Guidance for the Freshly Homeless

Joel John Roberts of L.A. Homeless Blog brings to our attention an article in today’s L.A. Times, “A guide for the newly poor,” of help to the tens of thousands who are finding themselves rookies to homelessness, out on the streets in the Los Angeles area.

Ideas in the Times guide can be helpful to anyone freshly down-and-out in any metropolitan area, though most of the linked resources are only helpful to Angelinos. But resources that are similar are available here in metropolitan Sacramento, and I would suppose, in other sprawling areas in this country. But you’ll have to find them on your own. Hopeful, my locality's Bee will put together a guide for the benefit of our homeless-to-be citizens.

The shock aspect of suddenly being out on the street is alluded to rather well. As is the idea of “entering a world of delays and bureaucracy.” But it will be good for the many, many anxious people out there to be aware that there are services that can help them – though the glut of people that will be crowding the streets and crowding the system is sure to foster anguish and depression for both newbie homeless and those of us who have been out here a while and now will have to contend with and compete with a growing hoard.

UPDATE: This says something about the times we're living in, I think. On the day the L.A. Times published its guide, the Tribune Company that owns the Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Cubs baseball team, and a lot else, including ten smaller newspapers and 23 TV stations, filed for bankruptcy. Here's yesterday's New York Times story about it, "Tribune Company Seeks Bankruptcy Protection." It all has to make you think, wistfully, that the guide story was published in part as an aid for the newspaper's employees [whose jobs may be in jeopardy] and former employees [who took a buyout, recently]. At the Tribune website they posted this notice: “All ongoing severance payments, deferred compensation and other payments to former employees have been discontinued and will be the subject of later proceedings before the court.”

Naked Reflections: Overcoming Poverty of the Spirit

	Eknath Easwaram

In a post titled "Overcoming Poverty of the Spirit,” in his blog Naked Reflections, my pal [in both electron-space and meatspace] Nagarjuna [also known as Steve] offered up a quote from his favorite philosopher, Eknath Easwaram, that talks about the “fleeting taste of joy of union” with whom St. Augustine identifies as “God,” but whom Easwaram cites [after quoting Augustine] as “the Lord – the Self within.”

What is this union? and with whom, exactly, are we having it?

Easwaran writes, “Once we taste this joy, all we want is to be permanently aware of him in everyone, everywhere, every minute. This intense longing is the mark of genuine spiritual experience.”

Steve asks in his post “How can I, and how do I [taste this joy]? By meditating and contemplating enough? How much is enough? And how does one do enough without the inspiration of which Easwaran writes? Just as one needs money or other resources in order to earn more money, doesn't one also need to feel inspired in order to make an enduring effort to make big spiritual gains? I often feel like a man who is too poor to become rich.”

I think a terrific example of this joy, found “in everyone, everywhere, every minute” must be Thomas Merton’s “Vision in Louisville,” which I quoted in this blog last August. In his vision, Merton tells us he sees “the invisible light of heaven” blazing in everyone and that “it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed …I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and “understood” by a peculiar gift.

Merton ends his essay, writing, “I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”

In his vision, Merton also mentions “le point vierge,” which comes from the writing of Louis Massignon, a distinguished professor and scholar who was deeply inspired by the life of a tenth-century Muslim mystic known as al-Hallaj, who was crucified in Baghdad for having loved God. Literally, le point vierge means “the virgin point,” I think, but I find it translated as The Virgin Heart in an essay on point vierge by Dorothy Buck. There, I find le point vierge is described by Massignon: “The Virgin Heart refers to the secret place in the center of the human soul where God alone has access. al-Hallaj envisions the core of all human hearts as one, where the human and the Divine meet, unified and untouched by anything except the seed planted by God's love.”

Quoting Buck:

It was Massignon's character to be deeply moved by life and particularly by the stories of human beings. He seems to have understood his own religious vocation as profoundly connected to human relationships. As his scholarly research plumbed the depths of these connecting themes and images his views of the world expanded, leading him to live out his convictions through social action. Imaging God as the stranger who comes to our door begging for food and shelter, or the refugee who struggles to speak our language, or the poor and marginalized in our society Massignon envisions Mary, who was also an outcast in her society. She represents the sacred hospitality in the center of every human soul that welcomes the stranger, God.

Merton, inspired by Massignon, corresponded with him, and gave this definition of le point vierge: “At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.”

This "fleeting taste of joy of union" is also central to Plotinus's The Enneads. "Think of the ONE as Mind or God, you think too narrowly.... For This is also a self-existent, with no concomitant, whatever. This self-sufficing is the essense of its unity. Something there must be supremely adequate, autonomous, all-transcending, most utterly without need."

Quoting a short paper on The Enneads: "ONE is inviolable. It is also infinite. It is self-awake. It radiates. Finite intellect cannot put these descriptions together. We must find these meanings in our heart. The leap we hope to take is not into a foreign good, but our own Nature as Good."

Does this post offer any hard answers to Steve's or my questions? No. But it does find a few fingers pointing at the moon, maybe.

The Buddhist at the Baptist Rescue Mission

	The Primordial Buddha statue on the grounds of the Sacramento Convention Center. That yellow thing in the background is a statue titled Walking the Dogs. Photo © Tom Armstrong

The person referenced in the title of this blogpost is me.

In Ryan Garou's book On Homelessness in America [for sale in softcover here; downloadable in doc format here], Ryan writes [Emphases mine] ...

In America, Christianity is the dominant belief system and therefore the one to expect when showing up at a mission's doors - there may be Buddhist, Muslim, etc. shelters but I've never personally heard of any. ... This should raise at least one obvious question - if a Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, etc., or even a Christian of a flavor at odds with that of the shelter provider is in need of shelter and has no other options, what happens? How is it handled? And what about the Satanists, Wiccans, agnostics and outright atheists? It entirely depends on the mission's policy. If they rigidly require an hour's devotion to Christianity, a homeless person of a different faith either has to grin and fake it or turn away.

Since I've been at the Union Gospel Mission in Sacramento over six months now, I figure it’s about time I address the elephant in the room: How do I handle being Buddhist in the midst of this Christian conclave?

As I wrote in my third post to this blog, when I returned to Sacramento late last April, I was desperate for a place to stay and ended up at the mission. While I have been out on the street many days, I’ve yet to try to stay at any other shelter, though the Salvation Army shelter, and, now, the Winter Shelter are likely to be a better fit for my requirements.

Why do I continue to stay at UGM? For starters, the Union Gospel Mission has a lot of appeal. Foremost are many of the guys who are so-called guests, like me [that is, the sheltered homeless], and other guys, most of whom were recently sheltered at the mission and who had substance-abuse problems, but are now part of The Program, and pretty much run the joint. Among the guests and in The Program are a lot of fully nice guys who are interesting, colorful and friendly. And a few of the guys in The Program are downright magnificent people who have adapted a Christ-like love of their brothers. Others of my homeless brethren have evident [and sometimes not so evident and sometimes downright mysterious] problems, but seem to do a rather splendid job managing their lives under the difficult, frustrating circumstance of being homeless.

Like what Ryan writes in his book, UGM does rigidly require its sheltered men to attend an hour-long gospel service every night. Generally, in the first half-hour there is singing, by the congregation using the chapel hymnals and/or by a choir or musicians from a church. Generally, during the second half hour a pastor will preach to us.

The music half-hour goes by pretty fast for me. Even though I have a terrible voice and a narrow range of notes I can hit, I usually sing along. While most of the hymnal songs are cornpone, written a century ago, with lyrics that talk about blood a lot or joyously dream of the Rapture, by UGM tradition, many of the hymns are augmented with interesting or strange or comical or wonderful little inserts into the lyrics. These inserts generally come from The Program guys, pretty much all of whom sing robustly. This fun sensibility keeps the hymns from growing stale.

The preachers, on the other hand, are mostly pretty awful – but there are some who are quite talented! Many of the awful ones come wholly unprepared and just ramble on, saying pretty much the same nonsense every month. From those preachers you will get one or some or all of the following messages, usually delivered rather simplistically:

• Repent or you will roast in hell [The fact that the Bible tells us doing good works is important (Book of James, chapter 2) and that love is superior to faith (1 Corinthians, chapter 13) is, always, overlooked – as is Jesus’ Sermon on the Mound which I have only heard mentioned in passing!]
• God/Jesus loves you [But never ever “Love thy neighbor,” with mention of the importance Jesus attributes to having us “love the least of mankind.”]
• End Times are near! [Any bad news, from fires in the state or the economic downturn, is hailed as evidence of the End, coming any day now.]
• Well-established science and reputable scientists are repudiated and mocked. [Evolution and earth science and The Big Bang get special condemnation, though one preacher is a notable exception in that he cites The Big Bang as evidence of the existence of God.]

About ten of the preachers each month are very talented and very passionate and come well prepared to convince congregants of the Good News of salvation. Jimmy Roughton and the mission's in-house pastor, Rev Tom Mooney, are two in this group.

Here is something I believe -- though my believing it or not doesn't make any difference. [Believing the True Thing about The Cosmos, God and Everything almost certainly doesn't affect my future ... I don't believe. Though finding the Source is the goal in cosmic hide-and-seek.] What I believe is that consciousness is all One Thing and that we are all in the Game of Life, "a grand game of cosmic checkers," together. Here, a snippet from a Ken Wilber interview known as "A Ticket to Athens" which explains things:

Spirit is not good versus evil, or pleasure versus pain, or light versus dark, or life versus death, or whole versus part, or holistic versus analytic. Spirit is the great Player that gives rise to all those opposites equally -- “I the Lord make the Light to fall on the good and the bad alike; I the Lord do all these things” -- and the mystics the world over agree. Spirit is not the good half of the opposites, but the ground of all the opposites, and our “salvation,” as it were, is not to find the good half of the dualism but to find the Source of both halves of the dualism, for that is what we are in truth. We are both sides in the great Game of Life, because we -- you and I, in the deepest recesses of our very Self -- have created both of these opposites in order to have a grand game of cosmic checkers.

The Bannon Street Irregulars

The red-roof building to the left of the red star is the admin area of the mission. The large gray-roofed building just below [to the south] is the chapel, dining hall, dorm room and several small offices. Most of the Bannon Street Irregulars sleep in front of the gray-roofed building along both sides of the road with a few in sleeping bags on the sidewalk directly in front of the admin building.

A very curious thing about the Sacramento Union Gospel Mission — like nothing I've ever seen anywhere — is just outside mission property, out on the street.

On the sidewalk, against the black wrought-iron gate and fence and on the dirt on the other side of the two-lane street, are where the Bannon Street Irregulars* sleep and rest and eat. And on the pavement itself is where they frolic, mostly at night. It's very dangerous for the Irregulars because the road is narrow and there's a sharp curve right where they congregate. Sometimes cars pass through the area at high speeds.

In the spring and summer, during my first months of homelessness, the Irregulars had bedding and their few belongings on the street in spots they maintained. The Irregulars, a constantly shifting, changing group of perhaps fifty street people look out for one another, for the most part, but there are also very frequent fights that break out. Some fights end with a fire engine and ambulance showing up on the street and then, maybe, a police car with an arrest occurring. Too, there are other passionate discussions that occur on the street that may end quietly or escalate into something more troublesome.

The great majority of the street people are men between the ages of 20 and 55. Between four and eight, at any given time, are women. A few of the people will have dogs; there are typically three or four dogs on leashes around, most of which are gentle pitbulls. The street person who is recognized as the leader is an older black man named Champ. He often nobly intervenes when passions are raw, but other times stays out of things.

Though dirt poor in accumulated assets, most of the Bannon Street Irregulars do get checks and have expenses. At the beginning of every month, or shortly thereafter, the Irregulars get their "happy checks." The sources of the checks can be SSI or SSDI or veterans benefits, or, sometimes, small short-term general-assistance payments from the welfare office. Also, many find what work they can to earn some money.

By sleeping on the street and getting food from various sources, the Irregulars are able to use large portions of what money they receive for fun or to numb their suffering on substances they are fond of or addicted to. Alcohol, weed, crack, crystal meth, speed or a wide variety of other substances are targets of addiction, in addition to tobacco which is commonly used in the form of roll-your-owns, known as rollies.

Early in a month the Irregulars get their checks. At that time, the availability of beds in the guest shelter in the mission free up such that we regular mission sleep guests have no trouble securing a bed. Usually before mid-month, after the Irregulars have spent their money, largely on short stays in motel rooms and on their substances of choice, beds become competitive again and some men who want one will have to stay out.

Russell Yeargun of Radiant Life distributing food to the Bannon Street Irregulars. The story of how God changed Russell's life can be read at the Radiant Life webspace. [Permission to use photo granted by Russell Yeargun.]

While the Bannon Street Irregulars can and do get food from the mission [dinner at 8:30 every evening and lunch on Sundays are offered, following a sermon] or lunch, available seven days a week at Loaves & Fishes, which is just a mile away, they have other handy free sources of grub, too. Many are likely to be getting food stamps. Several groups, including Food Not Bombs with their hot tofu-and-vegetable plates, distribute food once a week in Chavez Park, downtown about two miles from the mission. Also, many groups and individuals, acting on their own, come to where the Irregulars are to feed them. Radiant Life and Abundant Life are two church groups that bring food on a set schedule. Bikers for Christ come with food, with their appearance being preceded by the roar of their choppers. Individual Samaritans come with sandwiches, pastries or soup they've prepared. Two young men irregularly appear distributing dozens of McDonald's burgers they bought nearby. Another food option: Pastor Dick Hedger of Downtown Baptist Church, who gives a sermon at the mission the first Thursday of each month, offers tickets for free McDonald’s meal deals to homeless people who attend his church’s Sunday or Wednesday services. Truly, like any metropolis, there are opportunities out there for the homeless of our extended city to stay fed. But it is especially important that the Irregulars, who may be apt to neglect their needs, be aided with diligence efforts that they be well. While there are many organizations involved in giving food to homeless Sacramentans, only Loaves & Fishes with their daily lunches [giving meals to 600 to 800 folks] feeds more than 125 people at a time in a metropolis where there are, perhaps, 2800 homeless.

In late summer, the population of the Irregulars began to increase and their presence on the street became more pronounced. A man with several ramshackle vehicles made from steel fencing, grocery carts and bicycle tires established a spot for himself. People began putting chairs on the street near the sidewalk. A hibachi got used regularly. Down the road, several vehicles were parked where homeless people slept. A large old trailer without a license tag became a few people’s makeshift home for a few weeks.

In May the city had reached an agreement with Greyhound to move their terminal from downtown to an area near the mission. Word later was that the new depot would be built beginning in mid-September. This was clearly the spur that got the police to make a play to move the Irregulars away from the area they occupied.

At night the police would arrive and roust out the street denizens. When this first happened, many Irregulars relocated at a spot near the American River. But others returned quickly to the Bannon St. locale. Soon, the Irregulars learned that there was no penalty for near-immediately returning after being banished.

After many rounds of roust-and-return, the economy began its tailspin and that put the skids to both the Greyhound move and the police effort to displace the Irregulars.

As fall arrived and the trees took on all their earthy colors, the nights got a bit wet and cold. Sometimes very cold. Tents began to spring up like wild mushrooms on the across-the-road-from-the-mission side in the Bannon Street Irregulars community. There were several big tents that were erected which could hold four beings. And there were small ones, too, that could keep a loner dry. Down the street, near where North B Street rounded a curve and had a name-change to Bannon, a tent village emerged on a piece of property no bigger than a quarter acre. The people there cooked chicken on an open fire and hung their clothes to dry on the wire fence.

Because of the bitter turn of the economy, the county of Sacramento delayed the opening of the so-called Winter Shelter [aka, Overflow] from Nov. 1 to Nov. 24. Overflow has a good reputation in the homeless community because of its beds on bunks [instead of bunk pads], tasty meals, lenient rules and TV room. Overflow adds 154 beds [104 for men; 50 for women] to the shelter opportunities we Sac’to homeless have in the cold months. The official close date is March 9, three weeks before its usual close. Hopefully, the weather will be friendly then. [Update: I am told by Barry Wisdom of VOA, in an email received on Dec 8, that, per Angelo Gama, there is a possiblity that the close date might be extended. Let us hope that it can be, especially if the weather in March is bad.]

In synch with the opening of Overflow, the Irregulars got notice from the police of their eviction from the street. As it happened, this time the police action was mostly successful. Today [Dec 3], only a few stragglers continue to sleep in front of the mission. And down the street, in the tent village, the population seems slightly reduced.

In the mission shelter, for the past three days, there have been about ten empty bunk beds out of the sixty available. And the number attending services and sitting for the evening meal have been greatly reduced. For the moment, things are rather good. The weather is chilly, but dry. Life goes on.


* I call them this, a play on the Baker Street Irregulars of several Sherlock Holmes stories. The Bannon street people are "irregular" in that they intermittently eat at and the men get beds at the mission.

The Death of the GOP?

This from a Thomas Frank column, titled "Health-Care Reform Could Kill the GOP," printed in the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal Online:

The goal [of the Republican party has been] to use state power to achieve lasting victory for the ideas of the right.

On the other side of the political fence, strategic moves of this kind are fairly rare. Instead, for most of my lifetime, prominent Democratic leaders have been chucking liberalism itself for the sake of immediate tactical gain.

... [C]onservatives have always dreaded the day that Democrats discover (or rediscover) that there is a happy political synergy between delivering liberal economic reforms and building the liberal movement. The classic statement of this fear is a famous memo that Bill Kristol wrote in 1993, when he had just started out as a political strategist and the Clinton administration was preparing to propose some version of national health care.

"The [health care] plan should not be amended; it should be erased," Mr. Kristol advised the GOP. And not merely because Mr. Clinton's scheme was (in Mr. Kristol's view) bad policy, but because "it will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."

Historian Rick Perlstein suggests that this memo is "the skeleton key to understanding modern American politics" because it opens up a fundamental conservative anxiety: "If the Democrats succeed in redistributing economic power, we're screwed."

Read the whole column here.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody. May your day be a joyous one with NFL games all in a row. May the cranberries and pumpkin pie be as delicious as the tofo turkey.

We homeless hate holidays since the few establishments where we can hang out and do constructive (and, for some, not-so-constructive) things are sure to be closed. BUT, for the homeless, there are many opportunities to get good free eating, albeit with a few ill-mannered homeless folks at the table. AND the food is plentiful and traditional and great. Loaves & Fishes served a Thanksgiving lunch on Tuesday with good-as-fresh leftovers for today's lunch. The mission will serve a Thanksgiving meal to us tonight. And the Salvation Army will be serving Thanksgiving fixings tomorrow at about noon.

It has been raining in Sac'to -- but not too badly. This is the first real rain in my six sad months on the street. Rain, the experienced homeless tell me, is the primary enemy of the homeless. Well, that and parole officers and bouts of food poisoning.

I am happy enough, even more than enough, my friends. Not to fret. Be well, y'all. Be happy, everybody.

-- Tom

HoTo Honored with posts in IpsoSacto and On Homelessness in America

I am late becoming aware of and acknowledging (1) a post in ipsoSacto [link] and (2) being on the 'roll of On Homelessness in America [link]. ipsoSacto is THE premier Sacramento-area metablog; it is to the metropolis of Sacramento what Blogmandu was to Buddhism, and this blog (and I) are highly honored to be singled out by ipsoSacto's splendid writer, John. In his post last August, John pulled a juicy tease of a quote from Homeless Tom's first blogpost.

On Homelessness in America, with The Homeless Guy [link] and Under the Overpasses [link], is one of the powerful voices for homeless folk we have goin' in this country. With the planetwide spiralling-down economy, we homeless people are going to see our population swell and our resources greatly diminished. Voices like those of Ryan Garou [OHIA], Kevin Barbieux [THG] and the anonymous blogger of UTO can save lives. I LOVE YOU GUYS. Don't stop doin' what your doin' and thinkin' about tomorrow.

By the way ... Ryan is the author of a 168-page book, also titled On Homelessness in America, described by the publisher thusly: "A meditation on homelessness in America; the realities of it, the causes of it, and what can be done about it." The book, in a new second edition, can be downloaded for a wallet-friendly two-and-a-half bucks! Update, update, update!: As Ryan tells us in a comment to this post, his book can be downloaded free, in doc format, at Cloud Bird Trail.