Lee's Liquor Bar is a simple, camel brown storefront in downtown Minneapolis with an art deco neon sign, lots of cigarette smoke, and songs like "Blue Bayou" pouring out of the eaves. It's the sort of bar that was prevalent on skid rows across Middle America during the thirties and forties. And like the rest of these aged little honky–tonks, there's a real subculture at work inside.

A tightly knit clique of swing and ballroom dancers come to dance to the live music, drink bottled water, and sit at a cluster of tables near the dance floor; people sitting on the stools at the bar come there to drink; a select group of career alcoholics live above the bar and barter cleaning services for rent and a bar tab, and right in the middle of all of it is the bartender, Claire Hagen.

Claire is well spoken, matter of fact, and with her vintage dresses, Betty Page bangs, and red lipstick, she fits right into the rockabilly crowd. But regular attendees know she's doing more than pouring drinks–she's serving spirits.

I've been a regular attendee at Lee's since I took up ballroom dancing four years ago. On one Monday night, in–between cha–cha–cha's, I noticed Claire talking to a gruff man with a filthy, ragged coat who looked like he'd been sleeping under the bridge half a block away. He dumped change out of his pockets and onto the bar, looked at her, and said, "What can I buy for this?"

The second his change hit the bar top I felt my eyes roll and heard myself think, Ugh, you're spending your pennies from panhandling on a drink? But my inner dialogue stopped dead in its tracks the moment I saw Claire very politely count his change with him and inform him as to what his pennies would buy. She did not speak down to him. She did not speak slowly. She did not treat him with any false affectation or affection. In response the man's face softened, his posture straightened a bit, and his demeanor became more cooperative and amiable. She treated him with dignity, and he felt it.

When no one else was nearby, I complimented her on her handling of that situation and said something like "I wouldn't have handled it that way, but I watched you, and I thought, that's the example of Christ, treating even the least with dignity. I would like to be more like that." Claire told me it was just part of how she practiced her faith. I was surprised. Faith doesn't get a lot of airtime in inner–city honky–tonk bars. I asked her if we could discuss it further sometime, and she agreed.

Our first two meetings to talk were canceled, one by a stabbing at the bar, and one by the death of a regular customer. Her schedule, which it turns out involves being a single mother of two teenagers and working towards a bachelor's degree in theology at a local college, doesn't leave a lot of time for small talk, so when we finally do meet, on a Sunday afternoon at a coffee shop, we get straight to the point.

Claire tells me she took the job at Lee's as a way to support her family. In the course of her work she met Tim, who had been burned during an attempted robbery, leaving him extremely disfigured, homeless, and too paranoid to sleep on the streets. His skin was damaged so that he had to drink water almost constantly to keep healthy; he wandered in off the streets often for water. Claire recalls shaking his hand once and his strong reaction to it. It occurred to her then that because he was homeless and disfigured, he didn't have the opportunity for what she calls "the human touch we all need just to live." From then on she went out of her way to touch him lightly on the arm, shoulder, or hand in their dealings, and he responded with gratitude and friendship.

Over time she noticed that sleep deprivation and his already bad health were causing him to deteriorate quickly. She spoke with the owner of the bar and got him a room upstairs in exchange for some cleaning services. He died shortly thereafter. As Claire finishes this story, she pauses and adds, "I think he was finally able to relax and sleep."

Her friendship with Tim led Claire into what has become an informal ministry of everyday actions. She explains that she doesn't evangelize outright at the bar, saying, "I don't think it's helpful there. It ends most conversations."

She evangelizes in a different way. Referencing Theresa of Avalon, she says, "We are the hands of God. In our day–to–day lives, we're all there is to make sure God's love and generosity is distributed."

Claire believes that her work gives her a unique opportunity to distribute some of God's love. "I'm not in a position of asking people to change," she explains. Where someone working in social service or in ministry outreach might approach some of her customers with the suggestion that they seek out a better lifestyle, she simply meets them where they are. As a result she finds that people trust her, rely on her, and respond to her in surprising ways.

Claire reports that some of her poorest customers leave her gifts on a regular basis. "I gave a little bag of potato chips to a woman who said she was hungry, and when I came in to work the next day she'd been by and left a giant Scooby Doo stuffed animal for me."

She believes that human beings need to give as much as they need to receive, and that in accepting what she suspects could be ill–gotten tokens she is doing them a further service by allowing them the dignity of giving. "Many of us misinterpret people on the fringes, thinking they're just out for themselves, and sometimes they are, but sometimes they want to give. We all have to give, and we all have to receive. I'm learning to be open to someone else's generosity."

Claire struggles with many aspects of her work. She's never comfortable serving alcohol to so many alcoholics and says, "Sometimes I feel like I'm just on the wrong side." The crisis–oriented and highly social demands of the bar wear on her, and she finds the amount of loss she encounters disheartening. In the five years that she's been working at Lee's, at least 12 regular customers have died.

She attended the funeral of one of the regulars who lived upstairs and cleaned in the bar, and heard Louie, the owner of Lee's, eulogize the man saying, "Given a different set of circumstances in life, he could have done great things."

"Louie hit it on the head," Claire says. "We need to change our thinking about poverty. We've changed the way we think about race and gender and other things, but the way we think of poverty is not even on the table. Many people have this idea that you can just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and for some of us that's true, but not everyone has a view of the world that includes better things. Poverty is hard. It's a full–time job that no one would pick."

Claire is not sure how she will carry her experience at the bar, her degree in theology, and her faith into the world from here. She explains, "My college advisor recently told me I need to answer two questions: Where does your joy come from? and Who are your people? It might be that people on the fringes and in poverty are my people."