Abandoning

by Joe Ferry

  BETHESDA NEWSLETTER

From time to time we have put people out of Bethesda's houses. The inviolable rule for us is that one cannot hurt another. If someone does harm to another in any of our houses then they are immediately put out. Because of this rule and our fidelity to it, our houses are seen by the residents as safe places. We simply do not tolerate violence, everyone knows that, everyone knows the immediate consequences if there is violence, and so it is a rare occurrence. Last year there was a fist fight between two men at one of the houses, both are gone - everyone at the house remembers this, worries even about the two - where they are, how they're doing - but everyone remaining knows the house is tranquil and their own safety is secured.

The question of putting people out is a plague to me. Bethesda is for those that are homeless, those who have already been put out of home. Everyone that we meet has this in common; they are alienated from home, they have become aliens, stranger from whatever it had been that was home. The histories and causes, complexities that have individually brought this to be are legion, never one-sided, sometimes reversible, oft times not.

I cannot see my way clear then to evicting people for any reason. Our work is to find someplace or way within Bethesda to include whomever becomes a member.

Recently we have asked three people to leave. It is always a failure when someone leaves us like this, it doesn't make it any easier for me when their actions justify or even require us to put them out. I know that they have failed to perform some or many of the obligations they might have. But I want us to be a place that is inalienable, I want there to be no means or process of abandonment and I keep running up against realities: Her behavior or his conduct is harmful to the others in the house; she hasn't paid rent in three years, his drunken loud foul-mouthed conduct is intolerable for the others to whom we have the responsibility of  administering a safe, peaceful and secure house.

We fall back to the guidance of justice, not the justice of courts and law, but justice, the virtue: some attempt to make a decision between two goods when both cannot be kept, or between two evils when both cannot be avoided. Bethesda has grown from an activity of a group of people caring about and for the homeless, to a corporation with ownership of many buildings, contractual obligations, moral obligations to donors and beneficiaries, partnerships with churches, government agencies, and commitments to foundations and trusts. Some days all this meshes seamlessly with our mission to find and care for the abandoned poor. Some days I wonder how to connect our contractual obligation not to invest in or hire for work any company that has investments in Namibia, to our mission.  I don't mind this clause, its reasoning and rationale, in our contract with the City of Philadelphia - we do get $108,000 through this contract that we can spend on sheltering frail men - but the clause, and our fidelity to it, is a distraction to me that turns my energy from the work I want to concentrate on. Even though I want our houses to be like homes, the federal government requires that I hang posters about worker rights, workplace safety, sexual harassment, drug-free workplace requirements. Not very homey all these signs on the walls.   But I'm whining here - these matters are just the day to day stuff of administering an organization that has a lot of work to do and the willingness to grow to do it.

More difficult are the personal sized conflicts, the resolution of which often falls to our staff. The woman who is unwilling to contribute even a penny of her social security income toward the costs of her room at our residence. For years we tolerate this, selling raffle tickets, having fund raisers, working with her, hoping to develop the trust that will allow her to recognize that her contribution according to her means lets us expend our efforts on others with less or no means at all. At what point do we say that it is just to stop supporting her? Or that it is unjust to the others to continue to support her and not them? Long ago, if justice were to be served.

But our name means Place of Mercy in old Hebrew - Bet h'esed. I have , infrequently , felt this impulse of mercy. It starts from a different place than justice. Justice works okay as a social discourse; it can be spoken about, hungered for, codified somewhat, institutionalized. But mercy is stuck, I believe, in a person's heart if anyplace - not a virtue that travels well to organizations, companies, governments. It doesn't make any sense, not common sense anyway. The well from which it springs is compassion, sympathy, forgiveness. 'Mercy' and 'misery' are from the same word, and at the far reach of its history it meant 'the womb that was beginning to swell'. No motherhood in me, but enough of fatherhood to know how one's children can call forth both mercy and misery, as well as joy and the longing for justice for them.

I want to be patient with whatever is unfolding in troublesome or troubled residents but we are not strong enough, smart enough, imaginative enough always to do that without in some way tolerating the harm their actions visit on others that we care about and are bound to care about, even I suppose, the Namibians. So we say 'be gone'. Justice is served I hope, but I feel more the need of mercy here than the instrument of it.

I saw Hammerman the other night at the shelter. He looks like hell, but it was great to see him. I used to give him my clothes, fifteen years ago he was about my size. But his body is wasted to a bony shell after all these years of heavy drinking, the damage of years mostly on the streets, in harm's way more nights than not.
So my clothes don't fit him anymore but I'm of other use to him now. As his faculties wane, I get to be his memory, at least some part of it. "Remember the time you told Mayor Goode what you thought of the city shelter? Remember how upset you were when PennDOT filled in that pothole near the Ben Franklin Bridge, where cars would lose their hubcaps, and you would collect them each day to cash in at the iron monger on North 5th street?"

For myself, I can remember standing on a street corner with him a wintry night years ago, questioning whether notions that I held about the injustice of homelessness were true. Does fate, his fate or destiny, call him to be there alone in that night? Is there anything society can really do to include him in some other way; I'm sent out there by the city to be with him, an earnest young social worker, able and with the powers to get him in to a warm safe place, contact his family, get him to a detox, to health care at the old Philadelphia General Hospital. Justice was served here wasn't it? What more could or should be offered to a cranky recalcitrant wino? Nothing more under the banner of justice: and that was as far as I could see it then as I left him that night, some disquiet tugging at me. Something of the same nagging sense still with me as I think of the putting out that we do, we who are missioned to stand against abandonment, we who try to be a house of mercy.