by Bobby
On my walk to work at 201 Poplar, I pass the parking lot of St. Mary’s Church. People gather there early for breakfast, some carrying backpacks or plastic bags, some talking together, others sitting alone. Behind them rises the enormous Renasant Convention Center. Nothing about the scene is especially dramatic, and that is part of what troubles me. Sometimes, when I walk to the parking lot in the afternoon, I see some of the same people still sitting near the church. The next morning, they gather again.
Part of my work involves measuring how our criminal legal system is functioning. We count cases, convictions, and changes in crime. Numbers can reveal patterns and help public institutions understand whether they are accomplishing what they claim to be accomplishing. Yet, my walk to work continually confronts me with things that resist easy measurement. What does it mean for a person to spend an entire day sitting on the curb with nowhere else to go? What happens to a city when people sleeping outside become such a familiar sight that the rest of us barely notice them?
Quaker practice asks us to pay attention to the inner light present in every person. That is a reasonable challenge, until our attention produces acute discomfort or an impulse to disengage. For Friends, I think this presents a particular query: What does it mean to see a person fully when we cannot personally solve the conditions of their suffering?
Memphis Friends are already answering that query in tangible ways. We donate to the New Tyler Food Pantry, Food Not Bombs, and Manna House and we share our space with other groups. This connects our Meeting to the broader Memphis community. But should our testimony of equality lead us to hold onto the motivation to act and create change, even after a donation has been made? Charity can meet an immediate need while also revealing how large and persistent the underlying need remains.
St. Mary’s parking lot offers me one small image of this tension. A space built for cars becomes, each morning, a place where people are fed. Faith communities have long filled gaps like these with meals, clothing, and care, and there is something deeply hopeful in this work. There is also, to me, something unsettling about how routinely our houses of worship and charities must compensate for needs that remain unmet.
Perhaps our task is both immediate and larger: to feed the person who is hungry while continuing to ask why hunger has become so ordinary; to support the organizations doing this work while remaining attentive to the conditions that make their work necessary; and, above all, to refuse the habit of looking away.