Thanksgiving at St. Anthony’s: A retrospective

We were very lucky to include Robert Rees as a volunteer and guest blogger during the first holiday season in the new Dining Room.  We hope to feature Robert as an ongoing guest blogger on topics related to social justice, Franciscan values, and other related issues.  Robert is a visiting professor of religion at Graduate Theological Union and the University of California, Berkeley; he serves on the board of the Marin Interfaith Council.

‘Thanksgiving at St. Anthony’s

by Robert A. Rees, Ph.D.

“We are committed to a healing ministry serving the spiritual, emotional and physical needs of those who are poor. We are called to solidarity with the poor and seek to identify with those we serve, realizing that by sharing in the healing of others, we too are healed.”

–St. Anthony’s Mission Statement

On Thanksgiving morning I took two of my teenage grandsons, Porter and Emmett, to St. Anthony’s in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco to help feed the poor and homeless. We parked in a lot close to St. Anthony’s and walked past a sprawl of people for whom the sidewalk had been (and likely often is) their bedroom. I thought of Jesus’s statement, “The poor you have always with you,” which often I have considered more a condemnation than a statement of inevitably.

As we entered 150 Golden Gate Street to attend an orientation, I thought of the lyrics to the 1936 song, “San Francisco”: “San Francisco, open your golden gate.” For many hundreds of homeless and hungry people every day and for three thousand on this day, St. Anthony’s is a golden gate. For sixty-five years the staff and a host of volunteers have served hot meals to people for whom a hot meal, or even a cold one, is not always assured.

After an introduction by one of the Franciscan friars, Father John, Angelina (Manager of the social ACTion program) recounted the following statistical summary of the meal that we would be serving in the new dining room across the street:

• 3,000 trays of food
• 4,800 pounds of turkey
• 1,3950 pounds of sweet potatoes
• ???       Pounds of yams
• 457 pounds of cranberry sauce
• 4,000 rolls
• 4,000 individual pumpkin pies

But such statistics don’t begin to capture what was to transpire across the street because Angelina said in addition to the food we were to serve, it was important to smile, to ask the people we were serving their names, to use their names as we served them, and even to sit down and talk to them if we felt inclined. She said, “It is important to make them feel like they are part of a family, a community.” Her remarks made me think of Mother Theresa’s, “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”

“Small things with great love” could be St. Anthony’s motto. It was evident with the volunteers pouring cups of hot cider to those in the long line waiting to be served, with the chefs and support staff who had prepared the meal, with those preparing the trays of food and those delivering the trays to the three hundred people sitting at tables, with those who bussed the trays, with the security personnel who maintained order, and with St. Anthony’s dedicated staff who made everything run smoothly—and did so with infectious care and cheerfulness.

Since there were more volunteers than were needed, I decided to talk to some of the staff, volunteers, and homeless to get a deeper understanding of this miracle that takes place on Golden Gate Street every day.

Carmelita is a diminutive, delightful ninety-year old Filipina who has been volunteering at St. Anthony’s for the past thirteen years. As she placed glasses of apple juice on each passing tray, she said, “I want to be of service until the day I die. It is what I can do for all of the blessings the Lord has given me. I’m not rich but I feel rich and I think it is beautiful that rich people are also blessing these people by giving food so people can be fed, doing what I can’t do.”

Thirteen years ago Janene began bringing her young daughter Zoe to serve on Thanksgiving Day. This year Janene was here by herself and Zoe, continuing the tradition, was helping to bless a similar group of people in Washington, D.C., where she is a college student.

I noticed a handsome black man with the most amazing dreadlocks I had ever seen standing in line. His name is Lamond and as we moved toward the dining room he told his story: He has lived in many places, including Switzerland and France. He is an artist and even had an exhibition in Paris many years ago. Fallen on hard times, these days he sells the “Street Sheet,” a newspaper “published by the Coalition on Homelessness” in a number of cities across the nation. Lamond, has worked at a number of jobs, including custodial work UC Berkeley.
Now seventy eight, he says with a glint in his eye that he is a young man at heart who “has fallen in love lots of times” (it is easy to see why!). He says he has “saved lives” and considers himself “a public servant.”

Mama Rose looks like the kind of mother every person would want. Like many people who stood in line to be fed at St. Anthony’s, she is a person of bearing and dignity in spite of her present situation. Trained as a nurse at City College and UCLA, she worked at UC San Francisco Medical Center (where she also gave birth to three children) and also served in the Army and went to Saudi Arabia. When she spoke of her “nine” children, twenty-four grandchildren, and two grandchildren I asked if all of the children were hers. She replied, “No, some just adopted me.”

About half way through the afternoon, I met Barry Stenger, the Executive Director of St. Anthony’s, who told me more about the work of the St. Anthony Foundation, including the fact that they serve forty-thousand meals a year, “without any assistance from the government.” A former professor, he now devotes full time to helping San Francisco’s down and out population. Barry said that one of the most gratifying aspects of his work at St. Anthony’s is helping people connect with one another and reconnect with their better selves. In a 2013 newsletter he wrote, “Connecting to our better selves; that’s the true joy and the gift of this season.”

Ken is someone whom St. Anthony’s has helped connect with his better self. A security guard at St. Anthony’s for the past seven years, Ken could easily have been in prison for the rest of his life. High by the time he was eleven in a totally dysfunctional family, Ken later became addicted to Meth and did many of the dark and violent things meth users do to feed their habit. He was saved by a girlfriend and St. Anthony’s “From Addict to Activist” program. He recounted his first visit to St. Anthony’s on a day not unlike Thanksgiving. He said, “When I walked in, a volunteer said, ‘We’re so glad you’ve come today. We love you.’” He said it had been a long time since he had heard those words and at first he distrusted them but slowly he began working toward connecting with himself through connecting with others. He has been drug-free for seven years, married his girlfriend and now has two children of his own—and is hoping to influence others like him through his work at St. Anthony’s.

In his poem, “Death of a Hired Man,” Robert Frost says, “Home is where when you have to go there/They have to take you in.” The wonderful thing about St. Anthony’s is that taking people in carries no such imperative or mandate—it is just what they do, and have been doing for sixty-five years. It is a reflection of the work of both St. Anthony, who is the patron saint of “lost things,” including I suspect lost souls, but also the work of the Franciscans whose service among the poor is reflected in the example of the new Pope who, though a Jesuit, has taken the name “Francis” after the saint from Assisi whose life was dedicated to identifying with and serving the poor.

In a world in which so many of our fellow human beings suffer and are in need, it is easy to become overwhelmed to the point of moral paralysis or suffer “compassion fatigue,” but on this day, as with every day at St. Anthony’s, the energy was abundant and the joy contagious. When my grandsons and I sat down with other family members at the end of the day to enjoy a Thanksgiving meal of our own, we had a heightened sense of gratitude not only for what we had, but for what we had been given earlier in the day at St. Anthony’s.