It’s always ourselves we find in the sea*

“What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue,” Ayn Rand (1964). This is the second in a series of responses to my recent post, Giving Very Small, reflections on hunger and homelessness in American cities not as detached statistics but as human encounters.

• You now prompt me to do the same. Now there are three of us throwing starfish back into the surf.

• My wife and I often carried the apples we grew to people on the street, only to notice that a lot of them threw the fruit into the gutter. You can't trade what they wanted for apples. So then we started bringing food to the food shelter.

• Those connections, those acts of kindness, are the best way forward.

• I have often wondered the same thing myself, but also have hesitated, as NYC is so full of grifters posing as AIDS victims, military vets, etc. Maybe a handful of bills and taking a chance is the way to go.

• Recently, I have found myself frequently annoyed by members of the young punk crowd with their little cardboard signs that say things like "Why lie? I need a beer."  I feel like saying, "You know, there are people on the street who really do need help."

• One summer in San Francisco, with lots of homeless and/or street people asking for money, I was uncomfortable and conflicted. My friend, a woman of color from Memphis, did not give them any money or even consider doing so. She said that nearly all these people know where the community help organizations are located – the soup kitchens and shelters and drug/alcohol advising centers – that San Francisco has significant numbers of them and has put lots of resources into such programs. She believes that giving the people we pass money does not help them with the larger issues they are facing.

• Is it about being a lapsed Episcopalian? Or was it Your "Giving Small" post that made me roll down my window for the elderly man I'd passed many times without five bucks for the look on his face? I'll pass that way again. Count on it.

* e.e. cummings, “maggie and milly and molly and may” (1956)

Giving Very Small

It’s an old tale. One morning after a big storm, a wise man walks along a beach covered with starfish. He watches as a small boy bends to pick up a starfish and throw it into the ocean. “What are you doing,” he asks?

“Throwing starfish into the ocean,” the boy replies. “If I don’t, they will die when the sun gets high.”

“But there are tens of thousands of starfish,” says the man. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to make much of a difference.”

The boy picks up another starfish and throws it into the sea. “It made a difference to that one,” he says.

(Cited in Amy Goldstein’s forthcoming Janesville, An American Story, p. 51)

These days, as I walk through the city I pass so many homeless people, often slumped on the sidewalk with a small, sad sign in black magic marker, a note to catch someone’s attention. But there are so many, I’m overwhelmed. How do I choose? What difference can my “spare change” possibly make to this immense tragedy? I look away, not just from their signs but from their faces. I pass by, embarrassed.

I decided to change that. My New Year’s resolution was to take with me each day a certain number of dollar bills and give them away until they are gone. I still have to choose, of course, but not in exactly the same way. Now I have a goal and I have a limit. I don't need to judge worthiness or compare hardships. I only have to give the money away, and since it’s not much money, it’s hardly a sacrifice on my part.

The day after I made the resolution, I got a note from my brother, Walker. It included an article he wrote in which he described his efforts to give something to someone every day, no matter how inconsequential the gift may seem.

Walker is a Buddhist, so I suspect this may come more naturally to him; whereas I am a lapsed Episcopalian, and a more tight-fisted bunch is hard to imagine. (Believe me, I’ve thought about how to make these gifts tax-deductible, although I haven’t yet asked anyone for a receipt.)

The reactions vary. Most are grateful, as much it sometimes seems for the recognition as the small amount of money; a few hardly notice. Because each small gift won’t alleviate the recipient’s distress – nor will they collectively make a dent in the city's poverty – I suppose you could argue they’re little more than random acts of selfishness.

But each transaction is an interaction with another being, someone I do not know, yet may pass by every day. It’s an exchange, and in that moment when I don’t look away – a moment I hope transcends both selfishness and charity – I imagine two people a little happier and a city a little more human.

Read Walker’s article. We could make this a movement.

What Would Jesus Say?

This is the time of year when I always used to say, “Merry Christmas.” I never thought of those as fighting words, but as part of my heritage, even though I am a lapsed Christian. It is my family’s way of greeting the season that celebrates the renewal of life and, yes, peace on earth – which in our tradition is embodied in the image of a small child born to a 14-year-old virgin in a stable in Bethlehem in Judea. I was offering my tradition to others, not to be offensive but to be open, offering it in the spirit of Scrooge’s nephew in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol:

"But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time . . . as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

But that was before I learned about the War on Christmas and the ensuing call to arms that has weaponized “Merry Christmas” and admonished us to shut our hearts against those fellow-passengers to the grave who have different traditions and different beliefs. I hesitate now to say “Merry Christmas,” lest it be misunderstood as part of that cultural war being waged in the name of the prince of peace.

But I can’t suppress my exuberance. Children arrive today from distant parts. We’ll go and cut down a (Christmas) tree, and in three days we will open stockings by the fire.

And so I say with Tiny Tim, “God bless us, every one!”

Beauty and a Feast

But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind (Luke, 14:13). In Rome the welfare queens don’t drive pink Cadillacs and buy Twinkies with food stamps. Instead, the homeless get private guided tours of the Sistine Chapel and a free dinner at the Vatican’s museum restaurant. This is the Catholic Church’s latest effort to implement Pope Francis’s initiative to reach out to the poor; it follows earlier directives to distribute sleeping bags, build showers, and provide free haircuts and shaves.

To those who think only in economic terms, these may seem inadequate gestures, and they certainly will do little to alleviate the structural burdens faced by the city’s poor. Perhaps the pope is only an enabler, but it’s refreshing to see the homeless treated as something other than a problem to be solved – or, more likely, shunted out of sight so the city can continue the business of gentrifying its tax base. In our own politics of poverty, it’s hard to imagine anyone suggesting that poor people might like to see ageless works of art or enjoy a walk through the papal gardens. And so we dehumanize them, the better not to see them.

This pope named himself after Francis of Assisi, known as Il Poverello (“Poor Little Man”), who is the patron saint of both Italy and ecology, but whose commitment to poverty and the simple life so challenged his own church's hierarchy that no previous pope had dared to take his name.

Samaritan

You know the story: A man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho is attacked by robbers, stripped, beaten and left for dead. Later, a rabbi traveling on the road crosses to the other side.  So does a Levite. But a much-despised Samaritan takes pity on the man, bandages his wounds and carriers him to an inn. The next day he tells the innkeeper, “Look after him, and when I return, I will reimburse you.” The moral, said Jesus: “Go and do likewise.”

Let’s change a few details: From the Jerusalem-Jericho road to 72^nd SKD Boulevard in Monrovia; from an unidentified man by the roadside to Marthalene Williams, a 19-year-old pregnant woman so sick she can’t walk; from a Samaritan to Thomas Eric Duncan, who helps Williams to the hospital and then carries her back home because the hospital is full; from recovery at an inn to a painful death in an overcrowded room. Like the Samaritan, Duncan leaves, but he doesn’t disappear from history. He goes to Texas where he now lies near death from Ebola.

If Duncan survives – and his condition is now “critical” – he faces criminal charges in Liberia and the United States for lying on travel documents. And if he came, knowing that he was himself a deadly weapon, perhaps he should.

Luke’s parable seeks to answer the question, “Who is my neighbor?” The Ebola story is more complicated, but its victims are not just “carriers” to be quarantined. They are our neighbors.

New Year Story

When it didn’t disintegrate harmlessly in the air, the two women in the car realized that what had just blown off the truck’s roof was not snow. Seconds later a block of ice the size of a shoebox slammed into the windshield on the passenger’s side, shattering the glass and the morning calm. My wife, Joanie, managed to steer the car to the shoulder and then to a small gas station near the town of Brewer, Maine, while our daughter, Annie, picked fragments of glass from her face. Somehow, no one was hurt. Inside the tiny market, its shelves crammed with soup cans and potato sticks, Sharon, the proprietor, swung into action, finding a tow company and doling out sympathy. She refused Joanie’s money for coffee (“It’s an hour old. I should have made a new pot”), all the while keeping up a kindly banter with the rough-hewn customers who came in to buy beer, cigarettes and lottery tickets, asking about their Christmas, their families, a grandson’s hockey game. And they, looking at the car outside the window, asked what had happened, responding with a mix of awe and compassion that made us feel we were not strangers. Here in a small market in rural Maine, where people come in to buy hope and ease disappointment, and where we had washed up by frightening chance, we had become, if only for a moment, part of a community, enveloped in its kindness and its humor, watching hope arise from the wreckage.