Offering more than food

Farm Street's lunch service for the homeless and vulnerably housed has already been successfully providing an excellent hot meal on Wednesdays and Saturdays, during lockdown, but Fr Dominic and the team wanted to provide more – including a space for creative writing where people could get to know each other and themselves in a more profound way. 

End of term report

After 15 sessions, we have delightful experiences and lessons to report.

The first lesson: prepare to be surprised by the way the Holy Spirit brings the most healing encounters from the most unexpected people.

First through the doors was a guest who spoke 5 languages and who continued to bring us gems from the world of Latvian literature. He also translated two of my own poems into Russian. His goal was to finish his own short stories that had been written on the backs of A5 leaflets and now he had the chance to work on them and to create some new poems that he was rightly proud of.

Next through the door was  a guest who was an 81 year old translator of French and Italian. His take on most of our exercises was to produce touching and romantic pieces. He reminded me of one of one of my most favourite characters in literature – Beppo Roadsweeper in Michael Ende’s ‘Momo’, who only tells the truth and so he only speaks occasionally, but always has something wise to say. He has also written a play in Esperanto that he is looking forward to sharing with us.

The second lesson was that God really does make up for all the things you cannot do yourself. Planning matters, preparation and ethos guidelines matter, shared goals written on the board matter and resilient boundaries matter, but most of all love and prayer matter – praying in advance for each of the guests that might come, asking for inspiration to bring the right  exercise, trusting the charism you’ve been given by God and trusting that others will bring their charisms into the room which will produce a marvellous ‘alchemy’. What marvellous pieces they made from the Russian word ‘Taska’, the Japanese phrase ‘Mono no aware’ and the Spanish word “Querencia”.

Leaving on a high

People leave the class feeling delighted because they have discovered the treasure inside of themselves.  They become convinced of the truth of an idea that I introduce at the beginning of the class - That each of us has a pocket of keys, that we might not know about, but that those are the keys to other peoples’ dreams.