Interview: Night Ministry in San Francisco With Reverend Lyle Beckman by Peter Menkin
when they see someone in a clerical collar they will engage us in telling us the way their life has gone. Looking at their options, they speak of their being the best person they can be. When people come to us, I do believe that is a moment of decision for them…sometimes. And maybe, yes, they will give some serious thought to where they are and their head is.
I can give you [an example] …a man had a string of problems and his wife had left him. He’d lost his job, he was living on the street, and he was involved in a drug addiction that he wasn’t able to control at the moment. He was contemplating suicide at the time. We spent four hours together, sitting on a curb and after hearing his story, helped him come up with a plan of action that moved him from his despondency into the journey that was much more positive.
A year later when I saw him again, he had reconciled with his wife, and was in a job training program, and was living in his own apartment and was drug free. He would say this was a miracle story. I think that is what we do. We want to be available to people who are in distress in the middle of the night. Sometimes the other stories I could tell might not be as exciting.
We have conversations with people who work nights, but they don’t have time to be involved with their religious organizations as they would like. We can provide them with a prayer or connection with the sacred that they don’t have. We talk to people about faith, sometimes they are in a crisis of faith, and we can talk through those issues. Sometimes it’s just as simple as listening to people who are very lonely and disconnected… Particularly with people who have mental health issues. We’ll listen to them and stand with them and help them to realize they are not forgotten.
When you think about it, we work with people who are awake in the middle of the night. Oftentimes they are awake because they are working, or they are troubled, lonely, or looking for some kind of connection. That’s the role we play in the middle of the night. We can have a religious conversation or not.
Deacon Diana Wheeler, another of the Night Ministers.
3. How long have you been involved in this ministry, and are there one or more persons you see most nights who stick in your mind? It is likely as a minister you’ve made some friends. Please tell us something of those one or more persons who are regulars? Do you consider them characters of the night, like something out of the pages of our morning newspaper, or a Damon Runyon novel? How do you consider them, and what is the attitude, the stance towards them? I suppose, too, some readers will be wondering if the job of a Night Minister is to Save Souls. This writer is unsure what it means to Save Souls, but is it part of a Night Minister’s work?
Some of our conversations are one time only conversations. We’ll meet someone in a street or a bar or coffee shop and we’ll see them only once. We have some callers to our crisis line who have been calling 30 years. I have been with Night Ministry 6 years and there are many people that I see regularly, both because I know where they work and I get to know them that way: bar tenders, donut makes, cab drivers, police officers, and so on. Sometimes people who live on the streets live in the same neighborhood, so we see them over and over again.
I would say that so many of the people we talk to regularly have become friends of Night Ministry. We become for some people their primary support system, or their primary way of accessing spirituality. We pray with a lot of people; people know how to reach us when they are in crisis. They know us and trust us.
I think that for most people who have some background in spiritual life, they’ve been raised in a Church or had some connection with a Church, Synagogue or 12 step program; people have a strong belief there is a divine presence in the world. They want to grow with that relationship; for most people it is a good thing… It gives them hope.
…We think of Night Ministers as dispensers of hope. We look for something that will help them get through something, get them to move beyond that. So often, hope is found in the presence of God, in the peace and love that is God. Sometimes hope is found in their [own] strength. Sometimes it’s found within, their resilience, their strength, or even their stubbornness to overcome the challenges of life. Sometimes it’s found in community, or family and friends. Our goal is to help them find the place where hope can be found in their life. More than not, hope is found in some spiritual connection.
I think sometimes that’s right, there is no typical night for us. but sometimes the variety of the types of conversations we have are just