Acceptable?

According to the author, editor and humorist Bennett Cerf, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia would spend one day a month (I think it was) presiding over Magistrate's Court in his city. As Mayor, he was Chief Magistrate, and took that part of the job seriously. One day, a woman was brought before him, charged with stealing a loaf of bread. She confessed, saying she had no other way to feed her family. He fined her $50, then suspended the sentence and found everyone else in the courtroom guilty of "living in a city where a woman has to steal to feed her family". Each person was fined $10 and the sheriff was ordered to take up the collection on the spot. Then he turned the money over to the woman.

As I arrived at The Lord's Rain Tuesday morning, I passed an old man sitting on a street-level window ledge. His eyes were closed and he was at least half asleep. He's a fixture in the area: a man who calls himself a Pastor and putters around the Downtown East Side, usually with a walker, proclaiming Jesus to anyone who'll listen. Sometimes he has a roof over his head; sometimes not. It appears this was one of those "not" nights.

Another frequent visitor at The Lord's Rain is a man named Bill. He's well into his 60s and spends his days pushing a shopping cart around the city -- I sometimes see him in the West End, which is a considerable distance from the DTES -- collecting bottles. "Good morning, Father," he says when he comes in for his coffee. (I'm not a Catholic priest, but that's his way of addressing a leader in a religious setting, so that's OK with me.) Bill has the most gentle spirit and has astounded doctors by bouncing back from a lung infection about a year and a half ago that the doctors were certain was going to kill him.

Last month, I was in Toronto, and stepped on the subway one time to find the too-familiar aroma of stale urine. It was coming from a man who was sound asleep, folded up in one of the seats. People in the same carriage seemed to look past, around or through him: but never at him.

WHY IS THIS ACCEPTABLE?

Why is it acceptable that men in their 60s and 70s, with long lives behind them -- and who maybe made a couple of mistakes here and there that proved costly in the long run -- have to collect bottles and cans and sleep in doorways, waiting for a free-coffee place to open up? Why is it acceptable for a man to sit in his own urine-reeked clothes on a subway while people try to imagine he's not there? Why is it acceptable for people to have to urinate and defecate in alleys while the leaders of the city -- one of the "World's Most Livable" and "Greenest" cities -- dither over how to provide public facilities for them? (Even to the extent of suggesting it's the responsibility of the transit authority, for the luvva Mike!)

And yet evidently it must be for some people, because the situation persists and even seems to get worse. Ignoring them and figuring someone else can help people has hardly been a resounding success; remember what Jesus said: "what you do to the least of these, you do to Me."

That would include ignoring them. Ignoring these people is tantamount to ignoring Jesus.

Selah.

And lest you think that rising up and saying THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE! involves some mammoth undertaking, consider the guy on the Toronto subway. As we got near my stop, I knelt down beside him and roused him to see if he was OK. He said he was. Then I told him I was praying for him. "It's all I can do," I said. I was almost ashamed to say it, but he looked up and smiled and said, "Thanks, man."

I don't know why I was ashamed: probably because I didn't have a magic wand and didn't know where to take him to bathe and get a fresh change of clothes (in Vancouver, I would have taken him to The Lord's Rain). But really, prayer is the most effective tool we have when used as directed. And the sense that someone cares enough even to say, "hello in there" can plant a seed of hope that can grow more than we could ever ask or think.