University of the Streets, by Anna M. Alkin, farmer

“Have you ever held a pigeon before?”

 

“No,” I said, and before I could tell him I didn’t want to hold a pigeon, he grabbed the one next to me with sure hands.

 

“Now hold it firmly like this,” he instructed me. For a brief moment, I held the bird and felt its rapid heartbeat inside my hands. The bird didn’t seem to mind the experience nearly as much as I would’ve guessed.

 

When I set my pigeon friend back on the ground, I thought to myself: “Now where in hell am I going to wash my hands?”

 

I was on a day-long “street retreat” hosted by the Faithful Fools, an organization based in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The concept of the street retreat was a simple one: spend the day walking among the homeless in my hometown of Austin, seeking to be present, have conversations, and learn.

 

My boyfriend at the time teased me mercilessly for spending $50 for a retreat to go hang out with the homeless. That day on the streets, however, ended up being one of the soundest investments I ever made in my spiritual education.

 

The pigeon-wrangler, a man whom I will call Michael, had been on the streets for about a year. He was bright, affable, and determined to be my personal escort for the day in order to “keep me safe.”

 

Safety was a recurring theme I encountered in my time on the streets because, of course, it can be an unsafe place to be as a woman. But homes can be unsafe, too. Just ask any survivor of sexual abuse or domestic violence. We tend to overstate the danger posed by strangers and low-income folks in our culture. With no sense of irony, this homeless stranger felt it was his duty to protect me.

 

It was with mixed feelings that I accepted Michael’s assertive hospitality on the streets; I was grateful for his sharing, experience, and provision of pigeons to hold, even as I chafed at my lack of freedom to mix more with others that afternoon.

 

This was the kind of relationship I would seek, or that would seek me, if I wound up on the streets.  In just a few hours, I got a taste of the choices, tradeoffs, and difficulties of a life lived with fewer buffers between ourselves and the world-at-large.

 

However, the walls that keep us “safe,” in metaphorical and actual terms, also impoverish us.

 

*****

 

At the time of my participation in the day-long street retreat, I was a campus minister in charge of running the Alternative Spring Break program for a private Catholic University.

 

A year into coordinating the program, the whole notion of “service” really started to piss me off. It was great to send students to build adobe houses in New Mexico or to teach reading in New York City. Our aim was to get the students hooked on the joy of giving, but I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with the ways in which service built a subtle sense of spiritual superiority in the giver, myself included.

 

An intention was slowly forming deep within me: What about those we serve? Couldn’t they benefit from being the “givers” for a change?

 

That afternoon spent hanging out with the pigeons and Michael provided an answer by way of a story.

 

Michael told me about a “game” he played each evening to help him hold on to his dignity and stave off despair as his few days on the streets became weeks, and then those weeks stretched into months.

 

There are food trucks in Austin run by a local nonprofit, Mobile Loaves and Fishes, which visit local parks around town providing brown bag meals to the homeless every evening of the week.

 

Michael’s game, or spiritual practice, was that of inviting everyone to get in line ahead of him. He would step back from the truck if he saw someone running in order to make it in time for a meal.

 

He told me he did it to remind himself that he was no animal, but a man. He told me also that it was his way of remembering the larger truth that there is always “enough.”

 

This was the testimony of a true spiritual teacher. Michael had found a way to turn his anxiety about going hungry into an engine of growth in himself. This was no idle talk, or weekday reflection on the gospels as I gave each week in chapel, but a large-hearted practice in the face of genuine hunger.

 

Then one night, it finally happened. When it was Michael’s turn to approach the van, the volunteers told him that they had run out of food.

 

“I didn’t care about the sandwich, so much,” Michael told me, “but I almost broke down on the spot.” His life suddenly looked impossibly bleak and hopeless. What he was living was no game.

 

“But do you know what?” Michael asked me, his eyes meeting mine. I shook my head “no.”

 

“The folks on the truck felt really bad about it. And one of them took me out to dinner that night.”

 

By choosing the end of the line, by repeatedly aligning his slim and tattered agency with the role of giver, the realization of Michael’s worst fear—that there would not be enough for him—gave way to a spontaneous affirmation of his inherent worth in a gesture of friendship and a hot meal.

 

Sitting there on the grass with Michael and the pigeons, I had my answer.

 

Letting go of my social position at the front of the line to join Michael at the back had opened up a new world, a space of mutuality, between us. This homeless man was clearly fed by feeding me.

​

​

http://moonmagazine.org/anna-m-alkin-university-streets-2019-06-29/