For All Who Hunger

by Emily M. D. Scott

Then I tell the story of how they hung Jesus on the tree to die and how the land was dark and the curtain in the temple tore in two. Hannah and I kneel on the ground and blow out each candle, one by one. She’s so gentle, you’d think she’s blowing an eyelash from the face of a baby.

  Down the block, Nicholas’s father grieves.

  Across the country, Michael’s mother grieves.

  Sandra.

  Eric.

  Freddie.

  * * *

  —

  Who is my neighbor?

  We were only playing, he called out before the cop pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  —

  I blow out the Christ Candle.

  Nicholas.

  Another life gone.

  Standing on the subway, wedged between a tiny woman’s overflowing grocery cart and a Hasidic man reading an impeccably folded newspaper, I read a chilling story in The New Yorker about a man named Antonio.4

  “You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse,” Antonio is quoted as saying. A forty-year-old and former Facebook product manager, he recently purchased five acres on a small island in the Pacific Northwest. There, he built a house, outfitting it with generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

  Antonio is a prepper, someone who’s actively making plans for mass societal chaos brought on by natural or man-made disaster. According to the article, making arrangements for the collapse of society has become fairly common. People like him purchase property in remote places, keep their families’ bags packed, and plan to jet away to an isolated paradise on a moment’s notice as the world topples behind them.

  While people from any economic bracket can go a little overboard stocking canned goods in the basement or building bunkers out back, prepper culture, I read, is taking the 1 percent by storm. There is a growing awareness among billionaires that economic inequity could put them in a pretty awkward situation should resources ever become scarce. “The fears vary,” the article says, “but many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s second-highest concentration of wealth.” So they’re making an escape plan, protecting themselves from the angry, hungry mobs who might one day appear at their doors.

  The article describes a fifteen-story luxury apartment complex in Wichita, Kansas, built underground in a disused missile silo. Finished in 2012, the place has a lounge with a large stone fireplace, a gym, a pool, and a medical and dental facility. In the absence of windows, LED screens in each room broadcast a live feed of the prairie outside. You can change channels to display an image of a forest or a city. Outside the silo, armed guards stand watch. Apartments in this complex sold for three million dollars each.

  Rattling along on the 2 train, I start to feel queasy. The idea of ultrarich people making incredibly expensive provisions for themselves, and themselves only, when they are the very people who have the capacity to address the world’s need, is ironic. Not to mention that such wealth is often built on the impoverishment of the rest of the world. One critic wrote of the prepping trend, “Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?”5 We all have our preferred ways of managing fear, and there’s nothing wrong with self-preservation. But living fifteen stories underground, with armed guards under orders to shoot your fellow human beings should they approach, watching the live feed of a prairie you’ll never actually see…Is that life?

  To me, it sounds suspiciously like a tomb.

  * * *

  —

  In a few days, St. Lydia’s will celebrate the Easter Vigil. We observe Easter not on Sunday morning, but on Saturday night, enacting a liturgy that’s been passed down through the ages. After the hollow ache of Good Friday, we’ll wait on Saturday for the sun to go down, gather on the sidewalk, and light a fire. The “new fire,” it’s called in our tradition. I will fuss over it, mixing Epsom salts and alcohol that will ignite when a match is lit—a little stagecraft that makes the night more dramatic. Then we’ll light the Christ Candle from the fire and stand around it as I sing ancient words to a melody that a friend composed for us. He always accompanies me darkly on the accordion. “How holy is this night,” I’ll sing, “when wickedness is put to flight, and sin is washed away. It restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to those who mourn.” Every year my voice catches on those words, “joy to those who mourn.” This idea of a movement from brokenness to fullness—that even from the shards of the very worst of human violence, God can make something whole—brings tears to my eyes.

  At this year’s vigil, we will read the resurrection story from the Gospel of Luke. Women come to the tomb early in the morning to anoint Jesus’ body, but when they crouch down to enter, they find it empty. They’re standing there bewildered when two men appear beside them out of nowhere, saying, “Why do you search for the living among the dead?”

  The Easter Vigil is the fulcrum of the year at St. Lydia’s—our most extravagant celebration, with drinking and dancing well into the night. “This is the night,” I will sing, echoing words passed down through the centuries, “when wickedness is put to flight and sin is washed away.” Everything lost will be restored. The last few years, an awareness of the world’s brokenness has erupted into my life. I’ve seen what’s left after the storm. I know Nicholas’s story. Ula’s situation is growing worse each day as she bounces from one bad nursing home to the next, caught in a dearth of resources. I am still lonely. But God is making life, even at the tomb.

  * * *

  —

  The writers of the Gospels, it occurs to me, were living in a prepper’s worst nightmare. Forty years after Jesus’ death, Christians had formed fragile, new communities, many of which existed under the shadow of violent persecution. In Judea, tensions between the Jewish people and their Roman occupiers boiled over into revolt. By A.D. 70, the city of Jerusalem was taken in a violent siege in which the Jewish people were slaughtered and enslaved. The temple—God’s dwelling place and the heart of Jewish life—was set on fire and fell. For Jews and Christians in the region, life was overcome with destruction. The fabric of their society hung in shreds.

  They had a choice. They could hunker down, find the first-century version of a bunker, and hide their families deep underground. Instead, they did something different. As the world was rent apart, they came together around a table to share a meal. At the center of their community, they placed a story of death and life.

  They remembered another day when everything was wrong—when the land went dark and the curtain in the temple was torn, and humanity turned into a vicious crowd and hung God on a cross to die. At the center of the story are the women who awoke before dawn, moving through darkness carrying jars of oil, their bodies aching, the memories of that trauma-laced Friday still invading their thoughts like sudden screams as they went to prepare their friend for burial. But when they arrived at the place of death, they found not a body, but a pair of angels as fleeting and transcendent as lightning.

  You’re searching for the living among the dead, the angels told them, and sent the women out on the road, back to the disciples, to be disbelieved and ignored.

  Years later, the Christians who gathered in the wake of their own ruin and destruction told this story of violence and execution, of missing corpses and fractured community. When everything was in tatters, they spoke of life that comes from death.

  This, too, is the story we choose to tell, standing in our own ruined city. It is a story that does not offer one shred of security. We will not hide away in fear, building walls to divide ourselves from our neighbors, hoarding what we have. We turn and reach out toward the world, still trembling, to encounter a living God who longs for us to be one family and will not be bound by death.

  * * *

  We all spend our fair share of time han
ging around tombs. It’s a pretty normal, human thing to do. Death seems to draw us back like a lure.

  My personal tomb has the word “perfection” written across the top. I hover at its edge, thinking I can control things, thinking I can do it all on my own. Thinking that if I can’t, I probably shouldn’t even try. So I stay locked on the edge of death, paralyzed.

  Why do you look for the living among the dead? the angel asks me.

  “Listen, I’ve got it under control,” I answer.

  I was your classic overachiever. I have a vivid memory of the first time I got an answer wrong in the first grade. Mrs. Levitsky called on me, told me, “No, that’s not it,” and moved on to the next student. I sat in my kid-size chair, bathing in shame. If my answer was wrong, I must be wrong too. But if I found a way to please everyone, 100 percent of the time, then everything that felt like it was falling apart would hold together, just barely. So my hand shot up in class, and my tests were returned with A’s. I smiled and learned to please.

  In the early days of St. Lydia’s, I needed every sermon to be inspiring, every song to be exactly right. We were building a church on the conviction that mistakes and brokenness are where God enters in—I must have thought that applied to everyone but me.

  “Emily,” I remember Ana, a mentor, saying to me over the phone, “let God do the heavy lifting.”

  It sounded like a foreign language. I was the one who was supposed to be doing the lifting. That’s how I’d know I was worth something.

  I’ve got it under control.

  Then my mom got sick, and I didn’t have it under control at all. There was nothing I could do to achieve my way through this situation. No way I could work harder to change her outcome. Then the hurricane hit, and I didn’t have it under control. Then Trump got elected. Then your sister was deported. Then the cops shot your son, your daughter, and didn’t even get taken off payroll. Then the rent gets raised or the job falls through. Then the sky goes dark and the fabric of life is rent in two. Around you, the city is falling.

  On those Good Fridays, it is God, not we, who stitches us back together. And God offers not a bunker that will provide imagined safety, but a road to walk: uncertain and exposed. Grace shows up, not in the ways we try to hold it together, but when we finally let go.

  Why do you look for the living among the dead? the angels ask.

  * * *

  We come together in a church basement whose concrete columns have been painted a thousand times with high-gloss paint. Last time it was a clergy breakfast at 10:00 A.M. with untouched platters of elaborate pastries (everyone’s trying to eat just a little better). There are paper cups of coffee from urns, a portable screen teetering on skinny tripod legs, and a projector plugged into coiled yards of a Day-Glo orange extension cord. There are PowerPoint presentations with arrows and pie graphs, flip charts and dried-out markers.

  This is a meeting of Faith in New York, a community- organizing coalition of over seventy congregations in the city. Over the last few months the Lydians and I have become fixtures at these church-basement meetings. Hannah, Jason, Malika, and I all trudge to the subway at the end of the workday to ride for an hour to Ozone Park or Bay Ridge. There we attend the Prophetic Leadership School, soaking up the basics of organizing as we scratch notes on pads of yellow legal paper. We sit while the leader’s words are translated from Spanish phrase by phrase, a room of one hundred church folk waiting patiently even though we’re moving at half time, nodding in understanding and support.

  Faith in New York is led by Onleilove Alston.

  “My name is Only-love—that’s right, my parents named me a phrase,” she always jokes when she introduces herself to a group, her broad smile manifesting, bringing a glint to her eyes beneath the African-print head wrap she often wears. “People always ask me if they were hippies or if it means something. Well, in African culture, you usually name a child based on the circumstances of their birth or on a characteristic you see in them.”

  The first woman to lead Faith in New York, Onleilove laughs often but makes light of little. Though she stands a full head shorter than most of the male pastors she leads, her authority is palpable as she walks us through area median income calculations and the fight for affordable housing in our city.

  Onleilove started organizing because she experienced firsthand the consequences of bad policy. As a kid, her family became homeless when her stepfather lost his job. She was placed in the foster-care system because of a now-defunct law that allowed kids to be taken from homeless mothers. Today, she will settle only for a world in which every child and grown-up is given the best possible chance.

  Advancing the slide on her presentation, Onleilove is strong and sure as iron. She knows the Bible backward and forward and, without flinching, names the work our communities have to do. Catholics need to do more to support undocumented folks who attend and advocate for so many of their churches. Black men experience oppression but also must examine their misogyny. She rejects false dichotomies with a deft hand. There is not either/or with Onleilove, only a clear call toward what is right.

  She listens to each of us with unblinking attention. Even the rumpled man with a stack of flyers he’s eager to hand out who always stands on the fringes of the meetings, waiting for his chance to elucidate the evils of capitalism. He’s not wrong, but he does tend to go on for a while. She gives him honor and respect, and pulls a gem of wisdom from his tumble of words, even as the meeting risks running overtime. Everyone has a voice at the table she lays.

  I am a lover of beauty. I revel in placing flowers beside the Christ Candle at St. Lydia’s and smoothing bright cloths on our welcome table. Church basements like these are not usually thought of as beautiful. But between paneled ceilings and linoleum floor, in our Faith in New York meetings I start to see beauty of a different kind, illuminated by compact fluorescent lighting. The paint is sometimes peeling from the walls, but the will of the people is strong and their prayers are earnest and true. The desire to understand one another—to honor each other with full attention—is rare and extraordinary.

  We pray together often. Sometimes we are invited to reach out and touch the shoulder of our neighbor so that Hannah and Jason and I are linked together with the pastor from the Baptist church in Queens and the Puerto Rican lay leader from Washington Heights. Some of us wear collars and some suits, some pray in the name of Jesus and say, “Father, we just ask that…” and others read from a prayer book tucked in their breast pocket or their purse.

  I am one of the youngest clergy, and I wear my collar to make sure no one mistakes me for an intern. But I don’t feel like a rare bird here. I feel like we’re all rare birds, milling together and just noticing that each of us has wings. No one expected us to flock together—undocumented immigrants and Ivy League graduates, Baptist preachers descended from sharecroppers, Catholic Sunday school teachers, and a former foster kid from East New York. But here we all are, together, catching a glimpse of a different kind of world we could create. Maybe this is my flock.

  * * *

  I watch the election results come in at a bar up the street crowded with Brooklynites, with Julia. The night starts out cheery enough, but then Florida goes red. When Pennsylvania follows, the mood in the room shifts, as if the hair on everyone’s arms has raised at the same time. A hush falls over the crowd as the newscasters glance offscreen, looking for answers.

  I order steak frites and a cocktail, then devour the medium-rare cut mechanically, as if applying myself to stress eating will change the results. It doesn’t.

  People start posting on the St. Lydia’s Facebook group, “What is happening??”

  “I don’t know, but I’m praying,” I write back.

  By this time the entire restaurant is silent and stunned. Tears are running down one woman’s cheeks. Julia is aghast, her head leaning on one hand, as if to shield her eyes. When the results st
art to seem final, I post that the church will be open the next morning at eight. At home, I stay up until three watching the broadcast. I sleep fitfully, shock like caffeine in my veins. At six I lie awake. I shower and go to the church, and find the door unlocked. Omar is inside sitting at the table. They got off the night shift at five at the clothing store where they stock shelves and didn’t know what else to do, so they came here.

  “Let’s order breakfast,” I declare.

  “That sounds good,” Omar says, dazed.

  Omar is new to St. Lydia’s. Young, just twenty, with a loose, four-inch afro and always stylishly dressed, Omar has also recently decamped from a giant megachurch.

  “I went to their huge training program in Australia,” Omar told me their first night at Dinner Church, eyes wide, “but it turns out I’m totally gay. The staff had me talk to this chaplain, but she wasn’t really into conversion therapy, so I was lucky. Anyway, now I’m back in the Bronx living with my parents and I have no idea what to do with my life because all my friends are in college.”

  “Holy crap,” I said.

  Omar jumped right into St. Lydia’s and became fast friends with Hannah. In a few years Omar would shift to using they/them pronouns, to better express their gender identity. They’d also nurture an interest in fashion and the environment that they would follow to art school. But the morning after the election, Omar, who is usually hilarious and giddy, is devastated.

  “We live in public housing,” Omar tells me. “You think Trump’s gonna help my family?”

  We set up a prayer area at the front of the church near the benches, with tissues and candles to light. All day long congregants and random people who heard we were open stop by. They come over for little stints to talk in spurts with us.