For All Who Hunger

by Emily M. D. Scott

  “We’ll need proof of your company’s income,” he informs me briskly. “The landlord asks for eighty times the monthly rent.”

  Reluctantly, I multiply eight thousand dollars times eighty in my head.

  “Sure!” I tell him, brightly. And then, “But we’re not a company. We’re a church?”

  “Um-hm,” he counters, pulling out his BlackBerry.

  “So our income won’t be meeting those requirements.”

  “Well, you can always fill out the application and see what they say,” he says with a half-hearted shrug. He holds out a stack of papers with a corporate logo printed across the top.

  “Great. Thanks.”

  This is the fourth, maybe fifth storefront I’ve looked at in person, and it’s clear I’ll need to look for a sixth. The strategy, thus far, is this: Ignore the voice in my head screaming “YOU’RE A FRAUD” while real-estate agents rattle off square footage and heating costs. I nod confidently and ask about security deposits, well aware that our bank account balance currently sits at, like, seventeen dollars.

  “You guys have the collateral to do this?” one of them asks me.

  “We’re running a capital campaign,” I say, smiling confidently. It’s true! Last week, Rachel printed out the mailing labels on our sputtering desktop printer, and the interns spent the afternoon stuffing and stamping. People will definitely send those pledge cards back in. I’m sure of it.

  The name of the game right now is “Faking It.” But we’ve got to make it. St. Lydia’s is growing. Each week we stuff people in at the corners of tables or send an intern out for more bread. Finding a place to hold a meeting or a Bible study is a constant struggle in a city where real estate is the most valuable commodity. Our theology circle meets at a bar, where congregants shout about liberation theology over the din.

  “WHAT IS CONE SAYING ABOUT OUR THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN LIGHT OF THE WHITE HISTORY OF ECCLESIOLOGY IN AMERICA?” Burke, the facilitator, screams, while everyone else leans in, cupping their hands around their ears.

  I’m dreaming about our own space. A place where we don’t have to puzzle-piece our materials for the liturgy into plastic bins after Dinner Church, to be stacked on shelves in a closet. Most important, I want a place where people can see us when they wander by. Where we can hold community gatherings and arts events. Where we can invite someone off the street who hasn’t eaten in a while and heat something up in the microwave.

  Rachel and I explain all this to Ezra and Zachary, the interns. They nod, dazed, when they hear the plan.

  “It seems really big,” Zachary says.

  “Yes, it does,” I say.

  “Can we afford something like that?” Ezra asks.

  “Good question,” I answer. Very good question. We’ll need a capital campaign. And an architect. And a contractor. I’ve never done anything like this before.

  In the end, I find 304 Bond Street, not through a commercial real-estate agent, but on Craigslist. Trolling through listings in bed late one night, I see it. A long, narrow storefront with windows on either end, a patch of a garden out back, and a huge basement. The entrance is on the street. It’s close to multiple subway lines. The storefront sits in a neighborhood that is mixed economically, where anyone who might want to come to our church will feel comfortable. No orphaned toilets. No exposed ductwork. Just a clean, white room for four thousand dollars a month.

  * * *

  —

  I walk the few blocks down Bond Street to see the place on a snowy evening. After fiddling with the lock, the real-estate agent pushes the door open and we step inside the empty, echoing room. The overhead lights haven’t been installed, so we poke around in the dark with a flashlight, which feels sort of sketchy. But the place is neatly drywalled, the huge windows in front will let in lots of light, and the yard in the back (mostly rubble) is waiting for something beautiful to happen.

  I ask to see the basement. The agent (who by the way is wearing leopard-print stretch pants and speaks in a thick Russian accent) tells me it’s flooded right now and we can’t go down there. But the landlord is going to pump it out. “No problem,” she tells me.

  It’s the best space we’ve seen. There are discussions with congregants and visits from members of our Leadership Table. A week later, I’ve just landed in Los Angeles for a young clergy conference when the property manager calls. “If you want it, you’d better move fast, because someone else is interested.”

  This feels like a hoax, but it’s New York, it’s just how things work. Panic ensues. Calls back and forth. Helpless in California, I send Jake over because the basement is still filled with four inches of water. Jake leads our music program these days, playing the djembe and running rehearsals with the song leaders every week. He is the closest thing to an adult at St. Lydia’s. A complete and utter hero, he dons galoshes and ventures down into the basement, ducking under a low beam, then sloshes around taking video.

  “Just sent you a video,” he texts me. I press play and squint—the footage is mostly darkness and distressing gargly water sounds. “Ummm…looks like there’s a lot of space down here,” Jake narrates. “About up to my ankles in water…this seems like a load-bearing beam?” It reminds me of the garbage compactor scene in Star Wars. There’s got to be a giant snake down there somewhere.

  I call the property manager from baggage claim and feign an authoritative voice. “The basement is still filled with four inches of water and you expect me to sign a lease?” I yell into the phone, feeling very L.A.

  In the end, our hand is forced. The place is cheap, and we don’t have better options. They promise the basement will be drained and cleaned by move-in, and they throw in a month’s free rent.

  A fevered call to Rachel, and she’s throwing herself in a cab and driving through a freshly arrived blizzard to sign the lease in the basement of a cigar-smoking landlord. I’m not making this up. Documents are faxed back and forth. Edits are made. We have a place.

  Against all odds. Something from nothing. Across the country, I take myself out for a drink to celebrate. My hands are trembling.

  The Miracle of the Ice Cream

  Our architect tells me that liming the walls will be easy.

  “So, how does this work?” I ask her.

  “You just go to Lowe’s and get some lime, then you mix it up with water and put it in spray bottles. It will turn the brick wall this nice white, which will make the place look bigger. And it’s an antibacterial that keeps away bugs.”

  Keeping away bugs seems like a good investment of time and money, considering our ample use of food in a city with more rats than people.

  “It will be fun,” she tells me. “For the community!”

  “It will be fun!” I repeat later to Julia, our new staff coordinator, who has been on the job exactly one week.

  Julia looks skeptical.

  Rachel announced her departure a few months ago, to focus on her artwork and recover in the midst of a health crisis in her family. It was a blow. Her mom had been sick for months and Rachel had been just hanging on. For a while, it felt impossible to imagine St. Lydia’s without her. We threw her a big party and I cried a whole lot. She did too.

  Then we found Julia, a recent seminary grad obsessed with Harry Styles and, unlike everyone else at St. Lydia’s, oddly well informed when it came to pop culture. She loved to cook and was highly extroverted; the awkwardness of the Lydian tables didn’t faze her. She was perfect.

  By this time, we’re still paying rent for both the Brooklyn Zen Center and the new storefront at 304 Bond Street, leaving our bank account chronically endangered. We have a lot on our hands, and liming the walls seems like an unnecessary Martha Stewart moment, if not a potential complete disaster.

  But Julia relents. We enlist Clara, a congregant who runs a company making adora
ble stuffed animals, to spearhead the project. She seems accustomed to crafting on an unwieldy scale. She makes a trip to the hardware store and assembles dust masks, spray bottles, buckets, and a couple thirty-pound bags of lime. I announce at church that one Thursday evening in June, we’ll be liming the walls of the new space, and everyone should come.

  When the night in question arrives, I roll up at the storefront on my bike and find Clara crouched in a corner of the empty space, hair pulled back in a bandanna, mixing lime with water and shaking spray bottles.

  “It’s working pretty well,” she reports, showing me a section of the brick wall where she’s started spraying. It looks exactly the same as before.

  “It seems like it’s still red,” I observe.

  “Yeah…” she answers, furrowing her brow. “I think it takes a little time for the lime to take effect.”

  A little time is no problem. I pull a portable speaker from my tote bag and get some music going. Congregants begin to filter in, poking their heads through the glass door and marveling at the deliciously open space.

  Wendy and Phil arrive—together, I notice. Wendy leads the children’s programs at a big church in Manhattan. She’s a single mom to Peter, a precocious redheaded child who’s not yet in middle school. Phil’s a guy with neatly trimmed steely gray hair, and a more colorful background than you might expect. Kicked out of the house at age fifteen, he ended up in the New York City punk scene, and on crew for the Cramps. Now he serves on the church Leadership Table.

  Phil opens the door for Wendy. I raise my eyebrows.

  “I brought homemade cookies,” Wendy says, holding up a wicker basket filled with baked goods, and we all cheer.

  Soon the Access-A-Ride rolls up, and we all spill out of the door to help as Ula is lowered on the van’s hydraulic lift. The portable ramps haven’t arrived yet, but Ula manages to stand with a congregant on either side of her while someone else lifts her wheelchair the two steps into the storefront. She steps in painstakingly behind it.

  Things have worsened for Ula on a few fronts. She had a stroke and somehow landed in a hospital in Connecticut. When she returned to New York, it became clear that her personality had shifted. She was softer and more gregarious, less interested in stirring up trouble. Her barbed comments had been worn down to nubs. She had difficulty moving the right side of her body, and her speech was stilted and slow. James and Charlotte took a shine to her. “She loves drugstore novels and nail polish,” Charlotte told us during announcements at church, encouraging us to visit and send her cards.

  Ula still had a litany of complaints, especially about her care wherever she was staying. And who wouldn’t—she was living in nursing homes where the average patient spoke not one word. Together the Lydians and I visited her social workers, amplifying her requests for physical therapy or visits to specialists. She was always in a state of emergency—all her belongings were left at the last hospital, or her phone had gone missing again, or her disability checks had stopped coming. Solve one problem, and another popped up. Our resources always felt paltry in the face of her need.

  One weekday afternoon I joined her at Mount Sinai Hospital for a meeting with her neurologist. The three of us sat in his office, peering at pictures of Ula’s brain, illuminated by a light box.

  “When will…I be…back…the way I was?” she struggled to say.

  “Ula,” he told her. “You’ve been through multiple aneurysms and surgeries. Now a stroke. The fact that you even have speech…well, it’s something of a miracle.”

  Ula and I share the same birthday, October 24, only she’s exactly twenty-five years older than I am. We also attended the same college. I sometimes made a point of sharing this fact with newcomers to the church when we met for coffee. They always startled. It startled me too.

  Maybe Ula looks at me and sees a reflection of the person she should’ve been. I look at her and see a reflection too: of the person I could be. By some twist of fate, she’s the one in a nursing home.

  Tonight, arranged back in her chair safely inside 304 Bond Street, Ula regards us all one by one.

  “Hi, hi,” she says, waving with queenly dignity and nodding her head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Ula, you don’t have to be sorry!” we chorus.

  Clara arms her with a squeeze bottle. She scoots over to a section of wall and begins spraying with her good hand.

  * * *

  —

  The thing is, when you’re liming a wall and the wall doesn’t change colors, it’s hard to tell where you’ve limed and where you haven’t. Our architect had instructed me that we should try to achieve “three even coatings,” a request that seemed reasonable at the time. Now, though, with nine volunteers spraying the walls haphazardly, it’s clear we’ll end up with a wall that looks like it has the measles.

  They’re having fun, though. Julia and Wendy perch at the tops of the ladders left by the contractors, spraying along the ceiling line, while another congregant, Dan, takes a more random approach, spritzing indiscriminately as he tells a story. Everyone is bopping around to the music. It’s a warm summer night and we don’t have the benefit of air-conditioning; we work up a sweat.

  When the light begins to fade, we decide that we’ve done something equivalent to three coats and float outside to the stoop, sipping bottles of water and chatting. I’m leaning back on a hand pressed into the grit of the sidewalk, about to throw my head back in laughter at a joke Julia just cracked, when an ice cream truck pulls up, sounding its well-worn tune.

  “Hey, guys,” says the ice cream man, cutting the music and leaning out the window. “You all want some free ice cream? It’s my last day on the job!”

  Apparently, he’s going out with a bang. He plunges his hands into the freezers, pulling out Firecrackers and King Cones and ice cream sandwiches and tossing them toward our waiting, sweaty hands. There is ice cream for everyone. More than we can eat. More than enough, more than we deserve; a grace so easy and wholesome and pure, it falls on us like manna.

  Something from nothing.

  The Miracle of the Baptism

  Zachary’s mom forgot to baptize him. By the time he discovers it, he’s been an intern at St. Lydia’s for half a year, and a seminarian for two. Zachary’s dreamy calm is interrupted by little. But he’s not happy.

  “They did my brother,” he tells me at a supervisory meeting, “but then ‘things got busy.’ That’s actually what my mom said!”

  “Geez,” I tell him, grimacing. “I’m so sorry.”

  Zachary looks up through his lashes. “Do you think you could baptize me?”

  I grin.

  “Of course we can baptize you!”

  We pick a date in July, which turns out to be our second Sunday at 304 Bond Street. Zachary is thrilled, smiling and eagerly planning meetings with his baptismal sponsors. The problem is, our space isn’t ready. And when I say it isn’t ready, I don’t mean that the light fixtures haven’t arrived or something like that. I mean that the wood flooring has not yet been laid. I mean that there is no kitchen to speak of. I mean that there is no source of running water other than the spigot in the basement.

  Julia and I draw up a set of crazed arrangements to feed fifty people with no floor and no kitchen, and baptize Zachary in a church with no font and, in fact, no water. We do have a working bathroom with a door. So there’s that. And the limed walls turned out really pretty.

  After cooking up an army’s worth of pasta and salad at home, Wendy spoons it all into aluminum trays and loads them into a granny cart, to be transported by Phil to church. This particular granny cart, borrowed from Julia, is rickety, with a tendency to throw a wheel at an unexpected moment. So it is that a portion of Zachary’s baptism dinner is offered to the streets of Brooklyn, always hungry for the detritus of lost objects or, in this case, entire feasts.

>   Phil flies in the door, breathless and panicked, telling us what happened. We unload the remaining trays of food and send someone down the block for more bread, just as Zachary’s family arrives, en masse from New Mexico, alongside a group of ten corn-fed visitors from a church in Iowa. They are welcomed at the door by Hannah, wearing a long flowery skirt, feet bare and hair hanging down her back. She helps them fill out name tags.

  We all wear name tags at St. Lydia’s. It’s something I’m glad for because, until recently, Hannah went by a different name, and I’m still worried I’ll let the old one slip out by accident. After worship one evening she took me aside (though she went by another pronoun at that time) and told me in a soft voice that she was trans, and starting to transition. Over the next few months, her baggy jeans and comic book T-shirts were replaced by skirts and colorful tops, and her shell of shyness fell away, revealing a quirky, clever woman. She started speaking up more in church, and writing hilarious reflections on Facebook. She was blossoming. Now she stands at the door, handing out name tags and markers, her own name pinned to her chest.

  “Thank you so much, Hannah!” one of the Iowans says, and I see the corners of Hannah’s mouth lift just slightly, into an imperceptible but delighted smile.

  Everyone mills around in our thousand square feet of unfinished storefront, unsure where to put their backpacks or how to help. Julia and a few congregants spread the tablecloths on the floor, as if we’re holding a picnic, and set up an impromptu buffet on a piece of plywood balanced across two sawhorses. Ezra asks someone to keep an eye on the girls, and he and I trudge down to the basement, heave open the sidewalk hatch, and push through the giant, galvanized metal washtub St. Lydia’s employs as a font, which I stick in the middle of the sidewalk. The basement, by the way, is now clean and dry. The contractors laid down new concrete and dug a sloppy trench around the perimeter that slopes down to a sump pump that’s constantly gurgling, siphoning away the water that seeps in through the walls. Sometimes it loses its will to continue and gives up, dark water pooling around it. My relationship to the sump pump seems overly involved, like it’s another member of staff—a problem employee who’s always giving me trouble.