For All Who Hunger

by Emily M. D. Scott

  My table struggles along. There’s a computer programmer visiting for the first time who blushes whenever someone makes eye contact with him. Harrison bounces around from shelter to shelter, and always has a long story to impart; two Lutheran pastors visiting from Des Moines listen, nodding. Malika sits across from me, listening with focused patience to Gerry, a retired electrician whose pants are held aloft with a set of elastic rainbow suspenders, as he describes the technical details of a recent repair. Next to me, the new computer programmer and his tablemate have lapsed into a weighted silence that seems likely never to end. They sip their soup, staring straight ahead.

  Across the room at the rowdy table, Jason, an affable engineer with a head of curly hair, leans close to Ula in her wheelchair, trying to understand what she’s saying. She had a stroke a few years ago and finds it hard to string words together. She is also hard of hearing, so Jason is forced to lean close to her wheelchair and yell.

  “WHAT DID THE DOCTORS SAY ABOUT YOUR MAMMOGRAM?” he shouts.

  The scene elicits a familiar feeling for me: 49 percent flight reflex, 51 percent tenderness. A not-insignificant portion of me wants to run out the door. But keeping me in my seat is a warm wash of love for the people in this room. My congregants are often exasperating, unbelievably generous, reliably surprising, and very dear to me. And they keep coming back to do something that isn’t all that easy—make halting conversation with a stranger—because there is something at these tables that is more important than being cool.

  * * *

  I think often of Jonah, God’s reluctant prophet who tried to run everywhere but the place he was being sent.

  “Go to Nineveh,” God said. It was a simple instruction, yet Jonah balked.

  “Tarshish,” Jonah says to himself. “I’ll go there!” It’s like deciding to lie low in Pittsburgh, or Boise. “Yes, that’s the answer. Tarshish will be just right.”

  But it was not just right. God did not say Tarshish, God said Nineveh. So Jonah ends up getting dumped over the side of a ship, swallowed by a giant fish, and, eventually, spat out onto the beach, putrid and soaking. All of that before he’ll agree to just go to Nineveh and speak the words God’s given him. We all do our kicking and screaming.

  Christians have this strange notion of a “call,” which means doing things that don’t sound too appealing. If God had said to me, “Movest thou unto New York City, and startest thou a Dinner Church with no funding, no training, and no paycheck,” I would have started looking around for road signs to Tarshish. Generally, our call makes us want to run like hell in the opposite direction. But there’s also something about these “calls” that won’t let us go. Something alluring and compelling and a little intoxicating that we can’t help responding to, despite our best intentions and the flutter of fear.

  I need everyone together around one table. It’s the only thing that makes me whole. And so, despite my trepidation, I kept taking step after step to bring a church into being.

  “Why did you decide to become a pastor?” a friend of a friend, perfectly coiffed, asks as she takes a sip from her cocktail glass at a party we’re both attending.

  I didn’t decide, I wish I could say. It wasn’t a choice.

  * * *

  When it’s time to preach, I stand up and ring a bell to get everyone’s attention, and then invite someone to read the scripture passage for the evening. We’re reading a story from the Gospel of John, about a woman who meets Jesus when she’s drawing water from the well. She’s the kind of person who gets talked about around town, other women casting glances and turning their heads to whisper. But she’s the first person in the Gospel of John to understand who Jesus is. “He told me everything I have ever done,” she tells her neighbors, astonished.

  We listen to the story. There’s a silence, and another congregant reads it again. Every week, I invite people to share a word or a phrase that struck them in the text.

  “Mountain,” Charlotte says.

  “Ancestor,” someone else offers.

  “The well is deep.”

  Then I preach. The congregants turn in their seats or pivot their chairs toward me as I explain why it’s so unusual that this woman meets Jesus alone, at the well, in the middle of the day. After, we hold a silence and I invite them to share a story of their own. Angela, a jazz saxophonist, is thinking about the message this woman is given to share, and wonders how her work makes an impact on the world. Jake, a writer, reflects on what it feels like to be seen by someone. Ula, our most cantankerous congregant, enthroned on her wheelchair, takes issue with the way Jesus chastises this woman for having had five husbands.

  “I don’t like that,” she tells us flatly. “Jesus is being very judgmental.”

  “Thank you, Ula,” I say.

  We hold hands and pray. People utter fragments of hopes and pain, asking God to please help their sister, give them guidance, bring peace to our world. A congregant stands up holding a poem she’s chosen to accompany tonight’s scripture reading. “I am water rushing to the wellhead, / filling the pitcher until it spills….”1 she reads, Jane Kenyon’s words opening a space to breathe. I tear up, not expecting to. I love these people. We stand, and I chant a blessing over our cups, and we drink.

  Then it’s time to clean up. We do this together as a congregation; it’s part of the service. Julia, our staff coordinator, stands at the front and doles out jobs: dishwashing, wiping down tables, sweeping and mopping the floor.

  “If you don’t know what to do, just ask someone who looks like they know what they’re doing!” she calls out, as twenty-five people, a third of them new, begin running around like ants in an anthill, ferrying bowls to the folks washing dishes, who splash sudsy water as they work. Ula swipes ineffectively at a table and inadvertently topples a bowl of soup onto the floor. Six people rush over to help clean it up. Ezra and Burke stand with mops in their hands waiting for the dishes to be cleared, talking about Kierkegaard’s influence on Karl Barth. Malika is telling me the story of her latest breakup.

  “Well, it just sounds like he has some deep-seated issues with commitment,” I tell her, half distracted by the clean-shaven newcomer, who is hunting around for the dustpan.

  “Billy,” I call to him, “look behind the bathroom door!”

  After cleanup, cookies are placed on the counter, and the offering plate is passed from hand to hand. Announcements: the theology circle will start meeting next week. Sign up to cook or deacon or song-lead. Attend the protest against mass incarceration with Faith in New York. And don’t forget about the upcoming retreat.

  We sing a hymn. It’s four-part harmony and the tenors struggle but have their line solid by the third verse. I sing a blessing over the congregation, and their hands mark out the sign of the cross, tracing a line from forehead to rib cage, one shoulder to the other. We pass the peace with hugs and handshakes and greetings that spill out the door and onto the sidewalk.

  I head back to the kitchen, where a few people are helping Julia with the last bits of cleanup. Standing with the fridge open, she brandishes a large Tupperware container with a minuscule amount of leftover broccoli inside.

  “WHO WOULD DO THIS?” she demands, incredulously, a hand on her hip. “Just finish the broccoli!”

  “It’s just to get on your nerves, Julia,” someone calls back at her.

  Angela informs me that the doorknob to the bathroom has somehow broken during the evening. She scrawls a sign on printer paper, “PLEASE KNOCK LOCK BROKEN,” and tapes it up on the door.

  Something is always breaking or broken, it seems, some tiny but crucial piece of equipment that takes three trips to various hardware stores to replace. I can sit with someone whose brother has died or exegete an arcane biblical text, but am flummoxed by the broken sump pump in our basement. We have no building manager or custodian, so tonight it’s Julia who sweeps and mops down the bathroom, a
nd I pull the garbage out to the curb.

  Then we are finished, and Julia locks the door to our small storefront, which sits nestled between low brick row houses. We have checked to make sure all the candles are out. Every so often I wake up at three in the morning, wondering if the candle in the bathroom is still lit and imagining the whole place ablaze, so now we triple-check. Julia and I say good night and strike out in our separate directions, she for a drink with friends, I toward home, north on Bond Street, over the ruptured sidewalks.

  * * *

  —

  St. Lydia’s sits a stone’s throw away from the banks of a toxic canal. The waters of the Gowanus are stagnant, slick with the refuse of brass foundries and textile mills that once stood on its banks. Through the 1800s, these industrial machines poured whatever by-products they created directly into the water. In addition, a long-dead civil engineer made a string of poor decisions that eliminated any source of running water at the canal’s head. And so the toxins stewed there for a hundred years, mingling with raw sewage from Brooklyn’s turn-of-the-century slums. Now the Gowanus is one of the most polluted waterways in the country. We joke affectionately about it in the neighborhood; it emits a foul odor and glistens with oil. But there is a feeling of derelict shame about the place, as if the sins of our past are concentrated here, odiferous so we might not forget them.

  Rising up around the canal, the neighborhood is a study in contrasts. The high-rises under construction near downtown Brooklyn and their attending cranes are universal symbols of the encroaching ultrarich. Closer to the church are the low brick towers of the Gowanus Houses, public housing units that seem eternally enshrouded in scaffolding. There, neighbors sit out on their stoops, gossiping or watching toddlers play. Heading home from Dinner Church, I pass a bus depot where an unnamed company parks their fleet off-hours. Music pulses from a trendy bar called Swan Dive, and just south of that there’s an unlikely set of luxury condominiums ready to be leased, offering twenty-four-hour concierge, valet, dry cleaning, and dog-walking services. Only in Brooklyn can luxury sit so close to dereliction. Only here can you build condos on a Superfund site and call it waterfront property.

  Despite the encroaching high-end rentals, the Gowanus still seems like one of the last untamed places left in the city, at least for now, in 2015. Flanked by abandoned factories and weedy lots, and spanned by a few sagging bridges, it feels like you could get lost here and never be found. A local podcaster once reported a story that involved trespassing in an empty cement factory at night; he discovered a goat running free through the building. I once observed a tiny bulldozer floating on a miniature barge in the canal, its purpose unknown. A few weeks later, it was gone. Overnight, giant graffitied murals appear on cement walls that rise directly from the canal’s waters, as if the artists suspended themselves on rigging to do their work. Along the Union Street Bridge, a derelict boat floats half submerged in the water.

  It’s been like this for as long as anyone can remember. The Gowanus is a place for abandoned things. It’s also the place where our church ended up.

  “Go ye to Gowanus,” the Lord said unto me, and the leviathan ascended from the virulent deep and spat me onto the banks of this canal, slick with slime and shuddering. Here I stand at the edge of the water, in the rift between excess and poverty, between the emptiness of the well fed and the yearning of all who hunger.

  This is a story about how bread, broken and passed from hand to hand, rescued me from my aloneness. Perhaps you’ve been alone as well, and need to be reminded that, despite all evidence to the contrary, your aloneness will not last forever. When I think of what our church made together, I think of those small beacons of light reminding you that even if you haven’t found it yet, there is a shore somewhere, and you won’t drown in these depths.

  What can a loaf of bread do? It’s just bread. It can’t rewind the centuries of misuse of this canal. It can’t restore the estuary or bring back the oysters that once multiplied in its waters. It can’t erase the history we all know but would rather not see: that the mills along this river were built by slaves. A loaf of bread can’t convince the 1 percent looking down from their condo on the twenty-first floor that the Vacant signs hanging in their hearts are tied directly to the pillage of their life’s work. It can’t produce a job that pays more than minimum wage for the woman who turns the elderly man in his bed or rises early to scrub someone’s brownstone. It can’t keep the child safe as he crosses the street to the corner store to pick up milk and peanut butter, pulling up his hoodie against the wind. Bread can’t bring the father back home or restore the lost child. It can’t satisfy the longing for a world connected, found, or redeemed.

  Or perhaps it can.

  I

  CREATION

  The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

  —JOY HARJO

  A memory:

  We pitched our tent close to a lake. It was August in Vermont; some friends from grad school and I had driven north to spend a summer weekend camping. One night, when the fire had burned down to embers, my friend Michael and I walked down to the water, he to smoke a cigarette and I to take a swim. Fir trees stood sentry around us in the pitch-black darkness as we made our way to the water by feel. At the shore, we gazed up to see countless stars thrown across the sky, mirrored perfectly in the water.

  I took off my clothes, set them on a rock, and waded in. The water felt as warm as a bath. Step by step I moved deeper along the sandy bottom, a circle of ripples running ahead of me in the moonlight. I swam out a ways and turned to float on my back, looking up to the constellations. For someone accustomed to the constant yellow of streetlights, the stars were uncommonly bright. I began to lose track of where the sky ended and the water began.

  * * *

  —

  In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep…

  In the Bible, God makes the world out of a dark water of nothingness. I imagine this formless void as a womb, but also a tomb: a cavern waiting with the possibilities of both life and death. The image reverberates for me. My great-grandmother Beatrice drowned in the water. She found her ending in the inlet that hugs the city of Vancouver, British Columbia. When she left the house that night, in despair over her husband’s death, she told her grown son that she was just up to make herself a cup of tea. She waited for him to fall asleep, then walked out the door in her nightclothes, padded down the street to the pier, and walked over the edge. The choppy waters were not warm. She didn’t know how to swim.

  Beatrice was a bright bloom in our family, but she would float away into depression for months or years at a time. When her head sank under the waves that night, it wasn’t the first time; it was just the last. Go even farther back. When she was a baby, the priest held her in his arms, scooped the water from the baptismal font, and let it trickle over her brow. “Grant that this child may die to sin and rise to newness of life,” he intoned. In her long baptismal gown, she kicked her small legs, and let out a cry.

  * * *

  —

  In that lake tucked in a corner of the woods in Vermont, I was held suspended in the material of the cosmos, like a child in the waters of the womb. It was time to swim to shore, but as my gaze fell from the endless stars to the dark horizon, I couldn’t find the beach. The view looked the same in every direction. My awareness shifted to the water below me, which grew deeper every minute, yawning and unknowable. Images formed in my mind of the creatures that might live below. They had palpitating gills and webbed translucent fingers; at any moment they would brush by my ankles. Panic crept in. I was aware of my nakedness. I couldn’t see Michael on the shore. What if I couldn’t find my way back?

  The beginning is a lonely place. We hang there as if strung by invisible thread, unsure which way is up or down, the stars scatter
ed across the water above us and below. Unknown creatures glide ominously up from the deep. Yet in these beginnings God, like a star being born, compresses herself into something as fragile and earthy as you or me, or a girl named Mary, or a friend keeping watch on the shore.

  From the water I saw it: the ember of his cigarette glowing hot as Michael inhaled. And I struck out from the fathomless deep, to find the place where my feet reached the sand.

  * * *

  I once spoke on a panel at my divinity school. Afterward, a woman approached me. She was a generation or so older—ordained when it wasn’t an easy task for women. We chatted briefly. She had an openhearted, gentle look about her that made me want to listen.

  “This might sound strange,” she said, “but I’ve been following the work you’re doing, and I just wanted to tell you, that I see that something is gestating in you. And I affirm what is coming into being. And,” she continued, “I want you to know that I’ll be part of your cloud of witnesses. I’ll be praying for you.”

  I hugged the woman, a relative stranger, and was surprised by my own tears. Later, sitting on the quad under a maple tree, I kept turning over her word: “gestating.”

  No one had ever put it quite that way before, but it seemed insistently accurate. Creating something new was not a process of building or forcibly making, but of gestation. While the world was dominated by masculine notions of construction, my work was a silent, mysterious drawing together. I knit you together in your mother’s womb, someone once said. The words echoed through history until someone else penned them on parchment in the poetry of the Psalms. The verse speaks of a God who weaves something new as cells split and divide and multiply in the dark and cavernous space inside us. Artists and writers know this place—a secret, soft cave of impulse and intuition.