During Lent and Holy Week, 1999, Phyllis Cole-Dai and James Murray lived voluntarily on the streets of Columbus, Ohio, the nation’s fifteenth largest city. They didn’t go out on the streets to satisfy idle curiosity, or to experience a strange new world. They didn’t go out to find answers to questions, solutions to problems. They didn’t go out to save anyone, or to hand out donations of food and blankets. They went out with one primary aim: to be as present as possible to everyone they met—to love their neighbor as themselves. Doing so, they were reminded just how difficult the practice of compassion can be, especially because of personal judgments, assumptions, fears and desires, all habits of mind that harden one’s regard for and behavior toward other people.
The Emptiness of Our Hands: A Lent Lived on the Streets is a meditative narrative accompanied by nearly thirty black and white photographs, most of them shot by James using crude pinhole cameras that he constructed from trash. This book will thrust you out the door of your comfortable life, straight into the unknown. What can happen to a person without a home? Indeed, what might happen to you?
Phyllis Cole-Dai and James Murray share the conviction that faith is inseparable from compassion, spirituality from social concern. Their Lenten experience on the streets of Columbus, Ohio, changed them forever. Now their story will lead you out the open door, away from the comforts of your sheltered life, away from your usual sense of what’s necessary and real and meaningful and good. It will plunge you into the in-between, where nothing is secure, and everything is significant. Dare to go. Go not that you might be entertained, or even find answers to hard questions, but because there are people—lives—at stake. . . .
Phyllis Cole-Dai is a writer and composer now living in Brookings, South Dakota, with her husband Jihong and their son Nathan LanTian. She holds graduate degrees in both Theological Studies and English. When she went to the streets, she had lived in the Columbus area for more than a dozen years.
James Murray now resides with his wife Phoebe in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. He is a counseling supervisor at The Academy at Swift River, an emotional growth boarding school located in nearby Cummington. He is a graduate of Kenyon College, not far from Columbus, where he majored in religious studies.
When James and I hit the streets on Ash Wednesday, 1999, we weren’t aware of any homeless statistics or policies. We were scarcely aware of any services (shelters, soup kitchens, clinics) available to homeless persons. We’d made few efforts, through research, to prepare, wanting to go out as thousands do each year in this city who suddenly have no place to call home and must stumble their way through the not-knowing.
About the only serious inquiries James and I made beforehand were into ourselves. As earnestly as we could, we dragged up into the light of day all the things we’d ever heard, or believed, about homeless people; all the stereotypes and prejudices and assumptions, not even sure how they’d become part of us—Homeless people are dumb, lazy, on the streets because they want to be, mentally ill, violent, lucky not to have any responsibilities, inarticulate, dirty, rude, mostly male, mostly black, mostly drunks and addicts, many of them Vietnam vets. . . . These were the things we “knew” best—not that a homeless woman could be so lonely she’d ride up and down in a shopping mall elevator, just to be close to other human beings; or that a young man, unable to cope with the tragic deaths of his wife and infant daughter, would abandon his home for the streets, intent on destroying himself.
Before you read further, James and I invite you to reflect on what you think you know about homeless people; on what you believe it’s like to live without a real home. Be honest.
Now, lay all that aside, if you can. . . .
day 1: wednesday, february 17
doors
I’ve walked through thousands of doors in my life; left some of them standing wide open, closed others, locked my share. But I’ve never walked through a door quite like this one—my own front door, a plain slab, not very thick and not very heavy but looking sturdy as steel on this brisk, gray morning—and I’ve never pulled a locked door securely shut behind me, as I’m about to do now, without a key resting in my pocket or under the doormat so I can easily go back inside. Today there’ll be no easy way back in, no easy changing of the mind. Only the leaving. . . .
Ash Wednesday: what T.S. Eliot called “the time of tension between dying and birth.” I pause just over the doorsill, James behind me on the porch, my gloved hand clinging to the knob. It’s a little after 8:00 a.m. Jihong’s already left for work, as if this were just a usual day in our marriage; Phoebe, James’s girlfriend, has started for her home in Connecticut, as if this were just the end of another too-brief visit. They couldn’t bear to stay here at the house and watch us go, and we couldn’t bear to leave them behind, so they were the first out the door, just after the four of us had made our parting, borrowing the strength of ceremony. In a small bowl we’d combined wood ash from the fireplace with the finer, sweeter ash of incense collected from the meditation room. Then we’d marked each other, as Cain is said to have been marked by God before setting out into the unknown, better to learn the keeping of his brother. The faint dust marks, so tenderly imposed on the skin of our foreheads, were our sign of belonging—to each other, to this set-apart time, and to a world that covers us with the dust of sufferings and miracles alike.
Now I look over my shoulder at James, hand still full of knob.
“Are we ready, Irishman?”
His body visibly braces: he feels the edge. Who empties his bags, rather than packs, before a long, hard journey? He breathes deeply, all he can do, bright tears staining his cheeks. Then his eyes lock mine. “Okay,” he says firmly. “Ready.”
I step down, tug the door home, test the lock. Ready or not, the thing’s done. . . .