Polonsky: What other healing support does cots provide?

Records: Thanks to volunteers and donations, we offer onsite medical and dental help, as well as an acupuncture clinic and a trauma clinic.

A couple of years ago I approached the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which is based in Petaluma and has an international reputation for consciousness research. I said, “The people who take advantage of your programs are generally people of means who have their lives in order. That’s like fine-tuning a Ferrari. Shouldn’t ancient wisdom teachings be available also for people with no means at all, whose ‘cars’ — to extend the analogy —  have been totaled?” So now we have a program, At Home Within, that offers instruction in hatha yoga, creative visualization, meditation, energy work, and more. Preliminary results are very encouraging. Participants have reported relief from anxiety, chronic pain, and insomnia.

Polonsky: As cots has grown, have you come up against resistance from the surrounding community?

Records: Yes, a police officer who worked in another community phoned us and said that homeless people are “garbage.” I imagine his work had brought him in touch with human beings at their worst, homeless people among them.

I sometimes tell that story when I give a public presentation. I’ll tell the audience that there’s some truth to what that caller said: Garbage is something that we have used up and thrown away. That’s what’s happened to people who are homeless. Sometimes they’ve hurt themselves, but more often other people have hurt them. They were damaged and then discarded. We take the trouble to recycle newspapers and tin cans. Shouldn’t we try to salvage human beings?

Another time, after a public hearing in which the city council approved a new facility for us, a woman stormed up to me and shouted, “When the next Richard Allen Davis happens in this community, it’ll be on your head!” Richard Allen Davis was the man who abducted and murdered twelve-year-old Polly Klaas in Petaluma back in 1993. My daughter was a schoolmate of Polly’s. They were in band class together. My entire family participated in the search for her. I would walk around town and see the posters with Polly’s face and just break into tears. Polly’s death cast a pall over our community for years.

So this woman at the hearing was equating homeless people with a murderer and child-rapist. But my wife used to work for the Polly Klaas Foundation, and she can tell you that, in fact, the person who harms a child is far more often someone the child knows and trusts: a family member, a coach, a clergyperson.

So part of my work is to help my neighbors see who homeless people are, to see how they’ve been hurt and why they are homeless — not to excuse their shortcomings, but to understand what’s happened to them and ask, “How do we help them now?”

One way we can help is by raising homeless people’s expectations for themselves. Homeless people often feel unable to face life’s difficulties. So if we can help them to accept the challenge of, say, not using drugs or alcohol, or working for a living, they begin to see that they have the capacity to do these things.

We had one client whose stepdad had regularly beaten him with a two-by-four when he was a kid. The boy would run away from home, and when the police would pick him up, he’d beg them not to take him back to his house. As an adult this man became an addict and lived on the streets for decades. But with a huge amount of support from many people over the years, and after numerous slips and relapses, he’s now a civilian supervisor on a military base. He’s saving up money to buy a house.

So we might say to someone, “OK, it’s really awful that you were beaten as a child, or that your dad gave you vodka when you were eight to keep you quiet, or that you have a learning disability, or that you’re in a violent relationship, or that you had a baby by the time you were sixteen. But what now? You have something worthwhile to give this community. Do you want to work together on discovering what it is?” And some people don’t. Maybe they’re not ready, or their pride gets in the way. But when they say yes, they enter into a powerful current of grace and healing.

Most people in Petaluma support our work. Even some people who had led a neighborhood’s opposition to one of our facilities later became donors and supporters. That’s because they saw that we made reasonable accommodations to their concerns, managed the facility well, enforced the rules, and respected the neighborhood.

In my view, the Polly Klaas tragedy makes it all the more remarkable that Petaluma has embraced our mission. Some residents have even told me that cots is part of how Petaluma defines itself. COTS serves to remind most of us that our fragile bubble of privilege and comfort can be ruptured at any time; that we, too, can be broken and brought to our knees; and that if we haven’t been brought to our knees yet, it’s only because we haven’t been hit hard enough.

Polonsky: How do you handle malcontents? I’m sure not all your clients are cooperative and receptive to your programs.

Records: That’s true, and I’ve had my life threatened more than once. But then, I once lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a neighborhood we compared to a war zone. Dealing with threats here is not much different from adapting to a city with a high crime rate: when necessary, you watch your back and use caution.

Dealing with homeless people who are upset is similar to dealing with anyone who’s upset. Running clean and sober facilities greatly reduces dangerous behavior. Yes, people get nasty and mean sometimes, but the program participants themselves help settle down those who are making trouble. Our staff members, many of whom were once homeless, are good at defusing tension. If all else fails, sometimes we have to call 911, but as cots has grown, it’s gotten more and more stable. It’s a combination of safe policies and procedures, experienced staff, and self-selecting program participants who want healing and transformation in their lives.

And the transformative aspects of the work apply to everybody. Volunteers thank us for the opportunity to serve. People want to connect; they want meaning in their lives. We’re all finding our way, stumbling and falling and getting up again. In a sense, it’s easier to be homeless, because then it’s clear you need to change your life. Food and shelter are necessities, but I think being loved is just as important. Many people are materially comfortable but feel alone and estranged. I think Mother Teresa alluded to this when she spoke of the “poverty” among the rich in our country. We all need love and support and structure. You can say, “This one’s homeless; this one’s not.” But I think, from a God’s-eye view, there is probably not a lot of difference between the most highly accomplished human being and the most broken.

When Jesus told us to serve the “least among us,” I think he was offering a spiritual path that’s not limited to Christianity. Working with people who are hungry and need to be fed, who are thirsty and need something to drink, who are in prison and need visitors, or who are naked and need to be clothed opens up blessings in our lives.

Polonsky: You make it sound so appealing. Why don’t more people volunteer?

Records: A lot of them feel they don’t have time. But how much time do we spend watching television or surfing the Internet? We may have more time than we think we do. And we might find a greater happiness from giving where we are needed than from being entertained.

Fear is another obstacle. A while back we asked churches to consider taking clients we didn’t have room for in the family shelter, and a member of one congregation did not want homeless people using the church’s bathrooms. There are fears of disease, fears of destructive or violent behavior, fears of being taken advantage of. And those fears are not always unreasonable. You can encounter scary people in this work, and you can get hurt. So you should honor your own needs as much as another person’s and get involved in a way that stretches but doesn’t break you. Part of what cots offers is an opportunity to serve in a safe, structured environment. Then again, even when we are broken in service, we may recover with new strength and wisdom.

I also think people don’t get out there and help because they’re afraid of the world’s pain. There is so much agony just behind the doors of the homes in our neighborhoods, let alone among people sleeping on the street. How do you face all that pain? My own experiences have shattered me several times.

Some activists are driven by a sense of outrage. I’ve felt that myself, and maybe it can be productive in a way. But anger and desperation are also corrosive; they can eat us up. So I encourage people to do what comes naturally for them. Many people connect with animals, for instance, because they are safer to work with and easier to care for than people. You can even start with a plant. Many of the homeless people we work with take care of plants and pets, because it’s rewarding to care for another living thing.

Polonsky: Heartbreak must be an occupational hazard.

Records: It is. I was at our soup kitchen last week, sitting next to a woman who had been in our program a couple of years ago. She’d gotten a job and a place of her own, and had been doing ok — and then she’d learned that she had stage-iv cancer. She had a deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes. Later that night, I wept as I thought about her, but I was glad she knew she could come to us for help at the hardest, most frightening time in her life. I saw all of humanity in her: our struggles, triumphs, inevitable suffering and death, and also the possibility that people who care won’t let us struggle alone. We can ask for and get help. Somewhere, somehow there should be love and support for all of us.

Polonsky: In your foreword to Invitation to Service you describe a young girl who was once in the cots family shelter and is now being pimped on the street by her drug-addicted mom’s boyfriend. This news sent you into a tailspin, because you’d felt like a surrogate father to her.

Records: Yes, I was devastated. But it also strengthened my resolve to help make cots a haven from all the harshness and villainy in the world, a place where children are protected and cherished, and their parents are taught to be good parents.

Just to think of the way that tens of thousands of children all over the world die of preventable causes every day — and not just homeless children — the horror of it can tear us apart. But I think it can be good for us to be shattered in this way. It’s an opportunity to process some of the big human grief, to receive as much of it as we can take into our being. As much as it hurts, it’s a blessing.

Polonsky: How is it a blessing to receive pain?

Records: It’s a blessing because it means engaging with the truth of our lives, which is that this world is full of overwhelming suffering. Many religions suggest that the pain and injustice are acceptable somehow: there is a loving God whose ways we don’t know but must trust; or that it’s all an illusion; or that we’re reaping the karma we’ve sown. Yet religions still encourage us to help those in need.

But suppose you don’t have faith, and for you all of humanity’s suffering is heartbreakingly, horribly real, and there’s absolutely no sense to any of it. Then the blessing is that you still get to choose how you are going to live in the world. You can change the world from one that is senselessly horrible to one in which there is compassion with your choice about how to live. You can choose that, to the extent of your ability, the people whose lives touch yours will be treated with love. 

My view is that until our hearts are broken, we’re less-than-complete human beings. Maybe sometimes we have to ignore the pain of others, just to function. But if we’re incapable of recognizing others’ pain, then we’re fragmented and cut off from ourselves. We all have the capacity to love and to care, but it has to develop, and that process usually involves some breaking, some pain. The payoff comes in a sense of connectedness. There is this painful gouging-out of the stone of our hearts, which can then fill with kindness.

Polonsky: But even you must lose sight of that sometimes.

Records: Well, sure, I experience the normal range of human emotions. Some things that happen at work make me angry. Other times I feel an overwhelming sadness, which can open into a tenderness for all life. But we also laugh a lot at cots.

I bring my own shortcomings and challenges to this work, some of which are rooted in my early life and losses. But to the extent that I’ve offered my being, my hands, my body, and my mind in service, that largely displaces fretful feelings. Last week I was working with a guy who’s an abuse survivor and is seriously ill. He was about to undergo another round of medical treatment, and I said to him, “I don’t know how long you’re going to live, but I know you’re going to be ok.” That perspective echoes through all of this: we’re all going to be ok.

In the book How Can I Help? Ram Dass talks about looking at someone who’s dying from aids and thinking, This person is doing interesting work. That’s true for everyone: we’re all doing the work of our lives. Homeless people are doing their work. COTS staff are doing their work. I’m doing my work. We’re all works in progress, learning the hard way how to be more comfortable and happy, on a planet for slow learners.

Polonsky: But your own life is not as difficult as those of the people you serve. How do you reconcile your relative material ease and comfort with the poverty you witness every day?

Records: I don’t feel like I am witnessing poverty every day. What I witness is people who are getting support and putting their lives back together. They often are eager, happy, and proud of what they’re doing.

If I reduced my economic status to be more on a par with that of the people I’m serving, I don’t know that I’d be more useful to them. Part of my work is to act as an intermediary between the population at large and our program participants. I need nonhomeless people to relate to me, too. I was a lawyer; I live in a house; I’ve got a car; and I think it’s a good idea to help homeless people.

Recently a client thanked me for his new teeth. I’d asked my dentist, as a favor, to make him a new set of dentures. That client looks so different now; he’s handsome! When your teeth have crumbled, there’s nothing like a set of new dentures to change the way you see yourself and the way other people see you. I couldn’t have facilitated that process if I didn’t have a dentist myself.

I do a lot, but not all that I could do, to make life better for our clients. People like Mother Teresa and Gandhi apparently gave without ceasing, and I sometimes feel bad for not meeting their standard. I haven’t given my life over fully to this work; I haven’t become the work, as they did. I still have a somewhat normal life, but on balance I’m satisfied with that, because it has permitted me to be a good father and husband and to enjoy my life.

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