'Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past

Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus' --T.S. Eliot

So, on the day after the prudential judgment talk, while Fr. Fones was still at Blessed Sacrament (where you can attend a real live Dominican Rite Mass on 8.8.8), when I cornered him (which is what I do - when I can muster the courage, which is most of the time these days - with anyone religious or otherwise who is living out his or her vocation), he brought up Mother Teresa's view of those she served: that what she saw was the suffering and wounded Christ in each and every one of them.

She said it numerous times to different people, as that was precisely what compelled her to do what she did. But the version it brought to my mind was when a journalist asked her if she didn't have an ethical problem, or wasn't in some way in conflict with her faith, serving those who were dying of AIDS. Mother Teresa said something about not even understanding what he meant, and repeated that all she saw was the suffering Christ.

And a couple different aspects of that interaction really strike me as relevant to issues we face when addressing the problems of poverty and homelessness. One thing that is just terribly sad is that the reporter (I don't recall at all if it was a secular or religious reporter, big-time, small-town, male, female, or anything else) appears to be trying to create two classes, to separate himself and Teresa in their righteousness on the one hand from the dying sinner on the other. (Again, no idea whether he was really feeling that, or just playing devil's advocate to get a good quote, or perhaps even a gay man himself really hoping she was indeed as loving as he wanted to believe.)

The other issue it brought to my mind was how we look at 'those sorts of people' in general. I think very, very few, even among believers in Christ, manage to see glimpses of Him in the wretched of the earth. Fine: very few of us are saints, so that stands to reason. But we tend not even to see ourselves in them! That should be a much easier leap - and yet we so frequently see their suffering as proof not of our unity, shared longings, and common fears, but as clear signs of the gulf between us. To their fallenness we contrast our responsible jobs; to their lack of restraint we contrast our calm demeanor and good relations with coworkers; against their battles with addiction and petty crime we recall our sober investment practices and our determined, successful New Year's Weight-Loss Resolutions.

But I will repeat that any one of us is a finite number of tragedies away from our own version of just that level of despair. Some of us are broken more easily, some require decades of horror and abuse in order finally to abandon hope. And we can never know what it would take until we, too, are there ourselves. Just as the invisibles on the street didn't know. Just as they never hoped for the day when their suffering would be so inconsequential that most people wouldn't even see it as suffering, but justice, judgment - or simply an inconvenience.

I am not a pessimistic person, but I see a few bad winters ahead. With gas, electricity, and heating prices rising, the elderly in many places are not going to be able to heat their homes. With the mortgage crisis continuing, more families will be displaced. With food prices rising along with all other bills, contributions to already overtaxed food banks are diminishing - and thus, so, too, will access. My 'positive' spin on my fears is that, with more 'normal' people finding themselves on the margins, it may become easier for the other normal people to begin to see poverty not as a moral failing or a vice but a complex state of affairs brought on by many factors. Perhaps the struggling banks and airlines and weak dollar could be held up to the sceptical as examples that bad things can indeed happen to good people (well, corporate 'persons,' at any rate). Perhaps a negative $200,000 downturn in the value of one citizen's home could serve as testimony that if external conditions could affect one life so dramatically, they or a different set of circumstances might well be able to operate in a similarly striking fashion elsewhere.

In other words, I am hoping that all the nastiness that is still to come will help people to realize it could happen here, and it could happen now, and it could happen to me. Maybe for one person it will take a job loss, for someone else that and the loss of home, too, and for the very strong maybe no job, no house, a DUI conviction and a departing spouse. But if Mother Teresa could pray for years with loneliness and despair in her heart, I think many, many people in the coming years will receive the gift of brokenness. I hope it helps them see the humanity, and the divine, in the rest of the wounded.