The Door Is Open - Bart Campbell, (Anvil Press)
“Joyous Christians are welcomed – just as are alcoholics, junkies, and the untreated mentally ill – in the same patient way that everyone else is accepted.” - p. 38
What a devastating book.
Campbell has crystallized his several years of volunteering at an eastside Vancouver soup kitchen (called The Door is Open) into a collection of statistics, interviews and anecdotes that paints a not easily dismissed picture of poverty in Canada that leaves one wanting to blame somebody, but not being able to figure out who.
Poverty is a huge problem, even here in the ‘best country in the world’. Over 70,000 Canadians visit food banks every month and 1 in 5 Canadian kids live in poverty. The mutual influences of poverty, addiction and mental illness feed and exacerbate each other. Drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs have spotty success rates and domestic violence is an incomprehensible quagmire, perhaps partly because of all poisons, loneliness is the most fierce, only temporarily set at bay by cheaply bought sex.
The welfare system is rife with inconsistencies and prejudices that leave people, especially single parents, especially native single parents, not only frustrated and looking for ways to cheat (one BC case-worker says, “Of course we know they cheat. If they didn’t they’d be dead by now.”), but fearful of losing their kids to the foster system which is woefully unable to cope with the wounded kids who are scooped up into it. Municipal governments and police struggle with developing policies that will not only make a difference, but will stand up in the face of current laws.
Most of The Door’s patrons are living in cheap monthly rented motel rooms where “a hot plate or an electric frying pan alone rates as “cooking facilities”, and every shady windowsill is a fridge” and cockroaches are everywhere. No wonder, the author says, they go looking for meals elsewhere. But perhaps more importantly, they go looking for acceptance and community. Everyone is accepted, no one is stared at. “Poverty means different things in different cultures. The many afflictions of Third World poverty are indeed horrible to endure, but the poor in those places are seldom as totally rejected as they are in the skid rows of the affluent western world. Here poverty is demoralizing and dispiriting and humiliating.” p. 128
He writes compassionately and respectfully about the individual people ‘served’ by the soup kitchen at which he volunteers, less so about the people who serve them. Most volunteers are either doing community service hours, or religious, the latter receiving most of his disrespect (second only to pimps). (“The only soup kitchen volunteers who occasionally get punched out are the ones who preach… ” p. 36) He doesn’t appreciate the way many religiously motivated people behave and speak to those who need the subsistence help they offer (“The food bank is OK for some things”, a welfare mother told me, “but I have to shoplift all of my milk and eggs and butter because they never have enough.” p. 77) and describes how his own drop in centre empties in a tidal wave when a street person comes in and shouts that the Salvation Army has cancelled Bible study that night. This means a meal, but without the sermon for once, or being made to sing. Brother Tim, the priest who runs The Door Is Open is asked why he’s never started a Bible study or preached to his customers. He replies, “Because I’m not an asshole.”
For Christ followers, the challenge of this book is to be objective. To recognize how we are perceived, and to find the balance between “Christian charity” and the charity of Christ.
I’m reminded of a quote from the movie, The Big Kahuna in which a jaded, cynical salesman tells a young Christian just starting out in the job, “It doesn't matter whether you're selling Jesus or Buddha or civil rights or 'How to Make Money in Real Estate With No Money Down.' That doesn't make you a human being; it makes you a marketing rep. If you want to talk to somebody honestly, as a human being, ask him about his kids. Find out what his dreams are -- just to find out, for no other reason. Because as soon as you lay your hands on a conversation to steer it, it's not a conversation anymore; it's a pitch. And you're not a human being; you're a marketing rep.”
As soon as you lay your hands on a bowl of soup to use it, it’s not love anymore, it’s manipulation. And to quote one street-wise patron, “You gotta realize that homeless people are not stupid, ‘cause nobody stupid is gonna survive on the street. You gotta be smart and strong.”
r
What a devastating book.
Campbell has crystallized his several years of volunteering at an eastside Vancouver soup kitchen (called The Door is Open) into a collection of statistics, interviews and anecdotes that paints a not easily dismissed picture of poverty in Canada that leaves one wanting to blame somebody, but not being able to figure out who.
Poverty is a huge problem, even here in the ‘best country in the world’. Over 70,000 Canadians visit food banks every month and 1 in 5 Canadian kids live in poverty. The mutual influences of poverty, addiction and mental illness feed and exacerbate each other. Drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs have spotty success rates and domestic violence is an incomprehensible quagmire, perhaps partly because of all poisons, loneliness is the most fierce, only temporarily set at bay by cheaply bought sex.
The welfare system is rife with inconsistencies and prejudices that leave people, especially single parents, especially native single parents, not only frustrated and looking for ways to cheat (one BC case-worker says, “Of course we know they cheat. If they didn’t they’d be dead by now.”), but fearful of losing their kids to the foster system which is woefully unable to cope with the wounded kids who are scooped up into it. Municipal governments and police struggle with developing policies that will not only make a difference, but will stand up in the face of current laws.
Most of The Door’s patrons are living in cheap monthly rented motel rooms where “a hot plate or an electric frying pan alone rates as “cooking facilities”, and every shady windowsill is a fridge” and cockroaches are everywhere. No wonder, the author says, they go looking for meals elsewhere. But perhaps more importantly, they go looking for acceptance and community. Everyone is accepted, no one is stared at. “Poverty means different things in different cultures. The many afflictions of Third World poverty are indeed horrible to endure, but the poor in those places are seldom as totally rejected as they are in the skid rows of the affluent western world. Here poverty is demoralizing and dispiriting and humiliating.” p. 128
He writes compassionately and respectfully about the individual people ‘served’ by the soup kitchen at which he volunteers, less so about the people who serve them. Most volunteers are either doing community service hours, or religious, the latter receiving most of his disrespect (second only to pimps). (“The only soup kitchen volunteers who occasionally get punched out are the ones who preach… ” p. 36) He doesn’t appreciate the way many religiously motivated people behave and speak to those who need the subsistence help they offer (“The food bank is OK for some things”, a welfare mother told me, “but I have to shoplift all of my milk and eggs and butter because they never have enough.” p. 77) and describes how his own drop in centre empties in a tidal wave when a street person comes in and shouts that the Salvation Army has cancelled Bible study that night. This means a meal, but without the sermon for once, or being made to sing. Brother Tim, the priest who runs The Door Is Open is asked why he’s never started a Bible study or preached to his customers. He replies, “Because I’m not an asshole.”
For Christ followers, the challenge of this book is to be objective. To recognize how we are perceived, and to find the balance between “Christian charity” and the charity of Christ.
I’m reminded of a quote from the movie, The Big Kahuna in which a jaded, cynical salesman tells a young Christian just starting out in the job, “It doesn't matter whether you're selling Jesus or Buddha or civil rights or 'How to Make Money in Real Estate With No Money Down.' That doesn't make you a human being; it makes you a marketing rep. If you want to talk to somebody honestly, as a human being, ask him about his kids. Find out what his dreams are -- just to find out, for no other reason. Because as soon as you lay your hands on a conversation to steer it, it's not a conversation anymore; it's a pitch. And you're not a human being; you're a marketing rep.”
As soon as you lay your hands on a bowl of soup to use it, it’s not love anymore, it’s manipulation. And to quote one street-wise patron, “You gotta realize that homeless people are not stupid, ‘cause nobody stupid is gonna survive on the street. You gotta be smart and strong.”
r
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