She’d been skeptical.  Curtis had always been good to her, but he had what you might call an alternative lifestyle.  He and his wife lived in some kind of commune up there in Duluth.  Sure, they glorified it with the title, “intentional community” and it was supposed to be a mission.  They even named it after a Bible character—Barnabas Place.  But it wasn’t like they were building home equity and saving for retirement.  They turned their paychecks over to the community—pooling their resources Curtis called it—and they did some kind of charity work with homeless people.  Curtis said she couldn’t call them crazy.  They had “mental illness.”  Whatever.  She had her doubts.  But the Sister-hood was behind her, and Curtis said Barnabas Place was close to the harbor, there was plenty to do helping others, and God knew she needed the work getting over her grief.

She took the Greyhound from Red Wing, and Curtis met her at the station.  Curtis was her brother’s second son.  Her brother Lowell had gone to college on the GI bill after the war and ended up as president of Munsingwear’s lingerie division, working in downtown Minneapolis and living in a mansion in Edina.  His older boy was a gastro-enterologist in Wisconsin, Curtis was a headache.  He’d met his wife Suzanne in New York City at one of those places that take kids off the streets and gets them off drugs where he volunteered one summer.  They blamed Suzanne for turning a perfectly nice Presbyterian boy from Macalester College into a socialist working the slums instead of going to law school. Thank God they’d moved back to the Midwest even if it was Duluth.

Veryl and Curtis walked the three blocks to Barnabas Place.  Curtis said the car was being used to take some of the residents to their group meeting.  The car?  The Barnabas community had purchased a cluster of six houses, two for crazy folks—people with mental illness—and the rest for the three families and six single people who formed the community.  It wasn’t like Curtis was a psychiatrist, that he needed to work with homeless people.  Before leaving New York, he’d earned a Master of Divinity degree and gotten himself ordained as a Presbyterian minister.  His so-called ministry was befriending crazy people, AIDS patients, and druggies.  Barnabas Place was what he called “supported transitional housing.”  Veryl called it dangerous.  Or just plain nuts.

Since “busy hands are happy hands,” Veryl didn’t even unpack her bags before she headed to the kitchen, scrubbed and began chopping onions for the night’s chili dinner.  Five nights a week Barnabas served dinner for Duluth’s homeless, prepared and served by people from just about every church in town.  The Methodists did ham and green beans on the 1^st Monday of the month, Wisconsin synod Lutherans did lentil soup and biscuits the 2^nd Monday, and the 3^rd Monday (today) it was chili and corn muffins by the ELCA in Proctor.  Every night of the month a different menu.  You could set your calendar by it.  Veryl spent her month recovering from grief:  cooking supper, eating it with the guests, and washing up.  Just like home, except there was more conversation.  By the end of the month, she’d heard every reason people have for cooking for poor people they don’t even know.

Roger was a Poli Sci major at UMD whose honors thesis on poverty took him to Barnabas for a closer look.  He’d intended to change the world, but in the meantime he was feeding hungry people.  Nancy was getting divorced and needed something to do the night her husband had the kids, so she tagged along with her co-worker’s church for fourth Wednesday meals.  It was a short step to showing up every week, no matter whose church was serving, and next thing she knew, she’d even gone to a couple church services.  Nate was fulfilling a community service sentence.  Leah came because the med student she was dating was fulfilling the public health component of his program.

Veryl’s favorite conversations were the ones with Curtis, hunkered down at the pot scrubbing station at the end of the night’s meal.  At first, she’d gravitated there because it was quiet and she wouldn’t have to get entangled with the church folks (who always seemed to be having too much fun cooking and yakking with the guests).  But this was Curtis’ customary place, and soon it was their special time together.  It turns out that after five years at Barnabas, Curtis had hit a wall, questioning whether he was doing the right thing.  The same people kept cycling back onto the streets, into the jails and hospital and out again.  The people who get to Barnabas, he confided, aren’t easy to love.  They let you down, they don’t plan, they waste the resources you provide, and misuse what you give them.  They aren’t grateful.  They get addicted and make really bad decisions.  He and the other members of the Barnabas community had to work day jobs to support their ministry, and they felt isolated from the city.  They weren’t even making a dent in all the need, and Duluth is a small city.  He had questioned his faith and his God.  He’d staked his life on Barnabas Place.  Sure, his wife and children were part of the vision, but his parents were downright hostile about it.  His father thought Curtis was a failure and his mother was disappointed. 

He had decided, he said, that Barnabas Place wasn’t about success.  He wasn’t precisely sure what a successful Barnabas Place would look like, but it aimed for the kingdom of God.  Maybe a successful Barnabas Place was one that worked itself out of a job.  For instance, they’d given Ted, a homeless vet, a micro-loan to raise red wigglers to sell as bait for fishermen.  After a successful first summer, the ice fishermen kept up the demand over the winter, and soon Ted had composted enough restaurant food scraps into dirt for an organic vegetable business.  Charlene had been an exotic dancer who transitioned out of jail at Barnabas.  She answered an ad to become an H&R Block tax preparer, and now she’s bookkeeper for non-profits.  One at a time, one at a time.

            When Veryl reminded Curtis of Roger and his desire to change the world, Curtis chuckled.  That’s what he’d wanted to do, he said.  It was his faith crisis that stopped that program.  When he realized he wasn’t changing the world, he figured the most courageous thing to do would be to keep walking the streets, meeting folks, offering an alternative.  Maybe this wasn’t the way to God’s kingdom, but changing lives one at a time filled the gap for now.  He turned to his aunt, the only family member to show any interest in his life’s work, and she’d only come because of her own grief.  There was a sweet, indefinable look on his face that Veryl couldn’t read.   “Did I stake my life on the wrong thing?” he asked.  Maybe it was a rhetorical question.  Veryl gazed at the burnt-on spaghetti sauce in the pot in front of her.  Curtis’ enigmatic smile did not betray sadness or even doubt.  His question wasn’t for his sake, it was for hers.  Did I stake my life on the wrong thing?  Veryl thought about her 52 years cooking food that just got eaten up and dishes that no sooner got washed than they got dirty and needed washing again.  “It was right at the time,” she said.  To which Curtis replied, “It still is.  It’s just right for different reasons."