Frightening the Natives

My history professor mentor during the first two years of college had been an Air Force gunner in World War II and the Korean War. He slipped once or twice. Inadvertently, he spilled the beans about shooting down other airplanes. The look on his face of grief and pain lasted only a moment. He’d catch himself. Then he changed the subject to something altogether unrelated.

A man with a classical education and sharp mind, he often warned his would-be radical students of the 1960s and 1970s not to frighten the natives. Meaning our parents, university administrators or persons in positions of power in politics or business. Someday we might find ourselves in need of them.

Over the course of the last week I spoke with two very different people about two very different spiritual subjects. The situations were similar to many others where it can be impossible not to frighten the natives.

One person is well informed about the spirited mystical work I have done all of my life. That discussion ended rather amicably.

With the second person it was somewhat questionable. For reasons unknown, during the last few months of Covid-19 I have become curious about a project I started almost forty years ago with two other people. Television, radio and newspaper stories of increased hunger in America reminded me of that long-ago time.

I lived in an industrial town that suffered the Reagan recession blues, as did most of middle- and working-class America. The numbers of homeless and hungry rose unbelievably after the growing post-World War II economy of the region tanked in the 1980s. A church-affiliated group I belonged to held food pantry drives, clothing drives, blood drives and every other kind of drive we could think of to do something for our neighbors.

It was never enough. It felt like every time we did something to help one person, two others were thrown out of work or temporarily furloughed. Factory shut downs were endemic.

Yet, we persevered.

The chairperson of our committee was a woman of prophetic vision and extraordinary energy. She had an enormous capacity to see what was needed. People were by turns frightened, amused, appalled, approving, sneering, scoffing and just outright afraid of her cajoling or bullying everybody and anybody. She got them into action or they got out of her way for fear of being run over.

Her right-hand woman was similar, but far more lowkey. She played the system to get people to do good in spite of themselves.

The two of them realized that more was needed. The town wasn’t doing enough. Food pantries and fund raisers were not feeding people with empty cupboards.

Action had to be taken.

The two of them spent hours strategizing. They viewed and reviewed every possible idea from as many angles as they saw and added a couple more. While they had long since been regarded as revolutionaries in a socially conservative blue-collar factory town, what was not publicly known was how many better, more substantive ideas they killed than enacted knowing public support did not exist.

Ultimately, they devised a plan to create a soup kitchen.

The chairwoman was very well connected in town. She literally knew everybody and their cousins. The two women decided that she would grease government and business wheels to get the permits, short term finances and food to start a soup kitchen.

The other woman would arrange private and public grants and long-term funding.

Their problem was that they felt they needed me in on the planning phase. They simply were not sure how.

They made an appointment with the local priest who was my spiritual director. In that meeting they informed him of their plans. They also told him they knew they needed me in on the plan somehow to make it work. But, they had no idea what I was supposed to do.

They had taken care of the business side of it. What could Janssen do?

The young priest looked at them.

Have him pray, he said.

A few days later we met for coffee. There the ladies told me they were organizing a local soup kitchen, something which had never existed in that city. They said they needed my help, but they weren’t certain how until they went to see the young priest. Instantly, they had seen how right he was.

We need you to pray this into place, they told me.

Horrified, it was clear to me that they were both madder than hatters.

Except for one detail. They ultimately convinced me they were right.

Thus, it became my job to pray. All day. Every day. I prayed for miracles. I prayed they would get what they needed to set up the soup kitchen. I prayed the permits would come. The business support would appear. That grants and funding would open up for as long as it was needed. That the volunteers would turn up to help us.

The first day the soup kitchen opened for business I showed up early at the sister church that offered us space. I made sandwiches and hid in the kitchen. I come from a long line of quietists. The worst mortal sin is to be caught doing good.

When I finally came out of the kitchen to ladle soup, I saw one of my neighbors in line at the same time he saw me. Figuring in for a dime, in for a dollar, I told him that if he cared to wait around until I finished clean up, I’d take him home.

Within months the grants woman took a job out of state. I moved out of town to continue my spiritual work in other parts of the country. The soup kitchen gradually became an independent entity. Today it continues operation on a far larger scale.

Recently writing to the current executive director, it felt as though perhaps the part of praying the soup kitchen into being seems beyond the pale.

Sometimes we do or say things that frighten the natives.

Sometimes it’s just another day.