Good morning, everyone! My name is Eli Poore, I use they/them pronouns, and it is my pleasure and blessing to be with you all as your intern minister this year. It’s also equally lovely to get to celebrate worship in community with you today on my 3rd day in worship, 2nd day in the chancel, and 1st day preaching. I’m just beginning my 3rd week here at the church tomorrow, and I have to say everyone has made it feel like home from the moment I set foot in the building, and I’m so incredibly grateful for that. Thank you for opening your hearts and community to me. It’s a real privilege to be a part of it, and I look forward to getting to know all of you better in the coming year.
To tell you a bit about myself, I just came to Portland from Corpus Christi, Texas, where I live with my partner and our blended family that includes my partner Angela and stepkiddos Daisy and Peyton, and my son Asher from a previous relationship, as well as a whole ecosystem worth of pets that includes too many cats, Ashers pet rats, Daisy’s bearded dragon, and several fish and houseplants to round out our collection. I graduated from Starr King School for the Ministry this past May, and I’m looking forward to learning with and from this community this year. I am also a first generation Texan, with my mom and dad’s family hailing from South Carolina, and stepparents from Iowa and Lousiana; I also hold a few marginalized identities as well- I’m queer, trans and nonbinary, formerly houseless, formerly incarcerated, a person in recovery, and I’m from a working class background, having experienced poverty as an adult. While my message doesn’t center on this today, I’d like to just take a moment to acknowledge all of the mixtures of experiences and identities that have shaped all of our lives- some we chose for ourselves, some we did not. Some of these grant us certain social benefits or privileges or more visibility, some leave us trying to play catch up, or even leave us out of the circle altogether, rendering us less visible, or even invisible to others. I would invite you to think about all of these different identities and experiences that have impacted you- both in positive ways, and maybe not so positive ones. These are your stories, and they have power. Collectively, they are the story of the community, the story of us- and they can help us understand not only where we came from, but where we are going. In that spirit, I’d like to offer one of my own stories to the many already present here.
It was sometime in the mid to late nineties, and I was living on the streets. I was walking, on them, too, at this particular moment at least, my feet falling tired and heavy over the sidewalk alongside a main road in my hometown in Texas panhandle as a crisp fall wind-battered newly fallen leaves, fast food trash, discarded lottery tickets, and various other pieces of street debris this way and that… Overhead, the brilliance of a Georgia O’Keefe sunset was settling into a cool blue twilight, its impossible oranges and fierce pinks too dazzling to last for long, and furthermore decidedly unwilling to compete with the coarse and ignoble streetlights which were beginning to buzz and flicker and hum alive in the accumulating shadows down below.
When my partner at the time and I couldn’t hustle enough money for our daily heroin habit AND a motel room, we mostly jumped from couch to couch, staying as we could, could with friends and acquaintances, occasionally family members if we happened to be on good terms, but occasionally circumstances led us to have to seek shelter elsewhere. I had slept in parks, in my partner’s car, once in an alley behind a friend’s house between a fence and a storage building when they had not answered the door and I had nowhere else to go. On this particular night, again we had not been able to devise money for both drugs and room, and addiction being what it is, chose accordingly. It was getting colder, and beneath a sky of quickly fading colors and in between wearied steps, I tried to plan out where we might go tonight- running through lists of names, places, wondering if we had enough gas in the car to get where we needed to go.
The glow of red taillights are caught in reflection in the shop windows and spots of puddled water here and there in the gutters and parking lots. All around me are the names of places you could recognize anywhere- the winners of the capitalist game- Starbucks, McDonalds, Wal-Mart- the landscape looks like any and every other place, an Anytown, USA. My flip-phone- which miraculously had minutes on it because I had managed to charge at a friends house earlier- vibrated in my pocket- I answered, and my partner asked where I was, tells me she is on her way to meet me. We had become separated at some point earlier in the day. I look up ahead a block or so to the glowing yellow and red “Denny’s” sign, and tell her to meet me there.
Originally, we both had been a part of the area punk/underground/creative scene, which was surprisingly thriving for such a small and conservative place. We bounced between the punk and hip hop shows, art shows, poetry slams, and house parties, painting, writing, making music and graffiti art, talking Basquiat and beat poetry, socialism, anarchism, anti-racism, and mutual aid; we dreamed of living outside a system that we all could see so plainly to be broken, and creating a new one for ourselves. It was my first introduction to a group committed to radical politics, to anti-racism, and to the DIY spirit that drove such scenes. Interestingly, this Denny’s that I was now approaching was the place where we often went after punk shows, drinking coffee and talking long into the night.
I crossed the Denny’s parking lot, went in, and was greeted by one of the managers that I vaguely remembered from a few years before. “Just you tonight?” He asked. I told him that I had a friend on the way, and he led me to a table in the back, placing two floppy plastic menus on the table. I sat down, and ordered a cup of coffee, welcoming the warmth and the place to sit down for a bit and the chance to remove my backpack from my shoulders, which had become quite heavy. I settled in, watching the cars go by on the road on which I was just walking, stirred some of the small tubs of creamer into my coffee. I wasn’t there long before I heard the crackle of police radios in the front lobby. I stiffened a bit, but tried to reassure myself that I used to see officers in all the time when I was here with friends after shows. I stirred my coffee and tried to look casual, as they entered the dining room. Instead of taking a seat, they continued, straight toward me. “Hi,” one of them said, “could we talk outside?”. It wasn’t a friendly request. I got up to leave, my backpack still on the seat where I just was, by my half-drank cup of coffee. “You might want to grab your things,” he continued. I noticed my hand shaking as I reached out for my bag.
As they escorted me out, we passed the manager who greeted me when I arrived. He nodded and thanked the officers, and didn’t even look at me- I was invisible, a threat, a presence not worthy of acknowledgment. A few moments later, I’m sitting in the back of a police car, having been arrested for warrants for unpaid speeding tickets and possession of a controlled substance for four methadone pills in my pocket- incidentally prescribed to me, but out of the bottle, this latter charge sending me to prison for the first time several months later. The squad car that I’m now in the back of, handcuffed, passes my partner’s car as we pull out of the Denny’s parking lot and head down the wet streets toward the county jail. If I could, I would wave, or shout, but I can’t move due to both the handcuffs and the intentionally small space in the back of the car. We pass by, me anonymous in the backseat. The rain on the wet roads sluices beneath the wheels, with sprays of bright droplets sitting on the outside of the window. Through the wet, she doesn’t see me either. As we travel down the road, people catch my eye, then quickly look away. How can one be both invisible and a threat? Somehow I manage.
There are many stories of experiences of being unhoused, and this is one of mine. For the past several years, I worked closely with the unhoused community in Corpus Christi, Texas where I’ve lived for the past decade, and I’ve had the opportunity to hear plenty of these stories, many similar to the one I’ve just shared with you all. My work with the community, called the Unsheltered Voices project funded in its final year by the Fund for UU Social Responsibility, utilized a relationship-based community development model that is centered on the idea that relationships are the basic unit of social organization and can function as a basic unit of social change, and that every individual within a particular community has gifts and strengths that can be mobilized to support one another and the community as a whole; this process believes that if real change is to happen within that community, it must be guided and directed by the members of that same community. This organizing process is focused on intentionally strengthening relationships within communities and building partnerships, eventually leading to increased agency and an organized community using their gifts to tackle challenges collectively from within, but it’s the relationships that remain at the heart of this change. And to build those relationships, you have to get to know one another’s stories.
When we talk about poverty, it is generally in terms of a lack of money or resources. And while this characterization is certainly true, the poverty that impacts the unhoused community perhaps most profoundly, particularly those who experience chronic houselessness, is a poverty of connection. It is a profound loss of relationship, a process of creeping invisibility that renders you unseen- similar to what I felt that day in the diner and in the back of the squadcar, though sometimes repeated daily for years or even decades. It is a relegation from a whole, complex being with dreams and gifts and hopes to, at worst, a threat, and perhaps at best simply a person “in need”- of money, of clothing, of food, of a job, of a car, of a home- which, society tells you, you are defective somehow in your inability to provide these things for yourself. And while it may be true that these physical needs are there, the more damaging absence that often occurs is that of real, human, heart to heart, connection, and the sense that you are a person with gifts and capabilities beyond just being on the receiving end of someone handing you a dollar or a bologna sandwich. The way that we have traditionally tried to address this poverty of things as individuals and as faith communities is by placing ourselves in the role of the benevolent “givers”, which allows us to feel great about our own generosity; our church groups head to soup kitchens and shelters en masse in matching t-shirts to hand out meals so that at the end of the day we can pat ourselves on the backs for our selflessness and compassion, and maybe for a while these experiences inspires us to reflect on our own blessings and privileges, being faced with so many that have so little. And indeed, there is a very real need for some of these things; after all, hungry people need to eat, cold people need warm clothing, houseless people need shelter, and so on. But ultimately, if we don’t go any deeper than these transactional relationships, the people that are “helped” by this model become 2-dimensional figures, defined only by what they don’t have, caricatures of struggle and need. Similarly, the “givers” in this relationship too are also robbed of complexity and humanity, with both groups suffering the loss of not only their own but also each others’ potential. We remain invisible to one another.
In the time that I’ve spent working with unhoused communities and in my own experiences with being unhoused, I’ve seen tremendous suffering. I’ve also found connection and community and instances of caring for one another in ways that we housed folx just don’t do. For example, one particular day while my partner and I were working at the camp that we regularly visit, sitting on the sidewalk talking to some of our unhoused neighbors, Michael, one of the young guys that we regularly meet with was having a bad day and had not had his medication in some time. He approached my partner, who was seated, standing over her threateningly, saying “you! You did this!”. Before she or I could even get up, a group of three or four people had surrounded him, and very gently and adeptly took him away, reassuring him that my partner had not “done it” and that we were friends and he was safe. They began reassuring us that he was just having a “bad day” and had mental health challenges. There was no escalation, there was no violence, no one was hurt or restrained, and the police were not called. The community was comfortable with him, because he was a part of their community, and he in return, trusted them. How different would the situation been with, say, Steven Taylor, the mentally ill black man who was shot by police after wielding a bat in the midst of a mental health crisis in a California Wal-Mart, had Steven been in the midst of such a community? I’ve seen so many people, dealing with so much of their own trauma, or in the midst of their own addictions, support one another in phenomenal ways, giving their last of whatever they had to whoever was in need, caring for and looking out for their neighbors. By contrast, most of us have neighbors we never speak to, we don’t even know their names and have little idea what might be going on in their lives.
The way our unsheltered neighbors live, outside, together in small groups, is far from unnatural. For most of human history, we lived itinerant lives, moving from place to place as hunter-gatherers. It could be argued that our houses, our cities with their pollution and urban sprawl, and our economic system that relies almost entirely on transactional relationships, and the vast and ever-increasing spread between rich and poor, these things, these things are far more unnatural to human beings. And our houses have become over time much bigger with the average square footage of an American home more than doubling since 1950. By contrast, according to a comparison of studies from 1985 and 2004 published by the American Sociological Review, the number of close relationships we have shrunk in that time by nearly 30%, with 25% of people reporting that they had no close friends at all, a number that doubled over that twenty year period.
We have come to value things more than people, objects over relationships, houses and security over community- we suffer from a poverty of connection too.
Whether we’re gay, straight, bisexual, pansexual or queer; transgender or cisgender, incarcerated or free, addicted or sober; affluent, or middle class or poor; Black or white or indigenous or Latinx or Asian, or Kenyan, or Kurdish; whether we’re Christian or Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Atheist, Pagan or Sikh, as our 7th principle which recognizes the interdependent web of which we all are a part reminds us, our lives depend on one another. Our communities depend on one another too. We are deeply interconnected in ways that we are only beginning to realize. So how do we begin to imagine or reimagine, create or recreate, our lives and churches and communities and systems that reflect and support this crucial fact?
What can we continue to learn from the Unsheltered community and other marginalized communities that exist on the outside of oppressive systems that naturally hold clues as to how to transform them by nature of being counter to them?
What wisdom can we gain from the unhoused communities that live closer to the way that we have lived for most of human existence,
before we carved out and fenced off separate pieces of stolen indigenous land and called it “ours”,
in the process pitting ourselves against
and isolating ourselves from one another,
before we built our lives and a world around pursuit of disposable objects
on the backs of poor people,
Black, Brown, Asian and Indigenous people,
at once destroying bodies and polluting waters
and called ill or broken or even pitied those
who cannot or will not participate in our madness
of endless and mindless consumption?
How, my friends, do we find and connect with one another again?
The concept of “shelter” or “refuge” is one that is common in a number of faith traditions. We see this in Buddhist vows in which the adherent takes “refuge” in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, or sacred community. The idea is also present in the Jewish concept of “Shekhinah” from rabbinic literature, which means “dwelling” or “settling” and refers to the “dwelling” or “settling” of the divine presence of God, often used in the context of the Divine Feminine. Also in Islam, the Arabic “sakinah”, with a similar root and literal meaning as the Hebrew of “dwelling” refers to the “peace of God”, and in Islamic mysticism can refer to divine inspiration or a quality of spiritual awakening. If we go to Mazlow’s famous hierarchy, which may have been appropriated from the deep wisdom of the Siksika/Blackfoot tribe, we recall that shelter is, along with the need for safety or refuge from harm, one of our most basic needs, with relationships right above. We need shelter from not only the weather, but also from our own isolation. We need shelter for our hearts and our souls. This is a shelter of a more holy sort- one that reveals the complexity of those made invisible, one that contains within it a revelation of- and connection to- our inherent Divinity that becomes more fully realized when we see it reflected in other people. It is one that contains within it our own holiness, made visible in the eyes of another.
I believed when the Unsheltered Voices project began that relationships and presence could transform even the most seemingly troubled communities. I still believe that, only my notion of what a troubled community is has shifted. A troubled community is one that has lost its connections, in which members exist within it but not a part of it, a community that has become severed from itself. My friends have community together. I’ve seen so many struggling with so little, give the last of what they have to support their neighbor, a rare thing in most housed communities, including mine.
I believe that as people of faith- we are called to moral repair. As someone who comes from a southern baptist tradition, I can’t believe I’m saying those words, because they meant something entirely different in that faith context. But in this context that I’m using it, which I’m borrowing from restorative justice, it means that we are responsible for tending and repairing connections- to and with one another, to and with the earth, to and with the wider community, to and with the wider world. But in order to do this authentically, we have to be willing to not just see people as they are, but see ourselves as we are. We have to be willing to see our privilege, come to see the water that we swim in, and open our eyes to the systems that perpetuate the inequality that we see around us. And these systems seem so huge and overwhelming- how, for example, do you tackle a systemic problem like homelessness and income inequality, or racism, or violence? The answer is that we start small. We start by listening. We start by paying attention. We start with presence. And I believe in almost every case, the beating heart at the very center that allows oppressive systems to function is the condition that we remain disconnected from one another. We have systems that work against what our souls call out for, that serve to pit us against one another, to draw us apart, instead of together, to make us invisible to one another save our relationship to power structures or positions of use or disuse to these systems, to see one another as Homeless, as a Cashier, as a Waitress, as Black, as Brown, as Queer, as Trans, as Poor, as Christian, as Muslim, as Gang Member, as Parolee, as Addict, as ‘Convicted Felon. But we are so much more. We are multitudes. And when we have the courage to step out of this disconnection, into relationship, into mutual, authentic relationship and not only see each other but see each other… understand, hear, and make room for and for each other in all of our complexity, understanding that the real distance between us isn’t far at all- that friends, is when we make change. That is when we live into our faith. That is moral repair. That is tending connections, and making the invisible visible. That is beloved community, and that is love.
PRAYER:
Spirit of Life and Love, God of many names and no name at all, May we have the courage to remember, foster, and honor the sacredness and power of our relationships, and may we remember that we are- all of us- deeply, powerfully, irrevocably connected. May none of us be invisible.
May you be blessed, may we be blessed, and may we be a blessing to each other. AMEN.
BENEDICTION:
We leave this gathered community,
But we don’t leave our connection,
Our concerns, our care for each other.
Our service to each other, to the world, and to our faith continues.
Until we are together again, friends,
Be strong, be well, be true, be loving.
Topics: Our UU Principles