On weekday nights, around 8 p.m., the halls of the Bethesda Mission men’s shelter, at the corner of 6th and Reily, are cleared for cleaning.
The long-term guests do most of the work, according to a schedule of duties pinned up next to a poster for HIV testing. The other men either wait in the chapel, watching TV, or go outside, where they can have a smoke and look out at the view: a parking lot, a grassy field, a luxury residential high-rise.
This routine was underway at Bethesda when I arrived to check in there, on a mild, foggy night in mid-November. On the recommendation of the shelter’s program director, whom I’d interviewed a couple of weeks before, I showed up unannounced and asked for a place to sleep.
On Dec. 22, the Bethesda Mission marks its 100th anniversary. Most people associate Bethesda, if they know it at all, with the men’s shelter at 611 Reily, a grand brick structure with an iconic green cross hanging out front. The shelter has been at that location since 1934, when Bethesda purchased what had previously been the Railroad YMCA. But, since 1983, the organization has also operated a women’s shelter in Allison Hill, in a former elementary school. And, since 1990, it has run a youth ministry out of an old fire station at 15th and Herr.
This year, the Bethesda Mission has undertaken a campaign to spread awareness of its lesser-known programs, through billboards and radio ads bearing the tagline “Inspire Hope.” A second goal of the campaign, according to Scott Dunwoody, Bethesda’s vice president for business development, is to educate the public about Bethesda’s mission. Traditionally, a homeless shelter was thought of as providing bare essentials—“three hots and a cot,” Dunwoody said. “But now the goal is long-term recovery.”
While the employees at reception figured out how to accommodate me, men streamed out of the chapel into the front hall. A few minutes later, a voice over the speakers, polite but firm, reminded everyone to keep out of the way of the cleaners.
The men at reception didn’t push too hard. They didn’t ask for my name or my information, but they did want to make sure I needed just the one night. Unless you enter Bethesda’s recovery program, New Beginnings, you’re limited to one 10-night stay every four months, and they were puzzled I didn’t want to stay longer. “You miss the bus or something?” one of them asked. They said they could put me up on a mat on the chapel floor. “Now, don’t come back tomorrow saying you want the 10 nights,” one of them added.
The recovery program at the men’s shelter extends a guest’s stay in phases. A guest in the New Beginnings program can stay for four months, but he has to opt in by his fifth night. A second phase, called the Helmsman program, extends the stay another six months. Doug Barger, program director at the men’s shelter, explained Bethesda wants guests to make a considered decision to sign up for recovery—and not just a last-ditch choice because they have nowhere to go. “We make a long-term commitment to them,” he said. “They have to make a long-term commitment to us.”
Barger has been with Bethesda for 13 years. He previously worked at America’s Keswick, a Christian addiction recovery program in Whiting, New Jersey. Like many people who go into recovery work, he overcame his own addiction. “I gave my life to Christ and asked my church to pray for me,” he said. When I asked if his experience helped him understand Bethesda’s guests, he replied, “I speak their language. I know where they’re coming from.” Many of them, he said, don’t believe he ever had an addiction, because they don’t think theirs can be defeated. “But I tell them, ‘It’s very possible. Just make the next right decision.’”
Programs at the women’s shelter operate on a different calendar. Residents must commit to a full year, and their movements are restricted for an initial period, the length of which varies depending on the circumstances that brought them there. As Shelley Brooks, who has been the director there for the past 30 years, explained, “We don’t do emergency shelter. We focus on recovery and homelessness.”
Brooks took me on a tour of the house in late October. Where the men’s shelter feels like a dormitory, the women’s shelter feels like a home—quieter, cozier, more evidently inhabited. We passed a mural, titled “Fruits of the Spirit,” showing a tree bearing fruit of a dozen different varieties. I took note of a banana labeled “patience” and a pineapple labeled “love.” “People become very gentle, very caring for one another, one they find out that they’re safe,” Brooks told me. She recounted the looks on women’s faces at Christmas, when they receive gifts from donors who learned about their specific needs. “They don’t understand that someone took their name, and went out and bought clothes that fit them, and wrapped it—that there are still good people in the world.”
Brooks introduced me to Margarita, the shelter’s house manager, who has worked at Bethesda for 14 years. Margarita, who came through the program herself, recalled her feelings the night she arrived. “It was a release for me,” she said. “They had these raggedy blue chairs. I didn’t care. I said, ‘I got somewhere to lay my head. I got some peace.’”
After being admitted, I entered the chapel, a large room with a high, tapered ceiling. In the center are a hundred upholstered metal chairs, divided into eight rows with an aisle up the middle, and facing a squat white lectern. Behind the lectern is a flat-screen television, mounted on a glass wall. Flanking the television are cream-colored banners, one saying KING OF KINGS, the other LORD OF LORDS. Flanking the banners are poles holding American flags.
I sat in one of the chairs to get my bearings. A young man, perhaps 19 or 20 years old, stood in the corner with a ping-pong paddle, serving a ball to himself off a spot high up on the wall. After a few minutes, I headed to a lounge behind the altar, dimly visible through the glass. Here, perhaps two dozen armchairs were crowded together in front of another television. Several men reclined in them, some with shoeless feet draped over the arms, watching “Thirteen Ghosts.” At one point, someone remarked he’d once walked from Philadelphia to York. At another, someone said the chairs were comfortable. But mostly no one said anything.
I headed back out to the chapel. In the interim, maybe half-a-dozen men had drifted in and taken seats, and the television was now on. Someone flipped the channel to a documentary about Randy Moss. In addition to ping-pong, the chapel is home to a foosball table. While I was eyeing it, a young man walked over and picked up a small cardboard box off a stack of hymnals on a bench nearby. It held a traveler’s toothpaste. He gave it a little shake. “There a foosball in there?” I asked him. “Huh?” he said. He started to walk off, and then he turned around. “You want to play foosball?”
The young man’s name was Preston. It was hard to guess his age. He had short, dark hair, light brown skin and a compact build. He said he grew up in the area; he’d played foosball at his daycare in Allison Hill. He’d been at the shelter for two and a half months, and was enrolled in the New Beginnings program, which he highly recommended. I asked if he knew Barger, and told him I was there on Barger’s advice, to help with a story I was working on for a local magazine. He sounded disappointed, but not fazed. He told me his story in basic outline. He’d developed a drinking problem, and had been in the shelter once before; this time, he wanted his recovery to stick. He hoped someday to go into either counseling, personal training or theater and the arts. Then, after making a winning shot, he shook my hand, said it was nice meeting me, and disappeared.
By this time, the cleaning was finished, and the men starting moving around more freely. In a corner room off the main hallway, I came upon two men in raised swivel chairs, singing Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “Tears on My Pillow.” Their names were Phil and Steve. Phil was white, with a bushy beard and gray hair parted neatly in the middle. He wore a long V-neck T-shirt over his round belly. He sang the lead in a reedy vibrato, baring long white teeth and keeping time with his hands. Steve, on the bass line, was black, bald, wore glasses and carried a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. When they finished the song, Steve wanted to take pictures with his Fujifilm disposable camera: first of me and Phil, then of himself and Phil.
They continued to sing doo-wop songs for the next half hour, usually introduced by Phil: “Blue Moon,” “Under the Boardwalk.” Phil had to grope to come up with each next song, but once he’d started he knew the words. In between songs, they talked about their situations. Steve was from Philadelphia, where he and his brother worked in a barbershop. “Each day, I’d cut hair, take my money, and go buy dope,” he said. He had a plan that was a little hard to follow: the gist of it was he hoped to sell some property he owned in Philly, save up while going through the full program at Bethesda, and eventually buy a home. Phil left and came back with a gray pinstripe suit on a hanger. “Look what God gave me,” he said. His daughters, he added suddenly, would not be coming to visit this weekend after all, because their grandfather had fallen ill. “But that’s just part of God’s timing,” he said.
As the men sang, a small crowd gathered to listen or sing along. Then, all at once, the group dispersed—it was time for roll call and prayer. Men filed into the chapel, filling up the rows, and a man named Israel, one of two who had checked me in, approached the podium. He made reference to the grace of God, soliciting applause. Then his tone became more somber. “Gentlemen,” he said. “If you sign up for the doctor on Tuesday night, then you gotta be here.” The men were rapt; the chapel fell into a guilty schoolroom silence.
Israel moved on. It was Veteran’s Day, and after thanking those who served, he reflected on the private “war” of addiction. “Use the tools you pick up in here out there,” he said. “‘Cause guess what? Nothing’s changed out there.” Then he told the group they could take “late showers”—an opportunity not afforded every night—and that the laundry, which held a stockpile of toiletries, would be open for people who needed them. He waxed briefly on the topic of deodorant. “Use it!” he said. “It’s here for you, man. You know what I mean?” Then he called roll, cracked a joke about the “barbershop quartet” in the hallway, and said a short prayer.
After prayer, the night wound down quickly. Heading back into the hall, I learned that the corner where Phil and Steve were singing was, in fact, Bethesda’s actual barbershop—someone was now sitting on a swivel chair, getting a buzz cut from another guest. For a while, a few men hung around in the chapel, watching the CBS crime drama “Person of Interest.” The episode was a potboiler, built around a gratuitous riff on the Ebola crisis. But the plot was engrossing, and there were murmurs of disappointment when, halfway through, the loudspeakers crackled on to announce it was time for lights out. I went back to collect a mat from the hallway, a thick foam slab encased in a rubber sheet. When I got back, I was alone.
Two of the chapel walls are lined with stained glass windows, all made in an identical abstract pattern: yellow in the center, with green, red and blue along the borders. Though the windows don’t look out on anything, they are lit by fluorescents from behind. Now, with the other lights off, they gave the room a yellow-green glow. I placed my mat on the floor, between the ping-pong and foosball tables.
Also along the chapel walls are quotations from the Bible, and at various points in the evening, I’d read and re-read one from Paul’s letter to the Colossians, intrigued by one line in particular: “You were enemies in your minds because of your evil ways.”
With nothing better to do, I found a Bible on an empty chair and flipped to the relevant passage. The letter to the Colossians, only a few pages long, is a note offering encouragement and some guidance on the faith to a new Christian church in Colossae. At the end of it, Paul notes that he’s writing from prison. “Remember that I am being held by chains,” he says. It’s a curious way to end a letter. For me, it has the effect of making the preceding advice seem less preachy. It’s as if Paul is saying, “I need this stuff as much as you do.” I thought of what Barger said about overcoming his own addiction, and the fact that most of the men working at Bethesda at one time or another went through the program themselves.
Just before 11 p.m., a voice came over the loudspeaker a final time. “All conversations, guys, must come to an end,” it chided gently. “Please respect yourself, your neighbors and this facility. Some of these guys have to get up and go to work in the morning. And some of them have to get up and cook.”
