I don’t know how we got onto the topic. Bruno asked about suicide. Thankfully, this is not a major issue among the homeless youth. In our time here, there has only been one suicide attempt. Actually the very person who attempted it was listening to our present conversation. It was Guilherme. He suffers from symptoms of depression, at least, according to my extremely sparse knowledge on the subject. Most days he is fine. However, he goes through frequent periods when he shuts himself off from the rest of the world. One day when he was in such a state, he stopped and saw us. He wanted to say something to us and then he just turned around and walked away without even acknowledging our presence. We know that it is nothing personal. Guilherme does the best he can. This year he had an incident. Thankfully, there were no permanent consequences. Now, he is feeling better. However, Bruno wasn’t asking the question because of Guilherme. He was in his philosophical mood today. He wanted to know if there is forgiveness for suicide victims.

It seems like recently most of our conversations revolve on the subject of death. Even Felipe shared that he has been having nightmares about death and destruction. Well, it has been a difficult year. The pandemic has confronted us with our mortality. Even though everyone is trying to go on with business as usual, its threat is looming in the background. Our youth sense it. They are more sensitive than people give them credit. They are in the streets all day and night. They sense threat and danger intuitively. On the other hand, we only receive our information through media which is filtered and devoid of any real human contact. Our youth come in direct contact with the people in the streets. Consequently, they are also exposed to all the dangers of the pandemic. They just deal with the pandemic like many of the other dangers they experience in the streets.

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”

I don’t know how it happened but our conversation brought us to Book of Ecclesiastes. Bruno was surprised that the Bible has such nihilistic expressions. He actually used this term. It is quite amazing that a young man who spent most of his early childhood in an orphanage and then his teenage years homeless has such a wealthy vocabulary. I told him that it gets worse. The author is brutally honest and can leave his readers feeling like him. Bruno’s curiosity perked up. I explained that the author writes from a perspective of a wise king who has accessed to everything he desired. He decided to embark on a search for meaning and indulged in all the pleasures life could afford without succumbing to hedonism. Wisdom was his primary objective. His final conclusion was that life is meaningless. However, the story does not end there. It is actually the beginning of something new. We won’t be ready for the new if we don’t realize the futility of the present reality.

Bruno admitted that he hardly knew anything about the Old Testament. He knows stories about the kings especially David and Solomon. I had never really given serious thought to this. The Old Testament started out as a story of simple shepherds and then somewhere along the way, kings and politicians usurped the narrative. It became a story of the elite and the common everyday people were a mere background to these stories. Everyone looked to the authority or the king in their case to show them the way. Very little has changed today. The common and everyday people are reduced to mere statistics and often lumped together without any heed to their individuality. The focus is still on the people at the top of society’s hierarchy to give us the answers for our happiness and significance. The answer we get from them is unsatisfactory. If they were humble and wise like the preacher of Ecclesiastes, they would give us the same answer. “Everything is meaningless.” However, I see Bruno before me. He has literally nothing. He doesn’t all the opportunities even the average Brazilian has and yet he is hopeful. He does not have idealistic view of life. He has experienced the most brutal blows this life can offer. I asked Bruno, “Do you think life is meaningless?” He disagrees. It is because he is looking at life from a different perspective. It is one that the Christmas story redeems. It is the one that dominates the New Testament. It is a narrative of the common people.

Mary was a young teenage girl. In her society, she had no voice nor place except to be a mother. Christmas elevated her motherhood. The shepherds in the fields were insignificant people in society. There was no great expectation placed upon them to change the world. Yet, they are remembered throughout the world for their testimony of the little infant lying in the manger. The apostles were fishermen, tax collectors and idealists. No one expected much leadership from this crowd. Christmas opened the doors for these people to be remembered for thousands of years. Jesus healed many people who were never named and yet their stories are read everywhere in the world. Jesus came into the world to give these people a space in a kingdom which never ends. The gospel is virtually void of stories of kings and politicians. Beginning with His birth, Jesus redeemed the narrative of life from those who have nothing to offer into the hands of those whom society has ignored. Therefore, if we want to look for the meaning of life, we need to stop looking for it the wrong places.

There was never really a conclusion to our conversation. Bruno had to process some things. I needed to process them too. Perhaps, it is good that this year Christmas is going to be different. It is going to be less hectic and maybe even more contemplative than the previous years. Due to the pandemic, our friends who spent almost every Christmas Day with us won’t be doing so this year. In fact, this year we hardly saw them. However, this year we discovered something special. We found genuine friendship among our homeless youth. Before, we said that we ministered to them but now they have become our friends. They have become our family. They have helped us listen to the narrative of the Emmanuel in their lives. Life has become more meaningful to us in the period while death is quietly looming in the background.

It is the Advent season. Liturgically, it is the beginning of a new year. However, for all practicality, it is still the end of the year for us. Usually, this month invokes within us a desire to ponder upon all the valuable lessons we learned this year in order to carry them forth to the coming one. Needless to say, we have encountered a very different and difficult year. However, as religious people, we believe that the circumstances or situations do not change the nature of God. To the contrary, in this world that is constantly changing, it is our religious duty to discover the Logos which always remains constant and unchanging. Our reflections are based on discovering this constant presence that guides and gives us hope and peace regardless of the challenges we confront.

I posted some of these reflections on my newsletter but I know there are many who don’t receive it. There are readers who stumbled upon these reflections on the internet and have been following the lives of these young people who have become our family for some time. Also, the newsletter doesn’t give people an opportunity to respond to our reflections whereas here they can share their thoughts and comments. We begin our year end reflections with the most significant change in our ministry.

I have always described our ministry as bringing the church to the streets. Well, this year something changed radically. We began to have church in the streets. It happened at a time when almost everywhere in the world church buildings were closed to public worship. Our congregation is a tiny one of three. In reality, we never intended to have a church service. We just wanted to read and reflect on the Bible together with Felipe. We usually end with a short and simple prayer asking the Holy Spirit to help us live what we just learned. One day, we read the verse where Jesus said, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” (Matthew 18:20) Felipe immediately looked up and remarked that this was about us. I read this verse so many times and I never paid much attention to this detail. Felipe was right. Jesus made church simple and easy. We have added many complicated components to it and now we are facing so many challenges to maintain it. It took a pandemic to bring us back to the basics.

Our “church building” is in a park in the midst of skateboarders and cyclists. No one notices that we are a congregation. Everyone is too busy adjusting their masks and trying to socialize to take any notice of us. It seems better this way. Occasionally a homeless persons approaches us and we are forced to put into practice what we just read in the Bible. It is perfect environment to be a church. We have a friend who lost her faith many years ago and she asked if she could participate one Sunday. I asked Felipe about it. He liked the idea. I think that she will bring something special to the group. However, we don’t want to grow too much. I think we will limit to membership to five. This is a perfect number for us. I sense that we will lose something precious if we have too many people. For now, it is just the three of us and it is wonderful.

Every Sunday, we read the gospel of Matthew. We haven’t got past the Sermon on the Mount yet. There is so much to reflect on here. Nevertheless, we are almost done with it. Eventually we will read all the four gospels. Felipe has never read the gospels in their entirety before. Last week, we read, “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 7:12) I told him that this is sometimes known as the “golden rule”. He never heard about it before, neither did he understand what the “law and prophets” meant. I explained that Jesus used the “Law and Prophets” to describe what we call the Old Testament. In other words, everything sacred that was written up till then: everything is summed up in this rule. It is known as the “golden rule” because this same rule is found in other religious traditions even places as far away as China. We could see his mind working overtime. Frankly speaking, I had to stop and think about it myself. We have seen churches spilt over doctrines, ethics and politics. Christians have even killed each other over the nature of the sacraments. Yet, Jesus tells that everything boils down to this rule; if we only had listened to Him…..once again Jesus has simplified things. The problem is that whenever He simplifies something, it becomes harder to follow. Fighting over doctrines and ecclesiastic politics is much easier than living out the golden rule. I asked Felipe if he thought that people lived this rule. He smiled and said that it is a simple rule that everyone ignores.

After we say our prayers together, like good Anglicans we have our coffee hour chat except there is no coffee. Felipe wanted to know what we thought about heaven. I told him that I believe that the gospel news can only be good news if heaven begins here. I asked him what would he change in his past if he had the chance. We discovered that it was something that he has been pondering recently. He said that even though living in the streets was at times difficult and unpleasant, he learned many good things about life too. It has shaped who he is at this moment. Therefore, he said that he wouldn’t want to change anything in his past if it meant losing what he has now. This told me that he was beginning to grasp the idea of heaven now. It is not about changing our circumstances. We don’t have the power to do this and even Jesus did not do this at the Cross or prior to it. Heaven is not a place nor an ideal situation. It is a person or rather, a personal encounter with God. When we catch a glimpse of His goodness or presence in our everyday life, we have a fore taste of heaven. Felipe though about this for a moment and then he further added, “I want to know about nature and learn about the stars and all these mysteries of the universe, too.” He observed that he feels happy inside whenever he learns something about nature or the universe. “Well, then, heaven is becoming more concrete for you”, I replied.