This week, St. George’s hosts WARM. An acronym for Wrapping Arms ‘Round Many, WARM is a network of faith-based organizations in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, who provide shelter and food for persons who are homeless. It started four years ago, and we were one of the first host sites. More than that, we helped start the conversation which led to WARM.
One December, now several years ago, we were put in contact with a veteran who had a high-school aged son. They were homeless. Given that they were father and son, they came up against roadblocks in social services – there were places for women and children, or for children, or for men, but no resources to help a father and son, together. Stupid, I know. We put them up in a local hotel and, meanwhile, arranged a meeting between leaders of faith-based organizations, social services, and the county. It was a good meeting and we determined that – yes – the social service system is broken but they, the social service community, don’t have the spare time and extra resources to fix it. Moreover, we realized, the faith-based community needed to step up and the social service community needed to partner with us. Over the course of that winter and spring, a group formed and came up with the name and concept of WARM. Step one.
WARM is step one. The system is broken; we all know that. But the way to fix it is not by conventional means – more money, more government. Those things are equally broken. No, the only way to fix it is to transplant it, to get the social ills and problems out of the dark corners and into the reality of everyday people, and especially people of means. Hence, the genesis of WARM – exposing the reality of homelessness and poverty and brokenness to people who have homes and means and resources; an eye-opener, relationship-builder. Whatever profound new developments and transformations of social service may come, they can only come from the building of this bridge. But that’s step two, and we’re not yet there.
Not yet, because we haven’t accomplished, let alone, embraced step one. It’s challenging, I know. We haven’t yet entered into real relationship with those we welcome as guests. Don’t talk to me about “clients” because the genesis of WARM is a more radical agenda – people of means, just as much as guests who are homeless, are the clients. And until that distance is overcome, let’s not talk about step two.
While we were hosting WARM, the Episcopal Church was remembering Charles Gore and Richard Meux Benson, a bishop and priest who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, helped renew Anglican monasticism. Gore was a bishop who, as a younger man, “founded the Community of the Resurrection, a community for men that sought to combine the rich traditions of the religious life with a lively concern for the demands of ministry in the modern world.” Benson founded the Society of St. John the Evangelist (SSJE), sometimes called the Cowley Fathers after the name of the parish Benson served and in which the Society was born.
At the heart of both communities is an intentional embrace of poverty. It’s what Richard Meux Benson called “the law of poverty – the less of earth, the more of heaven.” To S. W. O’Neill, one of the original members of SSJE who had travelled to set up a mission house in India, the Father Founder wrote, “Try to keep the house as much to native simplicity; and keep the chapel also seemly for worship, and clean, but within the limits of religious poverty.” Benson further urged O’Neill to avoid the English: “…Keep clear of the English as much as possible. I know the bishop’s anxiety to get chaplains for English work, but that is not our purpose, and it must damage real mission work.” Living in true simplicity means real poverty, and that’s what Benson urged his Brothers to do, not because being poor is a value in itself but because it enables real and ready relationships with the people with whom they were called to mission. So Benson: “Large premises are a serious hindrance to poverty. I would much rather our mission should do its work – principally witness, prayer, preparation – with as little of external surroundings as possible. If I were in your place, I think I should pack up most of the things you took out, and leave them in a box. One could not refuse many presents, but I felt them to be in many ways grievous ‘impedimenta’ to missionary life.” In fact, the only way to transform is to pack it up and leave it in a box.
Kingdom transformation comes when we’ve fostered real relationships, when we have met the humanity of the other, not to mention the divinity, on an equal field, as brothers and sisters and, yes, as my brother’s keeper. Doing so, requires that we get the stuff and the divisions out of the way – that we put it in a box and leave it. What the world needs is a new form of advocacy and, indeed, new voices to advocate for those who are on the margins of our society – and there many, too many on the margins. But advocacy will not happen without awareness. And awareness will not happen without relationship. And relationship does not happen when people of means treat those without as clients, not siblings.
from the rectory porch 