Ivan is clean. His last binge lasted nine days, and he’s been clean ever since. That was five months ago. He’s waiting for me at the door. There’s a light in his eyes, his smile breaking out all over his face and he can’t stop laughing at everything, at everyone, at every word. Not mockingly – joyfully. There’s muscles all over his body where before there were only bones. He’s got a place to stay, and just finished school for a fork-lift driver’s license.
The girl in his lap looks up sneering, “What? Your friend shows up and all of a sudden you’re giggling like a little girl?”
I hadn’t seen Ivan since I took him away with my brothers. Not since he laughed and talked and slept and played and drank with us. He’s family now. We both know it. We are each others family. I’d stayed in touch through a friend, wept when I heard of his heart attack, and prayed desperately when I heard that he had started to clean up.
Ivan, my friend, it is good to see you. You are my Christmas present.
~
Visiting the drop-in was bitter sweet. Scribbles came up to me delighted, pulling me into a bear-hug, laughing and talking too fast. He’s clean too, he’s got a place, he’s gone legit, he’s a father now and he’s taking care of his baby. Scribbles looks like he’s made it. Nikita too, she’s doing well. Eric isn’t nearly as angry as he used to be he smiles and cracks jokes when I point at his long hair and beard and call him Jesus.
“All I know is that if people start deciding I’m some sort of icon to follow then the world is going to get really fucked-up really fast.”
That’s the good news. And then there are the others. Shaun was clean for eight months. He appeared in Toronto about three weeks ago and has started binging again. I talk with him but he’s sketched out. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic and when you couple that with a crack addiction it can be hard to have a coherent conversation. I was hoping he had gone away for good leaving this city and its demons behind. But he’s crashing and burning once again. Lexus buried her baby three weeks ago. She’s older now too, a little more open to being sorrowful instead of angry. I hold her for a moment and she kisses my cheek before she goes. And then there’s Becky. She was doing well. She was clean, looking for work, pursuing her dreams. Then, three days ago, she jumped in front of the subway train. Nobody really knows why. She was in a battle for her life… I guess she lost right at the very end.
In a way, I wish there weren’t so many kids that were thrilled to see me. In a way I wish I had come back to discover a place full of unfamiliar faces. I wanted to dream that the kids I knew had moved on, had healed, had been made whole, but a lot of them are still here, still fighting, still chasing highs and lows. And it’s sad but that’s life. So we just love each other, we delight it one another’s company until we part ways again. For one more day we know that we are beloved and then we say goodbye.
Yes, this is where I wanted to be for Christmas. God bless us, everyone.

For the first time since moving out here I felt like I was home. Home in the way that usually only those who have been homeless can understand it. Yes, this is where I belong. I felt like I was with family. These are my people. These are my kids. I was glowing. Those who know me well would have recognised the look in my eyes, “Uh-oh… Dan’s in love.”
And I am. I love these kids. These gutter-punks, thugs, queers, loners, trannies, junkies, prostitutes, and crack-heads. I love ’em. They burst through the door decked out in chains and trench-coats, bandannas and diamond earrings. A flash of leather and teeth, steel and skin. Bruises, pock-marks, scars and unwashed hair. I think to myself, “how can so much beauty fit into this room? God, these kids are beautiful.”
So I wait on them, I bring food to their tables and clean their dirty dishes. I laugh at their jokes, not politely but like a lover – it doesn’t seem to matter how funny the joke is, it’s just a delight to be in the presence of your beloved and any excuse to laugh will do. It’s good to laugh with these kids. God knows they’ve spent enough time crying.
You know, when all is said and done, I think that love is all that I have to give. I used to read stories from the Bible about all sorts of miracles. I used to long see those things happen in my own life, you know, some dynamic in-breaking of God’s power to heal the sick, to restore the down-trodden. I’m not really looking for the miraculous anymore. I’m just looking to journey in love relationships with the down-trodden. I am content to only have my love to offer, as imperfect as it is.
The funny thing is that, in the end, it is through love that the truly miraculous occurs. It’s this strange paradox of surrendering to powerlessness and, in doing so, discovering the power that truly transforms the world. It’s a hard line to walk and an even harder line to describe to others. To embrace love as the only thing I have to offer is to recognise weakness. It highlights all sorts of limitations. Yet, at the same time, I am convinced that love will triumph over all else. It’s victory, but not in the way we are accustomed to thinking of it. It is the victory we discover in the character of the God who loves us deeply enough to come alongside of us. The God who embraces weakness and suffers with us… so that we will be set free.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
– Paul, 1 Corinthians 13.13

Oh we drink and we smoke and we fight and we fuck
And we bleed and we’ll die when we run out of luck.
– Anonymous
Part of the problem was that I was one of the one’s who actually fell for it. I actually believed punk rock was about unity. I actually believed that it was about standing together regardless of the way we looked. It was about honesty. It was about letting people know who you are. Nobody needed to hide the fact that they were fucked up. This is me, this is my heart on my sleeve. Punk rock was about coming together. It was about accepting one another as fucked up. It was about finding strength in weakness, getting through things together.
I don’t know when everything changed. Punk rockers “pimpin’ their rides” and Tim and Lars singing about “bitches and hos”. Maybe things were always the way they are now. Broken kids crying out, lashing out, searching for something to soothe the fire, to put the pieces back together. But the only community you discover is your own loneliness reflected in the faces around you.
She left home cuz daddy beat her
Out on the street they say they love her
So what if they hit her when they’re not sober
Their parents beat them too
Then when she went home daddy said he loved her
And when mom went out he started to kiss her
And when it was over part of her died
So she don’t go home no more
Run to the shelter the streets are your friend
Situation at home won’t ever end
Here are your brothers your sisters your lovers
We can empathise
She started turning tricks so her daddy wouldn’t touch her again
She started smoking crack to numb the pain
She likes the stupor induced by liquor
Her daddy wouldn’t recognise her
Run to the shelter the streets are your friend
Situation at home won’t ever end
Here are your brothers your sisters your lovers
We can empathise
She slit her wrists when she was twenty-one
And let her broken heart bleed out
Before I could bridge the distance between us the scalper had already busted the kid’s face up pretty good. His lips were split, his nose was gushing. I jumped between them. “Okay, enough. That’s enough,” pulling the kid away. Fifty punk rockers looked on without moving. Fuck you, this scene isn’t about unity.
~
I don’t know why I’m the only one who really made it out. We used to walk the streets all night together. Curling up on park benches in quiet suburbs watching the sun come up over the trees. Sleeping in industrial parks on the edge of town in tents that would always collapse. They problem wasn’t that they loved too little, the problem was that they loved too much. I’ve never seen somebody love their mother as deeply as Critch did. Even after she kicked him out when her boyfriend moved in… and then again with the next one, and the next one. JP loved his mom and she died. Years later he woke up in a hospital with bandages wrapped around his wrists and a daughter of his own. Curty – Curty could have been anything. Breaking walls, breaking doors, breaking faces, until he too was broken. I sit and share a beer with him and wonder how we drifted so far apart. I remember when I was jumped by six guys. They were serious, spitting in my hair and pulling out brass knuckles. Curty was the only friend that didn’t turn tail and run. He stuck by me – not because he thought we’d win but, fuck, he wasn’t going to let me go down alone. Now we barely have the words to say so we sip our drinks and cigarettes and silently wonder how we can miss each other so much when we get together.

When I first started journeying with people who have suffered much (and continue to suffer much) I imagined myself as a sort of knight in shining armour. I was riding in to rescue the damsel in distress. I was going to save people. Hell, I was going to save the world.
Thankfully, I learned pretty early on that that’s not who I am. That’s not who any of us are.
“Knight in shining armour? Where the hell were you when everything was happening to me? You never picked me up off the ground. You never stopped him from doing what he did to me. You can’t be my knight in shining armour. You’re seven years too late.”
It’s impossible to be a knight in shining armour to people who are already broken. You can’t save them from being broken… they already are.
Of course once you realise this about one person, and then another, and then another, and then another… you also learn that dreams of saving the world don’t really fit in either.
So then I started thinking, well, I may not be able to save the world but I’ll save myself. At least I’ll absolve myself of complicity. Like Jeremiah I’ll be able to say that the blood of others is not on my hands.
But I can’t save myself. I am too deeply immersed in the systems I was born into. I am too weak, too frail, too blind.
So then I began to view myself as a tragic hero. Someone who does all he can to triumph over the forces around him but in the end the powers that be are too strong and overwhelm him. Yes, I too would “rage, rage into the night”. I would be Tarrou in Camus’ “La Peste”, submersing myself among plague victims, doing what I could to relieve their sufferings, until I too succumbed to the disease.
But I’m no tragic hero. As if this is all so romantic. What I do is not tragic. When people ask about my job with the homeless youth I often just say that I plunged a lot of toilets. Apparently I’m good at that. There’s nothing romantic about plunging toilets. And suffering is only romantic to those who have never experienced it. To those who have, it just… hurts. And I’ve watched a kid get refused entrance to our drop-in on Christmas day. I didn’t even think to try and work it out so that he could come in. I just stood in the door to support my co-worker and dodged when the kid, screaming and crying, spat at me. No, I’m no hero.
But that’s fine. It’s okay that these things are impossible, I don’t need any of them anymore. I don’t need to be something more than I am. I don’t need to be a hero or some sort of tragic icon. And I don’t need to save the world.
No, I’m just going to love people. That’s all. No provisos, expectations or exceptions. And there’s freedom in that. I’ve left my armour on the field, shrugged the world off my shoulder, laughed off the tragic romance, and discovered myself free to love and be loved.
Not that this means that broken people are damned to always being broken, or that we are always damned to weakness or failure. It’s just that all these things are in somebody else’s hands. And the one who holds these things is the one who calls us beloved.

I miss my kids. I miss the street-kids from Toronto. True sometimes they could be nasty, sometimes they actually scared the hell out of me, but mostly they weren’t like that, and I don’t blame them for the times they were. I wonder what I would be like if I was in their situations. Mostly though they were just like kids. Maybe more broken than most but, more often than not, more beautiful as well. Every now and again I wonder about the connection between those two, between brokenness and beauty… I loved those kids.
People who have never been loved – not in a true way, not a way where they are loved for who they, not for something they can offer – are often quite puzzled by it. They don’t trust it at first. “No, that’s too good to be true. There’s gotta be a catch somewhere.” So they feel me out, they come at me from different angles, sometimes they offer me all the things they’re used to offering when someone treats them that way. “This person shows love to me… it must mean that he wants me.” But they keep coming back. They can’t escape it. It’s too intriguing, too strong for them to escape… too much like something they never imagined possible. So they come back. Love is a powerful thing.
Yet as the relationship deepens and they start to realise the nature of my love for them other thoughts start running through their minds. This time its related to shame, to guilt, to self-worth. “No, I’m not what this person sees me as. No, I am not lovable. I don’t deserve this. I deserve the hatred, the shame, the hurt… not this.” And so little by little I will hear more of their stories. “Listen man, I’m not like that, I’ve done all sorts of shit you don’t know about.” But I just keep loving them. “Sure, you’ve done all that, but that’s not what defines you. The way I see you… that’s closer to who you really are.” And so it goes on, until eventually they tell you everything. Not only about their past but about what they did last weekend, what happened last night. Of course I just keep loving them. Really it’s not that hard. They’re beautiful kids… and really they never had a chance.
And I’ve realised something. It’s the sacrament of confession and absolution that’s going on here. The words are all different, nobody’s explicitly asking for forgiveness and I’m not explicitly offering it but that’s what’s happening.
By loving these kids, by accepting these kids as who they are, even in the midst of everything that’s going on, I am manifesting God’s love for them and providing them with a glimpse of what they will one day fully encounter. The fact that I love and accept them is the first proof that God does too. I embody the forgiveness of sins by loving them and suffering with them. By laughing with them and crying with them.
You see, a lot of these kids never make it out. A lot of these kids die. They’re murdered, they overdose, they commit suicide. A lot of these kids are so broken they just never heal. A lot of these kids die without any sense of knowing God. “Yeah sure, I used to pray, but that didn’t stop anything that was happening to me. Maybe God’s out there, maybe not… I just know God doesn’t do anything for me.” Yet I am convinced that, when the time comes for God to make all things new, these kids will be welcomed home. You see, they do know God they just don’t realise it. The love inside of me that drew them to me, that made them love me, that was God. On that day they’ll realise, “Holy shit! I do know God. I met God in Dan.” And then they’ll probably look embarrassed that they just swore in front of God but God will just laugh and say, “Hey, watch your fucking mouth you little shit.” And we’ll all be laughing too hard to notice that we’re crying until we realise God has gone by and wiped all our tears dry.
Maranatha. Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Come quickly.

don’t ask me why I’m crying
i’m not gonna tell you what’s wrong
i’m just gonna sit on your lap
for five dollars a song
i want you to pay me for my beauty
i think it’s only right
cause I have been paying for it
all of my life
– Ani DiFranco, “Letter to a John”
I’m gonna take the money I make
and I’m gonna go away
When I read that Martha had died…
When I read that…
When…
Will.
Susi.
Ellis.
And now Martha.
How many more people are going to die this fall?
People say that it’s the way I carry the suffering of others that gives them hope, inspiration, whatever. But I’m tired of that. I’m tired of crying. I’m tired of hurting. I can’t say I didn’t ask for this because I did. It’s just I didn’t know what I was asking for. I thought it was heroic, tragic, romantic, to pursue suffering love. I didn’t think it would be so… tangible.
Sometimes I wish more than anything else that I could just let it all go.
Well, that’s not entirely true.
Sometimes I want to wish more than anything else that I could just let it all go.
But I never do.
Fucking Christians. I’m tired of being what you’re supposed to be. Fuck you for abandoning the broken and abandoning your identity in doing so. Fuck you for forcing crosses on the backs of those who understand what it means to follow Jesus.
they think I make a big deal
about nothing
but they still think I’m kinda cute
they joke about the status quo
to break the ice
once the ice is broken
I hope they all fall through
because this is no joke to me
they don’t fool me with their acts
of sensitivity
they too shall pass
just like everyone who’s only here
for my ass
– Ani DiFranco, “The Waiting Song”
and I can’t wait, oh I can’t wait
till they get their due

By the rivers of Babylon,
Where we sat down and wept,
When we remembered Zion.
Upon the willows in the midst of it
We hung our harps.
For there our captors demanded of us songs,
And our tormentors mirth, saying,
“Sing is one of the songs of Zion.”
How can we sing the LORD’s song
In a foreign land?
-Psalm 137.1-4
I’m taking a course in Washington that focuses on journeying with people who are oppressed and feel abandoned by society, the church and God.
As part of our program we visited a camp for migrant farm workers where we saw the living conditions and heard the stories of some of the leaders in the community. All the workers were Mexican, and all were illegal immigrants. One man told of his family being kidnapped and held ransom by the smugglers. Another man talked of the farms in California that charge more for rent than they are able to make during a month’s work. A third man told us how his nephew had just been killed in a car accident. He asked for money so that they could fly the body back to Mexico. It’s actually cheaper for them to send their dead back across the border than it is to have a burial in the USA.
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
May my right hand forget her skill.
May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth
If I do not remember you,
If I do not exalt Jerusalem
Above my chief joy.
-Psalm 137.5-6
I understand what the Prof was trying to do – make the stories real, give suffering a human face, perhaps awaken dormant consciences. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were going about everything the wrong way. It felt more like a peep show than anything else. A quick glance, a hurried intimacy, and then they’re off to the fields and we’re driving back to the classroom.
I’m always left wondering: how do you walk the line between promoting awareness and contributing to the problem? There must be a way in which such things can be spoken of, can be communicated, that does not contribute to the problem. Such things cannot be unspeakable for that only furthers the isolation and alienation experienced by those who have suffered.
I think that being entertained by the suffering of others is a epidemic problem in our culture. Although the emotions such sights arouse in us are not always termed pleasurable it seems that we take pleasure in having such emotions aroused. It is doubly epidemic in our churches where we not only treasure those feelings but then treasure the feelings of sympathy that follow close behind. “Look, I’m crying… I’m such a loving person, such a good Christian.” We think we are loving or compassionate because of our feelings, never realizing that we are apathetic or hateful if such feelings do not result in action.
I can empathize with the grief that causes the Psalmist to conclude:
O daughter of Babylon, you devastated one,
How blessed will be the one who repays you
With the recompense with which you have repaid us.
How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones
Against the rock.
– Psalm 137.7-9
Sometimes it is hard not to resort to violence.

It’s the freight ships I didn’t expect. Enormous rusted hulls, broad flat decks with stained white towers. My mind keeps wandering back to them. I find myself wondering: how do you get a job on one of those ships? Could I do it? What’s involved? Part of me badly wants to find out… but then I wonder: what sort of people work on those ships? Coarse men, absorbed in a world of working and drinking and fucking? Where would I fit into that company? I’ve seen too much hurt, the consequences of too much chauvinism and objectification to be able to just sit by idly in the midst of all that. It wouldn’t take long for me to be hated in such a crowd as that… and where would that leave me? Or am I simply stereo-typing labour workers, playing off the negative impressions I received from those I knew working on oil rigs?
What I had expected was the islands. Driving up the coast sandwiched between the mountains and the ocean I wasn’t surprised to find myself dreaming of working on the islands. Living away from all this industry and concrete, working outside with my body.
Something is always calling to me.
Come away, come away. Disappear. Escape.
Here is peace, here is laughter. Here is rest.
How long will I feel this pull?
Like a moth following the moon, every lamp along the way urges me to turn aside – especially when the clouds come and darken the sky and the rain makes it hard for frail wings to fly.

Whenever I have been away for awhile I find it so hard to get back in.
There is so much hurt, so much rage, so much brokenness here. Here the waters are deep and slick with blood and everywhere I look another person is drowning.
How many times will I have to jump back in?
Whenever I have been away for awhile it’s like I return to strap on a bag of rocks. A bag full of hurt that cannot be carried alone. Not that I can carry it for them, although somehow we seem to make progress together.
How many times will I have to carry that load?
I once worked alongside of an elderly woman who was full of dignity and beauty and wisdom. As I talked about these feelings she told me about friends who had worked in this field and were unable to take it. They never became calloused, they never got hard. They would go home every night and cry themselves to sleep. In the end they ended up leaving. They weren’t cut out for this work. She questioned if I was the same as them.
But I find myself wondering if this is what it means to lay down my life for those I love. Maybe that’s not just romantic language, maybe it’s a real death I experience every day. Little by little, until, one day, maybe I too will be shattered by the storm.
Whenever I have been away for awhile I find a voice inside of me that says, “You are too sensitive to carry this cross.”
But there is always another deeper voice responding, “No, you are too sensitive not to carry this cross.”