It was time to put everything where it should’ve been: books on the shelf, clothes in the hamper, dishes in the sink. When my apartment is clean and my bed is made I feel energized, ready to face the day, ready to run the gauntlet of life despite the many poles of adversity swinging to hinder my stride: then they were unemployment. It was a day of cleansing, of beginning anew.
I started volunteering at a homeless shelter and was excited yet nervous, feeling both charitable and cautious; I didn’t know entirely what I was getting into, but knew that I had to get into it like a man knows when his eyes are going bad and need glasses, but first he must take the exam. This is the good work—priceless work—impossible to be measured or calculated by societies standards of what makes a man rich, I told myself. I had something to give someone else; therefore I was wealthy, and who could ask for anything else?
I rode my mountain bike to the shelter, houses were heaving to possess me as I pedaled past them along the way—especially the big Victorian ones, certified museums, beautiful as the thoughts of the architects that brought them to life, as the people who bore them on their backs, blood, sweat, and tears—but I couldn’t stop, nor did I want to.
The Bible encourages volunteering—and since I’m a Christian apprentice, throwing stones at biblical text to test its resilience—I gave myself to it, as best as I could, without ego, without judgment, and without prejudice. I wasn’t sure what to expect, except there was a hunger inside of me that through fasting wanted to fill itself by feeding on itself how a fire feeds on itself to fill itself; to know how to go without in order to go within and find the universal truth that makes us who and what we are in our singular but pluralized lives.
