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Outdoor ministry strives to serve the homeless

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 21, 2012|By Rosemary Chandler

Pat Penzerro (center) and Pastor Mary Eaton (right) participate in the… (PAT GREENHOUSE/GLOBE STAFF )

It’s Sunday around noon and a line forms that winds around the towering bronze Brewer Fountain in a corner of Boston Common. Weary-looking men and women shuffle forward, making their way toward the folding card tables, where a dozen teenagers hand out carefully wrapped sandwiches and bags of potato chips. It is the end of the month, and many of these people’s food stamps have run out.

Walking by, you might mistake the whole thing for a soup line. The cast of characters seems right: the long line of the downtrodden, carrying their belongings on their backs or in tattered bags; the suburban youth group bused in from some parish outside of Boston, offering sandwiches from their perches behind the tables; a few clean-cut, middle-aged men and women overseeing everything, stopping to chat with the people waiting for their lunch. But then around 1 p.m., something altogether different unfolds. A woman with short blond hair and wearing a clerical collar steps forward.

“I’d like to invite all of you to form a circle,’’ she says. And in the space in front of the fountain, most of the 30 or so people who had stuck around to eat come together with the teenagers who had handed them their sandwiches, while a few remain standing at a distance.

Standing there quietly, they form an unlikely looking group that suddenly does a most unlikely thing: They begin to sing.

Common Cathedral, the outdoor church of Ecclesia Ministries, has met every Sunday for the past 15 years, rain or shine, snow or sleet. Although the size of the group changes each week, its numbers dropping and rising along with the temperature, a communion service is always offered.

“We take the gift of church outside to people who can’t come inside, for whatever the reason,’’ says its founder, the Rev. Deborah Little. The group is made up mostly of homeless and formerly homeless people from around Boston, who don’t feel comfortable attending traditional services indoors. Lunch is served before every service at Common Cathedral. “This is not an outreach program,’’ says Little. “This is a church.’’

“Do you see that man there? The one with the loud, gruff voice,’’ says Ginny Walden, a former Common Cathedral intern. She points to a small, elderly man, hunched over and with a scraggly gray beard and a weathered face. She says he comes to Common Cathedral almost every week. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,’’ the man hollers at the top of his voice. “Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine,’’ he croaks, and then stops short when the chorus ends. While the people on either side of him continue to sing, he looks from face to face, waiting for them to return to the part of the song he knows.