Sing It Loud

It’s a few minutes past 6 pm on a Monday and Redhawk is in the fight of his life. Carrying a lion’s crest shield and wielding a foam battle-axe, he growls “Come on!” egging on a group of tweens. “Come on!”

He urges them to sort through a table of shoes, clothes and toys in a building behind St. Anne’s Church, which sits at the south end of a scab of earth-and-gravel dilapidation along Lee Street near Sprague in the East Central neighborhood.

The building is stiflingly hot. Everyone’s sweating, fanning themselves, trying to move as little as possible. Redhawk had told the kids that the donations were there for the taking. But they had hung back, picking furtively through the stacks, not really latching on to anything. That’s when Redhawk went into attack mode: “Come on! Come on!”

Which sent the kids, despite the heat and whatever trepidation they felt, into attack mode too.

Twenty minutes later, collapsible chairs have been assembled into a semicircle and no one is allowed outside it. Not even the reporter, despite his protestations of needing to observe. Once the circle forms, it’s all there is.

Everyone — kids, adults, volunteer staff — is required to take a seat and a songbook (unless the person has the songs memorized, a point of pride). At the center — with an acoustic guitar, a portable CD player and a camp counselor’s exaggerated mannerisms — is Redhawk. (His given name is Reverend Michael Rice-Sauer, but it’s a name he almost never uses.)

The people in the semicircle are the Voiceless, a choir of homeless and formerly homeless that Redhawk formed years ago as a way to get people off the streets, even if only for minutes at a time.

Ranging in age from pre-teen to post-menopause — but including eight kids in a gathering of 22 — the attendance tonight is indicative of homelessness in general. Statistically, 40 percent of homeless are children, usually part of an entire family forced from their homes by disease, unemployment, mental illness or a mixture of them all.

A heaviness etches the faces of the adults, and even prematurely carved features on some of the children. Worry lines, wary eyes.

By the end of “Circus Parade,” a psychedelic processional of big top animals in a form that wends back and forth between a waltz and complete bedlam, that worry seems to recede. People loosen up.

Later, “The Fog,” a song about the nearly impenetrable darkness of mental illness, adds a measure of catharsis and resolve, neither of which is the kind of thing attained from rosy endings. Indeed, “The Fog” is ink black in tone right up to the end, where the lyrics turn, ever so slightly from “Can’t answer the door, can’t answer the phone / nobody’s home / I lay me down, but there’s no sleep / my soul to keep” to “In the name of truth I’m facing these fears / so I can sail this ocean of tears.”

There’s nothing easy about the path walked by the Voiceless, and nothing didactic about Redhawk’s approach. This wouldn’t work if it did. Though ostensibly a “ministry” — the way church-run missions are ministries and teenage house-building trips to deepest, darkest Cabo San Lucas are ministries — there’s no preaching in the circle.

During the entire practice, Redhawk never quotes Scripture, never mentions God. His business card reads, “There is no greater power than our loving one another!”

That’s what this is about. Openness, dialogue, trust and, above all, love.

During the housekeeping portion of the meeting, Redhawk invites everyone to a barbecue at his house, but asks the group to choose between two dates. The group largely votes for the first, but Christine Fort somewhat timidly says the latter works best. “I have finals,” she says. She’s completing the third quarter of administrative secretary school at SFCC. Having gone from homeless to degree-bound, she doesn’t want to be derailed. The group begs her to come. “It’s only an hour and a half …” Redhawk says, “and we’ll help you study.” Her smile beams and she relents. “I have my books in the car right now!” she warns.

Redhawk had sought to give homeless people a voice and a place to just “feel safe for an hour and a half.” He ended up helping them build a community to ensure that safety stuck around, maybe across generations.

“These people have become family,” he says. “They look out for each other. Watch each other’s kids.” Despite the weight of their collective troubles, they’re stronger together than they are alone.

Redhawk takes those as the first signs of a deep societal healing. “We’re getting back to ourselves,” he says of an America he feels has been lost in its own kind of self-absorbed fog. “We’re going to be a people again.” Asked if that’s because everyone’s lost their shirts in the recession, he replies, “It isn’t financial. It’s sociological.”

We’ve been hoodwinked into thinking what we needed were things, he says, when what we need is people. And he wants us to change: “I believe that everything that is good and right with America should be aimed at everything that isn’t.”

That’s why that game with the toy shield and foam axe really was a fight for life. Until the least of us is complete, he won’t be. Whether we realize it or not, Redhawk believes, that’s true of all the rest of us too. “These are human beings. They’re part of who America is,” he explains. “And we’ll never be whole until we realize it.”

For more on Redhawk’s ministry, visit covenantchristianspokane.org.