Alan Graham

Graham tells stories of the homeless individuals he's met and worked with in his ministry Mobile Loaves and Fishes.

The problem is that Graham, in his effort to focus on the positive in these people and their made-in-God's-image status, ends up romanticizing poverty, addiction, and mental illness. For example, on page 46, he recounts the following story:

He asked me if the glass-plastic-poly-whatever elephant in his yard was crystal. It wasn't, but I still replied, "Yeah, maybe." He said, "Screw you, I know it is." This small ability to see the potential renewal in anything and value in everything, so embedded in J.P., brought a new sense of sacredness to all space and all practice, as everything was now seen on a heaven-bound trajectory of restoration.

Really, the moral of this story is simply that J.P. is in denial. Graham is reading way too much into this.

He tries to redefine the definition of "homeless" by talking about the emotions and connectedness of "home," but that's really not what the term means. He states at one point, "I don't like calling Danny homeless because so much about him is so homeful. Especially when so many people with extraordinary homes are pretty homeless when it comes to matters of the heart and soul." (p 65)

Graham seems to overlook very practical matters and tries to spiritualize everything. To try to keep the practical and spiritual in balance is one thing, but that is not what he's doing.

It's also hard to take seriously the words of someone who spouts off shoulds when they themselves aren't living out those shoulds. He scoffs at those who give 10% of their income away (side note: most American Christians give less than 3% in reality), and says people could/should give away 50-80% of their incomes. I don't even disagree with his point, but a few pages earlier, he was talking about how he has an Apple watch and loves it. Perhaps if he seemed more extreme in his own lifestyle choices, I could understand the extreme judgment he passes on others.

A huge problem for me is that Graham kept referring to certain individuals as "Christlike" when there was no indication that they were even Christians. He decided they were "Christlike" because they were "good people" or generous in some way. But there are lots of "good" people who don't know Jesus Christ. What makes a person "like Christ" comes in their attitude to God the Father. Jesus Christ laid down his own will, and even his life in surrender to the will of God the Father. This is what we have to do in order to be Christlike. There was very little mention of the actual, true Gospel in these pages.

Graham also claims "... the disrespect for human life is almost a distinctly Western problem." (p 98) Since when?! Every culture in every part of history has dealt with humans not valuing the lives of others. This is the problem of a fallen world, not of the West exclusively.

There are so many other books that will encourage Christians and spur them on to good works, while simultaneously presenting accurate information about Jesus Christ. I recommend reading one of those and skipping this one!… (mer)

SOCIAL ISSUES / RELIGION & SPIRITUALITY
Alan Graham (with Lauren Hall)
Welcome Homeless: One Man’s Journey of Discovering the Meaning of Home
Thomas Nelson
Paperback, 978-0-7180-8655-8, (also available as an e-book, an audio book, and on Audible), 240 pgs., $16.99
March 7, 2017

‘Notice it doesn’t say, “Feed the hungry, unless you think he might just have the munchies … Or, “Clothe the naked, unless he doth get drunk on Jack Daniel’s.”’

Alan Graham was struck by inspiration in 1998: food trucks. He envisioned a truck to feed Austin’s homeless where they live. Graham recruited five friends (the “six-pack”), and they pooled their money to buy an old catering truck. Inspired by God’s choice of Mary, an impoverished, uneducated peasant, and the example of Francis of Assisi, Graham understood that it’s about “communion through community, and community through connection,” and “bridging the gap between the divinity of God and dignity of man.” New, warm socks and a choice of Popsicle flavors are useful for this.

Some twenty-odd years later, Mobile Loaves & Fishes has served more than five million meals with the help of more than eighteen thousand volunteers. The mission has expanded to include (“Throw your fear away”) Street Retreats during which volunteers live on the streets with the homeless, micro-enterprises that allow the homeless to earn money with dignity, and the Community First! Village that includes not only housing but a grocery store, workshops, a clinic, a playground, and a dog park, among other amenities.

Welcome Homeless: One Man’s Journey of Discovering the Meaning of Home is Alan Graham’s spiritual memoir and autobiography, but more than that it is an explanation of “the gospel con carne,” and a demonstration of Mobile Loaves & Fishes’ philosophical cornerstone of community. Related in an engaging, colloquial style, and filled with gentle, good-natured humor (“It was like something out of a fairy tale, except instead of a Renaissance era king and queen, it was a badass Latino gangster and his wife”), Welcome Homeless is an inspiration and an exhortation to abandon our comfort zones and to attend not just to the passion, but to the compassion, of Jesus.

Believing human connections are meant to be “relational, not transactional,” Graham befriended the homeless men, women, and children on Austin’s streets, and it changed his life and his faith. “It allowed me to have the kind of faith that doesn’t ignore what’s underneath the overpass … behind the back alley … digging in the Dumpsters,” Graham writes. “It allowed me to know a God that doesn’t pretend what’s happening isn’t happening but, rather, is in the Dumpster too.”

Graham sprinkles facts and figures throughout his narrative, and quotes the Didache, C. S. Lewis, and Saint Augustine, but the bulk is comprised of the stories of people he has met. We go Dumpster-diving with J. P. Burris, meet Gordy the Gentle Giant and a transgender Navajo woman who earned a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Texas while living on the street, and follow the ups and downs of the love story of Brük and Robin. The photographic portraits of these individuals are a thoughtful inclusion.

In the introduction to Welcome Homeless, Graham states his goal for the book: He hopes ‘[we] will start to see the great “I AM” in the “least of these.”’ Mission accomplished, Mr. Graham. I laughed aloud, and I wiped away tears. I can’t imagine a better book for this Easter Sunday.

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.… (mer)