What Doesn’t Go Away

I live in Chicago and I work at an organization that assists homeless people. A big part of my job is case managing formerly homeless men and women in a supportive housing program located off-site from the main center where my office is. The program’s guests are housed among other tenants in a privately owned building with single occupancy rooms. I’d say it’s like a hotel, but with permanent residents. It has a front desk man and everything. The idea with our program is that men and women who are homeless can move into these units for a short or long period of time and receive supportive services which will help them make the transition from the streets to a more stable lifestyle. I visit these guests in their rooms at the hotel every other meeting I have with each of them. It’s good work, very good work, but being involved in the lives of these men and women takes its emotional toll, believe me. Of course there is a lot of joy in the work, but the moments of pain tend to stick to my psyche a lot longer. Some days I come home and sit on the couch and stare and stare at nothing, having completely retreated from the day into the darkest depths of my brain.

And then I blog about it. Here’s an entry from several months ago.

December 16, 2008 I wonder what things in people’s lives never go away. What becomes the background radiation of an individual? I got to thinking about this, because I went to do a home visit yesterday. When I do those, I always end up talking to Ray for a little while. Ray is the front desk man. I said, “How are things, Ray?” He said, “Okay. We had a suicide here over the weekend.” He went on to tell me about how he found the body of this person in the shower, naked. He’d used pills and booze to do it, apparently. Finding a dead man in the shower is something I can barely fathom. I said to Ray something to the affect of, “That’s terrible. How are you handling that?” And Ray said something to the affect of, “At least I found him right away. Other times I have to open the door when somebody has been dead inside for a couple days.” Here’s a man to whom, on some level, the finding of the dead is part of the job. I wonder how that plays out for Ray. I wonder, when he turns off the lights and all, how he listens to that or how it informs who he is the rest of the time. It’s the same for interacting with our guests… I’m always fascinated to find out the events in the past which are unignorable, the memories of which never go away.

It spooks me a little to reread that. If I believe (I do believe this, you should know) that an essential element of this kind of work is identification with the poor, then what elements of the lives of these men and women will never leave me? It’s sort of like I fear transference of the emotion of their experiences. That might be a disrespectful way to put it, because really, how could I ever know what the abuse some of these men and women have gone through is really like? Of course I can’t really know. But the background radiation of the lives of some of our guests is very invasive and I get hints and whispers of trauma that’s not mine in my case management meetings with them. After awhile, those hints and whispers really do become mine. They feel really heavy and I’m afraid they will never leave. That’s the best way I can put into words what scares me about finding any kind of identity with the poor.

But there’s also this: I found out that one of the biggest, but most subtle dangers of doing this kind of work is becoming filled with pride. The organization I work for is Christian based. We all know the dangers of that particular sin and we all know the appropriate response: Do the work you do for the glory of God and not for the glory of yourself. I get it. You know what though, I constantly find myself feeling superior to other people. It’s not like a real overt sense of superiority, but just a little something I carry around in the back of my mind so when I meet somebody new at church, let’s say, and I ask him what he does and he says something like, “I’m in finance,” I can dip into that little sack of pride in the back of my mind and think at him, “Finance, huh? Well, who gives a rat’s ass? I know a guy with a huge crack problem and it’s my job to help him. Finance? Please. Come on, ask me what I do, you sucker.” Not a lot of room for the glory of God, I’m forced to admit. I find myself clinging to crack guy’s pain, the heaviness of which, in reality, I’m afraid will never leave me. I think it’s because when I’m around other people, that pain provides a kind of identity. “This is what I do, and it makes me feel like a hero,” is what I would secretly say out loud to nobody.

So it’s my own pride that keeps me clinging to the hurt of others. (Man, that sounds terrible.) I find it hard to release that pride because somehow, doing it all for the glory of God just doesn’t seem to erase the complicated and nuanced god-awful experiences of some of the men and women my organization serves. How do you shove it all under a marching order like that? So I find myself giving lip-service to that glory of God motivation—evidently I don’t think it’s enough. If I think about it even more, I realize I ignore doing anything for God’s glory because I don’t see how that relieves me of the little traumas that aren’t mine and that I find clinging to me every day when I get home from work. I think if I could ever get beyond my pride, what I would really want to do with those whiffs of hurt is to share them with somebody who gets it, diffuse them a little bit with some honest conversation, seek some comfort in the arms of somebody who understands more than me. (By the way, for me “seeking comfort in the arms of somebody” = having a beer together in a dark corner of some pub somewhere. It’s not really hugging. Lest you think I’m a weenie.)

In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 11 verse 28, the Lord says, “Come to Me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” I’ve never really thought about this verse as it might apply to me, specifically in the context of working with the poor and of putting on the burdens that they might bear. As a matter of fact, I’ve always thought it was the poor He was talking to. I suppose the realization for me here is that in fact, He is talking to the poor and I am one of the poor he is talking to. On some level, it’s identification with the poor, a kind of solidarity of inadequacy. I am poorly designed to handle the pain and grief that some of the men and women in our housing program experience daily, just as they are poorly designed to handle it. In my pride, I’ve assumed that I have been set apart to carry those burdens, but, as I am always finding out, that pride of mine leads to an exploitation of those burdens, to a license to secretly lord over other people the work I do. I realize in my more lucid spiritual moments, or perhaps I should say, God shows me in those moments that the kind of rest He is talking about not only is given to the poor for the immense burdens some of them carry, but to me as well, because I’m not supposed to carry those burdens either. It really is a relief to stop pretending I can.

Paul Luikart lives with his wonderful wife in Chicago. He struggles with his own pride all the time. Writing and reading and Christ-centered social justice all matter a lot to him. More thoughts can be found at paulluikart.blogspot.com, if you are so inclined to read them.