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Real Austin: Theology on a Downtown Bus

Posted Jul 18, 08:05 PM | 13 comments | by Amy Moffitt | Link

by Annie Bullock

Since moving to Austin just two years ago, I’ve had my share of encounters with Leslie Cochran, almost all of them on the 1L/1M bus through downtown. Leslie is a homeless transvestite and a beloved Austin institution. I saw him for the first time on my very first visit to Austin. He was standing on the curb looking bewildered in a purple mini-skirt and pumps. He crossed the street halfway, paused, and then abruptly returned to the curb he’d just left, slinging his skirt over his hips as he went, revealing a leopard print thong. Between his flamboyant fashion sense and his proclivity for public semi-nudity, he’s hard to miss if you spend any time downtown.

Leslie is a one of a kind weird guy and yet in many ways, he’s emblematic of the Austin homeless community: harmless, eccentric, and not looking for a way back into ordinary society.

Austin’s homeless community is remarkably cohesive in some ways. Leslie Cochran ran for mayor in 2000, capturing nearly 8% of the vote. Jennifer Gale, a transgendered woman who ran for a range of public offices, from mayor to city council to a place on the board of the Austin Independent School District, was another fixture in Austin politics. At her peak, she could be counted on to garner 5-8% of the total vote in a given race. Her campaign slogan modified the popular “Keep Austin Weird,” promising instead to “Keep Austin, Austin.” Both understood themselves as representatives of a legitimate community. The next logical step was to run for public office. And both were emphatically part of what some call the real Austin.

I met Jennifer on the bus shortly after I came to Austin. She was wearing a worn blue sweatshirt, white polyester culottes, and a dingy visor. She carried her belongings in a plastic sack. I’m just coming from a city council meeting, she said breathlessly as she sat down. I’m Jennifer Gale. She shook my hand. I’m running for mayor. You’ll vote for me, won’t you? I thought she might be crazy but I liked her, so I smiled and said I would. As we rode, she told me about her vision for improving Austin, which sounded remarkably sane. A pair of tourists boarded the bus. They were from Oregon—Salem, not Portland, which explains their wary, wide-eyed first reaction to Jennifer. Within three blocks, they had warmed up to her as she told them a series of groan-worthy puns and jokes. Before she got off, she reminded me of my promise to vote for her and gave the tourists a restaurant recommendation. Gatti’s, she said. I go there all the time.

Six months later, I was in the car when I heard the local NPR station report that Jennifer had been found dead on the steps of First English Lutheran Church. She died of heart failure sometime during the night. It was December and they honored her by playing a recording of her singing “Silent Night” at a city council meeting. She was only 48. I burst into tears. I only met her once but she was my friend.

The homeless community isn’t a utopia by any means. There are real problems that come with living on the streets. Jennifer Gale’s death is a painful illustration. Jennifer’s heart condition was aggravated by the physical strain of sleeping outside. A 2009 attack on Leslie Cochran makes the same point. Leslie was hospitalized after he was beaten. He had warned a group of addicts about the dangers of drug abuse. The homeless suffer. Some suffer from mental illnesses. Others suffer from addiction. They all suffer the physical and mental exhaustion that characterizes life on the streets.

Waiting at a downtown bus stop recently, I encountered a man who wore long, shaggy dreadlocks, an ankle length leather coat, and a straw cowboy hat. I just got my guitar back, he shouted. Austin, I am going off! He was drunk or high and a passing cop stopped to run him off. There was a dog sitting in the passenger seat of a sports car stopped at the light. You see that dog, the hobo said as he looked me straight in the eye. That dog is treated like a person. He paused dramatically. You get it? Yeah, I said. I do. He nodded and went on his way. I didn’t do nothing, he threw over his shoulder at the hovering cop. Half a block up the street, I saw him pass a hunched man with a facial tic, shuffling and muttering his way down the street. They paused long enough to share a fist bump.

It’s not a utopia, but it is a community. And there’s a difference between a flawed community of suffering people and an issue, a problem to be solved, or a mess to be cleaned up.

Duane Severance understood this difference. He understood the lives of the homeless because he spent his days with them. Duane was at the beginning of a promising career as a chef when he started reading his bible. When he read that Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell everything he had and give it to the poor, Duane took the advice to heart. He sold what he had, sought out the most destitute folk he could find, and made them his friends. He eventually ended up in Austin, where he prayed for God to give him a corner of his own. As Duane told the story, God told him to go down to 6th and Congress—Leslie Cochran’s corner. He staked his claim there and became a part of the community: Brother Duane, pastor to the homeless. On Sundays, he preached at the Church Under the Bridge, which meets under the I-35 overpass at 7th Street. Duane eventually married but even as the married father of three, ministry on the streets of Austin was his primary occupation.

Duane didn’t set out to address homelessness. He went looking for people. In January of 2010, Duane was killed in a single car accident in Seward Junction, northwest of Austin. Mission Possible, the organization that sponsors Church Under the Bridge, held a memorial service for him that went for hours as a stream of men and women shared the many ways Brother Duane had touched their lives. His funeral was held a few days later at a local church. It was standing room only. For the second time, people were lined up to speak about how Duane had changed things for them. Love is a precious commodity in a world that treats you like something less than human.

To paraphrase Sarah Miles, author of Take This Bread: The Spiritual Autobiography of a 21st Century Christian, this is hardly what George Bush had in mind when he talked about faith based initiatives. The recent surge of public progressive religiosity prompted Glenn Beck’s ill-fated advice to his audience that they should leave their churches if their leaders talked about social justice. Critics rightly replied that the commitment to social justice is in fact biblical. Miles makes the same observation. She converted when she discovered that the radical commitment to solidarity with the poor that she had always associated with progressive values was perfectly consonant with Christianity. And from the Eucharistic table, she took an imperative to go into the world and feed the hungry.

Duane Severance lived that kind of solidarity with the poor and his impact among Austin’s homeless is a testament to the transformative power of compassion. The difference is that Duane was not a progressive—far from it, in fact. His faith was radical, though, and that’s where the real power for transformation—and the possibility of cooperation—lies. He lived among the poor as one of them because that’s what he thought God wanted from him. Like Sarah Miles, he took the gospel command to go and do likewise to heart. Both embraced a radical, kenotic faith. Both were utterly changed by it. Both were agents for change in their communities.

The last several years have seen a palpable shift in public discourses. But we should take care before we find ourselves divided into new camps, religious right and religious left in place of religious right and secular left. We have a new opportunity to seek the common good, not as a replacement for our theological commitments but as the result of them. This is an important distinction. It does not threaten my theological traditionalism to embrace the poor and to work for their elevation. On the contrary, my faith demands throwing my hand in with the outcast and the stranger, just as the faith of so many of my theologically liberal friends and colleagues demands the same thing.

What I’m suggesting isn’t easy. I’ve lost more friends over my religious and political views than I care to recall. I am too liberal for some and not liberal enough for others. It takes courage to stay when it’s uncomfortable. It takes patience to listen when you dislike what you’re hearing. It takes confidence to like people who don’t see things your way. And it takes humility to admit you might be wrong. Growth is painful. But as long as we isolate ourselves from one another, as long as we stay in churches with like-minded people, populate our social circles with our own kind, and fill our theology schools with homogeneous communities of professors and students, we lose the opportunity to mature.

To draw the conversation back to Austin, we lose the opportunity to be real. In the logic of Christian theology, Jesus was a new Adam, the new head of a human race in desperate need of restoration. Jesus restores our vision of what is possible for a human being, fully realized and fully reflecting the image of God. This image is part of every human person. It is obscured by our common captivity to sin and death, but it is there. Our work—which is the work of the Holy Spirit—is to seek what is damaged and restore it, in ourselves and others. Redemption means becoming more whole and therefore ever more fully and truly human. We become ever more real.

The image of God is present in every human being, no matter how addicted, unruly, or unwashed, no matter how unlike us. As I board the 1L/1M every day, I look for the image of God in the people around me. I acknowledge them. I treat them with dignity. I look for signs of life. Above all, I am not afraid to hope in their redemption. In the possibility of their redemption, I see the possibility of my own. And I pray with anyone who will pray with me: Keep Austin real, make Austin human.

Annie Bullock recently received her PhD in Religion from Emory University, with a specialization in the religions of the Roman Empire in postcolonial perspective. She is an adjunct instructor at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, TX, where she teaches both church history and New Testament.

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