Some of you may have read the following portion. It's appeared, in slightly different form, here.
Part II:
What is my vocational calling?
Another story. This past August I was coming home from
seeing my counselor when I drove past an older woman on the opposite side of
the road, taking a photograph of the geese who hang out at one of the local
restaurants. She had several knapsacks, so I figured her to be traveling.
I swung around at a gas station and pulled up and rolled down my
passenger window. "Sister," I said, "Can I offer you a ride
somewhere?"
She was about my age, maybe a little older. She
wore glasses that looked small on her big face, braided her long hair streaked
with grey in a ponytail down her back. She wore an ankle-length denim
skirt, high-top sneakers, and a flannel shirt rolled up to her elbows.
She giggled when she answered. She said, "I was just taking
pictures of the geese. You never know when you'll see something like this
again."
She asked where I was going. I said, "Well, I'm heading home, but
where are you going?" She said, “Minneapolis,” and asked how far it
was and I told her it was about an hour. "Oh," she said.
"I guess I'd have a long walk." She asked again how far I
was going and in that moment I could have told the truth and said I was heading
about 20 miles further (I did need some dog food there) and then dropped her
off at the Minnesota border without an ounce of guilt. Instead, I said,
"Sister, I'll take you to Minneapolis."
She tossed her things in the back seat and got
in and we exchanged names. Hers was Cora or it might have been
"Coral.” It’s not unusual, when on
the road, to name yourself something that reflects how you think of yourself. I was facing north when I picked her up
and she was surprised when I turned around and headed back to the interstate:
"Isn't Minneapolis that direction?" she said, pointing back the
way she'd been walking.
"No," I said. "It's west of
where we are."
"Oh, I would have had a very long walk
and gotten nowhere!" she said.
Almost immediately she told me she was a
street preacher who ministered to the homeless, and that God had told her to
leave her home a year and a half ago and take to the road. I said I was
also a preacher. We asked what each other was. She was "just
Christian," she said, "Just Jesus out of the book." She
had heard of Unitarian Universalists and had met a few and been impressed by
them. She filled up nearly every second of our drive with talk and
questions and confessions.
She left her abusive husband, she said, about
5 years ago back outside Denver.
She had begun this trip 3 days before at a truck stop in South Dakota. She was resting between rides and had been
approached by a Jamaican woman whose husband was a trucker and who asked if
she'd come home with them to help the Jamaican woman get herself together.
But then this woman had stopped taking her meds, Cora told me, and
progressively got more and more aggressive, yelling and berating her, finally literally
throwing her bags out of the truck when they'd stopped for gas at the station
where I turned around. Cora camped for two nights in the woods nearby, to
pray and settle herself, before heading back out. The night before she attended midweek services
at a Lutheran church not far out of town—I know the place, it's a few miles
from my house—and she'd heard from people there that there are a lot of
homeless people in Minneapolis. So Cora decided to head there next but
apparently hadn't a very good idea of where it was in relation to that part of
Wisconsin. I told her she'd likely traveled through Minneapolis riding
with the trucker and his wife.
She had been born in Alsace-Lorraine, she said, but couldn't speak more than rudimentary
French and German, and her mother was long dead. Her father was ungodly, she said, and dead to
her. She'd grown up somewhere out west, she was very vague about where,
and mentioned a daughter who was married. I tried on occasion to ask
about her family but it was like trying to blow into a whirlwind. She was
a talking machine, sometimes punctuating sentences with "Praise God!"
and "Lord, that's your way!" and sometimes girlish giggles.
She was attending an online bible college out
of Australia run by an evangelical couple that delivered two types of courses,
free and paid for. She was taking the courses for free so she wouldn't
get a degree but she didn't think that was important for the ministry she was
doing. She had no idea where she was going or what she would do when she
got there except to preach the word to people as she could and if they'd listen
and rely on their goodness. She said that God and Jesus had kept her safe
and healthy all her time on the road. She didn't care much, she said, of
what anyone else's opinion of her was, she would just be as crazy as Jesus
wanted her in order to do his work. I told her she was a
fool for Christ. She allowed she'd never
heard that phrase but she thought it suited her perfectly, and she repeated the
phrase several times during our ride.
She asked me about Unitarian Universalism and
I gave her a short answer about no one knowing about an afterlife but we know
we have this one and it's important how we treat each other here. She
thought that was wonderful and wanted to experience a UU service so I told her
where the nearest congregation was in the area where I would drop her off.
She mentioned her reliance on libraries several times so I told her the
perfect spot I could think of was at one end of Nicollet
Mall by the county library. She said that sounded
perfect. When we got there I pulled off to the side of the street and
helped her unload and then shoulder everything, We exchanged hugs and "God
bless you”s, and I watched her waddle around the corner before driving off and
heading back home.
Later, my wife would ask me "Do you
think she was crazy?" and I'd answer, "Yes." Cora
mentioned having refused to take mental health exams in order to receive social
services, claiming that Second Timothy says you can't be both crazy and a
Christian, and since she was Christian she wasn't crazy. I failed to find
this suggestion in Second Timothy or anywhere else in the Bible.
But on a larger, communal scale, did I think
she was a danger to herself or other people? Not for a second. She
seemed to have a solid understanding of her life on the road and what it
entailed, and if she didn't have it when she started, by this time she had.
She seemed to know how to stay safe—she told me she'd never been
physically harmed by anyone and I believe her—and when to recharge her
energies. After all, she'd spent a couple nights alone in order to pray
and "get herself together." She didn't seem too concerned about
getting anywhere in particular or about getting something done. She
wasn't upset when she found she'd been heading in the wrong direction. She
seemed content to drift along, going where her God sent her and doing what she
thought her God wanted her to do.
From what she told me what her God wanted from
her isn't very different from what my God wants from me: Serve people andhelp them be as human as possible. She didn't want anyone to stop doing
anything he or she wasn't interested in stopping, just maybe to think about
doing something else and offering to be with them while they went about their
lives. She seemed extraordinarily happy and she said she wasn't on any
medications—since she was not crazy—and didn't do drugs or alcohol or smoke.
She just liked people, she said.
I have known many preachers in my life, and
many of them I would model myself after, but Cora’s way of being with people
seems the most satisfying for me. It was
on meeting her I began to have first thoughts about shifting what I have always
assumed is my calling—that of a parish minister who spends much time on the
streets and opens the church to local homeless and troubled—to a minister whose
parish is the streets among the homeless and addicted. It’s a subtle but informed shift as it moves
my perspective from bringing others inside with me to being outside with
them.
