Suffering and Abundant Life
While preparing for this morning I found myself thinking back years ago.
I thought about when, fresh out of Harvard Divinity School, I helped start, and worked in, another shelter for homeless people, this one in the basement of yet another UCC Church up on the North Shore, in Salem.
As I thought about the two themes that seemed most prominent in this morning's lectionary readings — Suffering and Abundant life — I found my thoughts turning, more specifically, to the very first, honest to goodness, homeless person I met in Salem, a guy named Joe Gizicki.
Joe was a short fellow, about 9 or 10 years older then me—somewhere in his mid thirties—and I recall he had the worst, Disco-1970's style mustache and hair cut you could imagine.
I met Joe while he was holding forth in Derby Square, in down town Salem on what a "jerk" Ronald Reagan was. I don’t recall who he was speaking to before I came by, and I don’t know exactly how or why we started talking, but in next to no time Joe and I were critiquing or defaming, maybe most elected officials and swapping our favorite quotes from Nietzche and John Paul Satre.
As Joe never tired of pointing out, for an un-educated guy he could drop a name into a conversation with great skill and powerful effect. I think it was almost exactly a year that Joe and I knew each other.
The year ended when Joe’s body got fished out of a small river in the neighboring city of Peabody.
But during that year it seems to me that Joe really put me on the path to discovering and understanding what I believe is the all too common and, excruciatingly complex, relationship between suffering and all of our desires and efforts to obtain a happy or abundant life.
It wasn't at all hard to see, and be moved by, the role suffering had played in Joe's life. As I came to learn, he was the child of two alcoholic parents who left him to be raised in an orphanage that used to be located on a point that stuck way out into Salem Harbor. Joe said he thought the real estate was great, and he recalled fondly looking out at the boats and ship in the harbor, but otherwise, hated just about every minute he spent at the orphanage.
He told me that, as he got older, the behavioral expectations and constraints at the orphanage seemed to, let’s say, conflict with activities he and his pals at the orphanage found attractive and exciting. Those activities, in Joe’s words,--whose bluntness and charm I can't do justice to-- were fighting, drinking, smoking and stealing things.
But Joe also told me about what he called "this plan." When he was still very young, he said, he had "this plan," where he would get out of the abuse and craziness of the orphanage. The plan he told me about was clearly what church, or creative types like us, would call a dream or vision. It was, in my opinion anyway, Joe’s dream of a better and more abundant life.
Joe's plan was based significantly on education. It was education in the classic, go to school, sense. Most people born in Joe’s part of the 20th Century believed getting some kind of advanced, formal training was the sure fire, guaranteed way to get out of some of the bleak, dead end situations he, and others like him, found themselves in.
But, having left the orphanage under a serious cloud as a teenager, Joe had to find a different way to put "his plan" in to affect. For a while, he put one of the few things he took seriously at the orphanage—fighting—to good use. He did some boxing in the Salem-Lynn area and actually made some money and won more fights then he lost.
But after getting hit in the face, and the head, and the abdomen, and the groin, for about two years, Joe felt some of his orphanage alumni pals might be on to something when they convinced him that robbing banks could be a more time-effective and much less painful way for him to gain access to larger sums of money then boxing was making available to him at the time.
Joe and his associates got themselves organized sufficiently to actually rob a bank. Joe never burdened me with a lot of details about what happened after they actually committed the robbery. What I learned, partly from Joe and others, was that after successfully robbing the bank, Joe wound up getting shot by one of his associates in a disagreement about how to divide the loot.
Joe wound up with a serious, but not fatal, loss of liver function and some other chronic health problems. On top of that, Joe wound up doing time for armed robbery at the state prison out in Concord.
I've met people who did time with Joe, so I know he wasn’t lying when he told me that, while in prison, and unable to box or do other strenuous activities because of chronic damage from his gun shot wound, he read his way through a big part of the prison library at Concord. This, of course, was where he became acquainted with Nietzsche and Sartre. While he was doing time in the joint Joe was still trying to work on "the plan." In classic autodidact form, he was keeping his hope of a better, more abundant life alive, by trying to read himself to success. I guess he thought being conversant with mid-20th century phenomenology and existentialism, as well as their 19th Century fore runners, could be at least part of his pathway to succes.
From what I could gather, making the transition from life inside the joint to life outside wasn’t easy for Joe. For a while it seemed he couldn’t get back on track. He couldn’t get working on his “plan”.
He said he couldn't find a job he could—or wanted to—keep, and the only thing that he seemed to stay consistently involved with (and I obviously think this was not unrelated to his unstable vocational situation) was, as he put it, drinking and hanging around with other people who were drinking or who would pay for his drinks.
But, at least at this point, Joe didn't seem to have given up on "the plan." People I met who knew him when he got out of prison said that he eventually got a good job at the Hawthorne State School, in Danvers. There Joe worked with people we now call the developmentally delayed. It was a state job, with great benefits and people who knew him there say he seemed to love the kids and the work.
While he worked there he also met a woman, who I met later, after Joe died. The two fell in love and, for a while, moved in together. Sadly, for a number of reasons, the relationship did not last.
People who knew him then told me that this seemed to change the way Joe looked at things. He never seemed to be able to, as he had in the past, pull himself out of the tail spin that started when this relationship ended.
He wouldn't show up for work, started carousing and drinking. Joe was probably never a social drinker, but now it was something he did around the clock. Since he didn’t have much of a liver left this was especially transparent, self-destructive behavior.
Not surprisingly, he lost his job. After that he found himself, pretty quickly, on the street. Joe was no longer able or willing to keep himself engaged with the plan he had. I guess he didn’t think what was required to stay focused on it was worth what he thought he was going to go through in order to do so.
When I met Joe he was living with a couple of other guys in box cars that had been abandoned on side tracks in the Salem Train station.
Joe and I sincerely enjoyed each others company so it wasn't hard for me to work up a lot of enthusiasm for trying to help him get back to work on his plan, the plan, the dream the vision he had for a better kind of life then the one he was living at the time.
I assumed that Joe, like me, thought that, whatever the short term price might be—if it didn’t involve prostitution or self dismemberment—it would be worth it if Joe got out, and stayed out, of his current, degrading deprivation and demoralization.
I think Joe agreed, kind of, for a while at least, because, together we made what I thought, and he seemed to agree, was real progress.
Joe, as they say "cleaned up well." I had picked him up some cheap, clean new clothes. A couple of days a week I would let him stay with me over night. In the morning he'd shower and shave, have a little something to eat then he and I would head out.
I'd go with him to help get his identification replaced. I'd drive him to pick up medical records and other documents, and for a while at least, Joe seemed to be back with “the plan” He thought that he was being productive, that he was getting some where, which he was.
At that time in Massachusetts, if you could prove a disability and had a spotty work history, you were entitled to enroll in Mass Rehab for vocational training and to receive a benefit called General Relief, which paid about $214 every two weeks.
Joe's plan now was that he would get on General Relief and get the training he needed. He'd get the education that would help him get the better life he had wanted and hoped for while he was a young person in the orphanage.
Joe certainly had the "spotty" work history, but we needed a disability for him to be eligible for General Relief.
Joe and I walked into the Mass Rehab office in Lynn and actually managed to convince the case worker we met with that, since Joe was serious about recovering from his debilitating addiction to alcohol, and to pursuing training that would help him lead a better life, he should receive General Relief, and access to support for vocational training
Joe seemed almost stunned that it had worked out so well, and so easily. He had a source of income, courtesy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and it looked like, his plan for a better life might actually work.
Joe’s assistance from the Commonwealth did not come with out some strings or expectations. While he was receiving General Relief, and before they would approve Joe to have full, unlimited access to their rehabilitation options (including free tuition at state colleges and universities), Joe would have to participate in some pretty boring, remedial and diagnostic evaluations and consultations. They wanted Joe to get, and were prepared to pay for him to get, medical attention for his liver and other chronic health problems.
Mass Rehab also expected Joe to show his commitment to sobriety by participating in treatment on an out-patient basis.
Most of what they wanted Joe to do I felt was of limited utility. The medical consultations and the addiction services made sense, but the other stuff seemed—to me anyway—just busy work, especially for a guy like Joe.
Still, and I told Joe this, it was just what Joe needed to do, something he had to put up with and pass through, in order to get a chance at the more abundant life he wanted.
Joe gave it a try. For several months he sat through what he thought were totally useless group sessions with other Mass Rehab applicants. He consulted with the health care providers and even started in with out-patient treatment for substance abuse. But I found out that Joe, after all that he had been through, didn’t really have it in him to put up with the alternating boredom and irritation, the hoop-jumping that he felt Mass Rehab wanted from him.
Joe especially couldn’t tolerate the self reflection that was required in the substance abuse treatment. He said he didn’t know why he had to wallow in all the pain and disappointment that this treatment seemed, to him, obsessed with.
He didn’t see, or didn’t want to see, the connection between the suffering he had been enduring—the disappointment and abuse—and what he wanted to replace it with. Nor did he see how to do so.
Joe I think tried to avoid disappointing me by not, to directly or immediately, revealing how fed up and frustrated he had become. He tried to make it seem like he was involved with his plan for a lot longer then he actually was.
After a few months Joe just disappeared. He didn’t show up for any of the Mass Rehab mandated sessions and didn’t even come around to pick up his General Relief check, which, since he didn’t have an address, came to my place.
I was, to say the least, disappointed. It was hard for me to understand how someone who had absolutely nothing could walk away from what wasn’t, to be sure, a guaranteed passage to a better life, but certainly had to be better then sleeping in an abandoned box car.
Joe didn’t see it that way. What was required of him to get out of the abandoned box car was more than he had inside him. I had profoundly underestimated how impoverished some one like Joe could become.
Growing up in the orphanage, serving time in prison, losing the relationship in which he probably came as close as he ever would to being loved and cared for by another person, that all seemed to create some kind of permanent barrier between Joe and his vision, his dream, his plan for a better more abundant life.
I had to go to the morgue in Peabody to identify Joe. First time I ever saw a dead body not decked out, and in a casket.
We had a memorial service for Joe and, eventually, I got his cremated remains buried in a church cemetery in Topsfield. Joe is right next to the remains of a former MIT professor who helped develop some bomb sighting device.
But the lesson I took away from all of this is was just how horribly crushed, how scarred and, as in Joe’s case, how fatally and irrevocably damaged even someone as charming and talented as he could become.
Joe just didn’t see the point of enduring what just about all of us here would consider pretty innocuous inconveniences in order to get the chance to have something he had wanted all his life.
He came to think that living with several other addicted, deprived victims was preferable to contending with relatively ordinary suffering and frustration.
Hopefully none of us will ever know the exterminating despair that took over Joe’s life. But I think we can all afford to pay closer attention to the relationship between suffering and our hopes and dreams for a better, more abundant life.
I don’t think there is really any change for the better that doesn’t come at a cost. But in my opinion, we don’t really have a reliable or consistent way to comprehend or promote that understanding very well, not in the church nor the larger cultures or communities we are a part of.
Down in the shelter, there is a guy who is so devastated by his depression and the stigmatization he feels that will come from accepting that diagnosis that he spends most of his time threatening the women and men who are trying to help him move out of homelessness with legal action if they push him to pursue psychiatric disability benefits.
He seems committed to maintaining the illusion that he can work and obtain housing on his own even though, over nearly his entire adult life he has never held a job for any significant length of time or been able to afford and keep his own place. He doesn’t want to risk paying what he is sure will be to high a price to have a better, more abundant life.
And most of us are not all that much different. By and large we expect our changes to come at little or no cost. We want things done, we want good schools, we want a sane health care system, we don’t want our bridges and public buildings to fall down on us or our neighbors, but we aren’t convinced that we should have to pay for it.
Most of us at Fist Church would also say that we want our government to do something about the 2 million PLUS people who have descended into poverty over the past 8 years, but I don’t hear a lot of people like us saying that this is something all of us have to pay for.
People like us, and others from similar communities and constituencies, often get stuck in the paralysis of economic analysis. Most of us tend to push the focus onto others, usually a small number of high income earners and corporations who we are convinced are not shouldering their fair share.
We don’t think the kind of change that needs to happen has to begin with or affect us because we are not encouraged by our faith or our social and political culture to understand that the kind of sacrifice that needs to happen to have the kind of world we want has to, by necessity, affect everyone.
Which, of course, is a shame. Because we are precisely the people who should be pointing to the kind of solution that is necessary and, in fact, really the only one possible. The solution that calls for sacrificial, or crucified love. It’s the crucified love we see in the life of the one we call savior, Jesus Christ.
As Christians we stand in a tradition, which, as we heard read from scripture this morning, teaches that we have a calling.
We have a calling, and that calling is based in the faith that we have that Christ suffered for us and that in doing so he left us an example, an example of productive, redemptive sacrifice which, if we follow it, can help us live for the good.
I know there are people in this church who live in miserable, abusive situations that I think any sane person would decide to move out of in a hot second. But these people are not convinced that, should they take a step out of that situation, there would be some place, some thing, some person to help them reestablish themselves in a better situation. They don’t think it is worth taking the risk to pass out of their intolerable situation and into a more abundant life.
We need to, and I know our lay and ordained ministers are prepared to, reach out to those individuals and let them know that there is something and someone that they can expect to be with them if they are willing to risk the change and uncertainty that will confront if they move out and towards new, abundant life.
Down in the shelter we will do the same for the men who come trying to move out of homelessness and towards the abundant life that will be available to them when they obtain transitional or permanent housing.
In our life as a church community, we can all see that there are a lot of things we could do better. We could do better, we could be a better community, if we were willing to risk some tension and confusion—risk, maybe, even some conflict. If we can move through the unpleasantness, the confusion, there could be a more abundant life for this particular part of the body of Christ at 11 Garden Street in Cambridge and for the rest of creation as well.
But it requires that we follow the example, the example of the one we call Lord and Savior.
This is our calling, to live for the Good. God grant us the vision and courage to fulfill it.