Hungry Minds.(Church of the Holy Apostles, writers' workshop)

The Church of the Holy Apostles, at the corner of Twenty-eighth Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, is a church only two-sevenths of the time. The other five-sevenths--every weekday including holidays, no exception made for weather, fire, or terrorist attack--it is the largest soup kitchen in New York City. It serves an average of about twelve hundred meals a day, though the number often spikes higher; on a recent Columbus Day, the number of meals served was fourteen hundred and ninety-two. As a church, Holy Apostles is a not large and not wealthy parish in the Episcopal Church's Diocese of New York. As a soup kitchen, it has lasted for more than twenty-five years, since back in the first Reagan Administration, and has served more than six million meals.

I know about the soup kitchen because I am one of the teachers of a writers' workshop that meets there after lunch on Wednesdays in the spring. I started the workshop fourteen years ago, with the help of a grant. I wanted to do something with the soup kitchen because I admired the people there and the way it is run and the whole idea of it. There are so many hungers out there; the soup kitchen deals, efficiently and satisfyingly, with the most basic kind. I consider it, in its own fashion, a work of art.

To walk into the church while lunch is going on is to enter one of the city's defining public spaces. The building, which turned a hundred and sixty this year, was declared a New York City Landmark in 1966. It has a high, arched cathedral ceiling supported by cylindrical pillars that rise to Tuscan-style groined arches. Natural light comes into the nave through tall and narrow stained-glass windows whose age and artistry make them rarities in themselves. But as for traditional church fanciness that's about it. Most strikingly, the church has no pews. From the baptismal font, at the back of the church, to the steps of the altar, ninety feet away, no pews or carpet or other fixtures interrupt an open expanse of stone tiles, whose foot-polished smoothness suggests a dance studio or the floor of Grand Central.

People who work for the soup kitchen set up round dining tables and metal folding chairs in the main part of the church every lunchtime. The soup-kitchen guests wait in line on the sidewalk outside, receive meal tickets, file through the serving stations in the Mission House adjoining the church, fill their trays, come into the church, sit down, and eat. The meal, which lasts from ten-thirty to twelve-thirty, takes place in a murmur of dining noises sometimes accompanied by music on the church's piano or organ beneath (if the day is sunny) shafts of stained-glass light. Most guests finish eating in twenty minutes or half an hour and are on their way. Formerly, when the church was not used for dining, you ate in a smaller room in the Mission House and had to be finished in seven and a half minutes. Now you can take your time.

To let all the soup-kitchen guests know that our writers' workshop exists, I sometimes sit during lunch at a little table with a hand-lettered sign and a stack of flyers right by the exit door. Often, I have to clip a pen to the flyers and tape the sign to the table so they won't blow away in the cold drafts from the door. For the two hours I'm there, the stream of people does not stop. Preceding me in the exit line might be tables for representatives of housing advocacy groups, drug- and alcohol-counselling services, domestic-abuse shelters, or (a few years back) Charles, the Condom Man, who passed out free condoms for AIDS prevention with a carny barker's spiel. Because I'm nearest the door, many people wait a moment at my table before heading out into the cold, where some of them will be continuously until they return for lunch the following day.

Some ask about the workshop; most do not. They set their paper cups of hot coffee or tea next to the flyers, along with the orange or the piece of bread they were given on the way out, and they button up, pull their caps over their ears, put on gloves if they have them, re-tie the bags or parcels they brought, and kind of hunch down into themselves, getting ready for the city again.

On really chilly days, they might spend a long time on these details before they go. And then sometimes, after half an hour or so, the same person is again at my table, again buttoning up for outdoors. That means that the person waited in line, filled his tray, ate, and then went through the process over again. There's no rule against going back for seconds; the soup kitchen never turns anybody away. On occasion, I've noticed people who have passed by three or even four times--have eaten that many lunches, in other words. The soup kitchen portions are generous, and the menu for each lunch has been designed to provide a person with enough calories to last twenty-four hours. Most people who eat at the soup kitchen look like anybody. If you sat across from them on the subway, you would never guess how hungry they were.