Via Dolorosa
Despair and Prayer among Seattle’s Homeless
An abridged version of this article by Jon Magnuson appears in The National Catholic Reporter, March 23-April 5, 2018 under the title “Good Friday street-level Stations.”
A stench of garbage and urine drifts on the breeze in the alley off Yesler and 2nd Avenue. It’s a little after 11 A.M., cool, overcast. A soft blanket of condensation from Puget Sound’s dark grey waters covers our small group on this Good Friday morning. The sky is gently weeping.
We’re paused in front of a stoplight at a congested street corner, not far from the heart of the largest urban center in the Pacific Northwest. What’s left of this once prestigious neighborhood is now crowded with pawn shops, taverns, and cheap hotels. These littered streets lie less than a mile south of the city center, a few blocks north of Century Link Field, home for the Seattle Seahawks. With a year-around mild climate and tree-shaded park benches, this particular part of Seattle is known across the country as an urban refugee camp, a gathering place for the homeless.
Thirty of us are moving in procession around the streets that border an historic cobblestoned park called Pioneer Square. We accompany a Jesuit priest and a homeless man who carries a cross, nailed together from two pieces of discarded driftwood. Together, we pause to pray in alleyways, under overpasses, outside abandoned storefronts. Most of our procession is made up of persons of Native American descent, the rest from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, different ethnic groups, and religious traditions. All of us are joining together on this particular Good Friday morning to participate in a centuries old liturgy rooted in Roman Catholic penitential practice.
The Via Dolorosa, honored in the oldest of Christian liturgical traditions, marks a path through Jerusalem’s old city streets where it’s believed Jesus once walked, carrying a wooden cross, to the site of his execution. According to Church historians, Christian pilgrims began to appropriate the “Path of Sorrows” to new settings and distant places in the 14th century. Now, 2,000 years later in Seattle, here in front of homeless shelters and at busy intersections, we, too, are praying our way along 12 “stations of the cross.” As our scattered procession moves along 3rd Avenue, we pass by a patrol car parked abruptly on a sidewalk. A police officer, his hand resting on a pistol grip of a 9 mm Glock, is talking intensely with two young men. They are both dressed in jeans and hooded sweatshirts, leaning in defiance against a boarded storefront door. Background noises from traffic and nearby construction projects surround us as a constant, discordant, nerve-rattling hymn.
The Chief Seattle Club, a small nonprofit street ministry, is coordinating this Good Friday service. The agency’s mission statement, typed on the morning’s bulletin, framed by a Coast Salish design, reads, “To provide a sacred place to nurture, affirm, and renew the spirit of urban Native Peoples.”
Founded by Jesuit priest Raymond Talbot in 1970, the street mission is currently housed in a modest brick-lined storefront. For over forty years, it’s established a solid record working with Seattle’s urban Native American population. Its program operates in collaboration with half a dozen other faith-based mission groups in the city’s rough central neighborhood, offering support programs, shelter, food, and hygiene facilities.
It’s said that Talbot, the mission’s founder, was regarded by many administrators in the Diocese as a rogue priest. From all accounts, he lived an independent, solitary life, saying Mass daily, often alone, at the center. Then, each morning as one Spokane newspaper described him, “went about the tasks of making coffee, sweeping the floor and arranging chairs.” He exemplified for some an extraordinary, but to others, puzzling commitment to American Indian peoples afflicted with addictions, homelessness, and mental illness.
Talbot had previously served missions in Alaska and on Washington State’s Quinault Reservation. He had little enthusiasm for conventional recovery or rehabilitation programs, most probably because he’d seen too many of them fail. A Seattle reporter once asked him how he saw his work. Talbot replied, “Taking care of the dying and the dead.”
Sr. Julie Codd, a cordial, disarming, but focused Sister of St. Joseph of Peace, met Talbot in 1992. He was then 84 years old, in fragile health. When Talbot discovered she’d worked for an extended time on an Indian reservation north of Seattle, he invited her to consider serving as the next Director. She accepted, carrying on the Club’s mission, expanding its services over the next ten years.
Currently, more than 200 individuals come to the Club each day for basic needs including showers and laundry services. The vast majority are low-income American Indian and Alaska Natives. Most are in transition, many homeless. The agency serves an estimated 60,000 meals annually. In 2012, the Club formed a partnership with Harborview Medical Center. Since then, on-site mental health services at the Club are offered four days a week.
There is no shortage of government studies about homelessness in the United States. Most of those reports attribute the problem to loss of affordable housing. That’s only part of the story. Statistics reveal 30 to 40% of homeless persons struggle with mental and emotional disorders. Studies document that 60 to 70 % of those individuals live with serious levels of drug dependency and alcohol addiction. Women and children fleeing abusive relationships, along with youth alienated from their families, add to the mix. In Seattle, a recent night’s count identified over 10,000 individuals homeless or living in shelters.
Even in the context of such haunting statistics, many Native peoples across North American face deeper challenges. Alcoholism and episodic homelessness have been framed by over a century of broken promises from the Federal government. Shifting Federal policies continue to contribute to a bleak, insidious threat. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), 4 % of Native Americans are homeless in the United States, yet they represent less than 1% of the general population. A recent CDC report found over 12 % of deaths among American Indians and Alaska Natives were tied to alcohol abuse. Over 60% of those who died were younger than 50. In comparison, among the general U.S population, alcohol related deaths were 3.3 %.
Another important component of this tangled social equation is, unlike other minority populations, legal provisions, outlined in 389 treaties ratified by Congress between 1796 and I879, protect members of federally recognized tribes. These agreements define boundaries of reservations (trust lands), pledge a level of support for health care, insure education opportunities for eligible tribal members, and protect access traditional fishing and hunting lands. A central theme in the turbulent history of U.S. jurisprudence continues to be the ongoing, persistent challenge by States, corporations, and other interest groups, sometimes including churches, to compromise those treaty rights.
In the complexity of this often forgotten drama, hundreds of thousands of Native peoples have been raised in foster homes and distanced from their traditional cultures. In addition, children of intermarriage often lack documented bloodlines. As a result, such individuals have no legal tribal home, treaty rights, or extended family networks. Because of limited tribal resources, attempts to reconnect to their heritage are not always welcomed by tribal governments. In a search for a home, they are met with rejection, finding themselves cultural refugees. Some became homeless.
The irony is worth noting. ` Over the last 400 years, European immigrants traveled to North America also in search of a home. Most of their hopes were supported and shaped by formal and informal religious institutions. They displaced hundreds of thousands of Native people, imposing treaties and, at times, encouraged Federal authorities to declare wars on indigenous tribes in order to build a new country they could call their own.
This morning’s Good Friday liturgy, grounded in sacred Christian tradition, is finding expression in modern, gritty, urban context. At different “stations,” a portion of the Passion narrative is read from the New Testament, followed by an explanation about why that particular spot was selected. Each site is linked to an incident of violence or act of compassion having been witnessed there. Sets of readings and prayers conclude with selected words from a specific tribal spiritual tradition. Volunteers, randomly invited, carry the makeshift cross from station to station. Ray Kingfisher, a square-shouldered, tall, 50-year-old Cheyenne leads our procession. He carries a hand-held drum covered with stretched elk hide.
Pat Twohy, the Jesuit priest presiding over the morning’s liturgy, has spent his life and ministry among Native peoples. Dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, and a worn plaid shirt, he wears a tarnished western belt buckle, a reminder for those of us who know him, of 40 years working with Indian peoples in central and northern Washington State. This morning, he wears no formal liturgical vestments.
A twenty-year-old stands next to priest, wearing a sweatshirt and jeans with the word “Peace” embroidered on both sides of her leather boots. A forty-year old Ojibwa from Turtle Mountain, North Dakota, raised by foster parents, wears a jacket “Honor the People.” A white-haired elder from Alaska, wearing a traditional bark-woven Native hat, leans on a cane. A raven-black-haired young man with a limp holds steady a wheelchair that carries an 80-year-old blanket-wrapped relative, her head tilted to one side.
Last night, I stood high on a forested cliff overlooking Puget Sound, not far from Skagit County’s Deception Pass. My wife, an illustrator, and I were completing a days’ visit with a long-time friend Ray Williams, a Swinomish tribal elder. He pointed out a bay to the East that serves as a launching area for a portion of his tribe’s fishing fleet, recalling a time from his childhood when the beach below was used for his tribe’s annual blessing of the salmon.
Williams is a 64-year-old cultural specialist and also one of several spiritual leaders among the Seowyn, the traditional smoke house religion of the Coast Salish. He’s been working under a part-time contract with the Roman Catholic Diocese, seeking to build common ground with missions led by the Jesuits. He also commutes twice weekly to work with Native peoples who meet at the urban mission near Pioneer Square, where we will gather for tomorrow’s Good Friday Service. “It’s about awakening.” Williams says, pausing. “To a spiritual world that will connect everything.”
Off to our right, a photographer sets up a tripod. His assistant holds a four-foot reflective screen to reduce the setting sun’s glare. The remote cliff upon which we stand has also been chosen this late afternoon to serve as a picturesque backdrop for a photo shoot. A young woman, self-conscious, totters on the edge of a forty-foot drop wearing 3-inch heels. She is posing, wearing a sleeveless blouse and long skirt, her long, salon-styled hair blowing in a light breeze. We all acknowledge each other briefly, and nod politely.
Williams, a former Swinomish tribal council member, has traveled, as all of us, his own personal “path of sorrows.” He gives credit for healing and sobriety to recovering his own Native spiritual traditions and his work with the Jesuits. He talks reflectively, this afternoon about the complexities of tribal life and politics, the fight for tribal sovereignty by his tribal leadership, the efforts to protect of Puget Sound from encroachment by corporate energy companies and developers. He pauses, mentioning the loss of his son who drowned while working on a tribal fishing boat. Surrounded by groves of cedar, we watch the sun begin to set against dim outlines of the San Juan Islands twenty miles to our Northwest.
The three of us talk together, intermittently, between silences, of spiritual things: Of ancestors, dreams, the relativity of time and space. He speaks about the power of the Catholic Mass, the Swinomish practice of prayers, sweat lodges, and the secret rituals that begin for him in the early fall, higher in the mountains, marking the beginning of another traditional winter ceremonial season.
Turning to begin our walk down the trail to our vehicle, Williams remarks he’s been notified his formal employment with the Jesuits will be coming to an end later in the month. Lack of funding, he says, and a sudden decision from the Diocese, a result of increasing lawsuits against priests for child abuse. Due to legal consequences, they have suspended Jesuit supported ministries with Native American young people.
Leaving the cliff edge, we hear the repeating click of a camera shutter. The photographer irritated, impatient, reminds his entourage that the sun is setting, the fashion shoot needs to be completed. He raises his voice, instructing the young woman, covered with make-up, uncomfortable in this rugged, outdoor environment, to keep her balance on the precipice.
Our Good Friday procession now makes its way through littered streets under an overpass known as Seattle’s Skyway. Our Swinomish friend Ray has traveled down from the Reservation to help organize this morning’s liturgy. He stands next to his friend the Jesuit priest. We hear Scripture and pray. A few feet distant is the door to the Compass Center, a homeless shelter known for its work among this city’s poor for over 30 years. Two men carrying worn duffel bags, part of this morning’s street population, walk by. Briefly acknowledging our presence, they nod their heads, and disappear behind an adjacent door on the Center that reads “Hygiene Facility.” Sounds from trucks and cars passing overhead are almost deafening.
Huddled together under this overpass, I’m suddenly aware that we’re only a few miles from the mansions of two of the richest men in the world. This morning’s Seattle Times front-page headline announced this city’s housing prices are rising more than double the average of any metro area in the country. We’re less than a ten-minute drive to Seattle’s affluent Mercer Island. One can’t purchase a mid-level home there, or anywhere in the University of Washington’s nearby Laurelhurst neighborhood, for less than a million dollars.
We crowd into an alley for the final stop in this morning’s Good Friday liturgy. Led by a volunteer who now carries on his shoulders the makeshift processional cross, our group moves next to a dumpster. Broken bottles and remnants from a torn mattress are scattered on the littered pavement. We’re informed it’s the site where, a year ago in early morning hours before dawn, a garbage truck ran over and killed a homeless man. He’d been sleeping under a pile of cardboard. A name is whispered. Several in our circle had known him as friend.
We begin the scripture reading. During the prayers, an intoxicated passerby at the end of the alley pauses, then shouts intrusively, “Don’t you see the ‘No Trespassing’ sign? What are you doing anyway? This place is full of garbage.”
The Cheyenne lifts his drum. The closing words for the morning’s liturgy are read. “With this final act, and the death of Jesus, we remember the Aztec teaching: “It ended…His body changed to light, a star that burns forever in the sky.”
Jon Magnuson is Director of The Cedar Tree Institute, a nonprofit organization in Northern Michigan that provides services and initiates projects in the areas of mental health, religion, and the environment.
