There is something so utterly beautiful about praying - that most hope-filled, rebellious activity that seems at the same time pointless and frustrating to the powers of our world, because they can never understand it nor stop it - praying with only a few, in the rain, in the midst of a neighbourhood ravaged by pain and threatened with displacement.

We faithful, ridiculous four, soaked by mist, shivering slightly in the still-temperate Vancouver autumn, can never shift this park, let alone this community, or this city. We are naive. We are spitting into the wind. We are screaming into a tornado. Our little prayers and our off-key songs sung with cracking, early-morning male voices are nothing compared to the lust for dope, the lust for property, the disregard for life that characterises this place.

It is so beautiful, this hopeless hope.

At the end we always pray the Our Father, sing the doxology, and then hug one another. We have to. It is a last note of innocent defiance to the world, the enemy, the devil. "You will not dishearten us! See? We will hug! Try and stop that!" Why would Satan even want to? And yet he should, because those hugs spell his doom.

It is so silly, to even think that way.

And it is so wonderful.