The Weight of Mercy (eBook)

Chapter 1

I THOUGHT I’D BE WISE BY NOW.

I thought my experience with drug addicts and alcoholics and the mentally ill and people suddenly, brutally, surprised by homelessness would gel into wisdom. I thought I’d have something to teach people about how to deal with those who live under bridges and in vacant houses and in the woods – how to love them, how to haul them out of the quicksand and onto the solid red clay that underlies our little piece of South Carolina.

I thought I’d graduate from the Triune Mercy Center with compassion and wisdom.

People in Greenville sure give me credit for it. I’m always speaking at prayer breakfasts and mission luncheons and book clubs about homelessness and, especially, our Christian response to it.

But I don’t feel at all wise. I feel, by turns, cranky, humbled, incredulous, deflated, energized, furious, exhilarated, tired.

I suppose the lessons I was seeking are simply too complicated, too messy – not unlike our lives in this place. So I won’t try to tell you what it all meant, my time at the Triune Mercy Center. I’ll just tell you what happened.

* * * * * * *

I once interviewed the novelist Kaye Gibbons for a newspaper story. Kaye’s first book was Ellen Foster, a semi-autobiographical novel about a young girl’s painful and hardscrabble upbringing. The adult Kaye told me that life was behind her, that now she and her husband and children lived in a “high-vanilla suburb” in a mid-size North Carolina city.

I knew instantly what she meant, for I, too, am the product of a high-vanilla suburb. My younger brother and sister and I walked to the elementary school on our leafy street in Greenville, South Carolina, a mid-size city with all the promise and problems of any city in the deep South. Our dog, King, a feisty mix of boxer and who-knows-what, sometimes set out in search of us, arriving at mid-morning outside my classroom in the sprawling, one-level school. The principal would call our house. If my mom was home, she’d drive to get King, all embarrassed and apologetic, but shooting me an amused glance. If she was at her job as a tax attorney’s secretary, the housekeeper got the job of chauffeuring King.

I say “housekeeper” now. Back then, in the 1960s, she was our maid. And she wasn’t a single “she” at all, but a string of women, always black, always poor, with exotic names: Lena, Odessa, Birdie.

And as long as I’m being honest, only one actually drove a car to our house and thus got the job of ferrying the recalcitrant King. The others my mother drove home to a neighborhood inside the city limits, where houses sat packed tightly on steep, narrow, pockmarked streets. When I was old enough, I’d sometimes drive the maid home. I was disturbed by those houses, many of them leaning precariously on cement blocks, their porches slumped under the weight of threadbare sofas and rusting refrigerators. One Christmas, I stuffed $40 of my babysitting money in an envelope, wrote “Birdie” across the front, and drove by at dusk to slip it in her mailbox.

So yes, my suburb, and my upbringing for that matter, was high-vanilla and bland. But also safe, cocooning. My mom and dad were married for 58 years. We kids walked on a path through the woods to our community pool. I babysat for the younger schildren in the neighborhood, and played softball with the older ones. I was a Girl Scout.

My friends from elementary school remained friends through high school. We stay in touch, have the soup, salad, and breadsticks once in awhile at the Olive Garden. At our first lunch after I took the Triune job they never got a word in. They sat, eyes wide, mouths grimaced – the college dance teacher, the social worker, the stay-at-home moms – as I described my new job: How the facilities manager smelled of liquor and screamed at me, how clothes and food walked out the door and into crack houses, how the kitchen assistant bought prescription pills from congregants. Only the social worker laughed in recognition.

I never wanted to be a minister, but it wasn’t a case of considering the notion and discarding it. It simply never crossed my mind. I was no more likely to become a minister than a bullfighter. A hog farmer. A submarine captain.

If it had crossed my mind, I would’ve dismissed it. Ministers were boring. No drinking. No dancing. No cussing. Good grief. Who would choose such a life?

No, for as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a journalist. I edited my high school newspaper, then went to Wake Forest University in North Carolina, and edited its student newspaper. The Old Gold and Black, it was called, and it covered the goings-on of the Demon Deacons running around that autumn-hued campus. I didn’t appreciate until much later how funny and how self-mocking it was to have a top-hatted, maniacal deacon represent the Baptist school.

My experience as a college newspaper editor was enough to land me a job at my hometown Greenville News, where I stayed for 27 years.

I am nothing if not loyal.

Once, in my early 20s, I helped my dad cut down a tree in his front yard. It was a chilly New Year’s Day, and I had accompanied my parents to a party. I was wearing designer jeans and heels, a preposterous fashion get-up that unaccountably gained popularity in the late 1970s.

Dad wanted to get rid of a pesky sweetgum, which peppered the yard with its prickly fruit, and he’d asked me to help. After we returned to their house, he instructed my brother and me to hold tightly to a rope wrapped around the tree. His plan was to guide it straight down rather than have it spin and hit the house.

“Hold on,” he said, revving up his chain saw. “This won’t take a minute.”

A moment later, I felt myself being jerked through the air as the tree crashed to the ground, well away from the house.

“Let go!” my father yelled.

But I was already on the ground, designer jeans muddy, heels hurled 20 feet away. My father’s laughing face loomed above me. “Why didn’t you let go?”

“You told me to hold on,” I murmured, checking to make sure my arms and legs still worked.

“I meant until the tree was headed in the right direction,” he said. “Not forever.”

But that’s me. I’ll hold on forever. Sometimes that’s long after I should have let go.

* * * * * * *

The first sermon I preached at the Triune Mercy Center was on August 7, 2005 – two weeks before my 51st birthday. My topic was the kindness of strangers – appropriate for a church that existed to welcome the stranger. Appropriate, too, since besides my husband, Vince, and our teenage daughter, Madison, the 40 people in church that day were strangers to me.

In the hallway behind the pulpit, I nervously shrugged into the voluminous folds of an untested, creased black preaching robe. I carefully placed a crisp white stole over my shoulders, marveling at the colorful butterflies that draped all the way down to the hem, well past my knees. The radiant and playful stole was a gift from my home church, First Baptist Greenville, and I felt a momentary twinge that I wasn’t among those friends.

Instead, I was preparing to preach to Greenville’s homeless in a 300-seat chapel dotted with men carrying bedrolls and duffle bags. Several were stretched out full-length on the pews, sleeping off the crack and malt liquor from the night before. Others were staring at me, this middle-aged white woman from the suburbs coming to pastor the inner-city mission church where they ate hot meals and received groceries, got clean clothes and watched Sunday afternoon football on TV.

The former pastor laid down three rules: Never give money. Never give cigarettes. Never give rides.

No problem, I thought, running a hand through my tousled blond hair to give it, and me, some much-needed height. I was ready.

After the organ prelude and desultory hymns, a prayer of confession and collection of an offering, I delivered the sermon I had worked on so hard. It came from Matthew 25, a passage in which Jesus talks about Judgment Day. People will be judged, he said, on whether they fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, visited the sick, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger.

The kindness of strangers, I mused aloud. It was an image I had always liked, the stranger coming into our lives, the random kindnesses we children of God exhibit in the midst of our awfulness to one another.

As a former theater critic for The Greenville News, I mentioned Blanche Dubois from A Streetcar Named Desire and her dependence on the kindness of strangers. And as a former general assignment reporter, I included a story I’d covered about a mother who murdered her two children, then told the authorities a stranger had abducted them. When her story unraveled nine days later, it was strangers across the nation who grieved and supported her bereft husband.

The sermon was an amalgam of all the experiences that had brought me to this time, to this place: Daughter of the South, newspaper reporter, wife, mother of three, seminary graduate. And so, as a lover of words, I suppose it wasn’t so odd that I mused on the phrase perfect stranger. I pointed out that when we speak of a perfect stranger, it is not the stranger who is perfect, for how could we know?...