Not only can we grow beyond that hollow and paralyzing feeling rejection brings, but we can find acceptance, love and healing in the process. Helping others to find the same along the way. We may even be surprised to find that purpose and meaning await us on this journey.

I offer this quote from Jean Vanier, founder of  147 L’Arche communities in 35 countries for people with intellectual disabilities writes:

“People cannot accept their own evil if they do not at the same time feel loved, respected and trusted.”

Jean Vanier, Community And Growth

People who are rejected often practice rejection as a reaction to the stored pain a lifetime of rejection brings. It can come if the form of perfectionism, shame, impossible expectations and many other forms.  Rejection is passed on from generation to generation. The fear of rejection traps us in the pain of isolation, convincing us we are alone, and that it is us against the world. This kind of learned and deeply engrained belief keeps us from reaching out to communities of healing that might be the key to our self-acceptance and the doorway to letting go of painful emotions that block us from our higher selves.

It seems that we need to place ourselves in relationships and communities in which we find love, respect and trust. But these don’t just magically appear. We have to risk looking for them. In my experience, the way I’ve approached this is to become willing to give the very things I crave myself: love, acceptance, healing and trust to some of the most rejected people on the planet before I could open up and receive these things for myself.

For a decade, I followed this mantra (and I still do):

“We are healed by those we reject.”Jean Vanier – (winner of the 2015 Templeton Prize in the company of Mother Teresa, Dalia Lama and others.)

We are not doomed to hatred, fear and rejection, there is another way. We are not doomed to constantly spin into frantic action driven by our pain. I call that way of living emotional whiplash. There is a better way, and the key is through offering not necessarily our great achievements to others, but our vulnerability, acceptance and love.

I began to experience the kind of healing Vanier refers to when I began working with the community that suffers from homelessness as a pastor in urban churches. As I began to open myself to the woundedness of others, some of the most rejected people on the planet, I began to gain the courage to explore my own wounds. Something was broken open in the exchange of brokenness. I could see into my own heart in ways that had been previously sealed off to me by pain and my own efforts to protect myself from pain. I had fear, certainly, but something more powerful than fear took over as I continued to put my body, my work and my faith into a community that was, by all outward appearances, not thriving but dying. Healing. Love. Trust. Faith. None of these things were misplaced. I began to believe that I had a path to walk, a path of purpose and meaning and it came by taking the risk of loving those whom the world seems to have stamped “rejected.” It was not easy, but I was ushered through cosmically, somehow, by the needs of others, by the very real healing presence of Christ between us, and my willingness to respond to those needs. I didn’t fix anyone, I helped some, but mostly what I had to offer was acceptance and love. And over time I leaned that it was enough.

When we interact with those we reject, we somehow feel safe enough to open up our own deep wounds for healing. Because of this, we gain the courage to take the rejected pathway in ourselves. I say that Christ, the sacred, shows up when we open ourselves to those we reject, because it takes the power out of our fear and shows us true power, that of love. Love transforms fear into the energy of hope. Rather than rejection, we suddenly experience acceptance. Rather than fear, we have the sudden bodily knowledge that we are loved and that we are capable of love. Rather than mistrust, we have the experience that we can trust others and be trusted. There are plenty of places in your community that need you to express love and acceptance. As you become willing to find them, you will.

I wrote a song about my experience, it’s called “Tending Angels,” and it tells the story of how I began to have the real life experience, working among the homeless community that I was, in fact, as the passage in Hebrews states, “tending angels unaware.”

Have you had experiences that have changed your life similar to this? How did it change you? I would love to hear about it, leave your thoughts in the comments box below.

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Peddling Hope In Dystopia 2

Peddling Hope In Dystopia 2

You Can’t Play A Player | “I came to Nashville as a tramp,” he said. Just another guy in the crowd of those who come for our weekly meal, I learned his name and began calling him something other than tramp, not sure if he heard me. “Gossip on the street is that Nashville is tramp friendly,” he said. He came here to make a go of it, but he soon realized that all the “tramps” were just taking advantage of everyone’s kindness and not getting any better, he discovered how easy it was to just live off the good will, never taking the hard steps towards becoming self sufficient. He was having a hard time getting motivated.

He was a bit of a philosopher, I pointed out, a good quality, but also, a tortuous one. He went on the pontificate that this realization made him question whether or not having all of these free services for the homeless is a good thing, “doesn’t it just make the problem worse?” he asked. He also said that it seems really condescending from his perspective, that churches would just offer meals and assistance without ever really getting to know people or trying to change the problems. Basically, in his opinion, churches were just being played by the “tramp” community in Nashville and it was disturbing to him, though, he was deeply appreciative, he said, “don’t get me wrong.” I would never.

He had a great point. You’ve most likely heard the phrase, from some cobweb deep in one of the prophetic books of our Old Testament, often pilfered for political speeches, “Charity gives but justice changes.” This is what he was referring to. He didn’t see any real changes happening around him. He thought we were all engaged in a giant game of blowing smoke, all being played by the players… | READ THE FULL POST comment, and share frommy website SherryCothran.com