The Ones Who Stay
By Michael P. Evans
Two baptisms were scheduled, and I’d never witnessed one at Open Cathedral before. I arrived at UN Plaza thinking about thresholds, about the moment someone formally enters a community, about the visible declaration of belonging. It seemed like it could be a good article.
Yet neither of the newly baptized remained after the service ended. I stood there for a moment, slightly at a loss, and then Pastor Katie approached me.
She said that she’d been talking with a church member earlier who’d mentioned, before I even arrived, that he’d like to be interviewed for an article someday. The comment had been entirely unprompted, but it seemed serendipitous.
Now, I’ve seen Tom at Open Cathedral for as long as I’ve been attending. He’s an usher and rarely misses a Sunday at UN Plaza or a Thursday at 16th and Mission. He always arrives in a ball cap and leather jacket, pushing a stroller that carries his chihuahua, wearing a matching leather jacket. But we’d not spoken much one-on-one. Tom’s shy. I’m shy. Without the notably extroverted Katie intervening, we might never have found our way to a conversation. She told me to ask Tom about his AIDS activism in the eighties and nineties, then drifted away to let us talk.
Tom was born and raised in Nebraska. Home life was unhappy, and he ran away before turning eighteen. He arrived in San Francisco in 1984. He describes the years that followed, the eighties and nineties, as “lost.” It was a difficult period in the city’s history, particularly for its gay community, and Tom had his own struggles. He didn’t elaborate on any of this at length. And I didn’t press. Those years belong to him.
What he was willing to say was this: in 2005, he found Open Cathedral. And it saved him.
He told his story plainly, without drama. The presence of community helped him to recognize his own worth and to turn his life around. He has stable housing now. He’s built a life. And every Sunday, he puts on his leather jacket, loads his equally well-dressed chihuahua into the stroller, and comes to church. He’s done this for over twenty years.
During the prayers of the people, Tom gives thanks for being alive. It is the compressed testimony of a man who lived through something enormous and knows it. He didn’t reconstruct those details for me that day, but he’ll name his gratitude out loud in the congregation, week after week, before God and whoever has gathered with him. That distinction feels important. The story isn’t mine to tell. The thanksgiving is his to offer.
I went to Open Cathedral that day looking to share a story about people entering a community. I found instead a story about someone who has spent twenty years choosing to remain in one.
That quiet, consistent choice may be its own kind of testimony, rather ordinary from week to week, yet extraordinary in its accumulation. San Francisco Night Ministry did not rescue Tom and send him on his way. He became part of the thing that had been there for him. He ushers. He prays. He shows up.
There is a version of belonging that announces itself through ritual: a baptism, a confirmation, a public declaration. And then there’s the version that shows up consistently in a leather jacket, pushing a stroller, ready to hand out bulletins.
Both are real. Both matter.
But it was the second kind of story that was waiting for me that afternoon, in the person of a shy man from Nebraska who’s been quietly showing up for two decades, and who, finally, I now have the chance to know.
