Hospitality is Mutual Trust and Respect
by Michael Kirwan
This essay about the life of Michael Kirwan, a Catholic Worker in Washington, D.C., was first published in the Catholic Worker newspaper in September, 1991. It is reprinted (with a few editorial changes for clarification) from A Penny A Copy: Readings from the Catholic Worker, edited by Thomas C. Cornell, Robert Ellsberg, and Jim Forest (Orbis, 1995).
In 1978, I was working as an account clerk at the George Washington University Hospital, in Washington, D.C., and beginning studies at the University for a graduate degree in sociology. I was living in a university building on F Street, N.W. I was very happy and content, and was looking forward to going back to school. I enjoyed my job at the hospital, and had good friends to share my life.
I was out walking one night near the State Department, only a block from my apartment. It was bitterly cold, and as I passed a heating vent at 21st and Virginia Avenue, NW, a man was sitting there. He called out to me and asked for a dollar to buy a bowl of soup. I ignored him and kept on walking. I still remember being very irritated and annoyed that he had disturbed my peace. He kept calling after me. I stopped about a block away and thought to myself, I'll fix him. He doesn't want soup, he just wants a drink; that's what they all want. I'll go up to my apartment and fix him some soup and that'll serve him right. I did this and brought the soup down, set it down, and walked away. I don't remember if he thanked me or not, and I didn't care. I didn't want to know anything about him; I just wanted to be spiteful.
I never saw that man again. I hadn't cared what it made him feel, but I had just helped someone; and actually there wasn't too much to it, and I felt pretty good about it. The next evening, I made more soup and a few sandwiches and some hot tea, and I took the food out to some other men on the heating vent, and I put it down and walked away. I still didn't talk to them. I was still afraid, as well as nervous, and very embarrassed. They thanked me, not knowing what I had brought, but grateful anyhow, it seemed, for the gesture.
I kept doing that night after night, repeating the same menu but gradually bringing down larger and larger containers as more and more people seemed to congregate for the food that I was bringing. One night as I brought down a large gallon-jug of hot split pea soup and set it down on the cement block near the heating vent around which they gathered, a rather rough-looking fellow picked up the jar of soup and, in one motion, broke the jar over my head. The soup ran down my clothes; it was boiling hot, and it burned me, but I was too afraid to feel it. But instead of running away, I asked the man why he had done that. They were probably the first words I had ever spoken to any of them. He told me that I was doing nothing more than bringing food to the dogs. I was treating all of them like pets. I was bringing food, setting it down like I was feeding them out of a pet dish and then just walking away. He said, "Talk to us; visit with us; we don't bite." I told him that I was afraid of him, that I didn't know what to say. But I did tell him that from now on, when I came with the food, I would stay and visit if they wanted me to. If not, I would just leave.
What had happened that night was that a first barrier had been broken in my perceptions of who homeless people are. I realized that these men and women on the streets had feelings, just like me; they wanted to be loved and respected and listened to. They cared that someone cared about them, but just giving food and a blanket was not enough.
I continued to go every night without fail after that. I would stay and talk and listen, usually listen. I would begin to fill requests, most very ordinary, for such things as razors, a bar of soap, a bus token. I had always figured that their requests would only be for money, to buy a drink or get a fix. I had always heard and assumed that homeless men and women didn't care how they looked or smelled or acted or what people thought of them. I assumed they didn't want to work, and yet I gave out more bus tokens than anything else. Such little things yet such big assumptions.
Going to the grates at night began to be something I really looked forward to. It wreaked havoc with my personal life. "I have to cook the soup" became the standard excuse before any other outing, seven nights a week.
Everything was fine until, one night, a man asked if he could come up to the apartment and shower and shave. He had a job he needed to go to in the morning, and he had to clean up. I was stunned. It was fine as long as I could make soup and just bring it down and visit and then go back to my apartment to my "normal" life. No one was the wiser. I would have been mortified to be seen with them; some unkempt and dirty, some a little intoxicated, others suffering from mental and emotional illness. Staying on the grates meant that I could and did deal with these things in a neutral way. But when this man asked to come up, it literally put me on the spot. I told him that I wasn't allowed to have people up who didn't live in the building; what I meant, of course, was that I wasn't allowed to have people like him up, or more honestly, that I didn't want him up. He accepted my excuse, but he kept asking. I could see that I was being tested, not just by him -- everyone was looking, listening, and trying to figure out how genuine I was. Many were suspicious that I was working on a sociology term paper and when it was finished, so were they. Others thought I was some sort of do-gooder, or some kind of religious freak; most thought, and still do, that I am a priest, although I never bring religion into it or discuss it unless someone asks.
Finally, after a few days, I said all right, I told him that he could come back with me, take a shower and have a shave, but that he had to leave right away. I can still remember being very nervous, irritated, and afraid. I gave him some clean clothes, of which I had many. He went into the bathroom, and I went into the kitchen to finish the soup dishes. When I came into the living room about a half hour later, I found him asleep in the chair and didn't have the heart to wake him. He looked wonderful; cleaned up and in clean clothes, completely transformed. The next morning I got up and found breakfast on the table, and he was cleaning the apartment. I told him that I had to go to school and to work, but that he could leave when he wished.
It was a tremendous gamble. I had a stereo, books, records, a checkbook; a few valuable things, at least to me, and I really didn't know him at all. Yet, somehow, he looked so totally different and acted so normal that I trusted him. When I came home that night, he was there. He had never left. He had dinner on the table, the apartment looked immaculate, and he was listening to Richard Wagner on the stereo. He started to tell me about Lohengrin. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that a homeless, unkempt person living on a heating vent could appreciate culture of any kind, let alone Richard Wagner, who was even a bit much for me. It broke barriers of other kinds; that homeless people could be educated, could appreciate the arts and beauty, could cook, want to be clean and live in pleasant surroundings and perhaps even trusted; could be honest, decent human beings.
He stayed for thirty days. He wouldn't leave, because I think he felt I wouldn't let him back in, and I probably wouldn't have. I loved my privacy and the way I lived. But yet I began to feel that there was something right about having him stay there. I just couldn't see forcing another human being out on the streets in the middle of winter, when he took up nothing more than floor space. I also wasn't bothered at all that he wasn't going out to work, the reason for his coming up to the apartment in the first place. I discovered then, and it has been confirmed many times since, that more often than not there has to be a transitional time from the life of the streets to full-time and meaningful employment; there has to be a time to calm down, dry out, come to terms with life, mentally, physically, and emotionally, especially if no structured program is available.
When other people on the streets saw that he was all right, they asked to come up. By the end of that month, I had fifteen people living in my apartment. The University couldn't quite figure out who was letting these people in and where they were going once they got it, because I would give them all a key. It was, in retrospect, perhaps a foolish thing to do, but at the time I though of them all as nothing more than friends.
People in the apartment respected my need to study and to have quiet time. They would all sleep together in the small living room that I had, next to each other, much as they did on the grates for warmth and security. The apartment became a way station for those who needed to clean up or make a phone call, or just to rest and to get out of the weather.
One day I was at work and the phone rang. It was my bank. They told me they had a guy there with five of my checks, all signed, and he wanted to cash them. I said "No", and they asked me if they should have him arrested. I again said no, just to give him the checks back and tell him to come home. He was waiting when I got home, and I said to him, "You know you didn't have to do that. Anything in this apartment is yours, if you want it; just ask." I didn't ask him to leave and I didn't make a big deal out of it. I knew he had nowhere else to go. He stayed. He never took anything out of the apartment again, and no one else did either. He became a dear friend, and, as with so many people on the streets, a tragic story. He died a few years ago, after drinking Mennen Skin Bracer one time too many, often a drink of choice on the streets. It's called Green Lizard. It's inexpensive and, because of its high alcohol content, gives one a very quick high. That spring day in my apartment I told him, as I did everyone else, we could only go on like this if we loved and trusted each other. The whole experience was based on that mutual respect, and so it is to this day.
One day a nun called, and said she understood that I was taking homeless people into my apartment. She told me about an eighty-year-old man who was living in a rooming house down the street. The landlady wanted him out because he was dying of cancer, and could no longer take care of himself. She indicated that he would soon be homeless unless I took him in. I told her I had no facility to take care of someone who essentially needed full-time care. But I did take him in, and I got a hospital bed and put it in the little room that I slept in, after moving my bed out. The men were afraid of him, and so was I, none of us having been around anyone who was dying before. I got a visiting nurse to come in every day and be with him while I was at work and school. She was wonderful, and very concerned. The fact that fifteen men were in the front room or somewhere in the apartment didn't seem to bother her at all. She taught me how to change a catheter and bedchucks, how to bathe him in bed, and how to medicate. She could easily have turned us all in. She didn't, though in some ways it really was a crazy situation. How reassuring she was, and how often I've thought of her since.
One Saturday morning, I was in the kitchen and I heard him scream from the bedroom that he was falling out of bed. He had ben screaming all night in pain; I went into the bedroom and told him that he wasn't falling out of bed, but I went behind him and pulled him a little further up on the mattress. Just as I did that he lost complete control of his bowels, and everything was dripping down the sides of the bed, diarrhea and urine everywhere. He then took a deep breath and went to sleep. I cleaned him up, changed his sheets, and then went back into the kitchen. I came in a little while later and somehow it dawned on me that he was dead. He must have died when he had taken that deep breath. I wasn't aware of it because I had never seen anyone die before. I was petrified. Here was a man dead in my apartment, and all of these men in the front room. There was no discreet way of getting him to a funeral home. I called my mother. She was very calm, and told me I had to dial 911 for an ambulance. I told the operator that I thought someone had died, and in about three minutes I heard the ambulance, the fire department, the rescue squad, the students who came piling into the apartment, the homicide detectives, and the University officials. It was quite an uproar. I had never been in trouble in my life and I thought for sure I'd be arrested. The University now knew where the homeless people were going, and the jig was up. They told me that I had to get rid of all of these people, and I was violating the lease, but surprisingly they didn't pursue it any further. I buried Al; I didn't ask anyone to leave, and we went on as before. One year passed and we began another.
Another Saturday morning, a few months later, a young man of twenty-four came up to the apartment and asked to shower and shave. He went into the bathroom, and after an hour still had not come out. He had died in the tub of an overdose of drugs and alcohol. He was a very well-to-do young man, and his funeral was at a French-speaking Catholic church in Georgetown. His death brought home to me again that all homeless people are not poor, uneducated, mostly black, as I had thought. Drugs and alcohol pervade, capture, and enslave all racial, economic, and social backgrounds.
This time I knew what to expect. The University told me that I had to leave since I had not cooperated. I told them I could go anywhere since I had a job, a college degree, I was white, and had many resources to call on. I asked them if they would let us stay in one of their abandoned buildings, then held vacant while waiting to be torn down for further University expansion, while I looked for a place. They said no. For the first time in my life, I took a stand. I told them that I wouldn't leave until all of us had a place to go. The University took me to court. The judge was very sympathetic and told me that what I was doing was a good thing, but that I couldn't do it in University housing. He told me, though, that he would give me three months to find another place to live and that we could all stay together.
I found a small real estate ad in The Washington Post that read: "Renovator's Delight!" It turned out to be a boarded-up four-room house with no utilities, what was termed a shell, for sale for $22,000. Since I still had my job at the hospital, I could move in. It was quite an experience. It was the first time in my life that I had ever lived in a neighborhood that was poor, in which I was the only white person, in a house that was incredibly dilapidated. The very first night that I moved in, with about fifteen other people, with no lights or heat, and boards still on the windows, the house was broken into. In confronting the guy who was climbing in the kitchen window having pried the boards off, I told him that he needn't have gone to all that trouble; the front door was broken anyway.
We had moved in during September, and by the end of that fall we had forty people living in four rooms. That little house became our first house of hospitality. The homeless men and women who came to the house heard of it by word of mouth. I didn't know most of them, and when I went to work they stayed and were still there when I came home.
Our inner-city neighbors initially didn't know what was going on in our little St. Benedict's Catholic Worker House. As I indicated later to them, I was in this neighborhood for the same reason many of them were; it was all I could afford. Some neighbors, as they saw the numbers of people coming in and out of the house, began to question why they had to put up with more problem people. They began to mellow through the intervention of a woman who was a neighbor of our two doors away, an elderly, black woman. She was very poor and often I would see her in the alley behind the house collecting pieces of wood to fire up her stove, which was her sole source of heat. She was in very poor health, but was known in the neighborhood for her kindness and generosity, especially to the children. She taught them to dance; she collected things; gave food and clothing away. Her name was Mary Harris but she was known in the neighborhood as Miss Mary. From the very first, she welcomed us and came over and told us that if there was anything she could do for us, all we had to do was ask. One night our electric power was turned off because I had not been able to pay the bill. Mary came over with a kerosene lamp and told me to keep it as long as I needed it. She said that her electricity had been turned off so many times she had gone out and bough the lamp. I never forgot her generosity and concern; her breaking down the barrier with this neighborhood; her welcoming these homeless men and women even though every act came from her own want. She died a mere five months after we moved into the neighborhood, and I was able to buy her little house. I turned it into a house for women and named it after her. What a lasting tribute. There were nights when upwards of fifty women were in those four rooms, sleeping everywhere.
In 1982, I began to talk about the need to get people out of the city, away from the constant temptations to violence and substance abuse; perhaps a return to a simpler, back-to-basics lifestyle. I saw a little farm advertised in the paper. It was in southern West Virginia, near a little town called Alderson. I was aware of Alderson because it was the location of the federal prison for women, and many of our neighbors had friends and relatives in the prison, 300 miles from Washington. I fell in love with the farm, with its peace and beauty. It was very rustic: indeed it had outhouses instead of indoor plumbing, and that kind of set the tone for the whole place. I signed to buy the farm for $48,000, to be paid in cash in two weeks. I had no money whatsoever, but the couple I was buying it from didn't know that. I came back to Washington and told my parish, St. Stephen Martyr, that I needed the money. They held a benefit which raised $3000, which was wonderful, but a long way from $48,000. The next day a woman came to the rectory and offered us the balance.
John Filligar Farm is now home to about eighteen people. Seven are now buried on the farm in our little cemetery. They were people who loved the farm, including a woman who had spent over thirty years on the streets of Washington. Tyra was only at the farm for six months before she died of all the abuse her body had taken on the streets over the long years. But it was the happiest time of her life, as she told me when she lay dying. She had grown up on a dust-bowl farm in the thirties and had never forgotten that experience. In her six months, she taught us all how to farm; another example of a homeless person given a chance to offer herself as gift and example to the rest of us. She loved the land, the animals, and the peace. Our farm for women and children, across the road from our original farm, is named after her.
Now our fields are planted; last year the farm canned 4,000 quarts of produce; our eggs and milk often come to the soup line in Washington at our hospitality house; hospitality is extended day in and day out by men and women from the streets. The farm reflects the needs, wants, aspirations of people caught in an impersonal urban environment out of control, and has given them and us a chance to change direction and rediscover the potential and gifts of each one of us.
The original St. Benedict's and Mary Harris Houses in the LeDroit Park neighborhood were closed after many years because they required too much investment to bring them up to code. In 1986, I bought an old rooming house at 1305 T Street NW and named it after Llewellyn Scott, and African-American Catholic Worker who had lived in DC. Two years later I reopened Mary Harris House for women in another row house a couple of blocks away on the same street. One of the original residents of the rooming house elected to stay on as a Catholic Worker.
Our houses exist in a neighborhood that began as genteel and well-to-do around the turn of the century. After the riots of 1968, the area around 14th and U Streets became a synonym for the worst of Washington, its crime, drugs and violence. Today the old Victorian row houses are being bought up by young professionals attracted by their beauty and grace, their proximity to downtown, and the convenience of the new subway which just opened two weeks ago, one block away.
A woman came across the street recently while I was unloading the car on a quiet Sunday morning in front of the house, and she screamed at me that she and other people were moving into the neighborhood and paying $300,000 for a house, and then they had people like us to contend with. She said it wasn't right. No, it isn't, but I don't think we would agree on why not.
It's very difficult, always being made to feel guilty; being made to feel that I'm in the wrong because I give hungry people a meal or floor space so that they won't have to sleep on the streets. What kind of society are we that what we do here is considered so wrong?
Most of all, people need to understand that this house of hospitality is my home; it is a way of life, a continuing commitment, a challenge in faith and love. How often I'm confronted and told that I am operating a shelter, a soup kitchen, charity, or agency. More than anything, people find it impossible to believe that I actually live in the house, as if there were something exotic, romantic, or holy about the prospect.
I really believe, with Franklin Roosevelt, that what we have to fear is fear itself. We must break down fears and prejudices. They feed on themselves; become larger and more complicated. We cannot just listen to or read media accounts of who people are. We must visit and learn in person. We must experience those in prison, in shelters, soup kitchens, in houses of hospitality, those with AIDS, those who are drug addicts and those who are alcoholic, or, in some other way, down-and-out on their luck. We must get to know people as people, not as classes or clients, or groups or caseloads, but as individuals. It is not easy; I'm the first to admit it.
I am constantly amazed when I hear the stories of so many of these men and women. I keep waiting to hear something extraordinary, weird, or unique. The stories are difficult, to be sure; some tragic, all sad. But they are all common to the human dilemma, to the human experience. What we don't know can dehumanize us and rob us all of the goodness and spirit and gifts of all the peoples among us.
Postscript: Michael Kirwan died of cancer at age 54 on November 12, 1999.
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