Downtown Crossing, Easter 2020
On the streets of Downtown Crossing and the grounds of the Boston Common, the evidence of the failings of our systems is laid bare. No longer hidden by the streams of commerce, mixing with the people on their way to work, the unhoused are more exposed and more vulnerable than ever. With nowhere else to go, they gather around the fountain, in piles on the grass, they walk and walk the emptying streets. They hunker down in the doorways of closed businesses and huddle against the bricked walls of train stations. They ride their bikes the wrong way down a deserted Tremont Street, waving to one another as they pass. I see them on the train as I return home from work, scattered among those few of us who are left, riding out the day where they are able. I overhear one man say to another, “No one will look at us, no one will look us in the eyes, because they’re afraid.” I look around and see no one else there, no one else to see them, to see what’s happening out here.
Yesterday, waiting for the train at Park Street, a man I met only recently recognized me and called across the tracks, asking if I knew when “that church” would be open. We hardly know one another, but many of these people, the only ones left outside, are people I have grown to know over the past two years I have spent working at “that church” with MANNA, a ministry for unhoused people at St. Paul’s Cathedral in downtown Boston.
While many people are sheltering in place in their homes, our community finds itself, already vulnerable with limited places to go, abandoned, left outside or in shelters where conditions are worsening by the day as beds and space become limited. As the doors of so many of the places where our people could once seek shelter, bathrooms, food and rest have closed, our doors are some of the last to remain open, drawing people from other communities to seek shelter in our space. Where once we served up to 100 people, we now, in cycles, serve as many as 200.
At the doors, I stand three days a week with other members of our team, greeting our community. We offer handmade masks, hand sanitizer, symptom screening and calls to medical teams for those needing care. We offer space inside, hot meals and bagged lunches, water, bathrooms, outlets for charging phones, a place, even briefly, to rest.
My days at the door are difficult. A barrier where there once was none, as social distancing requires us to limit our numbers inside. At first, at the door, these people who have survived every unimaginable thing, could not understand the new precautions we were required to take, why we are so afraid. These people who are so often left uncared for could not, at first, understand our new way of caring. A few weeks ago, I was there at the door only to open it and usher everyone, warmly, wildly, without counting, without waiting, inside.
All of these new precautions, they told me, felt like just another set of rules, limits imposed on their lives. One woman, who I was once friendly with, began to refer to me, chidingly, as “the rules lady,” angry with me for asking her to wait while I figured out the count inside. I hear from another woman that her plan to get her life on track, a new routine for can and bottle collecting, has been thwarted, that the Roche Bros. down the street is no longer accepting returns. A man who works security nearby tells me that he’s no longer allowed to use the bathroom where he works and asks if he could use ours. Paper face masks, we learn, are being sold for as much as $25 each on the street, and people are paying, if they can, with what little money they have left, because there is no or few other places to get them. I get texts from community members almost daily asking where they might find these life-saving supplies. A man who I haven’t seen in weeks texted me yesterday: “Outside moz ppl are bugging (mask / gloves). I don’t have either. Do u?”
As we learn that 1 in 3 of the unhoused population of Boston have tested positive for COVID, as more doors have closed, as our friends begin to disappear into emergency medical tents or isolation, we hear from them less and less. Inside, what had once been a lively space where we talked about everything from God to the game, we now find a defeated, dreadful silence. Behind cloth masks their voices recede, muffled, and vanish. They don’t want to talk. But they do continue, some of them, to write. One man at Writer’s Group wrote in a letter to Governor Baker, “The walls are closing in, even though I don't have any walls around me.”
Last week, as we gathered for a rainy Maundy Thursday on the Boston Common, masked, and 6-10 feet apart, we reflected about how we are called now to care for the bodies of our beloved. We set up hand washing stations instead of the usual foot washing that accompanies the service. We picked up people along the way, people lingering on the fringes, just looking for a place to wash their hands. This is what our love looks like now, masked and distanced, washing our hands in the rain. We realize that we can’t wait to understand later, as the gospel says we will, how to learn to love one another, how to care for one another’s bodies. We can’t wait for the government to help us. We have to do it ourselves, but we can’t do it alone.
We ask that you, our wider community, help us now while we wade through our grief and our silence, to help us as the walls of our spirits close in, to help us care for our beloved bodies. We ask that you use your voices to loudly lament the injustices we witness, the suffering of our beautiful, resilient, and courageous community. We can’t survive this grief alone. Many of us will not.
If you would like to donate, follow this link to St. Paul's Cathedral and specify in the dropdown box below "payment options" that your donation should go to MANNA: https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/stpaulboston
Christie Towers is a poet and educator at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she is currently earning her MFA. She is on the pastoral care team for MANNA, a ministry for the unhoused community of downtown Boston at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul. She has published poems in various journals, online and in print, most recently in Meridian, LETTERS Journal, and Cathexis Northwest. Her work has been featured in Ted Kooser’s project, American Life in Poetry. She is currently working on a collection of poems about the visions of Hildegard von Bingen.