Just a thought...

Sleeping on a bench, a man wakes up, rubs his eyes and looks around wearily at the world.  A full garbage can greets him, and he sees the shopping cart that totes around his life.  Sighing, he closes them again, wanting just for a moment to forget, to dream of his mothers embrace, running around in the yard as a small child, to feel loved again, whole and protected.  As the wind rushes up to rustle the newspaper he’s been sleeping on, he realizes it’s a lost cause and gets up.  Thus begins his day...

This is the scene for millions--tons of people in our midst:  Waking up to the elements, while we lie sleeping peacefully under a soft, fluffy blanket, remote still in our hand from a night up maybe with the wife and kids watching a movie in the bedroom.  Breakfast awaits us in the kitchen--pancakes or toast and eggs, depending...  Why the disparity?  Hardship, addiction, abuse, mental illness; conditions beyond our control, the list goes on.  It is not hard to understand why people are down and out, reasons to beat us onto the sidewalk abound.  What is hard to get is why we have let homelessness gain momentum and grow to such proportions.  Yes, we have dozed off, become numb in the face of suffering; we have submitted to the status quo--indeed have stood by as passive witnesses and somehow now the divide between our cheerful Sunday morning breakfasts and the man on the bench seems normal.  How have we let this injustice happen, not only the physicality of it, but the hardening of our hearts?

Just the other day, a man was sleeping in my quiet, little hometown right in the middle of the main drag in the bushes. He was big and unwieldy and his presence was like a pimple in the middle of an idyllic, everyday scene.  To me, this situation, though “normal" in our present-day society, was monumental.  I stopped dead in my tracks and did a double take.  I gawked, I gaped, I floundered...I didn’t know what to do.  It’s not that I’ve never seen people sleeping in the bushes, or otherwise living on the fringe, but the fact that this happened in a town  that predominantly caters to families and older white people,  where not much out of the usual happens for me, magnified the reality of homelessness to the nines.  And the fact that this was happening in my hometown was a real shocker.

As I stood by unable to move, pretending to look at my phone, wanting desperataly to do something but not knowing what, I noticed that most everybody walking by was making a point of ignoring him.  And those that weren’t, seemed to gape out of curiosity, as though tourists viewing a monster in a cage. Still others moved away quickly, as if they had been bitten and continued on.  I wanted to scream “Don’t you see??  Don't you care?”  And what did I do?  Nothing.  A big fat zero.  Oh, I prayed for him, that I did, but beyond this invisible supplication, I did nothing.  What could I have done?  What could anybody have done?  I don’t know, but for me, the man in the bushes served as a hefty reminder that something must be done in our society because something is very, very wrong.  When people sleep in bushes and others pretend not to care, we have a problem, Houston. 

There is a church in San Francisco where people can come to sleep if they need to get out of the elements; this church is called St. Bonifice.  No questions are asked.  Basically, this church has it’s doors open all day to the homeless.  Various folks fill the pews with their sleeping forms, and canes and backpacks.  Such an atmosphere of peace and sanctity soaks the place, you can just feel the reverence for life.  In this church, there is a fresco of Jesus on the ceiling.  It is huge. When I look at it, I feel as though I am surrounded by love itself, by protection and understanding.  His arms seems to call, to beckon to come. Grace and healing are St. Bonifice's cornerstones...   Shouldn’t that also be what we, as a society are about?  To shelter our fellow man; brother and sister as it may be, with compassion, kindness and very real assistance?    

Love is the only thing that will remedy this ill of homelessness. The love that has been planted in all of us, the compassion that we all have or are capable of having.  I am not advocating that everybody go out and house a homeless person, or spend money and resources they don’t have on the care and feeding of someone.  That's a big responsibility that not everybody is capable of.  What I am saying, is when you see someone in need, stop before reacting, reach down inside and listen to that voice for direction, the voice of your heart, your soul...    For me it’s Jesus, and do what it says.  It may be uncomfortable, but what’s the alternative?