Loaves & Fishes, July-August, 1990

OVERCOMING DOUGHNUTS: Serving God in a Soupline

by Carl Mazza

He has chosen voluntarily to live as a homeless person. He has been living on the streets in Wilmington for the past three years. He survives without money and with few creature comforts. Yet Bill is a well educated, intensely religious man. He is compassionate and articulate, and he speaks with spiritual firmness and understanding.

The obvious question all want to ask is: Why? Why would a thoughtful, deeply motivated person choose to live such a life? When asked, Bill never answers directly. He speaks a lot about a person's, and his own, daily need for God. He talks about the Second Coming of Christ a lot also. His spiritual guidance is from within himself. He hears voices of "angels" and sees visions of spirit beings. He will often mention seeing an aura surrounding a person, or a ray of light shining on their head. Material things, he often says, divert us from the primary task of knowing, loving, and depending on God. Material comforts are often illusory, and separate us from real perceptions of the harshness of a world without God. Of one thing I am certain: Bill has chosen to live on the streets more to know God than to know about God. He lives in homeless poverty because of love for persons in the same circumstances. The despair of their lives is not in Bill's imagination; it is part of his life also. Just as Bill's knowledge of God is rooted in life's reality, so is his knowledge of people.

Not long ago we were standing together in line at the Friendship House sponsored Sunday Morning Breakfast at St. Andrew's Church. Bill broke a long silence by quietly saying to me, "Some day we will overcome these doughnuts." (We always have a lot from the night leftovers at Mr. Donut.) Seeing from my puzzled reaction that I needed more explanation, Bill went on to say, "Learning to serve doughnuts is easier for most people than learning to serve God. There may come a day when the people now standing in line will be served a portion of God instead of a doughnut." I wondered aloud, "Will they still want to come to breakfast without the doughnuts?" "You might be surprised!" he responded.

But in reality is not the action of so many volunteers serving doughnuts to hungry people an expression of love? Is not love for God and one's neighbor the underlying significance of the moment? The doughnuts are only important as a weak physical manifestation of the love that we want to share.

Of course, serving doughnuts is not quite the same as serving God, it is not even close. How would one go about portioning out God in a soupline? God is not passed from one human being to another with a spoon, but only through love. Tolstoy was correct when he named his short story, Where Love Is, God Is. The Jewish theologian Martin Buber would describe the "serving" of God as happening only through the I-thou relationship. It occurs when one human being is in direct and immediate personal contact with the soul of another. The serving of doughnuts is an inadequate expression of loving. It is as poor a vehicle as overfeeding a child in the name of love. We may equate feeding a person with loving the person, but love is not so much a charitable act as it is a willingness, even eagerness, to know another person and to share their life. Doughnuts are a barrier that must be overcome.

When I first met Bill he was maintaining a 24 hour, two week vigil with a dying man. This very sick person had been taken out of the gutter by other homeless men. Denied entrance into other shelters because of his sickness, he found refuge in the back room of our old thrift store on Market Street. Bill immediately took it upon himself to stay with him. He rarely left his side in the two weeks he was with us. He slept next to him, prepared his meals, and prayed with him often. Their two lives became very much intertwined in those days, as Bill served God in the back room of a dilapidated storefront. Our faith still has its heroes.