NONFICTION
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Absolution
by Barbara Applegate

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St. Boniface Church - Barbara Applegate
The beautiful old church in the Tenderloin, St. Boniface, was warm and softly lit as I stepped inside at 7:00 in the morning to begin my four hours as a Volunteer Hospitality Monitor for the Gubbio Project. The Gubbio Project is a nonprofit in partnership with St. Boniface that provides daytime shelter, rest, safety, and community, Monday-Friday, 6am to 3pm, to homeless people in San Francisco.
 
Beautiful stained-glass windows high above emitted dim, gently colored light. The long, wooden pews in the back two-thirds of the church were usually already full when I arrived. The doors had opened an hour earlier to cold, damp, exhausted people who had no place else to go. Now, homeless men and women, our guests, were stretched out on the pews, sleeping, or resting or quietly chatting with nearby friends. Bags, suitcases, small carts, cardboard boxes, and plastic garbage bags bulging with all they possessed in the world were squeezed into the pew with them or stashed on the floor beneath them. Wheelchairs and sometimes a bicycle were stored against the far wall. Some guests had blankets covering their prone bodies, some had no possessions but the clothes they were wearing. Favored pews were those closest to the old-fashioned radiators that gave off heat. In the back of the church, there was space for six people to stretch out on the floor. Even the floor was a valued space in this warm and safe environment. If they didn’t have a blanket, they lay directly on the floor, head pillowed on an arm or perhaps on a rolled-up jacket.
 
The pews in the front third of the church were reserved for neighborhood residents who attended the daily church service from 8:00-8:30, or just came into the church to sit in silence. Homeless guests could also sit in the front pews as long as they did not lie down and they were quiet. Usually several Gubbio guests participated in the church service.
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In the back of the church, there was a supply closet where volunteers gave out toothbrushes and toothpaste, cough drops, aspirin, band aids, razors, combs, safety pins, and other personal supplies upon request. Bathrooms, one for women and female-identified, and another for men and male-identified, were available and sometimes, especially for the men’s, there was a line of people waiting to use them. Bathrooms that homeless people had access to were hard to find in the Tenderloin.

​My job was to welcome the guests, be friendly and helpful, and give out supplies upon request. On a cold or wet day, there would always be guests waiting for a pew to become available. In the dim light, I would help them find a vacant pew or a space on the floor at the back of the church. If a guest wanted to wait for a pew so he or she could lie down, I would tell them that if they wanted to wait up in front, I would come and let them know when a pew had come open so they could lie down to sleep or just relax and rest in this safe place.  
 
One guest that I enjoyed chatting with each week was Marcy (not her real name). She was there almost every Friday and carried her two to four heavy bags of possessions with her always. She was about 50 years old and had several physical problems that caused her to limp on swollen legs. She was on a waiting list to get housing but had already been waiting a long time. She usually spent the night on a friend’s couch but was not allowed to stay there during the day. I was glad she had an inside place to sleep at night.
 
One morning when she came in, I saw that there was a brightness about her. When I went over to talk with her, she told me, with a big smile on her face, “I’m going to get rich today!”
 
“Oh,” I said, “what’s happening? How are you going to get rich?”
 
She held up a large empty garbage bag and said with great enthusiasm, “There’s a big festival in the park today and I’m going to be collecting!” 
 
At first I didn’t understand what she was talking about—but then I realized that she was going to go from garbage can to garbage can at the festival and collect the empty cans and bottles tossed there by the festival-goers. Then she would take them to the recycling center. This was how she was going to get “rich.” I smiled at her and wished her good luck and a good day. As I thought about her “getting rich,” my own privileges weighed heavily on my shoulders.
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My least favorite job was distributing breakfast tickets. Different groups of local community volunteers took turns providing and cooking a hot breakfast every Friday morning. Next door to the church was a small elementary school, affiliated with the church. The church building and the school building were connected and the Gubbio Project had the use of the small kitchen and dining room in the basement on Fridays. Breakfast for the Gubbio guests had to be cooked and served and cleaned up by 9:00 each time so that the students could have the use of the dining room. The main problem with breakfast for the guests was that because the kitchen and dining room were so small, only about 35 of the guests could be served the hot breakfast. The 60 or so guests who were not selected by the breakfast lottery went without.
 
When breakfast was almost ready, notice would be sent upstairs and staff and volunteers would begin distributing 35 breakfast tickets by lottery. We would each take six or seven tickets with numbers on them and begin matching the number on the ticket with the number on the pew. If I had ticket #55, ideally the guest in pew #55 would be awake and hoping that I was headed his or her way to give him or her a ticket for a hot breakfast. This was the ideal. But upon occasion, the guest in pew #55 would be asleep. I would gently tap him/her on the ankle but if he was in a deep sleep, he wouldn’t stir. But the guest in the pew behind #55 would be staring at me with hungry eyes. If the sleeping guest in #55 did not wake up, it was very difficult for me not to simply give the ticket to the guest that by now was begging me for it. But this was against the rules. If we could not give the ticket to the intended person, we were to go back and get another number and give the new ticket to the guest in the pew of the new number. But it was hard to deny a hungry, homeless guest a hot meal when the person it was intended for was not going to take advantage of it. More than once I simply gave the ticket to the person who was begging me for it if the intended could not be awakened easily.
 
One time when I had been volunteering only a few months, I gave the breakfast ticket that was intended for a man who was deeply asleep, to the young man in the pew behind who asked me--begged me, for the ticket, telling me that he had not eaten all day the day before. As soon as I gave this man the ticket, a deep, loud voice sounded: 
 
“Did you see what she did? She gave that ticket to someone who wasn’t supposed to get it! Did you see what she did?” 
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His words, repeated in his booming voice, rang out into the silence of the church. My heart began pounding and sweat broke out on my forehead and under my arms. I had done something wrong and had been caught in the action! I was 70 years old but I felt like a guilty child! What should I do? I did not know what to do, so I ignored the accusing man who was sitting upright in a nearby pew, pointing at me, looking all around to see who had heard his accusation. I put my head down and continued distributing the tickets I had left, my heart pounding as the man finally fell silent. I was able to match the remaining tickets to the pew numbers without incident and a few more guests happily got up to stand in line to go downstairs to a hot breakfast. And I, standing as if paralyzed, in the aisle, my heart still pounding, wondered what I should do. Without thinking further, my body walked over to the man who was large, unshaven and shabbily dressed. He looked to be in his 50’s and, though silent, was still sitting upright in his pew watching me. Without volition, these words flowed out of my mouth:
 
“I know I was wrong to give that ticket away to that young man. I know it wasn’t fair and I didn’t follow the rules. You were right.”
 
“Oh-h-h, well now . . . don’t want to get you in trouble with your boss, now. No, no, now . . . . Don’t worry about it. No, no need to worry about it,” he replied in a low voice, his eyes downcast.
 
“Thank you,” I replied and, stunned, I turned and walked away. I suddenly realized that I had confessed my sin and been forgiven.
 
I never saw this particular man again during the several years I volunteered at the Gubbio Project, but I will always remember him and the gift he gave me as a result of my confession.
 
 
Postscript:  It has been five years since I last volunteered at the Gubbio Project. In those years the program successfully expanded to a second church to serve the homeless in the Mission. However, it has not been immune to the coronavirus pandemic. The Gubbio Project, sadly, is now closed.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barbara Applegate received a BA at UC Berkeley, with a major in Spanish, and an MS in Education at CSU, East Bay. As an administrator of Early Childhood Education, she developed a program to teach parents in non-English speaking families the value of helping their children retain the home language while learning English. She is the mother of 3 daughters, a traveler and a contemplative. She loves taking writing classes--not only because she learns from them, but because they give her structure for writing.
Other pieces in this Issue:
Fiction
The World Above
Nonfiction
Stillness
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Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by members of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at San Francisco State University​.​
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