homelessness and the precarity of life
A short essay on an underappreciated tragedy
I originally posted this on my personal Facebook earlier this week. The overwhelmingly positive feedback I received tells me I should share this here as well.
One of the unexpected blessings of the job I have at Fellowship Congregational UCC is the chance to interact fairly often with a wide range of homeless people who either live in Tulsa, or are passing through. It seems FCUCC has a reputation amongst people on our streets here as a place one can go for a bite to eat, a warm coat or new pair socks, and a place to rest and maybe get out of the rain or the heat. This reputation is down to the leadership of our church, and their commitment to being a beacon of hope and mercy in a harsh and unmerciful world. For anyone who knocks on our doors during the day, we freely bags of nonperishable foods, we open our clothes closet, we offer a smile and a kind word and a listening ear. Usually Scott or Chris handle these interactions, but at times I’ve done so, and I’m always struck by how much these interactions are an emotional blessing for me as much as they are a material one for these souls who find themselves in circumstances of life I can scarcely imagine.
This isn’t a post to brag or preen about how good or holy we are at FCUCC. No, it’s an acknowledgement by me that I, and those in this place I work, have a decent numbers of interactions with homeless folks of all varieties. Almost none of those people are saints, no more so than the people in our pews or the folks you pass in the grocery store. Some are, in fact, addicted to one (or more) of a variety of substances. Some of those folks also attend one of the AA or NA groups we host. Many do not. Some do give off a air of danger, or perhaps just instability, which often deters me from engaging in more of these interactions than I do, since most days I have my four year old with me and I don’t want to expose him to even the tiniest chance of harm. Folks who live on the streets have hard, hard lives, sometimes of their own making, but more often, from a fatal combination of their choices, their psychological predispositions, and the way those things intersect with our often uncaring, soulless, profit-driven capitalist culture and economy. Each one of these folks is a walking tragedy, who experienced a hardship or situation in their life that they have never been able to recover from. All of them are reminders that, but for a small few flaps of a butterfly wings here or there, we could be them.
What none of them are is worthy of disrespect, of prejudice, of dehumanization, of hate, of carrying the weight of the rest of our own fears and misconceptions and anger. Most certainly, none of them deserve to be denigrated by a piece of shit billionaire who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth that he is convinced he put there himself and who is so self-obsessed he can’t even begin to imagine what life must be like for the other 99%, much less for that sliver of the population who live on the streets thanks to the depredations and injustices of the same system that randomly plopped him down on top of it.
Folks on the political right like to use the power of the state to make life harder for homeless people, passing laws that require permits for panhandling, or that make it illegal for service organizations to hand out meals, or restrict where people can rest at night. They do all this, while also running around mouthing off about what good Christians they are. But here’s the thing: those two things are not compatible. You cannot use the coercive power of the state to make life harder for vulnerable people if you are really, authentically following the words of Jesus. You cannot badmouth homeless people, and being living in a spirit of love and grace towards others. Elon Musk may not be a Christian, but the people who voted for the candidate he bankrolled and most other elected members of the Republican Party are, or at least claim to be. And when I see stuff like this, when I see them working to make life more difficult for the vulnerable, I can only think of the words of Jesus himself: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
It is in the face of the homeless addict, of the teen kicked out of their parent’s house, of the child whose mom works two jobs and still can’t make enough to afford rent, of the itinerant woman who fled an abusive husband – it is in these faces that we most clearly see Jesus, if we care to look.