By the Rivers of Babylon: Blueprint for a Church in Exile

A Broken Benediction

4 A Broken Benediction The Gospel of Matthew and Homelessness in Dubuque, Iowa Beauty is often hidden, particularly in the places abandoned by Empire. It’s covered by crumbling bricks and swollen bruises, stained jeans and tall weeds, leaking roofs and rotting wood. Here, beauty has been marred by concrete and violence, graffiti and neglect. When people visit our neighborhood, the lack of beauty is one reason they feel less welcome or safe. When I tell people where I call home, they often respond, “You live there?” –Chris Brennan Homiak, Cherith Brook Catholic Worker1 If you walk down the southern end of Main Street in downtown Dubuque and look above the overhang of the thrift store there, you might see a little neon cross glowing through a window, as we did. Still new to Dubuque in 2003, my spouse and I were out walking, exploring our new home, when we noticed the neon cross gazing down on the street from a third-floor window. We saw people inside, their profiles outlined by light. “Maybe a storefront church. Or maybe a charismatic church,” we speculated. “Probably not Presbyterian,” I added dryly. “Not with that neon 1. Chris Brennan Homaiak, “Seeds of Beauty,” in Cherith Brook Catholic Worker (Lent 2012): 4. 85 cross.” And we continued walking. Later, we learned that this “charismatic church” was actually a group of men gathering for worship in a side chapel of a homeless shelter. Several years after this, but now as a volunteer, I became more acquainted with the shelter, particularly with its chapel. It’s an interesting room. Worship leaders know just where to go, to the wall opposite the entrance, where someone has painted a mural showing a series of cathedral arches, royal blue, white, and gold. The symmetries of the arches suggest coherence, balance, as if they captured the natural order of the universe. A yellow trim outlines the arches, as if it were a portal of heavenly light splashing into the otherwise drab space of the shelter. Central to the room is a battered looking crucifix, a forlorn figure, bereft of the usual accoutrements of churchly glory. Maybe, to some, it was cheesy, this crucifix and the mural, but when I arrived to lead worship for the first time, these symbols told me where I was supposed to sit, where I might “belong” in a shelter for those who do not belong. And this, I suppose, was where my comfort with those symbols ended. This particular “visualization” of church came from somewhere or, really, someone, perhaps reflecting the faith of one of the residents of the shelter who, when he was asked to “imagine” the church, saw something resembling a cathedral. Perhaps the mural suggests what many of us want: a world that makes sense, a place where beauty is exalted, where the doors are open rather than closed, and a place set apart for something different, deeper than merely survival. A place open with the generosity of hospitality. And yet, against this hope, the residents were required to attend the shelter’s worship service, a service broadly ecumenical in content but essentially Christian in character.2 This was not lost on the residents. I came once to see how the service was conducted before I started volunteering. During announcements, prior to the beginning of the service, “John” (not his real name), a one-time resident of the shelter and now a paid employee of the shelter who had done some prison time for the sale and possession of drugs, was confronted by a younger African American man who, like me, was also attending for the first time. Unlike me, though, he was required to be there: “Why I am required to be here?” he demanded. “You can’t force me to do this. This isn’t my religion. This violates my constitutional rights, my religious freedom.” John, who was known as the “captain” at the shelter, reminded him that as long as he was living in the shelter, 2. Given the nature of its work, a shelter may impose a variety of requirements, among these an expectation of sobriety among the residents, a commitment to a “drug free campus,” hours when the shelter is closed during the day and when residents need to be back, length of stay, perhaps some kind of rent, work expectations, and so on. 86 | By the Rivers of Babylon he was required to...