What to say? What to do?
Is it a Christian thing to ignore our brother on the street like some stray animal?
Yet I do it all the time... im out of my comfort zone.
Christianity is not about comfort zone, Jesus did not sit with the scribes and the pharisees and bring the gospel, he went to the homes of the tax collectors and talked to the prostitutes and the lepers. Saint Paul brought the news on several missionary journeys and was imprisoned, flogged, shipwrecked, stoned, and constantly under death threats.
Compassion for the homeless is hard to implement on the individual basis unless you're writing a check for a charity, or volunteering at the Joan Kroc center. The homeless group is hard to reach out to, even in a social work setting.
It is sad to see men and women who should be institutionalized and treated for mental illness or substance abuse out on the street and shoeless and dirty and loaded up with plastic bags. In India its called a pariah.
But do you suspect secretly that some street people are actually doing better than they let on? Or maybe we doubt that the money they collect will actually go to food/shelter, but instead be used to wipe away the pain of another day's existence.
It really depends on where you live and how you really interact with the homeless. Joy, who works for Flynt publications, has used to have in 2006 conversations with some of the regulars who even critique her (lack of) parking skills.
Living close to Balboa Park, I daily see these urban gypsies with their shopping carts full of recyclables (probably the biggest contributors to the recycling movement).
When TRM lived here 1990-1994 we saw a handful of society's marginalia coming through the door. A Catholic and overly generous with our home, TRM always had ulterior motives -- someone he could tweek with, be a companion to, and could control completely. If the person pissed TRM off, the door hit the guest where the dog should have bitten.
Christian groups hand out food vouchers for restaurants, assuming that food is the most pressing issue.
Its a very complex issue and not likely to be solved in this post.
More to come...
