Dinner is almost ready at St. George Church in Waimanalo. The church insists on using real plates and utensils to help Family Promise participants feel more at home. (HCH file photo / 2019)
View from the pew
Writing about religions in our community was my thing for years. So recent stories in the secular press, which now rarely gives an inch of space to faith, stimulated a strong urge to write.
At first my intended venue was the “letters to the editor” section rather than this Catholic news chronicle. But opinionated letter writers have short limits; that’s not my style! To be charitable, I should just thank the daily newspaper for waking me up fast — but often furious — any given morning.
One recent experience was a personality-of-the-week question-answer piece on the editorial page. It’s a truly lazy form of journalism: no challenging questions, just a chance for a subject, organization or government agency to use it as an extension of their website.
I stumbled through the “holistic services” and “non-congregate shelter models” and stuff like that in the email exchange that passed for an interview with the top executive of Family Promise of Hawaii.
I was in high dudgeon because it hardly did justice to what I knew about that charity.
The June 7 interview with Executive Director Ryan Catalani made no mention of the Family Promise roots here as a hands-on outreach to the homeless by churches, temples, religious organizations of every sort. So I was ready to wax indignant, but as I dug into details it derailed my dudgeon.
I wrote the first story when a local chapter of the national Family Promise program was launched in Hawaii in March 2006. It was so different from the approach today of citizens distanced as government agencies or big charities tackle homelessness at great expense.
It was about volunteers at Christ Church Uniting, a small Kailua Protestant congregation, cleaning spare office space, dividing it into private family housing units, making up the beds and cooking supper for three homeless families, six adults and six children.
To welcome strangers into your own safe space and commit to take on personal care of them certainly resounds with those who take Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount seriously: “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me.” But in reality, how many people are comfortable with such up-close-and-personal commitment? And how will the neighbors like what we’re doing?
“We want them to feel like it’s home,” said Marian Heidel of Christ Church Uniting at the opening.
Group effort by churches
What made the Family Promise shelter model work was that the commitment was doable. A coalition of churches joined together and took turns doing one week as host, then the families moved to another church. So it was an intense experience for a week every few months for each batch of volunteers.
The outreach is selective, choosing families on the brink, with a family member or two employed or willing to work. Adults receiving shelter are expected to participate in resources offered such as professional counseling on job hunting, financial security, social work, educational opportunities. And kids are going to school.
People who volunteered have never forgotten the experience, Heidel said recently.
There were 63 churches in the state involved in the project in 2013, according to a news story about open houses planned at the original Family Promise of Hawaii headquarters in a Kailua house owned by the Episcopal Church, and at its new Honolulu downtown headquarters in the Henry and Jeanette Weinberg Kukui Center.
But in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic halted the churches’ role.
“We couldn’t have families close to each other,” Heidel said. “We had a room partitioned by curtains. We couldn’t do that anymore.”
Church members still account for many of the 200 volunteers now engaged in the program, according to Catalani. Among their roles are cooking and providing meals for the families, and participating in social gatherings and playtimes for the children. The meals are delivered to the Kukui headquarters, site of communal events.
Catalani said Family Promise now has 12 families at a time housed in four shelter locations, and expects to have room for 28 families with planned acquisition of properties by the end of the year. Rather than moving on each week from temporary quarters, each family has its own housing space while in the program.
“The average stay is 100 days,” he said. “The majority leave to go into their own stable housing.”
Last year the organization sheltered 200 families, some multigenerational, for a total of 700 people.
“I am meeting with congregations all the time,” Catalani said. “We are working to bring back the person-to-person opportunity. Community engagement is what makes our program special. We have weekly activities, such as fun for the children, celebrating holidays.
“It’s meaningful to be a volunteer. People who volunteer continue for years; they have memories of the experience,” he said.
Vanessa McMoore of St. George Church in Waimanalo can attest to that: “My sons, ages 8 and 4, think it’s going to a party when we go and they play with the children.”
St. George is the rare Catholic church engaged in Family Promise, taking turns with other organizations to provide meals. McMoore said when it’s the church’s turn to cook and deliver meals, “we have 17 to 20 volunteers on Tuesdays, and 12 to 15 on Fridays and Saturdays.”
“I love how one of our former volunteers talked about it,” McMoore said. “She said, ‘These people aren’t homeless. They’re helpless.’ These are families with jobs who don’t make enough to pay for housing.”
Nuuanu Congregational Church still houses the families.
“We don’t have a role attending to families any longer,” said Mairi Manley, administrative coordinator of the church. She said it rents three rooms to Family Promise. The families leave during the daytime for work, school or to stay at the downtown center, and they eat meals there, not at the church grounds.
Only five of the participating 63 churches listed in 2013 were Catholic. One likely reason is that many Protestant churches have housing units, meeting rooms and auxiliary buildings on their property unlike most Catholic parishes.
I guess I have had an attitude adjustment since my initial reaction to scold a certain secular media outlet for ignoring religion’s roles in this charity.
Heaven knows we have countless avenues of our own in the Catholic Church’s response to Jesus’ challenge: “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me.”
The meaning of Memorial Day
Another letter I meant to write also has a religious connection. Several readers have already beat me to the punch, calling for an adjustment in the way Memorial Day is observed, particularly how the news media cover it.
Veterans organizations and families of fallen warriors wrote in to remind that the holiday is to honor the men and women who died protecting our country during wars. When it was established in 1868 it was called Decoration Day, a reference to tributes placed on their graves.
The official proclamation called for people to observe the solemn occasion by praying for lasting peace, in whatever form or belief system they choose.
I join the ranks of those who are not happy with the way the holiday, and the news coverage and weeks of advance publicity about it, has been preempted in Hawaii by a glitzy entertainment extravaganza.
The ever-so-photogenic sight of a battalion of lighted lanterns floating out to sea at sunset has drawn local people in droves since 1999, originally at Keehi Lagoon and now to Ala Moana Park.
In this cultural mix of our island state, it appeals to people who already may have a family tradition of putting flowers on graves on family birthdays, anniversaries and virtually every holiday of the year. And the idea of lighting a candle to symbolize a memorial or a prayer is familiar to Catholics, though not a feature in most churches anymore.
The extravaganza at the central public park in Honolulu is adapted from a Buddhist religious ritual that occurs during the obon season, a centuries-old observance which Japanese Buddhist immigrants brought to Hawaii. Ancestors are remembered during the season which some believe is a time when their spirits are close.
Islanders of any belief are familiar with it; generations have heartily joined in bon dances held throughout the summer at traditional Buddhist denominations’ temples around the state. So you likely know that it’s not a funereal somber tone; lively folk music and lots of food are part of the celebration.
What is most offensive to objectors is that the city has dedicated that major urban park to the lantern-floating event presented and underwritten by Shinnyo-en, a New Age Buddhist movement based in Japan. Unlike traditional Buddhist denominations, it engaged in proselytizing. The annual event is a mecca for Shinnyo-en members.
Hundreds of islanders have embraced the dramatic way to remember someone. There’s a scramble to get lantern space to write a memorial. I encountered people who wanted to remember auntie on the mainland who is ill, other people still alive, even pets who have passed into nirvana.
It was the bane of my last years on the daily paper because I inevitably was doomed to be assigned to cover it.
Sunburn time, no parking for blocks, nothing new to write since last year’s story. A crowd of beachgoers who arrived at dawn and were punchy by sunset. The sponsors so publicity-akamai but so unwilling to discuss the cost of the thing, their prosperity reflected in purchase of properties around their Moiliili temple, or even much detail about their form of Buddhism.
The current generation covering the event always refers to the Shinnyo-en folks’ beloved leader as “Her Holiness.” They clearly don’t know the newswriter’s bible, the Associated Press stylebook, which disallows using honorific titles used within groups. You won’t see secular media calling the U.K.’s King Charles III “His Highness” or Pope Francis anything but that; to use “His Holiness” is a church thing, not a news thing.
What Memorial Day letter writers ask is that the Buddhist group choose some other day to have their obon season celebration. If the city continues to allow it in public space, please do that some other day than Memorial Day — or June 11 or July 4.
Hawaii people have a history of respecting other people’s traditions and helping each other. I believe the aloha spirit we claim can be the way of practicing the biblical golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
