On Sunday, September 14, Congregation Beth Sholom hosted a beautiful Farewell Reception for Sister Bernie Galvin, Executive Director of Religious Witness with Homeless People from 1993 to 2008 and a Tribute to her deeply loving 15-year gift to grateful San Franciscans, unhoused and housed alike.

True to Sister Bernie’s dedication to heartbreakingly beautiful celebratory ritual over the years, the bitter-sweet occasion was held in a space filled with original song and dance and praise for this loving woman who gave so much of herself to the city and to those she called, her, “noble companions along the way.”

Her dedicated office manager, Kevin Lynema, fashioned a photographic kaleidoscope of memories flashing by throughout the ceremony. When I thanked him for taking care of Bernie, he smiled, “She took care of me.”

Rabbi Alan Lew spoke of finding it, “almost unbearable,” to say goodbye to, “that magnificent soul and great heart,” with whom he worked very closely for the last 16 years. He expects to share Passover yearly: “Or else!”

He considered the loss of this, “community of caring that has grown up around Bernie and her work. Each time the City said the homeless couldn’t sleep or stand someplace, she dragged us there so we would all sleep there or schlepped us down so we would stand there. I was arrested nine times because of this woman. I won’t tell you how long and hard she fought to keep housing from being destroyed while people were sleeping or dying on the streets. She spent the last years on the job meticulously documenting the incredible waste in millions of dollars and energy it was taking to continually harass, arrest, and prosecute the poor and the homeless—to process them through the legal system—instead of the much smaller amount it would have taken to house and take care of them.”

Once, the City kicked homeless people out of a park where many had been sleeping. All were sleep-deprived. Two weeks before election day, “they discovered they were not going to win many votes if they arrested a group of priests, nuns, and rabbis.” Some of the group went out and slept in the park. Rabbi Lew woke in the morning and walked to the top of a hill where he saw, “around a thousand homeless people sleeping in a circle around Sister Bernie.”

This is a picture, he mused, of what she’s always done with her life, and why she’s tired and needs a rest. Who else can, “hold up all these people with that great heart of hers,” while traveling to Oklahoma to care for her dying mother, and then lose her sister?

Sister Imelda, who knew Bernie’s family, observed she has been true to, “a wonderful legacy,” from her mother who keep a soft and beautiful home, and father—a compassionate, kind union man who, in his words, “had a preferential option for the poor.”

Richard Marquez discussed his own retreat from the political scene, and said, “Only when recuperating my strength… by leaving the trenches and undergoing a spiritual retreat, did I… realize how meaningful you are, Sister Bernie. The words of the great revolutionary Che Guevara ring true when he said, ‘A true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.’” To huge laughter, he proposed, “With all that freedom-fighting experience, I want to nominate you for Vice Presidency of the United States.”

Finally, Sister Bernie herself traced her steps from her family all the way to San Francisco where she arrived alone and talked for days to homeless people in the Tenderloin. She realized almost immediately, “the glaring absence of the united voice of the faith community speaking out against the cruel treatment of desperately poor people.” Out of that vision sprang the 14-member coalition of Religious Witness, all of whom blessed her one by one at the end of the ceremony.

“This I know from my life experience,” she offered: “Hearts that beat strong with genuine compassion for the poor find each other. Hearts that beat with a fierce demand for justice find each other. It is as if the human heart has a magnetic element that pulls us so tightly together around our passion for the poor that our hearts begin to beat as one.”

“There is ‘…a time to come and a time to go,’ and the heart is the time-keeper.”

Godspeed, Sister Bernie. We have all been hugely blessed and enriched by your presence.

Carol

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