“’Doesn’t it give you a crisis of faith?” The question is aimed at Kevin Higgs, pastor of the Church of the Reconciler in Birmingham, Alabama. Our Alternative Spring Break group, consisting of 20 students, files in around several long tables and metal folding chairs, dirt-clad in farm soil, paint on our necks and faces. This is also where we sleep, where we try grits for the first time, where we attempt to soak in the state of the world made clear to us through Birmingham, the “biggest small town.” Here, 60,000 men and women are without homes and even more are suffering under the poverty line. Enter crisis.

Pastor Higgs’ faith remains unshaken, however. He relays this, not as a Bible passage, but as a reminder of the non-discriminatory kindness he recognizes in his fellow man, “Blessed are the beggars, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

The first and only rainfall of the week hesitates slightly before breaking on us with brute force as we leave Charlamagne Records in Birmingham’s “Five Point South” downtown area. We exchange pleasantries with the clerk, his response following us in echoes down the carpeted steps, “Now you’re in the sleepy south.”

When we pull up to the Church of the Reconciler, I don’t see a soul outside. Every morning it has been silhouettes of multicolored racing flags casting shadows onto the pavement against a white and yellow sun. A man sings a capella originals while he smiles at us with bloodshot eyes. A woman sits on a folding chair chewing gum. She looks androgynous in an oversized white t-shirt and if we leave she asks, “You’ll be back, right? Right? You’ll be back?”

Today there is no one. “Now you’re in the sleepy South.” But in Birmingham, “sleepy South” does not refer to a man on his porch dozing in a rocking chair, shotgun cocked and ready at his side. Here, sleep is not come upon by a gentle rocking, but interrupted frequently by police. Sleepy is not the bloodhound on a sagging porch amidst paint chips, drool, and cigarette ash. Sleepy is a man in his parked van between the light pole and a tree on 14th street. Sleepy are the tent cities of families under the train tracks downtown.

Not all of Birmingham looks like this. In fact, some areas of the city are unnervingly well-kempt in comparison to the downtown area. There is a place on the outskirts of Birmingham called Meadow Brook, which according to Pastor Higgs is constantly under surveillance. If a stray car is happened upon by the police, the driver is asked, “Are you lost? Can we help you find your way out of Meadow Brook?” A stray person happened upon by the police is put in the back of the car and transported downtown. Awaiting them with open arms is the Church of the Reconciler.

I can’t say with confidence that everyone from Meadow Brook is so immersed in the socioeconomic divide that they don’t do their part in improving the surrounding community. While visiting a church in Five Point South, where we returned laundry to homeless people, I volunteer side by side with an ex-pastor who lives in Meadow Brook with his wife. He is publishing a book about his interpretation of the rapture, and writes “Understanding Exodus” on a business card for me. He jokes with the men and women when they come to receive their plastic bags.  A woman named Ginger hugs her plastic bag upon retrieval. Inside are three pairs of tube socks and a yellow cotton shirt. The rule here is that you must give them your dirty laundry before retrieving your clean laundry. A man named Tom admits that he needs his clean laundry so that he can change his shirt before handing over the one he is wearing. The ex-pastor and I bend the rules for Tom.

As the ex-pastor goes on to explain “Hell-on-Earth” to me, I wonder if he’s considered the present state of downtown Birmingham. Before the Jim Crow laws passed in Birmingham, U.S. Steel employed black workers for half the rate as white workers, making steel production cheap and easy and the city of the Birmingham an affluent and blossoming one. Over the course of fifteen years, the company deserted the city when exploitation of their workers was no longer passable and left a shell of a beating city. Now, burger joints and hair salons are reduced to graffitied wooden doorways. From between the doorways the homeless emerge in the morning for grits and prayer if the Reconciler is open. Foot traffic is minimal.

Under the awning of the “Reconciler,” our backs against the cool brick to keep out of the rain, someone asks, “Well, where would you go?”

John, our resident coordinator at the church, takes a stab at this question. John is scrawny and white. He is somewhere between 20 and 40 years old, something that can’t be determined by his grayish hair and the creases on his forehead. He often wears an orange t-shirt and wiry silver frames. He hunches. I’m not sure about John’s position at the church.

John is one of the men that sleeps in his car. He stays within sight of security cameras so that the cops can’t get away with harassing him in the middle of the night. John is earnest. He tells us that his best friend became ill because he was woken by the police almost nightly. John wanted to take him to a doctor, but his friend refused. The man died later that week. When John tells us this, he is at once a teenager that had to grow up too fast and an old man blunted by the reality of death. Later that night we prop open a door in the sanctuary and sit on the ledge outside to avoid waking anyone up. I hear John snoring under some musty blankets on the altar.

In terms of our coordinators at the Reconciler, John is third in command, if not appointed so out of sympathy by Rodney Cole, who is referred to affectionately as just Cole. Cole ends every sentence with “alright?” or “do you understand?” This is partly because he wants to make sure we are listening, but also because it is the natural way to end everything he says. This week only, John is allowed to stay at the Reconciler. The church has been denied permits to be a homeless shelter though through it, Cole runs a community outreach project to alleviate homelessness.

“At the end of the day, we can go home to our wives, our fireplaces, our flat screen TVs, alright?” To these people, there is no end of the day. They don’t get a break, “do you understand?” Cole poses the question.

Yes, there is an end of the day for us. We have lives awaiting us back in Amherst. We nod, trying desperately to convey that we care. At the very least I understand this; “Blessed are the beggars, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Rachael Roth is a Collegian columnist. She can be reached at [email protected].