A Home for Christmas
Image of homeless girl in London part of exhibition by Lee Jeffries at Museum of Rome (CNS photo/courtesy of Lee Jeffries)
Wend
your way through the streets of any large city, teeming with Christmas
shoppers, where store windows glisten with expensive watches and
handbags, and it is all too easy to avert your eyes from those
dehumanized shapes in doorways or sprawled on the steps or stretched out
in the pews of open churches. Swathed in blankets, they peer out with
blank eyes from between scarves and wool hats as they display their
cardboard manifestos: House burned down. Wounded Vet. Hungry. Pregnant. Jobless. Help. The message is sobering: We are helpless, abandoned and dependent on your seasonal generosity.
In the Spiritual Exercises, the
classic spiritual guidebook for retreat directors, St. Ignatius Loyola
invites the retreatant to contemplate the great mysteries of the
Incarnation and the Nativity. The starting point for these exercises,
however, is not the grandeur of the Trinity, “seated, so to speak, on
the royal canopied throne,” as Ignatius writes. Instead, he first
invites the retreatant to see and consider the various persons on the
earth, “so diverse in dress and behavior...some in peace and others at
war, some weeping and others laughing, some healthy and others sick,
some being born and others dying.”
St. Ignatius then describes God’s
compassionate response to so much blindness, suffering and death in the
world. He counsels us to hear what the Trinity says, “Let us work the
redemption of the human race,” and to see what the Trinity does,
“bringing about the most holy Incarnation.” Ignatius says the Lord was
born “in the greatest poverty” and experienced “many hardships of
hunger, thirst, heat, cold, injuries, and insults.” Though appropriately
regarded as royalty by the angels in heaven and the visiting Magi,
Jesus was born in a manger, and the family was displaced by the threat
of violence.
Those living on the street and in shelters
share in the Holy Family’s experience of transience and insecurity. But
how often are they welcomed with reverence and joy? Years ago our
culture referred to these persons as “down and out” or “Bowery bums,”
distinguished from the “deserving poor” who had “pulled themselves
together” and were thus worthy of concern. The Christmas message,
however, reminds us that those who are without homes are human beings
and deserve care. Do we see them that way?
According to a nationwide survey conducted
in January 2013 by the Department of Housing and Urban Development,
there are approximately 610,000 homeless people in the United States on
any given night, with two-thirds living in shelters and the rest on
sidewalks, benches and in cars. The number has fallen 9 percent since
2007, and housing vouchers to veterans have helped lower the number of
homeless veterans by 24 percent since 2009. This progress is
significant, yet much work remains.
In some places the problem is escalating.
The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless reports the homeless rate in
Chicago rose 10 percent to 116,042 in 2013. Chicago Public Schools
reports 18,669 are students, 98.3 percent of whom are children of color
and 2,512 are “unaccompanied,” living without a parent or guardian.
Meanwhile, as new skyscrapers rise in America’s most expensive city, New
York, the Coalition for the Homeless there reports that one child out
of every 100 has no home, and the number of homeless families went up 73
percent during the Bloomberg administration. The causes of homelessness
vary: domestic violence, untreated mental illness, joblessness, drug
and alcohol addiction, H.I.V./AIDS, foreclosure and eviction.
Because of local, private, volunteer and
public initiatives over the past 40 years, we now know what must be done
to solve the problem of homelessness. In New York State alone, over 200
public, nonsectarian, not-for-profit and religious agencies have worked
to develop policies that can effectively serve the weak and poor.
Congress must maintain funding for initiatives like these. St. Francis
Residence, directed by Franciscan friars in New York City, houses nearly
300 men and women in three locations. Its award-winning methods have
been imitated throughout the country. They start by recognizing the
worth of every human being and provide support services typical of a
good family: a private room, staff doctors, including a psychiatrist,
exhaustive records on every guest, a nurse who prepares medications,
financial advice, an art workshop, cultural trips, breakfast and a hot
lunch.
The main point, often overlooked, of the
feast of the Incarnation, is that when God entered the world in the
person of Jesus, the whole of humanity was transformed. Every person,
including that huddled person in the gutter, is Jesus inviting—daring—us
to love.
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