by Jerry Parr
When we finished going around the circle, nobody gave advice. Nobody tried to fix anybody else. But Gordon’s brilliant and daring question evoked a deep and instant sense of community. We had been vulnerable to one another. We had been heard without judgment, accepted right where we were. We left with a deeper understanding of our own brokenness than when we came in. And as Gordon dimissed us in prayer, I sensed we were bonded in a fellowship of pain.
Most important, we filed out of the room that night knowing we were forgiven and loved by God—just as we were.
The first homework assignment seemed equally as odd as the introductions: find a time during the week when you can be alone and completely silent for one hour. No music, no reading, just sitting with silence.
As a contemplative with a monastic streak, I relished this. But that kind of silence was a completely foreign experience to Carolyn. Nevertheless, because she has always been an A student and done the teacher’s assignment, she set the timer and sat alone in the dining room. About ten minutes into the hour, she told me later, she began to weep. Then to sob.
Now, Carolyn is not a weeper; she just sucks it up and moves on. At first she wasn’t sure what the sobbing was even about, but she knew she was releasing repressed grief. Then she realized it had something to do with Kim.
She told me she felt two things at once. One was a deep conviction that she had unfairly tried to force Kim into a mold that wasn’t Kim. And at the very same moment of being confronted with the truth, Carolyn felt loved and forgiven and embraced by God.
So when the hour was up, she called Kimberly in Syracuse. She began, “Kim, you have been the center of a deep spiritual experience I just had, and I want to tell you about it.” They wept together. Something that had been broken for years began to be healed.
The story of Gordon Cosby and the Church of the Saviour, which he and his wife, Mary, founded in DC in 1946, has been beautifully told by Elizabeth O’Connor in Call to Commitment.[84] At Heritage Christian Church, Carolyn and I had read it in a small group. When we moved into the city in June 1987, we wanted to visit the community but kept putting it off, I think because we were afraid of the commitment that would be required.
In fact, our first contact was not with the ecumenical service that met on Sunday mornings in a Dupont Circle brownstone. We began to touch the life of the community at one of their missions, Christ House, in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of DC. We’d sent them a donation at some point, and they invited us to attend a Thursday night dinner and worship time with residents called “Table Fellowship.”
Here’s what we knew going into the dinner: Christ House opened in December 1985 as the first twenty-four-hour residential medical facility in the United States for sick homeless men with nowhere else to go. Women were included more recently. (As far as I know, it is still the only one in DC. They have treated more than seven thousand people since the facility opened.) Patients came with frostbite, gangrene, stab and gunshot wounds, tuberculosis, AIDS, and the multiple afflictions common to life on the street. Most were alcohol and drug addicts, and many were mentally ill. Many were also convicted felons. They were sent from hospital emergency rooms, homeless shelters, and a roaming medical van that treated folks living on the grates. Christ House had thirty-four patient beds and apartments upstairs for permanent staff.
The founders, Janelle and Alan Goetcheus, were Methodist missionaries who visited the Church of the Saviour when they stopped over in DC waiting for papers to go to Pakistan. When they saw the need in Washington, they changed their mission field. Janelle was a physician and Alan an ordained minister. Every day Janelle stood in front of a condemned crack house across the street from the Potter’s House (another Church of the Saviour mission) and prayed for that building to become a hospital for the desperate.
One day a very wealthy visitor to the Potter’s House heard Janelle speak. The visitor donated nearly three million dollars to purchase the building, create a state-of-the-art facility, and cover all expenses for the first six months of operation. She made the gift anonymously and never even asked to be on the board.
The Servant Christ, a sculpture by JIMILU Mason, graces the front. It shows a kneeling Christ, basin in hand, looking up at the live Christ House patients peering down from the windows. Jesus wants to wash their feet.
The residents protect this sculpture. It has no trace of graffiti or sign of disrespect.
Along with Janelle and Alan, Drs. David Hilfiker and Don Martin, their wives, and two nuns completed the medical staff. Some moved in to live with the patients and provide round-the-clock care. The Martins, Hilfikers, and Goetcheuses were Church of the Saviour members, but volunteers came from other churches in Washington and elsewhere.
This has been the pattern of Church of the Saviour missions: two or more people sound a call and commit themselves to carry it; money shows up, often unexpectedly; a wider community of volunteers provides support. This is the loaves-and-fishes miracle of how a faith community that has never had more than 150 core members at one time has started more than 65 missions, some with budgets well into seven figures, almost all touching some aspect of the pain of people at the margins.
Mary Cosby says there are four marks of call:
You can say it in one sentence.
It’s impossible.
It won’t leave you alone.
It can cost you everything.
These folks were called.
So we showed up one night at Table Fellowship. It was November and getting dark as we parked on the street and walked to the entrance. Carolyn was scared but wanted to come. My “street sense,” honed in the days in New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, came flooding back. I was keenly aware of my surroundings. But once we rang the bell and were admitted, we felt very safe.
In the brightly decorated dining room, we sat at one of several tables with a staff member and some homeless men. They were showered, shaved, and sober. They wore clean street clothes, not hospital gowns. They were quiet, well behaved, dignified even. A young volunteer, Jennifer Erickson, played gospel piano and led the singing with a crystal-clear soprano voice. Alan Goetcheus said grace. Then we shared home-cooked soul food family style and tried to make conversation. Some men eagerly told their stories: how they got there, what they hoped for when they were well. Others were quiet, like James, on my right.
I was surprised that there seemed to be no difference between staffers and patients. There was a sense of connection, an equality, a feeling of family. At the end of the meal, bread and grape juice were passed as Communion, and as we took it, we each said to the person beside us, “James (or Jerry or Rufus), God wants you to have this bread.” As Carolyn passed the bread to her neighbor, I noticed tears running down her cheeks. I knew in my gut that God really did want those men to have that bread. And I was convinced God wanted us to serve it to them.
The experience reminded me of a poem attributed to Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan:
Sometime in your life,
hope that you might see one starved man,
the look on his face when the bread
finally arrives. Hope that you
might have baked it or bought it
or even kneaded it yourself.
For that look on his face,
for your meeting his eyes
across a piece of bread,
you might be willing to lose a lot,
or suffer a lot,
or die a little even.[85]
From this first encounter, Carolyn and I realized that the Church of the Saviour was where we wanted to put down roots. Even so, we didn’t get around to attending the ecumenical worship service at 2025 Massachusetts Avenue until the last Sunday of the year, December 27, 1987.
We did not hear a Christmas “feel-good” sermon. Gordon Cosby’s topic was the “Slaughter of the Innocents.”
This was vintage Gordon: take a very tough Scripture and force people to think about its implications. His question: “What mus
t Mary have felt, knowing the birth of her son would cause the death of so many children?” We didn’t get a pat answer, either. I don’t remember the rest of the sermon. That one question blew me away. I thought about how many innocent people had died through the ages, killing each other in the name of God. The thought strengthened my resolve to nurture life in Jesus’ name, not take it.
Gordon never sugarcoated Christianity, and his personal faith in Christ was deep. As a chaplain of the 82nd Airborne Division with the troops that landed in Europe on D-Day, he had seen plenty of death up close. His unit lost half its men in just a few days. He won a Silver Star for going behind German lines and bringing out eleven wounded Americans, carrying them on his shoulders one at a time across a river in the dark. He never talked about it; his wife, Mary, didn’t even know about it until she found the medal one day, tucked in the bottom of a drawer.
During the war, Gordon and Mary dreamed of starting a church that would be racially integrated and that would ordain lay members and prepare them for serious service by a process of deepening their faith. Theirs would be a robust, sacrificial Christianity. Members were challenged to give money generously, not to Gordon or to the church itself but to missions that small groups of members themselves would start based on their own gifts and calling, missions to touch the pain of the world.
They would go where Jesus went: to be with the undesirables and rejects of the world. The church would be ecumenical, drawing from many strains of Christianity, inviting members to share their own spirituality with the whole. Instead of a creed, Church of the Saviour members—after an intense period of preparation and internship—would make a commitment: “I unreservedly and with abandon commit my life and destiny to Jesus Christ. . . .”
Members would undertake an inner journey and an outer journey: to make God’s love real in the world, even if it took them out of their comfort zones. And, as they did that, their own faith would grow.
Gordon’s faith was built not on doctrine (though he didn’t minimize its value) but on the premise that God’s universal and unshakable love undergirds it all. He sometimes prayed, “Lord, help us believe against the data.” He respected an honest doubter more than a smug “believer” who had an answer for everything. So Gordon had no problem with the doubts expressed that first night in our class. He encouraged us to say what we really felt. It was okay to pray, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”[86]
My contemplative nature and Carolyn’s evangelical roots were equally respected and fed. We were challenged to take risks for Christ, to listen deeply to people in pain, to build relationships across class and racial lines, to get more comfortable talking about things that matter most. This was the kind of faith community we’d been looking for all of our married life. And we joyfully plunged in.
Even while I was still in the Secret Service, I knew of the Potter’s House on Columbia Road NW, in the Adams Morgan district of DC.[87] Ed Pollard and I went for lunch several times to look through the bookstore and just breathe in the atmosphere. At lunch social workers, intellectuals, musicians, and artists like sculptor JIMILU Mason and painter Mary Lou Barker mingled with characters from the street. Ed and I thought it was unique, the food was good, and the price was right.
Now I was learning the whole story. If “2025” (“Headquarters”) was an ecumenical feeding station for members, then the Potter’s House was the birthplace of missions. Over coffee or dessert young Christians and seekers of all ages evoked one another’s gifts and shared dreams of a better world. Christ House, Academy of Hope, Jubilee Housing, Jubilee Jobs, Family Place, Samaritan Inns, and many others were born around the Potter’s House tables. Small churches centered on ministries met at the Potter’s House on Sunday mornings and some weeknights. Each had its own distinct flavor, and each was organized and pastored by ordained laypeople.
Begun in 1960, it was probably the first Christian coffeehouse in the United States. A storefront with books in the window; art on the rough-hewn paneled walls; and homemade soup, salads, and sandwiches in the kitchen, it was a safe place for young people to gather and share their dreams. On weekends folksingers performed and writers read poetry and shared works in progress. People talked philosophy, theology, and politics. Church volunteers waited tables, offered warm hospitality to everyone who entered, and engaged in conversation with whoever wanted to talk. When people asked, “What kind of place is this? Who are you?” members joyfully shared their message of God’s love—but nobody pushed their faith on anyone else.
When we arrived in early 1988, the Potter’s House retained much of its original character. It still does. We wanted to taste it all. On Sundays we attended the ecumenical service in Dupont Circle, where Gordon preached. Monday nights found us at Jubilee Church with people of many hues from Jubilee Housing. They sang gospel songs, clapped their hands, and praised God with joyful abandon. Homeless people and recovering addicts gave tearful testimonies. Little kids danced and crawled around under the tables. Gordon gave a five-minute sermon, almost always about God’s inescapable love. Afterward our class with Gordon met. Wednesday was the Potter’s House Church, practicing silence, singing Taizé chants, reflecting on Scripture, and discussing a “table question.” That service attracted contemplatives and intellectuals. Thursdays found us at Christ House’s Table Fellowship. We couldn’t get enough.
After eight weeks we finished our first class in the School of Christian Living and signed up for a second, “Call,” with Mary Cosby. We needed to complete two classes to intern in a mission group and five to be ordained. The process usually took around two years, but we would do it in eighteen months.
About that time the Potter’s House needed a new manager. Gordon asked me to take it on. I knew absolutely nothing about running a bookstore, a restaurant, a nonprofit, or any kind of small business. My pay, when they had it, would be $6,000 a year—which may have been more than I was worth. I laughed, thinking about the six-figure sums my retired former colleagues were drawing. But I loved the folks who worked there, and I agreed to give it a try.
The first thing I came to believe was that God didn’t want the Potter’s House ever to make money. We lived on the edge of economic collapse every week. It would have driven a Harvard-trained MBA nuts.
The paid kitchen staff was wonderful. Rosa Easley was the main cook, a chubby, cheerful spirit who could pray out loud as well as anyone I ever knew. She said “affirmations” to herself as she walked to work: “Today’s going to be a blessed day. Thank you, Jesus!” Her assistant, Mary Easley, a close relative, had a brilliant smile and a secret knack for baking wonderful bread, which doubled as Communion bread. Delphine Sherrod, our dishwasher, had a beautiful singing voice, loved Jesus, and had borne thirteen children. I loved those women, and they loved me.
Sometimes they even forgot I was white. Once I went to Kyrgyzistan on a teaching assignment for the State Department. When I returned, I mentioned I was surprised that I never saw a black person the whole time. Delphine touched my arm in empathetic concern. She asked, wide eyed, “Weren’t you scared?”
A woman I’ll call “Bertha,” our outstanding bookkeeper, refused to be paid. She said, “No, this church saved my life when I was a drunk. I want to do all I can for you all.” Bertha was a white woman from the Appalachian hills, crippled from childhood polio, who had survived alcoholism, six husbands (some without benefit of divorce), time in jail for manslaughter, and life on the street. She and her adopted son, Bobby, who was black, lived in one of the Jubilee buildings.
When we met Bertha, she was celebrating ten years of sobriety and had sponsored many new AA members who were trying to stay on the wagon. On cold evenings she carried hot food on her wheelchair tray to guys still living in the street. She said, “You all feed the hungry because you pity them. I feed them because I know how it feels to be out there.”
Bertha was spooked when she learned my wife was a judge—but she got over it when she heard Carolyn play guitar and sing a song she wrote abou
t the Good Samaritan. It ended, “For the wounded one was Jesus. / Could the stranger who cared be me?”
The Potter’s House was a good place to get over assumptions.
Bertha was a salty saint. She reminded me of Peter. Down to earth, volatile, and competent. She was worth her weight in gold but was not always easy to manage. One morning she and another volunteer got into a shouting match just before we opened. I managed to separate them, but afterward Bertha confessed to me, “I put my hand on my blade.” I sucked in my breath. I didn’t know she carried a blade!
Thelma Hemker, another faithful volunteer, reminded me of a tiny hummingbird. The biggest thing about her was her eyes, full of love and wonder. When she looked at people, they thought they were seeing Jesus. Or at least that she was seeing him. At nearly ninety years old, she was stronger than she looked and came to work every day except the one she missed to recover from a mugging about a block from our entrance.
Thelma knew all the homeless people who came into the Potter’s House, and she greeted them by name. The guy that got Thelma’s purse probably had to change neighborhoods, because a lot of her friends were looking for him.
Thelma laughed when I’d introduce her as the oldest cashier in the world. She lived to be 105. She had a story about finding the church.
When her husband died, she’d been living in Baltimore. One night Thelma dreamed about a place in Washington, DC. A voice said, “I want you to go there.” She wasn’t sure whether the speaker was God or her husband. All she knew was that the place was in DC, and she saw a sign that said “P Street.” She also saw a big building across the street, and people were going in and out with suitcases. She had no idea what her dream meant.
The next day she was visiting friends in Washington, DC, and they invited her to church with them in the brownstone at 2025 Massachusetts Avenue. As she and her friends came out, she noticed a hotel across the street and people going in and out with luggage. She said, “That looks like my dream, but this building is not what I saw.” Nevertheless, she was offered a job as church secretary, and she took it because she was at loose ends, she liked the people, and the job came with an apartment on the third floor of our lovely Victorian headquarters.