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Sept. 23, 3019
Sister Eloise Rosenblatt, RSM
I pass the homeless – or the hand-out seekers – any day I’m driving across town to the post office, the market or the freeway ramp. The hand-lettered signage on the ratty fold-up cardboard torn from boxes has evolved. The signs used to say, “Down and out, no money,” or “Will work for food,” or “Help a veteran. God bless.” Now it’s “Anything helps” or no sign at all. The guy just stands there with a giant-slurp plastic cup, and if a car slows down with window rolled down, he leaps into the lane, grabs the bill, and shoves it into his back pocket. The handout seekers – are they homeless? – present an ever-increasing population.
The guys holding up signs when the light is red used to be decrepit-looking middle-aged or older men, some with pet dogs, who looked like they hadn’t showered or shaved for days. Now the dogs are fewer. The athletic shoes clean. A series of women in ethnic garb with a baby in a stroller appear regularly on a certain corner. On the median this morning stood a 30-ish guy smoking, ear jack for his phone, a rolled-up sleeping bag at his feet. A disheveled obese woman, indeterminate age, pushed a shopping cart with a suitcase in it, crossing the street to the mall. I feel compelled to notice, but shame that I look away, salving my conscience that there are social services available to all these people, suspicion that this has become a racket, but convinced some are genuinely in need.
But how do I tell the charlatans from the truly desperate? The fact is that many homeless individuals and families are not visible, housed in temporary shelters, and “they” in Santa Clara County social services are trying to place them in low-cost housing. Another set of homeless have erected tents and are camping on sidewalks. They don’t want to be in shelters. This presents another challenge to social services.
Did the rich man have some of these complicated feelings about a homeless man lying at his door who had a name, Lazarus? Was he being used as a “front,” to collect money for his “keepers,” or did he actually live on the street outside the rich man’s house? Luke says he was “covered with sores,” and that the dogs treated him better than people did. The homeless include a high proportion of people suffering from mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, personality disorders, traumatic stress and malnutrition – plus health conditions aggravated by life on the street. In Luke’s parable, Lazarus may have become habituated to his feeling of helplessness; and he had a repellant, untreated disease.
We can presume Lazarus, like street people, had family somewhere. He was, at one moment of his life, recognized as someone’s son, maybe someone’s dad, someone’s husband, someone’s brother, cousin, former neighbor or classmate. Ultimately, the members of the “family” of Lazarus – the family of the poor –are angels, Abraham, Moses and prophets. The poor are destined to be “re-familied,” blessed by God and compensated for their earthly misery.
Luke teaches that those who pay attention to the forgotten, the friendless and abandoned poor, the terrified, the homeless, the chronically sick, the hungry – are on Abraham’s side of the “great chasm” that separates the blessed from the damned.
I know people who serve meals in soup kitchens, who raise money to support homeless relief projects, who open a room off the garage to a guy with no job, who staff the self-help center at court to assist fearful women petition for domestic violence restraining orders, who organize bus trips for family members to visit loved ones in prison, who donate blood, who hear complaints of lonely elders in assisted living, who bring communion to seniors who can’t get to church, who drive to tent sites in a big van with portable showers so camping homeless can bathe and get a haircut. I know people working in Rapid Re-Housing to help recently evicted families who can’t pay their hiked-up rent bill. I know volunteers who distribute packets of shampoo-toothpaste-soap to women in shelters.
You know them, too. A blessing on the people we know who live this Gospel message. And on the one who hands out a fiver to that woman in ethnic dress waving at you, with the baby in a stroller. On the chance the need is real.
Eloise Rosenblatt, RSM is a Sister of Mercy, a Ph.D. theologian, and an attorney in private practice in family law. She lives in San Jose.