Confessions of a
Conscience Haunted by Homelessness
A couple of weeks ago, on a Sunday evening, I was unwinding quietly on the couch with a cat and a book when I got a phone call. I looked at my phone and I saw “Tom ?”. The question mark is there because I don’t know Tom’s last name. I don’t know Tom’s last name because Tom is afraid to share it, even with the people he trusts. I first met Tom at Deep Run Park, where I would go to run. He was known by some of the park-goers as the “goose guy” because he would spend much of his time near the lake and look after the geese. One year, one of the geese had an injured leg. Tom hovered over that goose like its own mother and protected it to the best of his abilities.
Tom is homeless. When I first got to know him, he traveled around by bike and made makeshift tents in undisclosed locations. He had seen a social worker. He had received helped through several of the local charitable networks. And he had decided that he would never get the help he needed in these places, so he lived on his own. Today he has an old minivan that a friend gifted him. When the phone rang that Sunday evening, I was surprised to see his number. I don’t run much at Deep Run Park anymore, and it had been over half a year since I’d seen him. He was calling to ask if I knew of any good places where he could park his van at night without getting harassed. We talked about other things too. He’s a fan of English soccer, so I could commiserate with him over Liverpool’s recent woes.
Shortly after I hung up, I checked my email. I saw that I had just received a note from Lu, a woman at Gayton Road Christian Church who had been the liaison with a local homeless ministry, the Blessing Warriors (who are a little bit like MCEF). Like Tom’s phone call, the email was out of the blue. Lu was sharing news about Richmond’s inclement weather shelter for the homeless—how it was closing temporarily, and when it reopened, it would only accommodate 50 persons at a time. If you’ve followed the news, you’ve probably seen headlines about the growing homeless population, not just in places like San Francisco, but here in our own city, and all across the nation. Fifty openings in a temporary shelter is better than nothing, but it will not go very far. I thought of Tom, whom I’d just spoken with. I thought of how he was fortunate to have a van, but even so he too was struggling to find a place where he could park it in the evening and sleep in peace.
By then, my plans for a peaceful evening had been irrevocably disturbed. But the disturbances were not done. As I closed my laptop, I had one final haunting. (Three hauntings—very Dickensian! Just like Scrooge.) This final haunting was not a phone call or an email, but a fresh memory, from earlier that Sunday. When I had arrived at church, I saw by the side of the shed a shopping cart. Perhaps you saw it too. It’s a longer story than I have time for here, but here’s the short version: that shopping cart appeared on our parking lot about half a year ago, on a very rainy Sunday when a man (who was presumably without a home at the time) pushed it here all the way from Kroger down the road. His story was convoluted, but the short of it was that he was leaving on a Greyhound for Ohio the next day and needed to secure a few last items before his departure. (A friend later picked him up from our parking lot.) Ever since that day, I’ve kept the shopping cart hidden behind the shed, purposefully out of sight, with the vague intentions of one day securing a truck to take it back to Kroger. But I’d never returned it. On occasion, it has reappeared. I will arrive at the church in the morning, and there it is, sitting in plain view in the parking lot, an unwanted, unsightly, haunting reminder of homelessness. As I push it back behind the shed, I have a vague sense of guilt, as though I am trying to bury a piece of evidence.
When “Our Hearts
Condemn Us”
After these three, Scrooge-like hauntings intruded on my Sunday evening, I felt this same vague sense of guilt. Was this my only response to all my homeless brothers and sisters? To push their homelessness out of view?
Guilt and shame can be paralyzing feelings. Today’s scripture seems to address this paralysis, as John writes with concern about how, on occasion, “our hearts condemn us” (1 John 3:20). That seems a very apt description of guilt and shame: “Our hearts condemn us.” So I’m very interested in what John advises. What do you do when your heart condemns you? What do you do with guilt and shame?
Well, it’s open to interpretation. Some people read John to say it’s about putting our love into action. If we simply do more good deeds, if we love “in truth and action,” then those feelings of guilt and shame will disappear. We’ll have no reason to feel that way. Or in John’s words, “we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him” (1 John 3:19). So maybe what I need to do is just to up my giving to the poor and the homeless, to attend more meetings in support of their cause, to preach more on the issues that are faced in our community, and so on. If I just do more, I’ll feel better.
But something about this interpretation rings a little hollow for me. Is John really addressing first-world problems like the shame and guilt I feel when I see others who are worse off than I am? And is he really just saying, “Come on, get with it, do more! Check off more boxes, and you’ll have a clean conscience!” That sounds to me like a merit-based spirituality, where God’s love is conditional upon my performance. It sounds to me like a faith of “works-righteousness,” that is, a sort of self-righteousness that believes I can be okay in God’s book by doing good works.
“God Is Greater Than
Our Hearts”
Another interpretation, however, is that nothing we do can reassure our hearts. Rather, it is God’s unconditional love and acceptance that reassures our hearts. (We are already okay in God’s book.) Here, I appreciate how other translations render the subordinating conjunctions in a different manner. Consider the NIV’s translation: “If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything” (1 John 3:20). I hear this not as threat—“Watch out, God knows every little thing!”—but more as the comforting reassurance that God understands the difficult stories behind our flaws and shortcomings and always has compassion. (I have a friend who will say whenever he encounters a difficult person, “Well, I imagine there’s a story there,” which is his way of expressing compassion and acceptance. According to John, God always knows “the story there.”)
“If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts”—which is to say, God is greater than our shame or guilt. If our hearts condemn us, we can remind ourselves that God does not. Rather than live at the bidding of shame and guilt, we can live in the freedom of God’s love. We can be ourselves, the good selves God created us to be.
The ”Way Out”:
A Friend by Our Side
I remember a conversation I had with a friend in Sheffield, Barbora, when I was studying there. We were discussing how we responded to the people who sat outside the grocery stores and begged for money. Barbora was a psychology PhD student, researching epileptic and related seizures, which are more common among the homeless population than among the housed. She is not a Christian, at least not confessionally, but her response has stuck with me as remarkably Christlike. She said, “Well, I’m a student, and I usually don’t have spare money. But I can still give them my attention. I can give them myself. So, usually, I try to look them in the eye and say, ‘Hello…’ If they have a request, I respond, even if that’s a ‘Sorry.’ I try to share my goodwill with them.” What struck me about Barbora’s approach was how honest and humble and free it was. What she gave others was not necessarily money but something even more valuable, her honest self and the gift of a relationship (however brief). I was reminded of Barbora’s approach when, years later, I heard Pope Francis make a remark along the following lines: “The question when we give to the poor is not, ‘How much do we give?’ but rather ‘Does our hand touch theirs in the giving?’”
There is a story that gets told in recovery circles of a person trapped in a ditch. A preacher comes by and prays with him and gives him a Bible and then leaves, and he remains in the ditch. A therapist comes by and asks him about his feelings and listens to him and then leaves, and he remains in the ditch. A doctor comes by and gives him a bottle of pills and then leaves, and he remains in the ditch. Finally a stranger comes by and jumps in the ditch beside him. The man in the ditch cries out, “Are you crazy? Why did you jump down here? Now we’re both stuck in this ditch.” The stranger replies, “I’ve been in this ditch before. Take my hand; I know the way out.”
The “way out” is not a handout from above, but a friend by our side. Relationship. That is the good news of Jesus in a nutshell. “We know love by this,” that he got into the ditch with us—that is, “he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 John 3:16). Laying down our lives may sound like a tall order, but at its root, it’s really simple. It’s sharing our honest, true selves with others. Entering into relationship with them. That, I think, is what “truth and action” looks like. “Truth and action” is not good deeds for the sake of chalking up points or checking off boxes and assuaging guilt or shame, but being our true selves in relationship with others, especially the needful.
I kept trying to push that shopping cart out of view, and it kept creeping back, as though to say, “You can’t hide from this.” Finally I got the message. Not a message of guilt or shame, but the message that there’s nothing to hide from. I am not to fix every problem in the world, but simply to offer my honest self to the world in friendship. There are many hurting folks who have immediate needs for food and care, and we can and should meet those needs with our donations to MCEF. But they also have a deeper need for relationship. That is why instead of hiding the shopping cart, I’ve told its story and brought it (for the next couple of weeks) inside our church doors. For me, the shopping cart stands as a remembrance of all our brothers and sisters who are in need, and as a reminder that whatever I give them, my hand can always touch theirs. I can always give them my honest self in relationship.
Prayer
You laid down your life for us—
Not just on the cross,
But in the little moments when you welcomed interruption,
Like when the bleeding woman touched you in the crowd
Or the little children were brought before you
…
May we feel deeply in our hearts and in our bodies
Your honest love and acceptance for us
And our worth in God’s eyes.
May your love inspire us to live likewise,
To share our honest selves with others.
Amen.
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