The Emptiness of Our Hands

During Lent and Holy Week, 1999, Phyllis Cole-Dai and James Murray lived voluntarily on the streets of Columbus, Ohio, the nation's fifteenth largest city. They didn't go out on the streets to satisfy idle curiosity, or to experience a strange new world. They didn't go out to find answers to questions, solutions to problems. They didn't go out to save anyone, or to hand out donations of food and blankets. They went out with one primary aim: to be as present as possible to everyone they met-to love their neighbor as themselves. Doing so, they were reminded just how difficult the practice of compassion can be, especially because of personal judgments, assumptions, fears and desires, all habits of mind that harden one's regard for and behavior toward other people.

The Emptiness of Our Hands: A Lent Lived on the Streets is a meditative narrative accompanied by nearly thirty black and white photographs, most of them shot by James using crude pinhole cameras that he constructed from trash. This book will thrust you out the door of your comfortable life, straight into the unknown. What can happen to a person without a home? Indeed, what might happen to you?