When You Wake Up Crying

The preacher stood rooted to the sidewalk, proclaiming “When you WAKE up CRYING you can TURN to JESUS” at crying women, day after day. One Saturday, I remember, he wasn’t there. I thought he must be deathly ill. But it turned out that the organization of Protestant men in blue caps had taken the day off from picketing the abortion clinic to picket the local Target, because Target had recently opted to give a cash donation to the Salvation Army instead of allowing Salvation Army Santa bell ringers at the doors. They viewed this as a bow to secular culture. The next week, they were back at the clinic.

One day, just as the protest was breaking up, I was stuck in that part of town without a ride. I was going to walk ten blocks to my house, but one of the men in blue caps stopped me. He said that he would take me home, but he had to make a stop first, and I said I wasn’t in a hurry; I’d go with him.

“I’m going to the homeless tent camp,” he explained.

I didn’t know there was a homeless tent camp.

He drove me clear to the other side of town, to a lot near the old Catholic Church where the soup kitchen was and where the Tridentine Mass was offered. Behind the church, there were railroad tracks, and behind the railroad tracks was a lot that had stood vacant for so many years it had become a forest. I thought I saw dirty cloth hanging in the trees in the vacant lot forest; I wondered if those flimsy things could be tents.

The man in the blue cap took a case of Diet Rite out of his trunk. He carried it across the tracks. I followed, thinking how I would catch it at home for doing anything as dangerous as walking on railroad tracks or going to a homeless tent camp.

There was a gravel clearing a little ways on; in it, I found several raggedy-looking men and a very old camper, with the brutal preacher from the abortion clinic standing by one window handing out lunches. He gave a plate of hot baked beans to every homeless person, including a dark-skinned man who spoke only Spanish– clearly an undocumented migrant who’d snuck past the vigilantes in blue caps when he crossed the Southern border. But the preacher fed him anyway. I passed out the Diet Rite. We all stood in a circle, in the dirty forest near the railroad tracks, in the shadow of the Catholic Church where Tridentine Masses were offered, listened to the preacher say grace in his stilted, syncopated Protestant staccato, and shouted “amen.”

“What do you need?” I asked a homeless man as he shoveled down his beans. My heart was struck by real empathy, for once. I had to give them something that they needed. I felt like I was the one who would die of my poverty if I didn’t.

They had a long list– gloves, thick socks, toilet paper, cans of food, propane. I shuddered at the thought that there were human beings relieving themselves in the woods and cooking canned beans on campfires, here in my own city.

As the man in the blue cap took me home, I was already making a list of things to buy, calculating how many of my socks I could give them and where in the world people bought little canisters of propane.

“The preacher brings them lunches in his camper every Saturday, after the protest,” said the man in the blue cap.

I don’t understand people. I don’t understand the way our minds work; how we can compartmentalize so completely, how we can be so brutal in one setting and compassionate in the next. How we can even be brutal when we’re trying to do something in Jesus’s name.  I don’t know how people can not see tears from six-thirty to noon and dry the tears of the poor from noon to evening. But when I wake up crying and turn to Jesus, I’m grateful that Grace is deeper than the folly of men.