There had been a minor occurrence, some words with staff, and now he sat across from me in my office. I told him I wanted him to make it, but that if he threatened staff in any way I would have to bar him. I added that everyone at the mission wanted him to make it, that we would do all we could to have that happen. He relaxed, smiled his Morgan Freeman smile, and in his rasping voice laid open his life. Regret upon regret. Ache upon ache. An hour, maybe two, and still there was more.

Phil did make it. He made it in short bursts, then in long stretches, then again, in fits and starts, until last summer when he died.

Phil was one of 22 men and women—the ones we could confirm—who died in our inner-city in the past 12 months. They were our friends and a couple Sunday’s ago they were remembered at a memorial service held at Hope Mission. Family, friends, street friends, street family, came together through grief, recalled softer times. There were stories, there was laughter, weeping—and there were "why’s".

A band played—a worship band partly made up of people who are in the Mission’s addictions program. They played and 150 people from the inner-city sang “Jesus Loves Me” and “Amazing Grace.” And Frank at the back of the room, drummed on his hand drum.

Then a collective eulogy: pictures and names of the deceased appearing and fading on a white screen, while a single guitar played. Not all the names were matched with pictures; some, like Phil, had only a head-silhouette.

It’s too obvious and inadequate to say those who died were all people with stories, with mothers, with childhood friends now lost to them. Stories too easily forgotten. Silhouetted faces we passed by hundreds of times.

What was it that they longed for? What were their joys? Their sighs? What did they leave? What dreams were untried? What was left undreamt?

What they had in common was an intimate knowledge of the street and a tenuous connection with a healthier community. Also in common, too often, was an addiction; but with it, as often, there were genuine attempts at staying clean, turning things around, committing to something higher.

Among these 22, there were failures, catastrophic failures, and there were successes, exemplary successes.

There is no template for this—for how one makes it. A clean sprint can be as Herculean an effort for one as a lifetime of abstinence is for another. An addiction overcome, can reveal the roots of the deeper longings and addictions of the soul, and without an intervention of love, the revelation can bring back the external, the obvious addiction.

And what of us, are we so different? What and where would we be without tenderness, without an early history of love-interventions? If we’re lucky we’ve received, through many kindnesses, the internal tools to be able to externalize, turn over and release our anger, envy, despair, bitterness, rivalry. If we’re not, the term dry drunk comes to mind—we haven’t had a fix for years, but neither have we had a "sober" day.

As it is we are all in process. For us all, beneath our grotty to glamorous exteriors there percolates a kind of glory. As the Chaplain pointed out in reference to the epitaph on Ruth Graham’s gravestone (Billy Graham’s late wife), this is a glory only fully revealed when we’ve reached the "end of construction."

There is, in our common humanity, a hidden glory that points to something beyond ourselves. And this is what rose up at the memorial service. And it brought comfort and restored dignity to friends and family—by restoring dignity to the men and women who died.

In the meantime there was a message left for us. A lady who has eyes for deeper wisdom, who stood to speak about her friend said, "These were beautiful people and for us who are still here, it’s our tears, our tears will give us strength, as we cry not apart but together."

What appears to have raised Dr. Newcombe’s eyebrows the extra inch however is the fact that ‘progressive’ evangelical Jim Wallis, a thorn in the fleshy-cheek to less ‘progressive’ evangelicals, is saying that Jesus is already there. Of course if that’s true it’s all too embarrassing to the more pious E’s who have built a safe spiritual Jesus on the ethical absolutes of the Almighty. You see how it looks bad for this Jesus to be at the protest; too many occasions for misunderstanding, even scandal, maybe jail time.

This doesn’t seem to bother Jim Wallis, who’s already been arrested 22 times, and is married to a Vicar—I suspect some evangelicals think the later should lead to the former—but of course the arrests  have all been for civil disobedience. Wallis has tempered his activism as he’s aged; these days he’s even rubbing tailored elbows and offering spiritual advice (progressive evangelical advice one supposes) to Mr. Obama. Hard to say if this has helped anything.

In any case, you see how these two evangelicals may simply end up glaring at one another across the valley of Raphaim; Jim’s Jesus isn’t Jerry’s Jesus. Jim’s Jesus, is, well, an able-bodied misfit and first century hippie with a work ethic that kind of sucks, at least one that tapered off, making him a poor role model for hard working fishermen; then again he was irresponsible from the age of 12, had questionable family values, was a nard wastrel, wine maker, anointer of people with oil from undisclosed herbs, curser of fruitless fig trees and religious systems (must have seen a link), who was apparently okay getting arrested to make a point, noncompliant while in custody, and to the end—forgiving of thieves and most everyone else…I mean hardly a ‘Truth In Action’ kind of guy—even though he claimed all he did was do the truth—just someone who might like to hide out among the rabble at the "Occupation." I suspect Dr. Newcombe’s Jesus might be easier to spot down at the park.

Thing is, as both Jim and Jerry know, Jesus is the merciful type…forgiving even of fraudulent CEO’s and their tax lawyers. Perhaps you’ll recall Zacchaeus’ bump with Jesus, so smitten that he gave half of his possessions to the poor and paid back everyone he cheated—four times the amount. Imagine now, with me, Goldman’s CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, up a tree in Zuccotti Park, scanning the crowd…and that’s why I’m going with Jim’s Jesus.

By my estimation, anywhere from 1200 to 1400 people turned out to ‘Occupy Edmonton’. It was an inspired, even surprising turnout, that suggests a broad concern and discontent.

There was a raft of signs—from a farmer carrying a sign chastising Harper for his plans to jettison the Wheat Board, to various environmental warnings, to anti-war messages, but the single dominant message—as touted, a message from the awakening 99 percent to the ultra-affluent 1 percent—was the call to end corporate greed and corporate influence on government, and to rein in unrestrained capitalism. 

Of course we Canadians have faired better than Americans—millions of whom have been foreclosed on, millions who have lost their jobs and still have little prospect of returning to the work force. Their lives and livelihoods have been raided by corporate fraud and elitist indifference.

In Canada the disparities between rich and poor not as pronounced as in America: Our 1% earn 11% of total income while in the U.S., their 1% earn 20 percent. (In terms of overall wealth the top 10% in Canada own 53%, while in the U.S. it’s 70%) 

However, perhaps what should concern us more in Canada is the gap that’s quickly widening between the very rich and the rest. Even conservatives are beginning to worry about this.

While we can be thankful that we have been spared from the kind of recession that has hit the U.S.—primarily because of regulations that are still in place between investment banking and commercial banking—we are not immune to the hegemony of corporations. There’s a ready army of lobbyists pushing for corporate friendly legislation, and with a corporate friendly government, we would do well, if we are awakening, to stay awake.

But concerning the “root crisis,” we are of course complicit. The charge of acquisitive self-interest can be levelled at most of us, not only corporations. Corporations salivate and bloat because of our buying habits, our lifestyles, mimetically derived from the rich-and-famous, our prurient wants we deem needs. All this has hardened us and helped create artificial classes and divisions between us, while leaving us no independent access to the basics of life, further fracturing local communities and giving us the illusion of independence.

Like corporations we’re messed up, myopic and mercenary, but we also have it in us to be empathetic and compassionate and to desire an egalitarian society. And it’s this that separates us from big corporations.

Our governments have granted corporations the rights and privileges of an individual; but a corporation is not a person, it is a principality—it is a power structure. It is not inherently good or evil. It does not create anything on its own. Whatever tangible goods it produces is the result of an entrepreneurial vision and a company of workers. The owner/entrepreneur has the right to keep a substantial portion of profit. But with that right comes great responsibility—social, environmental, and certainly, a responsibility to its workforce.

No doubt, there are humane and socially conscious corporations run by diligent and caring people. The problem, to my mind, is that it requires a herculean vigilance to keep a halter on a corporation when it reaches a critical size. The larger the system/corporation becomes, the more it operates according to its nature.

The hard reality is that the corporation, as an entity, exists solely for its own growth. It grows by keeping income private while socializing financial loss and costs. The corporation is an externalizing machine. It externalizes any and every cost a neglectful or complicit government, or unwary public, lets it get away with. For at the hollow heart of the big corporation lies the principle of self-preservation and expansion by way of the duel. Only winning commercial wars satisfies shareholders. (Sun-Tzu’s the Art of Warfare & Karl Von Clausewitz’s, On War, remain popular and recommended reads for CEO’s)

The corporation has no mechanism for social care. In the documentary “The Corporation,” management guru Peter Drucker says: “If you find an executive who wants to take on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast.” And if an owner should decide to be responsible to the workers, to pay them fairly, to protect their jobs, to refuse to outsource labour, and to be stewards of the environment, the shareholders can, and should, according to people like Drucker, sue the corporation.

Corporations do not care about relating, they do not have a lexicon for social-welfare. In the documentary, Psychologist Dr. Robert Hare lists psychopathic traits and ties them to the behaviour of corporations:

• callous unconcern for the feelings for others;
• incapacity to maintain enduring relationships;
• reckless disregard for the safety of others;
• deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit;
• incapacity to experience guilt;
• failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviour

If its true that mega-corporations are psychopathic, then the only treatment is proper boundaries and in some cases the use of restraint. And this is what the Occupation is calling for. It is simply asking to reintroduce relational responsibility into the economy.

Perhaps it was a taste of the fever that is gripping Occupation Wall Street, or simply the harmonic of hope that a peaceful protest for creative change sets off, but while I stood listening to the speeches and marching on the downtown streets I felt my own cynicism about the possibility of change soften.

Did this enter anyone’s mind at the beginning of the year that our northern Alberta city, and cities across Canada, would be part of a near global protest in support of, and spawned by, a New York sit-in? 

Is it too much to hope that this could be a spring board for a congealing movement that is as self-reflective as it is probing and provocative? Whether that’s possible at this point may be beside the point. There is already—despite main media’s talk-circuit smirks, derisive dismissals, and confused portrayals—something of an awakening.

And the spiritual movement that the term awakening alludes to is not unwarranted. Because how we connect and relate to one another, both personally and economically, is a matter of deep spiritual import.

In the monastic world, Lauds is the term for the first of seven daily offices of prayer. Lauds is praise and honour of the Divine. I also take Lauds to mean honouring the unknown, through mindfulness of the past and present. Lauds, then, is attentiveness to the way things are, suspicion of logical necessity, and hospitality for the way things could be.

It’s in this spirit of Lauds that I dedicate this last Radiothon post:

I honour all our supporters; all who refuse the lie that people on the street are uniformly without ambition—that they want to be there, that they can, merely by trying, overcome the contingencies that placed them in our out-of-bounds.

I honour the hope of Hope Mission, but specifically the hope of those the Mission serves. I honour their resistance to the supposed logical necessity of their state; I honour the heroic effort to consider another way; the momentary entertainment of what could be; all the beginnings and all the follow-through’s.

Having come through another Radiothon—a special one—we honour the ‘radio people’ from 630 CHED and CISN FM who generated waves of appealing story. We honour the interviewees from the Mission who gave over pieces of their lives to listeners, like personal letters; and we honour the great circle of supporters and generous friends in and around Edmonton.

We also laud the workers and volunteers at Hope Mission who endured the elegiac air then rose to the electric hum of phone calls, quick conversation, compressed time, shared laughter.

And finally, today I honour the gentleman who pushed his many-bottled-cart past my window. I honour the engineering ingenuity of balancing the capacity of two shopping carts of bagged bottles upon one.

I honour all the latent engineers, administrators, artists, craftsmen, designers, counsellors, philologists, hiding and emerging in all the humans Hope Mission serves. 

May we all grow together to revere one another, and so, laud the speech of day, the knowledge of night, the handiwork of earth and the declarations of sky, through our common Creator.

But you know the cool is coming. You can pick it up on the side of your face and on hairs of your arms. The "camps" in the river hill will thin out, people who are hungry, people without homes, those with gnawing needs will keep coming to Hope Mission for food, warmth and safety.

At Hope Mission we care for, feed and shelter, on average, close to 500 people each day and night. And when we’re full, and it’s cold out, we make more room, fill the halls if we have to. No one is turned away.

Khazma Asiff, from 630 CHED, wanted to help out the Radiothon by experiencing homelessness. Well, as much as one can experience in a day and a night. She picked bottles during the day and slept on a mat in Hope’s emergency shelter last night.

I talked to her this morning, and while she didn’t get much sleep, she was beaming about the people at Hope Mission who helped her.

Of course many of the Mission’s employees are people who were once on the street themselves, struggling with addictions and using Hope Mission’s services. Now they’re here, doing the work of care and hospitality in stellar and compassionate fashion. And many more have moved on, back in community, working or studying, or training for a trade.

Last year we celebrated with over 100 men and women who graduated our recovery programs and are going on with hope.

Donate to Hope Mission’s Radiothon here. Thank You!

Having worked for Hope Mission for over 20 years, I take it as something like an axiom, that meals are the connection. Beyond the programs—recovery, counselling, life-skills, job training—as important as these are, Hope Mission’s most vital ministry is food.

When it comes to bringing down barriers, there’s no substitute to sharing a meal.  It opens up a simple conversation, and creates a small humanizing moment; it forges a link with another soul. And this is what Hope Mission is about—what it does best.

Lindy, our Food Services manager, has a motto concerning this: "Dining with dignity." This is the simple act of offering food and genuine hospitality—creating a sense of belonging in a space that promotes healing, hope, and change.

If this is a value that twigs your heart and mind, consider donating to Hope Mission’s, Hope for the Hungry Radiothon. Tune in to CISN FM or 630 CHED, call 780.453.3877 or visit hopemission.com. For $57 you can sponsor meals for one person, for one week.

That’s one week of potential. A week of hope. A week of dignity that could well be the beginning of a new outlook and direction for someone from the street.

Today, October 4th, is also the day Hope Mission kicks off it’s 3-day Hope for the Hungry Radiothon: To make a donation and bring a ray of hope to a person in need, click here.