Radical Compassion: Finding Christ in the Heart of the Poor

by Gary Smith

Overview

Loving the Unloved of Society
 
“I realize that God brought me into this world, blessed with skills and talents. The only thing that makes sense to me is to use them in the service of the poor. It is at their feet that I find myself.”

For almost ten years, Gary Smith, S.J., lived and worked among the poor of Portland, Oregon. With this memoir, he invites us to walk with him and meet some of the abandoned, over-looked, and forgotten members of our society with whom he has shared his life. Just as Smith found a deeper, truer understanding of himself and of the heart of God through his work, these people and their stories stand to transform us.
 
“Although its subject matter is bleak, the book is not. Smith has found love amid the despair. His book is touching, at times hopeful, and the kind of book that is hard to put down, that fascinates, horrifies, and rivets one’s attention.”
—Booklist
 
“Smith takes us where we would rather not go, the heart of the poor, the lonely, and the abandoned. In true Ignatian fashion, he finds God there. An unforgettable experience for those who have the courage to walk with him.”
—Michael L. Cook, S.J.
Professor of theology
Gonzaga University
 
“Smith performs modern-day miracles of compassion, and his book sets a new standard for writing about the rich faith of those who are materially poor. His stirring prose and utter honesty will change the hearts and minds of many readers.”
—Gerald T. Cobb, S.J.
Chair, department of English
Seattle University

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780829420005
Publisher:	Loyola Press
Publication date:	10/01/2002
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

Gary Smith, SJ, worked for six years with the Jesuit Refugee Service in Sudanese refugee camps in Uganda. He is the author of They Come Back Singing, a journal of his time in Uganda, Radical Compassion, an account of his ministry to the poor and disabled in Portland, Oregon, and Street Journal

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One
People with Nothing to Prove:
Living among the Poor

I write this book so that the reader will have a better understanding of the poor.
 One morning I went to the hotel room of Stewart, a thirty-five-year-old man who suffers from cerebral palsy, which has disabled an arm and a leg and his sight.
 Stewart has lived in single-room occupancy hotels (SROs) since he left home in his twenties. His is a grungy looking room, needing a paint job. It has a small bathroom, a bed, a set of drawers for his clothes, and a tiny half-kitchen. The door leads out to the long and gloomy second-floor hallway of a four-story building. The window looks out onto a bleak inner court.
 I had come to help him get ready for a doctor’s appointment, and he talked as I helped him undress and get into the shower.
 “I have this dumb disease, in this stupid body,” he slowly told me, “which I hate.”
 The smallest tasks of this young man’s daily life are the tortured efforts of time and concentration: unbuttoning a shirt, drinking a cup of coffee, unlocking a door, crossing a street. As I helped him dry off and dress, we chatted about our lives and our families.
 “How many brothers do you have, Garibaldi?” he asked, using his nickname for me. “Are you married? What did you have for breakfast?”
 “Two brothers, Studebaker,” I replied, using my name for him, “and a sister. No, I am not married, and I didn’t eat breakfast.”
 His speech reflects longings and deprivations in his life. He told me of his twin: “He looks like me, but he is normal.”
 Stewart has an unaffected candor. As a matter of fact, he has no idea what it means to be pretentious. What you see is what you get. If he is happy, it is all there; if he is sad, one has no doubt.
 That is often the way for people with no power, no money, no exterior beauty. They have nothing to prove. And so Stewart is nonthreatening. He crashes through my defenses. He brings out what is good, whole, and deep down in me: the ability to love tenderly, speak truthfully, receive openly, and face gently my own weaknesses.
¦     ¦     ¦
On my way to work every day, I walk down Third Street in Portland, in a section of the city called Old Town, through a scene played out in the poor areas of every large city in the United States: the unemployed looking for work; drug dealers furtively hawking their heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamines; residents from the many SROs moving in and out of their buildings; burned-out alcoholics coming off or beginning another day of panhandling and drinking and misery; addicts engaging in the endless hunt for another fix; lines of people waiting to get food or clothes or shelter; the occasional nervous and fatigued prostitute wandering by; individuals talking incoherently to themselves; staff persons from a variety of agencies going about their work; alert police slowly surveying the streets on foot, on bikes, in cars.
 All this activity takes place in an area comprising low-income SROs, a Salvation Army facility that feeds and houses the poor, a couple of rescue missions that also run drug rehab programs, storefront operations that come and go depending on money and interest, vacant buildings retained by speculators waiting for the economic boom to swallow Old Town, dark and dreary taverns, city-run shelters, parking lots that are full in the day and empty at night, a nonprofit restaurant that serves the needy of Old Town, a women’s drop-in center, Outreach Ministry, a strip joint, an adult bookstore, and a community police station. Creeping into all of this, as Portland’s economic prosperity asserts itself, are upscale coffee shops, some high-priced restaurants and mom-and-pop grocery stores, and SROs that are being converted into condos.
 I live in the middle of it all in a room in the Downtown Chapel of St. Vincent de Paul Church. I wear several hats in terms of my ministry: working part-time for Outreach Ministry in Burnside (OMB), a money-management and personal care agency; assisting the Macdonald Center, a social outreach arm of the chapel, with SRO work; ministering to inmates at the county justice center; and hanging out on the streets.
 On occasion I come across a young flutist in the downtown commercial area of Portland. He is an Ichabod Crane of a man, wiry and fragile, and looks as if he is made of broomsticks and baling wire. He is usually wearing baggy pants and a raggedy sweatshirt. His full head of hair flies in a dozen different directions, especially on a windy day. There is a beat-up old hat at his feet containing a few coins from appreciative fans. His entire self is absorbed in the furious tooting on his cheap wooden instrument.
 Coming closer, one hears a strange thing: he’s playing nonsense notes. No melody. No organized rhythm. The listener experiences incomprehensible music and the mysterious force that propels those flying fingers. The musician never seems to stop, lost in and driven by the inner power of some mysterious melody. He looks straight ahead, apparently oblivious to gawkers like me.
 I linger for a few minutes whenever I see him. Inevitably I have created an imaginary scenario between us in which I approach Mr. Flutist and point out the obvious: “Excuse me, sir, are you aware that your music is not making any sense?”
 He drops the flute from his lips, eyes me, and says, with a hint of exasperation, “So what? I’m crazy. But, man, I’ve got to play my song. I mean, don’t you?”
 This book is about my song. It is not all the music in me, but there is a lot of it here. It is a song primarily about the people with whom I have lived and worked over the past several years as part of my mission on the streets as a priest in the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. I have changed most of their names, but their stories, their compelling stories, I could never change. I have tried to express how they have broken me open and helped me to understand my own heart, and how they have led me closer to the song of hope for all human beings, which is in the heart of God.
 I write this book so that the reader will have a better understanding of the poor. I write it, too, to keep out in front of me a fundamental chord in my song: that the church, when it becomes poor and internalizes the suffering of the poor, understands compassion and the demands of justice. The just and compassionate church becomes the incarnation of the heart and song of Christ.
 
 
 
Chapter Two
Cockroaches, Conversation, and Collectors:
Inside the SROs

In the midst of one-way conversations, I am communicating all the time. I try to affirm this human being, so lost in his own world of memories,
bitter and sweet.
 There is in me a longing to be real, to be authentic, to be a clear reflection of what my heart holds at its deepest levels. It is a goal that the gospel steadfastly holds up as an invitation to me, to the church. It is when the church embraces the gospel selflessly that it bears the heart of God and becomes real to the world. And when it is real, the church makes God believable.
 This truth is the impelling force behind the ministry of the St. Vincent de Paul Downtown Chapel, where I live. The chapel sponsors a social service outreach program, in which I participate, out of a facility called the Macdonald Center. Macdonald Center takes its two-person teams of staff and volunteers into the forty-plus
single-room occupancy hotels in the Old Town/downtown Portland area. There in the SROs, within the confines of the small rooms, the teams spend time visiting with people who have limited, if any, contact with the outside world.
 Like the dirt and concrete pockets under the Portland bridges or the recessed doorways on Skid Row, these rooms are the nooks and crannies of the city’s poor and near homeless, and frequently, they are the spawning grounds of paralyzing feelings of separation and loneliness. Paradoxically, the darkness of such places is light for the church, because there the church is invited and challenged to claim what is best in itself: the ability to love compassionately, to serve unselfishly, to profess and speak to what is truthful.
¦     ¦     ¦
I was in a hotel this afternoon, carrying on one of those endless conversations with Ned, who tells the same story over and over to anyone who will listen. He might as well play a cassette. That is, if he lets you in his room.
 Ned is in his late seventies, one of those rare birds who has lived that long in spite of pounding down a fifth of vodka a day and complementing his drinking with a couple packs of cigarettes.
 While he was in the middle of his monologue, a cockroach appeared, laboriously climbing up the wall behind him. It was huge; in fact, it was so huge that it couldn’t retain its adhesion to the wall, and about a quarter of the way up, it crashed to the floor. It followed this cycle repeatedly: climbing the wall, falling off, and beginning its bloated way back up again. Sort of a metaphor for Ned’s stories.
 He regaled me once again with tales of his lost family and of how his two sons had dumped him (“It’s all their fault”), of the crackpots in his hotel (“Why do they let nuts like that in here?”), and of his World War II exploits.
 Such conversations take place in the confines of these obscure little rooms. These encounters are the essence of the ministry of presence. In the midst of one-way conversations, I am communicating all the time. I try to affirm this human being, so lost in his own world of memories, bitter and sweet. I could try to preach religion to the shut-in, but it would be like talking about high-speed particle physics. And even if I did, he or she would, one way or another, show me to the door.
 No, I bide my time and wait, trying to pace them in their conversation, believing that in the presence of my brand of love they will discover within themselves the capacity to uncover that inner spirit that has been buried under bad decisions, bitterness, booze, and dizzying loneliness. And I don’t say this with condescension or superiority. I’ve experienced that presence of love myself, and in that presence I have grown, even when I had built some barbed-wire fences around myself. I trust that my way of being present to Ned will be used by God.
¦     ¦     ¦
One of the factors of SRO life is cockroaches. If you don’t like being distracted while having a conversation, try talking fairly serious stuff in an SRO, where roaches run up the walls or crawl out from underneath coat collars.
 Many SRO residents throughout Old Town have been awakened by their smoke alarms, triggered not by smoke but by a roach looking for a dark and cozy home. Roll over, go back to sleep. No fire; it’s just a roach.
 Sometimes I get a sense of how long someone has lived in a particular room by the condition of the smashed roaches on the wall: fresh wall kill means the resident has recently moved in; petrified wall kill translates into a veteran occupant. One becomes an amateur archaeologist with a specialty in cockroaches.
 Robert’s roaches always were in a herd around a hot-water pipe at its junction with the ceiling. He even had names for some of them and could identify them as they wandered off in solitary fashion across the walls of his dingy, dirty SRO room. I knew another guy who named his roaches after Old Testament prophets.
 One old fellow we visit has legions of the things, in all sizes, scurrying and surveying as they traverse tables, bed, walls, clothes, food. There are even scouts moving along the bed on which he sits day in and day out. He keeps a piece of paper tightly rubber-banded around his pipe—stem and bowl—to keep them out.
 When I was a community organizer in Oakland, California, one of the first cases I tackled involved a woman with a serious roach problem living in an east Oakland neighborhood. On either side of her residence were speculator-owned vacant houses. She nearly gassed herself to death with Raid because the roaches from the vacant houses were invading her home like army ants. The owner of those vacant houses couldn’t have cared less, even after written complaints and phone calls. Then he was invited to a neighborhood meeting to rectify the situation, under the threat—if he refused—of bringing half the neighborhood to his residence with an abundant supply of bottled roaches. Naturally, the neighborhood organization assured him, Raid would be provided free of charge.
 The politics of cockroaches is one that always forces the poor to lead the charge. Why is it so hard for hotel owners to regularly attend to the problem of roaches? And how much should one complain? Same point could be made for mice or rats. Why should people who spend more than a third of their income for housing—housing that is often poor and code defiant—not be protected from property owners who are indifferent to health hazards?
 Of course, roaches will always be with us. Ditto for rats, lice, and mice. Such creatures will always have a foothold in poor areas, but that is no excuse for not endeavoring to keep the problem under control. In some cases nothing is done to rectify the situation because the owners are greedy, and the poor have little power.
¦     ¦     ¦
Gene rolled toward me in his wheelchair. He is a fifty-three-year-old man, battling cancer and diabetes. He is a Vietnam vet but doesn’t like to talk about that “bleeping war.” Underneath his wisdom and an amazing amount of cheerfulness, I can feel his anger.
 In a strange story, he laughingly told me of the day of great “Christmas cheer.” He was trying to make a little extra money, so he got a job as a Salvation Army bell ringer in front of a local department store. While he was ringing away, his colostomy bag broke. He said he was assisted to the emergency room by one of the folks who regularly dumped money into the pot. He was laughing about it all because he never returned to his station and had not a clue what might have happened to the money. For sure, he won’t be seeing any of it, and he doubted that he would be hired again.
 With Gene off to other things, I ran into John, who was into another devastating drunk. I am always astonished by the amount of drinking that people can do and still live. John is a case in point.
 In contrast to the optimistic viewpoint of humanity that Gene has, John told me that “some rip-off car tow man” tried to charge him 150 bucks for the overnight tow of his car off a lot, after the lot owner had told John that he could leave his car (an Olympic-class clunker) on the lot for two days. John said that his anger forced the tow man to back down, and he was charged only a hundred dollars. So there was John telling me the story, walking with me down the hotel hallway, his arm draped over my shoulder. It was amusing to hear him say, “No way was I going to let that guy fuck with me.”
 Sure, John, yet you got so mad that you proceeded to drink yourself silly.
 He bade me good-bye and ducked into his room.
¦     ¦     ¦
At the end of the hallway I ran into skin-and-bones Maureen. I asked her what was happening, although I knew she was drugging and tricking. She talked vaguely about going into rehab that week. It was strange, because she had been on my mind and in my prayers lately. I reminded her of her two children and that she would never get them back if she didn’t start rehabilitation. I don’t like to dump guilt on anyone, but I did want a voice of love and responsibility to find its way into her murky and fuzzy-brained world. And she knows, as much as she hates it, that my voice is true and one that she can trust. Isn’t this the saddest part of drugs: that mommas can forget their children?
 Ironically, she informed me that Mick, a mutual friend, overdosed last week in Seattle. It was deliberate, she said. He propped himself up by a tree overlooking Lake Washington and fired away. There were two empty needles, one of which was still in his arm. She must know that this could happen to her, too. Yet I am afraid that even this will not deter her. It is madness.
¦     ¦     ¦
Joe, a shut-in at an SRO, is a seventyish former lumber worker. I greeted him in his room, and he remained in bed during my short stay.
 I always pride myself on observing what is in someone’s room, and today I noted the usual mess: the toaster at the end of his bed that doubles as a foot warmer; dirty clothes; empty beer cans; an electric frying pan containing fermenting fried potatoes; a lipstick message on his mirror that read, “I love you, Joe”; two Playboy foldouts hanging lopsided on the walls; and, of course, the omni-present cockroaches.
 Joe informed me that he was still planning to check into the VA treatment center in White City if he could save enough money from his next pension check. As I was wondering if he ever got out of bed, I realized that there, underneath the shabby blanket, was another person. He had a prostitute with him.
 I mumbled something about returning later. He said, “Yeah, Father, that would be better.”
 So much for the crack observer, Father Smith.
¦     ¦     ¦
Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays are always a paradox on the streets and in the SROs. On the one hand, there is a glut of food: free turkey dinners, huge boxes of food, and a little army of do-gooders who drive around handing out bags of groceries in blissful incomprehension of the world they have temporarily entered. On the other hand, there is always the clinging isolation that permeates Old Town like a fungus: people who have no family and few, if any, friends, facing the holiday in dreadful
apprehension.
 For several Thanksgivings, I loaded up two Styrofoam containers with turkey and mashed potatoes, prepared by the chapel kitchen staff, and walked them over to Willie’s apartment. It was too difficult for him to come to the dining room, where there was a big feed for seniors in the area.
 Willie was in his sixties, a recovering alcoholic, and a veteran of decades of drinking and riding the rails after he left his native Missouri. He had lived in the same SRO for fifteen years.
 Willie’s room was a mess in an ordered kind of way. He hung his few clothes from a nail on the tobacco-stained walls and located canned food items on an open shelf. Half of his sheetless bed was full of paperback Westerns and three clock radios, and the other half, where he slept, contained nothing but the saggy outline of his chunky little body, shaped by fifteen years of Willie use. Hanging on the walls and from his bedposts was an assortment of wristwatches, twenty-one of them. He used to tell me that it was better to collect cheap watches than to drink.
 I always enjoyed our meal together. Willie would sit and gum his food down as we talked about our usual topics: the weather, his family in the Midwest, a program he had seen on TV, or the latest Louis L’Amour book that he was reading. He didn’t get out much, because he was a consummate introvert and because arthritic knees limited his range of walking. Willie was simple, good, always hospitable and welcoming. Invariably he asked about my sister, Susan, who had visited Willie with me when she was in town. Both former alcoholics, they swapped horror stories. He remained always solicitous for her health.
 Shortly after I met him, I noticed all the cash he had on his bedside table. I discovered that he was draining his savings account but wasn’t putting anything back into it. When I asked him why he wasn’t depositing the cash from his monthly Supplemental Security Income checks, he said he just hadn’t gotten around to it. It turns out that he had three thousand dollars hidden around his room. He didn’t even know he had that much money.
 I wound up walking the bundle of cash over to the bank, ner-vous about having that much money on my body. I felt as though I was wearing a sandwich sign like the ones that read, “Eat at Joe’s,” only mine read “Rob me.” One of the baffling mysteries of this episode is why the hotel predators had never walked in on him, beaten him up, and walked off with at least the watches. That much money in an SRO is a fortune.
 Eventually a hernia operation did Willie in. I received a phone call at three o’clock one morning from his former hotel manager who always looked after him; Willie had died in his sleep at the foster home where he was recuperating. I spoke to one of his sisters by phone later in the day. Within the week, his ashes were sent back to his two sisters in his little Missouri hometown, and he was buried in the family plot.
 What was Willie for me? Most of all, he kept me simple: no proselytizing, no intellectualizing, no need to impress, nothing to prove. He accepted me for who I was, probably a lot better than I did him. I wear one of his watches. His sisters gave it to me. It was Willie’s wish that I have it.
¦     ¦     ¦
Macdonald Center staffer Mara and I, visiting one day at a rundown SRO hotel, met Billie, one of the most winsome eccentrics I have ever encountered. He was in his thirties, had a head full of blond tousled hair and thoughtful, darting eyes, and was full of engaging hospitality. He traveled on the roads all the time, so there was never much in his room. Only one thing stood out: a large sketchbook and half a dozen or so pencils.
 He was a wheel of energy, an endless talker who motored along at a furious speed but was self-effacing in a conscious and haphazard way (“I know I talk too much and bore people”). In the distant past of his life’s long march, there had been struggles with mental illness, family conflicts, fights in which he had been severely beaten up, sexual abuse in prisons, and an unceasing compulsion to travel. Periodically his angry paranoia would surface, and he would revile and scold individuals in the government and in corporations. Similar kinds of meandering endless diatribes were directed toward his wicked stepsister.
 Over the months he often referred to me as Robin Hood because he felt that I was concerned about people like him. And he always made a special effort to be sensitive and modest around Mara. He also began to show us some of his sketches, which were frequently of human beings, finely detailed. They made me think of drawings I had seen in a volume on Michelangelo.
 “I draw a lot because it helps me to slow down my mind. It goes so fast, so endlessly. I guess that is a symptom of my mental illness.”
 In the course of the few months I knew him, Billie said these things about himself with the openness and directness that characterized all his conversations with Mara and me:
I am a good guy.
I am lonely.
I am crazy.
I am bipolar.
I am without friends by choice.
I am gentle.
I am angry and pissed off.
I am a compulsive talker who feels like he sometimes abuses the listener with all the talk.
I am like a little bunny in the woods.
I am safe with Mother Nature; she won’t hurt me.
I am a victim of a baseball bat attack to my head.
I have been butt-fucked in prison.
I am treated—to the point of grief—inhumanely, indifferently, and cruelly by Social Security bureaucrats.
I am longing to know a woman.
I am an artist.
I am a friend of squirrels.
I will be stupid for the rest of my life.
 In one of our last visits, just before he left town, the irrepressible Billie said to me: “You, Gary, are like the feeling I had when I took out the last distasteful pimento in a salad my mom had made. Everything was then okay to eat and enjoy. When you arrive, Gary Robin Hood, everything is okay.”
 Whenever I left his room, I felt the same way about being around him.
¦     ¦     ¦
Moving through a couple of the hotels this afternoon, I was struck by how the deprivations that people experience can lead to eccentric kinds of compensation—like the hoarding syndrome of some of the poor. For example, Raymond receives a dollar a day from his money manager. He never spends it. He has a wallet bulging with ones. It looks as though he is carrying a bloated brown beaver in his back pocket. Paul lives in a fourteen-by-ten room. He is a self-professed dumpster diver—has been since the beginning of time. His apartment is a warehouse of goodies: furniture, clothes, hubcaps, discarded city traffic signs, broken toys, magazines stacked against the wall. There are rumors that he has hand grenades buried in his room, a kind of dynamite in that meadow of stuff. “They are in his pile of radio parts,” one insider told me.
 One collector woman hoarded clothes. She was probably a physically beautiful person before age, mental illness, and abusive men had exacted their price. She had so many boxes of clothes in her room that they took over, like an insatiable octopus. Boxes, reaching
to the ceiling, controlled the approach to the bathroom, blocked off the windows, filled her bed, stuffed her closet. Those damn boxes controlled everything from where she slept to her sex life. Someday, of course, the clothes will make her beautiful again. Her obvious conclusion: keep them.
 Some individuals squirrel huge amounts of food in their rooms, like, well, squirrels. They walk away from parties and free-food centers with a dinner in their tummies and ham sandwiches in their coat pockets. Often the food becomes nothing more than a glorious meal for delighted roaches and mice. One woman cannot pass up anything on the street. Her room is full of newspapers, gum wrappers, cigarette butts, and street garbage. Wilson must have fifty pairs of pants in his room. Barney collects televisions; some work, some don’t. He has four sets that get only one channel. Horace, a voracious reader, has jammed his room with science-
fiction paperbacks that he has ripped off from the local free library.
 Things give meaning to the lives of people who are deprived of authentic human contact. It is not necessarily a quirk of the poor: the millionaire builds an ostentatious house; the CEO wears a Rolex; the politician has a few people in his pocket; the dictator has his disposable private army; the preacher surrounds herself with unread theology books. Collecting things fills gaps in our hearts and gives expression to an internalized deprivation from the past.
¦     ¦     ¦
Macdonald Center staffer Melissa and I were in a hotel recently to see Ronald. Roly-poly and sixty years old, Ronald was plain and poor. He had spent most of his life in the midst of or on the edges of mental illness. His life had been a landscape dotted with mental institutions, community mental health facilities, cheap hotels, and empty, friendless moments. As a child he lost an eye in a scissors accident and in addition was plagued by a hearing deficiency; both were factors that, in combination with his illness, had diminished his opportunities to learn the normal social skills that most of us take for granted. As a result, he was shy, nervous, uncertain, and in need of medication every day to control the mental illness.
 Yet Ronald had the capacity to engage people—once he trusted them. His honesty and contagious sense of humor were qualities that Melissa and I cherished. He liked to paint watercolors, and a few of his letter-sized works were always thumbtacked to the plain white wall. They offset the aching sparseness of his room: a bed with a drawer underneath for his few articles of clothing, a radio on a small table, a washing sink, a chair, and a closet. He once gave Melissa a painting he called Root Canal. His other big love was Popular Mechanics magazine, the only reading material I ever saw in his room.
 During one visit we asked Ronald if we could have a small celebration for his birthday and my birthday, both of which had occurred a few weeks earlier. We would bring the cake. “Yes, that would be fine,” he said.
 But we weren’t sure he would be in his room when we came; sometimes he forgot about our visits and went out for a walk and a smoke.
 But we lucked out; Ronald was in. Was he ever. There he stood, ready as a sentinel, his good eye gleaming back at us, dressed for the occasion in a brilliant red polo shirt and wearing an understated smile that betrayed his excitement. Pushed up against the window, which overlooked Burnside Avenue, was his table, set with shiny red plastic dishes, knives, forks, paper cups, and white napkins. The napkins, on closer inspection, turned out to be neatly folded toilet paper.
 Somewhere in his hotel he had dug up two extra chairs. He had spent his limited allowance (a local mental health agency was his payee) not only on the tableware. He had also splurged on a quart of chocolate ice cream, two huge bottles of root beer and cream soda, and three chocolate muffins. Between Melissa’s cake, Ronald’s chunky muffins, the ice cream, the soda pop, and some killer whipped cream, we stuffed ourselves silly.
 It was the party of the century. We were in the presence of unyielding simplicity and care. He who had so little was giving us a lesson in how to give, and with not one hint of self-absorption. He was loving us in the best way he could.
 The surprises continued. Three-quarters of the way through the party, Ronald handed me a tiny package, wrapped in lined writing paper and Scotch tape. “Here’s your birthday present, Gary.” Inside the package was a leather coin purse that he had fashioned himself with tools provided at the mental health center. Turning the coin purse over in my hands, I was speechless. When Melissa and I left the hotel that afternoon, we were like two kids who had stumbled upon some grand treasure in the forest.
 Not long afterward, Ronald was diagnosed with cancer and began an aggressive treatment of radiation and chemotherapy. It was only a short time before the whole process wore his body down. Near the end, we talked in the nursing home about death, but it was never a concern for him. He didn’t ponder things much beyond the moment, and I mean that in the most praiseworthy way. He was a pure and loving little man who had lived his life with a mountain of handicaps. And in spite of a million reasons for living in self-pity, he had within him—every day—the amazing capacity to make coin purses and share his soda pop with others.
 One morning I received the phone call from the nursing home. Ronald had died in the night. That night, after the smoke from the day had cleared, I prayed in the chapel for him, commending him
to God and giving thanks for the blessing of his life. Ronald touched my heart because he would not allow my sophistication to impede his truth and goodness.
No, it was to shame the wise that God chose what is foolish by human reckoning . . . ; those whom the world thinks common and contemptible are the ones that God has chosen—those who are nothing at all to show up those who are everything.
1 Corinthians 1:27–28
¦     ¦     ¦
Clyde was a potbellied gnome of a man with a balding head and a round, round face. He usually wore a cowboy hat, either one that had been given to him or the occasional hat he had found while dumpster diving for cans. When I first met him, while visiting residents at one of the SROs, he was pushing sixty. He came originally from Oklahoma and had spent most of his life riding the rails and working odd jobs. Along the way his health broke (as he would say, “It wasn’t the years; it was the miles”), and he received Supplemental Security Income. He had never had a formal education, but he was never lacking for words, which he uttered in his delicious good-ole-boy drawl. He drank his beer out of one of the grimiest coffee mugs I have ever seen.
 The man was raised as a Pentecostal, and in spite of the fact that he could barely read, he referred to and quoted from the New Testament as well as any Scripture scholar. Sometimes he would make reference to a chapter and verse of the Bible that had nothing to do with the subject at hand, but it gave him the occasion to launch into some theological truth. After he found out that I was a Catholic priest, he became my self-appointed teacher in an effort to make a preacher out of me. If Clyde saw me as he trudged along the streets, pushing a grocery cart loaded with redeemable bottles and cans, he would typically hail me with “Hey, preacher, come here. I’ve got something to tell you.”
 Those times when he would instruct me in his sparsely furnished apartment were special moments. One day he said, “You know, Preacher Man, you got to get this about the Holy Ghost if you’re going to be a preacher. You got to have the Holy Ghost if you are going to cure addicts. And you got to beg God for it.”
 “Is it that simple, Clyde? I just have to lay my hands on someone and ask the Holy Ghost to help me?”
 “Well, of course it is, if you got the Holy Ghost. But you got to realize that man can’t heal a fly, only God. You need to lock yourself in a closet for forty days if you want to get the Holy Ghost. And then, after that kind of prayer, if you see some woman lying down dying of stomach cancer, you got to look down on her and say, ‘Woman, get yourself up and go get yourself a hot dog and eat it.’”
 “Well, why don’t you spend more time preaching and healing on the streets, Clyde? It’s clear you’ve got the Holy Ghost.”
 “No, I don’t,” he replied. “I am a backslider. Now read Acts 2, first thirteen verses. And listen!”
 I read from his well-underlined Bible, and as I plowed through it, he would nod in approval, his eyes closed, as he puffed on a fat, poorly rolled cigarette and made editorial comments on the passage. How many afternoons we engaged each other this way.
 One day, when I was doing a memorial service in the lobby of his hotel, Clyde appeared on the stairs leading down from the second floor to the lobby. He knew the person who had died and asked if he could sing a song out of respect for the deceased. Clyde thereupon gave us a neck-tingling version of “Amazing Grace” in that raw Oklahoma accent. His love for singing old
hymns flowed though him like the sun coming through the lobby window. His simplicity of faith, like so many of his instructions to me, left all of us, even the crusty old cynical veterans of that particular hotel, shaking our heads. I thought to myself, Here is a man without guile.
 Once, while my visiting companion Fred and I were meeting with Clyde, I mentioned that Fred was going to Phoenix with his asthma-plagued wife in the hopes of relieving her illness. I asked Clyde if he would mind praying for Fred, and he moved to it without hesitation.
 Laying his hands on Fred’s head, he prayed something like this: “Lord, I know you love this woman and that you want her to be with you. But remember that this man loves her, too, and he needs her and she needs him and they need to be together. So give them some more time, even as you are healing her from her illness. Let them love each other as you love them.”
 How ironic it was. Here was Clyde, living with whatever pain from the past, denying that he had the “Holy Ghost.”
 After he became seriously ill with liver and heart problems, Clyde moved to a nursing home where I was able to see him only a few times. It was clear to me, after my first visit to the home, that he had charmed the facility’s staff with his mix of kindness and earthy faith. His death came peacefully one night in the fall.
 I have had a lot of teachers in the course of my life. For directness, selflessness, and utter belief in his student’s destiny, he was the champ.
 “Okay, Preacher Man, now read Isaiah 49, verse 2.”
He made my mouth a sharp sword,
and hid me in the shadow of his hand.
He made me into a sharpened arrow,
and concealed me in his quiver.
¦     ¦     ¦
I went over to see Robbie at his SRO. It is a hotel used by the county for those poor who are physically mobile but suffer from mental illness or forms of dementia that require a special residence. It is a gloomy place, however courageous and creative the staff may be. In the lobby, I walked through a gauntlet of silent, staring residents. It reminded me of nursing homes I have visited.
 Robbie was in the first-floor smoking room, puffing away like a steam engine, fifty pounds down from the days before he began chemotherapy. I don’t think he understands what is going on.
 As we talked, we were periodically interrupted by the grunts and exclamations of an old gentleman who was shuffling in and out of the smoking room. The man moved like a robot, ambling back and forth in the room, making his noises, never looking at anyone, never saying anything. Robbie was unperturbed. He was so accustomed to the man that he would time his words to me around the sounds that regularly emanated from the old man.
 What is it that eats away at me at this residence? It is the vulnerability and emotional nakedness of those who live out their lives here, sick and lonely, most out of hinge with life and society around them. They have few visitors, if any. In most cases, they have no family, and if they do have a family, it has probably dumped this member like an old book or an inconvenient memory. Being in this hotel is like being in a ward of orphaned babies; it is an environment of deprivation, with bleak prospects for the future. Coming here, notwithstanding my love for Robbie, is like a blow to the gut.
 And yet each one of these people had a momma, and each presumably has a life story. But there is no one to whom they can tell the story, no one to carefully listen. How did this young man in front of Robbie and me, staring out the window, get here? Did that catatonic woman in front of the TV have any children? And the
striking white-haired fellow, there, in the corner of the smoking room, does he have a family? Did he play ball and make love and throw rocks into the ocean? Did all at one time live with the hope that they might have what society judges to be most important and desirable in life: joy, love, a home, a good reputation, security in the world, and children to cherish their memory?
 All these realizations fuel my energy to be present to Robbie, to give him the best of my attention, to treasure his story. He, and all these others, will not be forgotten.
¦     ¦     ¦
Housing should not be treated as a commodity but as a basic human right that is grounded in our view of the human person and the responsibility of society to protect the life and dignity of every person by providing the conditions where human life and dignity are enhanced.
U.S. Catholic Conference
Joseph and I go out for coffee once in a while; we have been doing so ever since we met one night in a free-food line. He suffers from a mental illness that involves severe spells of depression. He is supported by Supplemental Security Income (SSI), but he raids trash cans on a regular basis, retrieving soda and beer cans and redeeming them at the local supermarket. A few years ago he freaked out in his apartment, trashed it, and was subsequently evicted, which among others things resulted in a long-term loss of the rent subsidy provided him by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
 Presently he spends $350 of his $500 monthly SSI check on rent for a place that looks like a bat cave. He shares a toilet and shower with several other people on the same floor. He struggles financially, especially if he has to buy items that aren’t basic necessities, like a lamp or a radio or a pair of shoes. It is unlikely that he will obtain a subsidized apartment any time soon, since he is on a new HUD waiting list, and the waiting period is eighteen to twenty-four months. And that is not just a Portland phenomenon; the waiting period is longer in other cities. He knows all this, which leads to more depression.
 We walked down the street to our favorite cheap coffee shop,  heading into a newly developed portion of the downtown area that ironically is not four blocks from where he lives and just about that distance from many low-income SROs. The new buildings that line the street contain condos that are selling for half a million dollars. Count them: five hundred thousand big, fat dollars. Recently a traditional low-income SRO hotel was sold and will be converted into condos that will be priced strictly for the wealthy.
 People ask me where homeless people are coming from. Some of them have been squeezed out by the inexorable movement of real-estate capital into traditionally poor areas and can no longer afford what used to be affordable. The cycle serves to widen the gap between the rich and poor in Portland and in our country. It is an ominous sight and portends a future wherein individuals currently housed will become homeless.
 There is something wrong. The reality of homelessness, inadequate housing, and the lack of affordable housing is a national disgrace. This reality undermines the life and dignity of so many of our brothers and sisters who lack a decent place to live. It destroys lives and families. The crime of homelessness is not that people live in filthy camps under bridges, or that families sleep illegally in their cars, or that the homeless and the near homeless panhandle. The crime is that homelessness exists. And the reason people are homeless or that people pay three-fourths of their
­income on housing is that there is not adequate affordable housing. It’s nuts. How can a city countenance the development of off-the-charts-expensive condos and allow housing for the poor to diminish? How can politicians back tax cuts when the infrastructure of affordable housing is falling apart?
 We must view and confront the diminution of affordable housing in light of the church’s traditional view of housing. It is not a commodity, something to be bought and sold like a fancy car or a trip to the Caribbean; it is a basic human right. This right is grounded in the theological truth that every human being is created in God’s image. If that right is denied, an injustice is being committed. Society has the responsibility to protect the life and dignity of every person by providing the conditions where that life and that dignity are not undermined.
 The church has to take a stand, and it has to be indignant. It not only has to create its own affordable housing programs (just as surely as soup kitchens), but it also has to challenge greed-driven, land-gobbling institutions and the persons behind them. Like vultures, these same people feed off prime real estate in areas of traditional renter-occupied housing where only the poor can afford to live. As a result, the poor are squeezed out of their housing. The church in turn has to hound the government to deal with money-driven real-estate trusts that hungrily acquire property and cater to the housing needs of the rich. In short, the church must ensure that people are not denied their fundamental economic right to decent housing. And it has to fight those who, by their actions, scoff at that fundamental right.
 The dialogue with our economic culture—and it has to be insistent—must be driven by our concern for the poor and vulnerable and those shorn of dignity because they do not have a place to live. Two-thirds of those who qualify for housing assistance in the United States cannot get it because it is not available.
 Joseph and I had our coffee and noticed a sign in our coffee shop that said the little place was going out of business. The proprietor informed us that the rents in this particular building were being doubled. We will start looking around for another el cheapo coffee shop. Our prospects are diminishing.
 

Table of Contents

contents
chapter one
People with Nothing to Prove: Living among the Poor  ¦  1
chapter two
Cockroaches, Conversation, and Collectors: Inside the SROs  ¦  5
chapter three
Talking with Mannequins: Mental Illness on the Streets  ¦  27
chapter four
What Are You Into?: The Search for Indignation  ¦  53
chapter five
Crashing and Burning: The Insanity of Drugs and Alcohol  ¦  61
chapter six
To Love and Be Loved: Relationships in the Streets  ¦  81
chapter seven
Street Scenes: Glimpses of Old Town  ¦  91
chapter eight
Go in Peace: Celebrating Mass in Old Town  ¦  107

 ¦ contents

chapter nine
Jailhouse Prayers: Learning to Trust behind Bars  ¦  119
chapter ten
Poverty Is Not a Crime: Eddie’s Letter  ¦  135
chapter eleven
The Leper: Robert’s Story  ¦  141
chapter twelve
Ashes in the Wind: Death in the World of the Homeless  ¦  155
chapter thirteen
The Pearls of My Life: What Keeps Me Going  ¦  185

 

Interviews

General Trade