Did You SEE That Beggar?

I said yesterday that I had been awakened by the word more.  After a Tuesday of prayer first thing in the morning and spending time with my homeless friends at the shelter last thing in the evening, I had wakened to that one word.  And I know why.

Find God in them, we were told, in the ones we couldn’t stand, in the ones who drove us nuts.  Find Christ in them.  It was probably grade school, and it was possibly the nun who was teaching us that was one of those in whom we tried to find God.  What sounds like a call to compassion was more an application of fear in those days when heaven and hell were used far more often than today, when life was a slow but certain progress toward one or the other, and when we were never, except in those moments of blissfully weightless strolls from the confessional, quite comfortable with where we would end up.  

Finding God in them meant “you’d better not ignore me if I show up.”  The Messiah would, you know – show up, I mean.  Jesus said he’d come back.  He also said that at the end of the world there would be a big sorting out.  Wheat would go into the barns and weeds into the fire.  Sheep would go into heaven and goats to hell.  And the bad ones would find out that the beggar they ignored was, you guessed it

, God in disguise.  You snooze, you lose.  No, you burn.  Whatever we do to the least of our brother, we did to God.  It was hard for me to think of my brother, who was being a real pain in the butt, was God, for Christ’s sake!  I’d lived with him all my life.  The nun, well, I guess I could sort of imagine that, and I suppose it at least made me stop and consider the possibility.

But I know why yesterday morning the word more was my harbinger, my lark, my cowbell and crunch of grass on the path to the barn.  My homeless people had been more the night before; I had seen in them the magis of God.  Put a simple bowl of water on a pedestal at the entrance of a church and we take it to be holy.  Hang a painting in a museum and we call it art.  Put a person in a good suit and at a big desk in a corner office on the top floor, and we’ll expect her to be a capable executive.  Get a new word like magis from a Jesuit, and you take it to mean something.  They say that it means “the more”.  No matter how we think of God, God is more.  No matter how much we think we can do, the Jesuit educators would say in their excellent high schools and colleges, we can do more.  And when we leave their schools, that’s what we’re called to do.  More.  So God is more, and we are called to be more, too, because we are of God.

Tuesday night, my homeless friends had shown that they are more.  Six of them had come with Kathy and me to a meeting room in the library to meet with a journalist who wanted to see their board game, the game they had developed at my invitation, a game that they designed to simulate homelessness, so that we who had roofs over our heads could come to understand homelessness a bit better.  We could feel a bit of how they feel by experiencing on the game board what they experience in the real world.  Five of them had worked for the past three months on the design of the game.  One of them, Tom, had designed such a game a year earlier while he was homeless and he had come with the journalist to see how this group had done with their game.   The journalist was there because he had a heart that had been opened by his contacts with Tom while he had been homeless, and a mind that was opened too by Tom’s exceptional intelligence and wisdom. 

Tuesday night, the journalist asked them questions as they played the game with Tom.  He asked them what a HARP Voucher was, and a Bridge Card.  And as they came to trust him, he asked them how they had become homeless, and how they feel, and why they hope.  And Tom shared his story too, not just his story of becoming homeless because of cancer and an infection and an immobilized shoulder, but his story of being helped up out of homelessness by a woman in a reading group who had seen that he was so much more than she had expected, so bright, so peaceful and wise. 

Tuesday night made me think of Tuesday morning, when six professional men had come together to talk about life, and about God.  The talk about God had helped me to recognize him in those six brilliant game designers who had been so much more than one might expect from homeless people, without a pedestal or a museum wall or a corner office and good suit to prepare us for so much.  The ones we foolishly see as beggars had, after all, been Christ.  Anybody could have seen it.  Too bad we were in a meeting room.  Maybe the journalist can spread the good news.