A great little breakfast spot with specials in the $4.95-$5.95 range. They serve lunch also...

Sunny-Side Up
(A Priest's Breakfast Ritual)

A priest describes an ordinary diner/restaurant as a sociable place, with its own rituals, where he can enjoy the company of a parishioner in a homey atmosphere. One parishioner admits that he hopes that God loves him, a breakthrough attributable to the diner's homey openness.

On the corner of Northwest Broadway and Everett in downtown Portland, Oregon there is a greasy spoon of a restaurant called John's Cafe. I call it Police Headquarters because on any given morning you can find at least seven or eight cops at the counter mopping up their eggs with dry toast and washing them down with around five cups of industrial-strength Folgers. From 8:30 to 10 a.m., Monday through Friday, John's Cafe sits on the safest square block in three counties. It's run by an old Greek immigrant, his wife, and their 18-year-old grandson who acts as dishwasher, busboy, and interpreter. It is the kind of cafe that your doctor warns you about, a kind of cardiac hell. But I still love it. The service is good, the ambience is vintage 1962, and they cook my eggs just the way I like them. In the Hannon family, that is just about as good as life gets.

So when one day Stanley Wicks asked me if I wanted to take him out for breakfast, it was the first place I thought of. And for the next two years, on the first Monday of each month, Stanley and I would have breakfast together at John's Cafe. It became our regular haunt. We would meet at St. Vincent de Paul Church where I worked, and together walk the five blocks to John's--rain or shine. We would sit in the same booth, the one closest to the bathrooms, having arrived with some amount of fanfare and fuss. Stanley, being a rather large man and loud, would enter with cheerfulness dripping off him like water, saying hello to everyone, patting the shoulders of all the cops who, after the fourth or fifth time, rightfully concluded that Stanley was harmless and refrained from instinctively reaching for their weapons. He would blow a kiss to Sylvia, the grandmother stationed behind the counter, and wave to her husband slinging hash at the grill. I half-enjoyed the spectacle, respectful of the fact that in a large city, this was Stanley's home base. He was like Norm Peterson in the situation comedy "Cheers." Folks like Stanley gravitate to watering holes and eateries like John's Cafe because they are places where everybody knows your name.

Placing our order was like celebrating the old Latin Mass: it was a ritual wrapped in mystery and awe, lost to all but a very few who were privy to its inner workings. Stanley had to have coffee from a fresh pot, and it had to be poured in a mug that was free of chips or stains. His eggs had to be cooked over easy, with the stress on easy. The toast had to have just come out of the toaster. (It is a huge pet peeve of mine that at Denny's the toast is always cold.) It had to be cut diagonally and placed around the plate. Hash browns had to be brown, not yellow. I know all this because that is how Stanley ordered. He was specific and unapologetic. And he ordered each time like it was the first time he had set foot in John's Cafe. It was grand theater, and I loved it.

One Monday, Stanley seemed sullen and unlike himself. He didn't kid me about my age, reminding me that he was one year older, that his middle name was John, after John XXIII, that I looked like Robert Kennedy, whose older brother was also named John, and wasn't that a coincidence. He didn't call me "bucko." Or mess up my hair. Or ask me what I thought of his new shoes, which were actually eight months old, but I still said were the cat's meow, which always made him laugh. No, we had none of this playful banter as we walked from the church to John's Cafe. No patting the cops on the back. No blowing a kiss to grandma. No saying howdy to the cook. Stanley sat across from me and fished out four or five prescription bottles from various pockets and counted out his medication and placed them on the table as he always did. Without those pills, Stanley would be languishing in a state hospital somewhere counting the ceiling tiles instead of being here where he needed to be, blended into the soup of humanity.

Our breakfast arrived and I dug right in, leaving Stanley in the dust, nibbling his toast like a mouse and sipping his coffee. Only the clinking of forks and knives saved us from complete silence. Then, Stanley looked up at me, gazed straight into my eyes as if to say, "Listen, I know that a lot of the time you humor me because I'm mentally ill, and I ask questions that have no real basis in reality, but I want an honest answer to this question, okay?

"Father Pat, does God love me?"

God only knows from what dark recess of doubt or hurt or fear or anxiety this question came, but I knew Stanley was genuine in his concern, that he had been pondering this question, it seemed, for a very, very long time. And I gave him the only answer I had. "Yes, Stanley," I responded. "God loves you." More than you will ever know, I thought to myself. Stanley was obviously relieved by the answer because a huge grin appeared on his face and his appetite returned with a vengeance. He was wielding his knife and fork with such energy I could have sworn I saw one of the cops check his holster.

Five minutes later, Stanley was down again, finger painting with his egg yolks, scratching his head nervously Again he looked up at me and asked, "Father Pat, does God love me?" To which I responded, this time with my hand on his arm, "Yes, Stanley, you know God loves you." Once again, the fog lifted, the sun shone brightly and all was well with the world. But five minutes later, Stanley was scraping the ground with his chin, his spirits siphoned out of him, his heart broken. Isn't this just like the rest of us, I thought. How quickly we all forget. Stanley looked up at me, this time with tears coming out of his eyes; he looked like a child lost at a carnival, surrounded by hundreds of people and yet so very alone. "Father Pat," he asked me a third time, "does God love me?" Well, it dawned on me that something mysterious was going on here, that together Stanley and I had stepped into something quite sacred, and that John's Cafe had, under our very noses, become holy ground.

Taking Stanley's hands into mine, I looked into his eyes and said, "Stanley, you know you have asked me this question three times now. I think you know the answer. I want you to go deep into your heart, go to the peaceful place in the deepest part of your heart where Jesus lives. Go there and stay there for a few minutes. And then I'm going to ask you a question, all right?" Stanley agreed.

We sat there for around four or five minutes. I gazed out the window, finished my orange juice, listened in on the conversation in the booth adjacent to ours, planned the rest of my morning. Then, looking at Stanley, once again taking his hands into mine, I asked him, "Stanley, does God love you?" Stanley, paused for a moment, freed up one of his hands to take a sip from his coffee, and then with the tone of truth in his voice I have never heard before or since said, "You know, Father Pat, I'm optimistic."

I have since come to believe that in a world that is all too easy to get lost in, there is no greater confession of faith than the one that was uttered that Monday morning at John's Cafe in Portland by a wounded, broken man who went on a journey to the deepest place in his heart and discovered that despite it all, he was not alone, that in the very shadow of his life he found the God who loves him. And I have also come to believe that John's Cafe and gathering places like it are like churches, places where police officers and immigrants and priests and folks like Stanley can come and, at least for a little while, leave their aloneness at the door and step into a warm and welcoming place where they are known.

That Monday morning placed into sharp focus for me the kind of spiritual hunger we all suffer from in our time, this gnawing feeling in our gut that we are alone, that if, by some strange twist or turn in life, we were stripped bare of all those things that help to disguise our weakness and keep our true selves hidden, we would be like Stanley, a lost child in a carnival, unloved and unknown.

My work in downtown Portland among the poorest in the city confirmed this. Homeless men and women told me time and time again that the one thing that causes the greatest despair is not the hungry bellies or the cold nights or the ravenous addictions. No, what makes them despair the most is when ordinary folk walk by them without so much as a glance. It is being discounted and discarded that makes them want to give up. To be in the end stripped of the one thing that keeps them tethered to this world, the simple nod of a stranger that tells them that they are not invisible, that is the hardest thing of all.

Jesus felt it. He didn't want to go through his life like a lost child in a carnival, an invisible man in a world that was passing him by He hungered for the love of family and friends as we all do; he wanted to be known. Like all of us, he didn't want to leave this planet without at least one person knowing that he was here. "And you, who do you say that I am?" That had to be why he dared to ask his disciples, his companions in life, who they thought he was. And that was why he was willing to show them his truest self: that he was the Messiah. But, unlike any Messiah they had ever heard about, he was a king whose crown would be of thorns, a king with a cross. His would be a life stripped to the bare essentials: a holy poverty that clung to the hope of a God who promises us that we will never be alone, that he loves us. "Now that you know all this about me, will you still be my friends?" Jesus asked them. Second only to hanging on the cross, it was Jesus at his most vulnerable.

We who are baptized in the name of Jesus consider his way the only way It means being willing to strip everything bare, to lose our life as Stanley Wicks most certainly lost his, only to find it again in the loving embrace of a God who keeps promises. The world will never be so big that we will ever have to walk through it alone. God, who sees us for who we truly are, loves us without asking for anything in return. This I had forgotten and was reminded of one Monday morning by a man whose memory is as shaky as mine, whose mind is often lost in a fog, but whose heart holds a dwelling place for our God who feels very much at home in our presence. May we help to heal the heart of our world then, a heart that beats with a longing that betrays our deepest desire whether we be rich or poor, old or young, wounded or mended: we all wish to be in a place where everyone knows our name.

By Father Patrick Hannon, C.S.C., Associate Pastor at St. Felicitas Parish in San Leandro, California.