Food Pantry: Articles

from the Nyssa News, 12/08

The first Friday in November we celebrated the eighth anniversary of St. Gregory's Food Pantry with a Eucharist and an anointing of hands right in the middle of the pantry. It was a tender and lovely afternoon: I cooked lunch (chicken, okra and andouille gumbo, with cornbread); Paul baked a pumpkin and an apple and a pear and ginger pie; Katharine and Diana wrote out cards and brought our two dozen volunteers chocolates from the vestry; Nirmala arranged weeds and flowers into long arcs of loveliness to adorn the altar. We greeted visitors from the Food Bank, the Diocese, a neighboring school and several of the eleven other pantries we've helped launch. We lit incense, and everyone gathered around the Table, singing and praying; strangers and old friends held hands, kissed, gave thanks.
One of our regular visitors, the eighty-one year old Miss Beatrice, gazed around her at the worshipping crowd — Chinese ladies and Russian guys; Greek widows and black toddlers; Latina teenagers and homeless punks and priests vested with stoles and aprons.
"My," she said, shaking her head. "I've never been to a Lutheran service before. But this is really nice."
We all processed outside singing alleluias to bless the new storage shed — our Byzantine elf cottage, as builders Andy and Rick dubbed it — and shared memories of the early days in the desert, how far we've come.

The second Friday in November I snapped at two friends before nine in the morning. The sky was chilly and grey, and a crazy woman had a meltdown in the kitchen by ten. I got a nasty, blistering burn on my forearm cooking lunch; I bitched at our volunteers, who were anxious and whiny; by eleven they were all bitching at each other. Everyone had a problem: the compost bin's full; the bread's moldy; that tweaking speed freak's back and picking a fight. At noon, I got pulled outside because some old lady peed in a neighbor's bushes and we had to 86 her. It started to rain. A folding table broke. I was impatient when the second junkie in a row tried to get over on me, begging for help, and told her sorry, that's just the way it is. I snapped at another friend. The phone kept ringing. The line outside kept growing. By the time we opened there were a hundred and forty people waiting, and by 3PM we had served 300. A very tightly wound man jumped the line and tried to hit Michael, our volunteer. He kept screaming, "This is the house of God, faggot! Faggot, watch yourself, this is the house of God!" The toilet in the chapel broke. We ran out of rice. Yasmin, the two-year old whose mom volunteers with us, fell down and started howling, sobbing her heart out, inconsolable over a skinned knee.
I went out back. Christian, our 11-year old volunteer, ran up to me and leapt into my arms. He kissed my face and yelled excitedly about the elf cottage. Giancarlo came over and offered to deal with the speed freak; Blanca washed all the dishes; Tom put the kitchen back together and Raymond fixed the toilet. Michael took a cigarette break and calmed down. "Ah, shit," he said. "I wanted to punch the bastard, but what're you going to do?" Susan put her hand on my arm. "Don't worry," she said. "When I have bad days others cover for me.."
I remember talking once with a man who comes to the pantry, who's unemployed and lives in a cruddy SRO hotel with his schizophrenic wife. "All I can say," he told me, shaking his head, "is thank God for Jesus. Because, you know, he was here like a person. He knows how hard it is to be a person."
So thank God: for the sweet singing and the frustrating, messed-up afternoons; for the steady heartbeat inside the wrecked lives; for the generosity illuminating our pettiest, meanest, most lost moments. Thank God for the last five years of joy and darkness, food and hunger; for the promise of more.