I walked into the small, overheated, stuffy office for our weekly staff meeting. Andrea, the rector, was there, her gangly body looking uncomfortable on the wooden office chair, her pinched sour face more unpleasant than usual, and her short mousy hair typically unkempt. The light from the window behind her dazzled my eyes, making it hard to look her in the face. To her left sat Frank, the assistant rector, with his cherubic, round, smiling face. To his right, behind a computer screen, sat the awkwardly pregnant parish administrator Nicole. I had been hired to manage the parish soup kitchen ministry to the homeless.

“Let’s get right to the important issues today,” Andrea began suddenly. “Bruce, you’ve got to tell Fred he can’t be in this building unless you’re here.” Fred was one of our regular homeless clients who also volunteered in the soup kitchen.

“Is there a problem?” I asked. Unaware of any observed or reported untoward behavior by Fred, I told Andrea that I was present at the soup kitchen only weekdays.

“Well then you have to tell him he cannot be here at coffee hour.” (Sunday coffee hour after the service is sometimes called the Episcopalians’ “eighth sacrament.”)

“What’s the problem?”

“He scares people.”

“And how does he do that?” I asked curiously.

“He sits in the middle of the floor in that chair of yours and dozes off, and people get scared.”

“You mean he sits there, does nothing, dozes, and that scares people?”

“Yes, it does,” she said huffily. “People know he is an addict.”

“Does he do anything other than doze off?”

“No.”

“And people are scared of that?” I asked, hoping my voice was clear of the anger I was feeling about yet another of her criticisms of the soup kitchen and its homeless clients.

“Yes, and I want you to tell him he cannot be here unless you are here too.” She fidgeted in her chair nervously, skinny claw-like hands clasping and unclasping in her lap as if they weren’t quite sure where they belonged.

I had a mental image of Fred in his favorite wobbly rolling office chair sitting in his usual place in the corner I used for an office, dozing and occasionally twitching upright as the chair tilted precariously, while upper middle class parishioners politely sipped coffee, carefully nibbled their cake so as not to spill crumbs on the floor, chatted about mostly nothing in a brightly lit parish hall whose walls were lined with locked cabinets storing canned food we would make into lunches and suppers for the homeless, one of whom was being blissfully ignored by the very people who were supposed to minister to him.

“Well, people know he’s an addict,” Andrea continued huffily. Fred didn’t hide his addiction from staff. He told me once he was on the methadone program, but I suspected he also supplemented between clinic appointments.

With more sarcasm than intended, I responded, “Perhaps we need to talk about how we tell addicts and other hurting people they are not welcome in this church.” The meeting somehow played itself out with no further verbal swordplay.

Andrea was right to suspect Fred of being less than pure. Although, unlike many of his homeless peers, he kept himself neatly dressed and groomed, he was after all an addict, and like all of us addicts, not to be trusted.

We had just received a donation of warm socks (much sought after by our clients for the impending winter) and stored them out of sight in the dark recesses of the church’s cellar behind a seldom-locked door. Another regular told me that he had “just seen Fred down the farmers’ market selling them socks.” I checked the pile of stored socks. It had decreased markedly.

“Fred, can we talk?”

“Yeah, ’s up?”

“In my office.” We entered and sat down. I didn’t like this. I dislike confrontation, and Fred was one of my favorite people. “People tell me they’ve seen you at the market selling socks. I’ll say this only once. You’re an addict. Addicts and alcoholics lie. I know because I’m an alcoholic. We lie very well. I’ll take any answer you give me, but if I ever find you stealing from here, your ass is grass, and you’re outta here. Understood?”

Sitting straight up and looking me straight in the eyes, he replied, “Yeah. I did not steal those socks.”

Daily thereafter Fred came to me before leaving and insisted I search his backpack. I told him that was not necessary because I had accepted his answer. He insisted. So I did. Reluctantly.

Problem solved. No more socks went missing.

Issue not closed. About a week later Andrea stormed across the parish hall. Her heels echoed in its middle-of-the-day emptiness. Standing rigidly in front of me, she confronted me about the sock situation, repeating the “word from the street.” I told her Fred and I had talked and there were no more socks missing.

“Well I want him out of here!”

“Why?”

“Well, he scares people. I already told you that,” she said with impatience. I looked at her. She started to tremble and almost screamed in my face, “Well he’s an addict and a thief and I want him out of here!”

“I’m not sure it’s my job to tell people who can be here and who can’t.”

“I’m the rector and I’m telling you what to do!”

“I can’t do that just because of an allegation without any actual proof.” I didn’t remind her that Jesus hung around with people of questionable business ethics (like his disciple Matthew, who was a tax collector) and women of reputed easy virtue, and that the whole band of them was accused of drinking too much. (Heroin was not much available in Galilee.)

“I’ll speak to him!” she screeched at me as she stomped off across the parish hall, heels again echoing in the empty space.

As I left that day, Fred was sitting on the steps of the church, bent over with forearms on his knees, hands clasped, and head hung low. He looked up at me as I got close to him. “Well, that’s it, huh?” he asked dispiritedly.

“I guess so.” God, I was hurting.

“People don’t like us because we live on the street and are addicts.”

“You think that about me, Fred?” (Did I plead for his answer?)

“No.”

I didn’t see Fred again.

Sometime next summer there was a short item on the third or fourth page of the paper that an “adult male” was found on the Common, not far from the church, dead from an apparent overdose. Heroin. “Word from the street” told me it was Fred.