Hugh Hollowell

Creating a compelling vision of a better world.

Empathy

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Being new in town, I am still discovering the good coffee shops.

I have learned over the years that not everyone values the same things I do in a coffee shop, and so you can’t just take anyone’s word for it – you have to investigate for yourself.

So when I walked into the shop, I was wary, on alert – like a gazelle on the African savannah.

There were signs this was going to be good right away.

Lots of natural light, but no direct sunlight to blare in your eyes. A traffic flow pattern that made intuitive sense. Instead of one huge room, a series of nooks and crannies where you could have a private conversation, or sit quietly with a book. More than one type of coffee being offered, but only two, so you could break it down pretty simply into dark or lighter roast.

But it wasn’t until I asked for a mug of coffee that I knew this was going to be good. Because the barista took the mug, which had been placed upside down on the shelf so no random dust could fly into it, and then she ran it under the steam wand on the espresso machine to heat it up.

Two simple things – the upside-down mug, the pre-heated mug – told me everything I needed to know. This was a place where the people who work there had empathy for the people who would drink coffee there.

I think empathy is perhaps the most import thing needed to live in society and the thing I see most missing in today’s interpersonal interactions.

The ability to place yourself in the shoes of another – to ask yourself what their life must be like, to seek to understand their point of view, to do what Atticus Finch was recommending in the third chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird:

“…if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” – Atticus Finch

All of that seems not only lost but no longer even aspired to. Instead, our own desires, feelings, and goals assume primacy. They are the most important thing, we tell ourselves. Our convenience, our desires, our point of view.

I tremble for our world, where, in the smallest ways, we find it impossible, as Marshall Hodgson enjoined, to find room for the other in our minds. If we cannot accommodate a viewpoint in a friend without resorting to unkindness, how can we hope to heal the terrible problems of our planet? I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant. – Karin Armstrong

Maybe that is a lot to put on a barista in a coffee shop, but the person who asks herself what people want in their experience of drinking a mug of coffee (a clean mug, a warm mug, so the coffee doesn’t get cold before you have a chance to drink it all) is on the path to making the world better, even though both acts were minor inconveniences to her. Maybe because both acts were minor inconveniences to her.

I think, more than anything else, the reason I am captivated with the Jesus Movement was its focus on the Other. It wasn’t about how to achieve enlightenment for oneself, but rather about how to save the world, how to bring about Liberation for all people. At it’s best, it is a training school for compassion, for empathy.

I don’t think empathy, if we are to survive as a species, is going to be optional. Instead, I think it is what will save us.

The journey to becoming an LGBT ally and advocate: Part 1

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“How did you become such a fierce LGBT advocate?”

The other night, a high school classmate sent me that question on Facebook Messenger. I haven’t spoken to this person in years and years, and as the question was out of the blue, it caught me by surprise.

It has been years since someone asked me a basic-level question like that. I muddled my way through the answer, but I have been thinking about it since then. How did I get here? How did I change the views about sexuality I was born in to, that I was taught, that were assumed in my culture?

And since I am about to change my context, perhaps I should think about this deliberately, because no doubt the question will come up again.

Like most changes, it wasn’t a radical clean cut with the past, but rather a series of events that collectively add up to where I am now. At least, that is how I think about it – a series of stories that shaped me and where I am now is the logical result.

Since it is a series of stories, I feel like I should tell them that way, in a series of posts over a period of time.

Here is the first story.

* * *

I was 19 and in the Marines. I was in love with a Marine named Heather who, when she smiled, had dimples deep enough for you to fall into.

Heather had grown up in a big city up North, and I was raised 10 miles outside a town of 800 people in Mississippi. We were very different people, who had each inherited the political beliefs of people who raised us. She was probably my first “liberal” friend. Everyone I had known closely until then you could assume believed more or less like I did.

It was a Saturday. We were at the museum on a date when she told me.

“Hugh, I’m gay.”

I wish I could say how accepting I was. I wish I could say I saw her coming out to me as the gift that it was, that I recognized she was putting her safety and her career in the Marines in my hands, that she loved me enough to tell me the truth about who she was.

But I didn’t handle it well. I mean, I am Southern enough that I probably wasn’t rude, but I was hurt and confused by it all. It wasn’t just breaking up with someone. Instead, it felt like they were gone forever.

When we got back to the barracks, I went for a long walk to process. Everything I knew, everything I had been taught, about sexuality told me that being gay was a sin. Everything I knew about Heather told me she was one of the kindest, best people I knew. It was my first ethical crisis – do I stay true to the religion I grew up in, or do I stay true to the person I knew and (still) loved?

In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there is a point where Jim, the escaped slave, is captured, and Huck is faced with a choice: To stay safe, or to rescue Jim. To rescue Jim is to break the law and to go against the things he had been taught about religion, morality, and race. But it would also be the only way he could be true to his friendship with Jim.

He came to a conclusion: “Alright then. I’ll go to hell!” And he helped Jim escape.

I didn’t use these words, but the sentiment is the same. I decided that I was throwing in with Heather. I knew her, loved her, and would support her, even if it meant I would not be able to be her partner or her lover. And if it meant betraying the religion I grew up with, then so be it.

Over the next six months or so, she introduced me to her friends – other Marines who were also lesbians, people I had known but who were not out. This was the first circle of LGBT folks I had ever been invited into. They were so accepting of me, answered so many of my questions – even the ones that were unintentionally rude – so loving toward me. I think I freaked some of them out, but they knew I was important to Heather, so I was accepted.

Reading back over that, I recognize that there is a way to read this that makes me sound heroic, whereas in reality, I was scared.  I was changing, what I believed was changing, and I had a small circle of people who supported this change, while the dominant culture I was raised in and immersed in did not.

So, I took the coward’s way out. I supported Heather and her friends but kept my mouth shut in other situations. I was like the guy who has black friends at work, but laugh’s at his white friend’s racist jokes so he can fit in.

And it’s important to point out that I still believed same-sex attraction was sinful. I just overlooked it in Heather and her friends.

But the Evangelical faith of my childhood had a chink in it, and I would never be the same.

NB: Heather and I are still friends to this day. She is a grandmother, a nurse, and a cancer survivor who has a beautiful family and life. She has given me permission to use her actual name when I tell this story.

One change at a time

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As I mentioned before, I am in a time of new routines, and as a result I broke one of my cardinal rules for managing my ADHD – only make one change at a time.

You see this a lot at the beginning of the year. People will decide to change their eating habits, join a gym, meditate 20 minutes a day and start getting up at 5AM – all in one day. The end result is they get frustrated and overwhelmed, and then feel disempowered because they couldn’t effect change in their lives yet again.

But if they had made a list of the changes they wanted to make, and then added one of those changes a month, say, then at the end of the year they could have had 12 major changes in their life with relatively little friction.

So, I have a pretty hard and fast rule that I only try to add one new habit at a time. And I always try to make it a habit, because habits are things you get for free. And it has worked for me, when I remember to do it. First I changed how I eat, then I added exercise later when eating was no longer stressful.

But this month, I messed up. I joined a gym, so I can exercise indoors and add some weight-bearing exercise to my routine. And I started blogging daily. Both of those have to be done in the morning, if I am going to do them at all. And also, it’s December, the hardest month of the year for me at work. All of those things would be routine changing on their own. Add all three together, and it is chaos.

So I am going to back off the daily blogging until after Christmas and give it some thought. I like daily blogging – I like the idea flow, the discipline, the routine – but the way I am currently blogging, with longer form posts and occasional essays, with photos, is pretty time consuming. Sure, Seth Godin is able to pound out a post a day for over a decade, but he ain’t formatting images, either. His blogging process consists of typing and hitting publish.

I do like the discipline of getting up at 5:30 and going to the gym every morning, though. I am keeping that one for now.

I hope you and your family have a joyous holiday, and I wish you every good thing in the coming year.

Sitting in the dark with a friend. Again.

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It was Tuesday morning, and I had just gotten to work when I got the call.

It was Nessie, Lena’s daughter.

“Momma died this morning, Hugh. Can you come over to the house? We are waiting for the funeral home.”

“Of course. I will be right there.”

It’s never convenient. It’s never easy. It never fits in your plans, and it is always emotional and difficult. It isn’t happy.

That’s why I call it sitting in the dark.

* * *

I met Lena what seems like a hundred years ago, but it was actually more like ten. I had only been in town a few months, and was just getting to know people.

Lena was short and stocky, a Black woman with a huge grin and a near toothless lisp who acted like a momma to many of the folks on the street.

When we first met, she was only a few weeks sober, after a lifetime of drinking. She had woken up in the hospital after a blackout, and the doctor told her if she drank again, she would die. This was complicated by the fact her husband also drank, and refused to quit. So she left. She chose life.

Lena struggled to find employment, and bounced around the shelters for a while, but eventually she got a small duplex apartment and a job at a dollar store. Things were going pretty good.

It was sometime around the end of 2007 when she ran into me in the park.

“Hugh, I need some help. I was sick last week, and missed some work. Now I don’t have any money to pay my light bill. Can you give me the money to pay it?”

I had only been in Raleigh a little while. Eventually I would develop a network of agencies, colleagues and friends who could help with a $75 shortfall like this, but back then, I had none of that. I was barely surviving myself, and I just couldn’t do it.

“I’m sorry Lena, but I just can’t do it.”

Lena’s smile turned into a tight-lipped frown, and she put her hands on her hips.

“I thought you were my friend! And now you won’t even help me?”

I got pissed. I was trying, you know? I didn’t know what to do, and felt helpless.

“Dammit, Lena! I am your friend. I don’t have any money, and I can’t keep your lights on. What the hell do you want me to do?”

Lena looked at me with sadness, and resignation, and no doubt, fatigue.

“You could come sit with me in the dark.”

Damn.

It was from Lena that I would learn about what my work was to become; a ministry of presence. A lifetime devoted to not solving other people’s problems, but of being present with them in the pain. A new way of ministry that was as old as the story of Jesus on the cross: The romans wondered why God did not save Jesus from the cross, but Jesus just wanted to know why he was alone there.

Lena’s sass reminded me that the witness of the New Testament is not that God will get us out of shit, but that we are not alone in the shit, and that while we often pray for success, what we are actually called to is faithfulness.

It would be several weeks before Lena could get her lights turned back on. And nearly daily, we would sit in her cold, dim living room on a couch of questionable provenance and tell stories. She would tell me about her two adult children, about their own drinking problems, about her son’s time in jail, about her ex-husband. She would tell me about the preacher she was convinced was a hustler, and the drug dealer on the corner, and her landlord who she was convinced was also a pimp. I told her about why I had moved here, and about Renee, who I was dating at the time. She wanted to know when we would get married, and why I lived in the “hood”, and what my life had been like growing up.

“I know you grew up poor. I can tell. You aren’t scared of Black people or poor people.”

Back then, the Salvation Army’s shelter was beside the park, and they served a 5PM meal. It wasn’t very good, but it was hot and dependable. And free. I would often run into Lena there, and she would introduce me to folks. Lena is one of maybe three people who made it their mission in the early days to show me around, tell me how the streets in Raleigh work, and gave me credibility among the folks who live outside.

I remember when I told her Renee and I were getting married.

“Hugh, I’m happy for you, but you need to get that girl a good place to live. I know you’re a hood rat, but she ain’t – she’s from Arkansas. You need to move into a good neighborhood. Trust me on this.”

For the next few years, Lena was one of the constants in my life. We were, in every sense of the word, friends. I owed her so much – she had taught me who I was born to be.

* * *

Eventually, she got her disability approved and got into income-based housing, and was seldom on the street and I saw a lot less of her. I would visit her apartment, but she didn’t get out as much as she used to; avoiding the riff-raff, she called it.

One day, her daughter called me to tell me her mom was in the hospital with breast cancer and was in a dark place. Could I come visit?

Of course I can. Sitting in the dark places is what I do.

The next few years was the battle with cancer. First a lumpectomy, then a double mastectomy, then chemo for a while. I probably made 10 hospital visits for various things.

My butt was stuck at the office a lot in those years, so when she was feeling OK, she would come and see me to catch up. We would talk about her noisy neighbors, and she would ask after Renee, and she would talk about her fears around dying and her regrets about her children not getting along.

Back in the winter, Lena got the diagnosis that her cancer was not only back, but had spread all over. She had maybe six months to live, at best.

I wish I could tell you I visited her daily during that time, but I didn’t. I would have a crisis that would throw me into a great depression, and that would occupy much of my life all summer. I would go by periodically, and she would come by, but it wasn’t anywhere near as often as I should.

A few weeks ago I was out of town, and when I got back, the staff told me she had came by looking for me. I meant to call her back, but I forgot, honestly.

So when I got the call from Nessie telling me she was gone, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

“Please come, Hugh. The funeral home is coming for her. Wait with us.”

“I will be right there,” I said.

I was feeling regret and sadness and powerless, but waiting is something I know how to do.

* * *

She and her son were living in a rooming house on a narrow side street. A house designed to have two bedrooms had been cut up and partitioned into seven rooms, all of which were rented out by the week, with a common bathroom at the end of the hall.

When I arrived, there were a ton of neighbors on the porch. The hospice nurse was on the porch, just finishing a phone call.

“Are you the preacher? They been waiting on you.”

We went in together. The house smelled of sweat and fear and cabbage and desperation, the narrow hallway lined with flake board walls pressing in on us as we moved to the back of the house and entered a crowded 10×8 room.

Lena’s son was there, a huge man with tears running down his face. He grabbed me in a bear hug and thanked me for coming. Nessie’s son was there too, a 14 year old boy Lena never tired of talking about. And on the bed was my friend, Lena, who had fought a long time for dignity and respect and sobriety and later, her own life, and who had been tired and was now at rest.

The hospice nurse asked me if I would say a prayer, so I did, and then I read from the Bible:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”

And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”

I told them that some people believe you aren’t really dead as long as someone remembers your name, so it was important to remember her. For the next 20 minutes or so, we stood around her bed and told stories, and remembered her boldness, her sassiness, her big smile and her determination.

And then it was time. The funeral home guy showed up, and Nessie, her son and I went for a walk while they took Lena’s body out of the house, because there is no way she should see that.

When we got back, there was paperwork to fill out, and things that needed my signature as a witness, and then the car with Lena’s body in it left and we were left in an empty room that contained nothing but a twin bed, a loveseat, a tv and some memories.

Nessie and her brother and I walk to my car.

“I’m glad you came this morning. You been part of our family for a long time. It was right that you were here.”

Her brother hugs me again, and thanks me for coming.

And I get in the car and drive away, having sat in the dark with Lena for the last time.

* * *

Lena didn’t have much in the way of success, at least not as the world measures it. She died without any estate, in a shitty little room in a shitty part of town. But Lena taught me why I was here, and the value of presence. She showed me my calling, my vocation, and she loved me. She changed my life, and for that, I owe her everything.