The phone rang late last Friday afternoon.
Hi Steve, came the voice on the other end,
this is Marian. I have a gentleman here who just came home; no one will house him . . . can you help?
Sure, send him on down to Our House, I told her,
We'll take care of him.
Marian Sanborn, who runs the only re-entry pro gram in Orange County, did better than that - she delivered Anthony herself. If you click on the video, you'll get a sense of what happen
ed next and about what happens at Our House on a regular basis.
As you know,
Our House is a place where folks can come to use the phone or rest room, grab a cup of coffee, get a meal on nights when no one else is serving, catch a nap, play cards or dominoes or chess, maybe work on a puzzle, get help with paperwork, and even get a hand getting into Middletown's Addiction Crisis Center. But, it's also a place that will take people no one else wants because of rules, regulations and maybe a lack of want to.
All that stuff I just mentioned - and all the other stuff I failed to mention - are about hospitality and healing, opening the door to all who would walk through it, all who hear the call to come and be and become . . . somehow . . . different.
Our dear friends Br. Bernard and Br. James from
Holy Cross Monastery have each spent time at Our House. They wrote about their experiences in the May issue of
Mundi Medicina. Click here to read about what they discovered.
Next week, the Lectionary takes us to
John 10:1-10 and the beginning of Jesus'
Good Shepherd talk which relates back to the story of the man born blind, a story of healing, the story about a man saved from isolation, darkness, society's margins. In healing the man, Jesus opened the door to wholeness and the safety and security of community. In Sunday's gospel reading we read about how Jesus opens the door - the gate of the sheep pen - to all those who will hear the call to enter God's kingdom where they too find the safety and comfort and security of community.
Anthony reminds us of the importance of being the gate keepers, the people who open doors for one another. That's what we try to do here in Ecclesiaville - we are doormen and women who smile broadly as we open the door to others, welcoming the stranger, loving them if they choose to step over the threshold and loving them if they choose to go another way.
We were rocketing along Route 84 about a week ago and pulled over to make room for a car coming down an on ramp. Something caught our eye - the red of a bumper stick. Sure enough, it was our coveted "Be a Revolutionary" sticker on the bumper of a car driven by our friend Verne, one of the more revolutionary people you'd ever want to meet. We gave out brochures and bumper stickers last month at the Human Rights dinner and slowly but surely they're popping up here and there.