I hadn’t planned on posting this chapter on the blog. But, I saw this video recently, and it hit home with me. So, here is another chapter in my book. Again, copyright stuff applies here. And, also keep in mind that this is a rough draft. I’m not sure I even ran spell check on it.
The quest for a heart
As I stood there on that street corner that night, I’m not sure if this was the most afraid I had ever been in my life, but it is moment of fear that stands out the most. The truth is, for a guy as big as I am, I am horribly equipped to handle myself in against any kind of attack. But, I’m also aware of how my size would be perceived by would be attackers. Because of this, I was not nearly as fearful as I should have been when walking around somewhat dangerous neighborhoods at night.
This night, however, it was possible that my arrogance had finally caught up with me. I had gotten to know this guy, Zeb. He was a homeless guy who lived in my neighborhood in Cincinnati. Our relationship had started off with one of the classic lines that beggars use to hook guys like me in; he pretended that we had met before. But, unlike most of the rest, he continued to walk and talk with me before going into his pitch for money.
Growing up in suburban Kentucky, I had never really dealt with the homeless or beggars. I’m sure there were some in my hometown of Frankfort, Kentucky, but I was perfectly isolated from it. Even in trips to the urban areas in Kentucky, such as Lexington and Louisville, I never seemed to run into any beggars. It’s not that I didn’t know anyone living under the poverty level, but I had not witnessed it firsthand, nor did I understand any of the issues they faced.
Occasionaly we would take a trip up to Cincinnati, perhaps to catch a Reds game or something like that, and with the stadium being downtown, I ended up with my first encounters with facing this affliction. I felt sorry for them, but at this time in my life, I rarely had “my own money,” and thus, had nothing to give them.
It wasn’t until my senior year of high school, when my high school choir was invited to sing at Carnegie Hall in New York City, that any of this started to become real to me. Up to that point of my life, I had only been in a city larger than about one and a half million people, and that had been a trip to Washington DC when I was seven. I didn’t remember much about it. So, while I had been sheltered enough in my life that I wasn’t fully prepared for a city like the Big Apple, I wasn’t so sheltered that I was shocked or overwhelmed.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the number of beggars that I encountered over the four days I was there. It was a bit overwhelming. Again, I felt badly for them, only this time, I had a good bit of spending money with me. So, I was happy to be able to contribute.
Of course, I had heard, what I felt at this point to be a heartless cliché, that you should never give money to a homeless person, because they were really going to buy drugs with it. And, it wasn’t that I didn’t believe it, but surely this wasn’t always the case, right? Surely some, even most of them would actually buy food. It was a worthwhile risk, right?
By the time I met Zeb, I was well on my way to becoming a cynic. Bt this time, it had overwhelmingly been confirmed to me that you should in fact not give money to somebody who you meet on the street, because they will indeed go out and buy drugs or booze with it. So, I started to withhold my money, but not so much because I cared about their wellbeing and didn’t want them to be able to purchase the very things that were responsible for their poverty in the first place.
No, what actually bothered me is that I was being lied to. I remember the first time this ever happened to me. I was on a mission trip to Toronto the week after I graduated from college. One night, when we were out goofing off downtown, a man walked up to me and asked if I was interested in some “weed.” Despite the excitement of my first ever drug deal, I went ahead and declined.
A few minutes later, another man comes up to me and asks if I could give him some money to get something to eat. I was glad to do so. Well, another couple of minutes pass, and I see the dealer and the beggar walking away together. It occurred to me that I had in fact just completed my first ever drug deal.
So ironically, one of the things that I found refreshing about Zeb is that he did not lie to me. He told me straight up that he needed money to buy beer. And the worst part is, because he didn’t lie to me, and thus protected my ego, I gave him the money.
The result wasn’t all bad, because by giving him money, I established myself as a friend. We talked a lot over the months after that. He told me his story, how at one point in his life he was a millionare, though his money was made from drugs. Eventually, he was busted, and lost everything. Years later, he still wasn’t able to pick up the pieces.
And, when I told him that I was studying to become a minister, he told me of his own spiritual journey. Zeb was short for Zebulun, on of the patriarchs of Israel, for whom he was named. And, he professed to still be a believer. And of course, while I wasn’t particularly judgemental, I did have some difficulty fitting someone with Zeb’s background into my view of what Christianity was all about.
On this particular night, however, I saw a different side of Zeb. I was out walking around 11 or 12 at night, which as I mentioned earlier I should have been a bit more reluctant to do. I met up with Zeb, and he recognized me. As we began to talk, something was clearly wrong. First of all, he was either drunk or high on something.
And his personality was totally different. Something that night had made him very angry. I never figured out what exactly had happened, since he was rambling incoherently. But it wasn’t his words, or his tone that frightened me. I was his eyes.
People often call the eyes the window to our souls. I have found this to be true. And really, it makes no sense. It doesn’t seem that our eyes should have the versatility to communicate as much as they do. But, so often it is our eyes that ultimately give us away.
I remember another homeless man that I encountered often in Downtown Cincinnati. Looking at his eyes was one of the eeriest things I have ever done. Meeting him, it’s very apparent that there is some type of mental health issue, but they way his eyes communicate that is startling. It’s as though some type of equiptment in his head simply came unplugged, and his eyes have this checked out look.
In Zeb’s eyes that night, I saw the most intense anger I had ever seen. It’s as though every hurt, disappointment, and struggle he had ever faced had surfaced all at once. It is moments like this that I still believe in demons, because I can’t imagine anything in the physical realm that could torment someone to the extent that I saw Zeb tormented that night.
And his mood was so volatile, I had no idea if I was safe or not. I knew he considered me his friend, and believed me to be on his side. He even said so. But, I also didn’t know to what extent that he was in control of himself, or to what extent that he was aware of the realities surrounding him. So I stood there, paralyzed.
The seeds of my cynicism were laid by the encounter in Toronto, but I did manage to hang on to most of my innocence for a while. But, a year later, I moved to Cincinnati to begin seminary. Cincinnati is relatively small compared to most of our urban centers in the US. But, since it used to be one of the major cities but has declined out of that role, it definitely has most of the problems of cities much larger.
I got a job with a firm downtown. Part of my job was to make deliveries around downtown. So, I found myself walking around a lot. And, I came across many who were beggers. Some had the “checked out” look, others were missing limbs, and some didn’t look all that different from me. Most, however, simply had a look that they had simply given up. So, I tried my best to help as many as I could. But, it came apparent that on my part time salary, I simply couldn’t do very much.
When faced with an issue of this magnitude, our first tendancy is to try to solve it. If we find that we can’t, we tend to disengage. That’s the tricky thing about poverty. It’s not so much that we don’t care, we just don’t like the fact that we can’t fix it. So, we disengage from it. But this is the very thing that makes someone like Mother Teresa special—she has no delusions of fixing anything, but she still stayed engaged throughout her entire life.
I, however, found that I was no mother Teresa. So, I started finding myself giving less and less. But, I still had some compassion left in me, so I would occasionally drop some money in their cups.
Fast forward nearly six years. I’m out for another late night walk. All of the sudden, I hear someone call, “Hey big guy.” For some reason, by this time, whenever a guy was about to ask me to give them money for “food,” they always started by calling me “big guy.” This time, I’m just not in the mood for another one of these encounters, so I pretend not to hear him. But, he calls out a couple of more times. Realizing that he was not going to be deterred, I turn around and respond to him. And, like Zeb, he started off with the “I haven’t seen you around for a while,” routine. Well, I had heard it for what seemed like hundreds of times at this point, and I was not going to have my intelligence insulted anymore.
So, I responded quite coldly to him that we had in fact never met before. He tried to convince me otherwise, but gave up fairly quickly. So, he just dove right into his sob story, but I wasn’t having it. I was sick of it. I knew it simply wasn’t possible that so many people ran out of gas within a couple of blocks of my house. I had dealt with enough people who asked me for money to use the pay phone refusing to use my cell phone to make their call. I found it odd that so many people were getting out of the hospital without a way home, or people that were supposed to start their job tomorrow but had no ride to get there. I knew all of the sob stories, I had them memorized. And I was sick and tired of being treated like an idiot.
So, I gave this guy my stock answer, “I don’t have anything on me,” which by this time had been shortened to “duntavnethingonme,” due to overuse. And I walked off, annoyed at this terrible waste of my valuable time. But, something happened that night. As I walked away, I remembered back to the trip to New York. I remembered one of the chaperones commenting on my generosity. And now, I looked at myself, just a few months from graduating from seminary, and was shocked by what I had become.
In a lot of ways, it was a “rooster crowing the third time” moment, something that had pointed back to a previous time of my life. Peter was forced to reconcile an idealistic version of himself with the depravity of his reality. He had to do so in the span of a few hours. Mine took nearly 12 years.
Shocked at how cynical I had become, I knew something had to give. So, I began to go back to my old ways and gave out money to all that asked. But, shortly after that, I was at a convienece store when a man asked me for money, and I gave it to him. Then a cop came by and told him not to be doing that there. He then turned to me and chastised me for giving him money, telling me that I was “feeding the problem.”
And I knew he was right. But, it also rattled me to my core. What should I be doing, then? I didn’t have an answer, but I did have an insight. My cynicism had been based on my own pride, not out of any kind of compassion. Ultimately, my pride had overtaken my compassion, causing me to become the bitter jerk that I had become.
But, the reason that you don’t give money to these people is not because of the lie, but because they are going to use it to buy the very thing that was going to harm them. It’s an important distinction to make, because the first reason is the leads down the road of cynicism, but the second leads to a journey where you get to keep your compassion, even if you are overwhelmed and unable to figure out what to do.
Not that I came out of this with a perfect compassion for people. In fact, some of my cynicism remains. I recently read “The Irresistable Revolution” by Shane Claiborne, and often found myself upset by his stories. Really, my reactions went back and forth between distrust and jealously. He told of some beautiful encounters with some of the very poor people in Philadelphia. But, for the most part, it really didn’t jive with my own expirences.
And, perhaps Shane is just a better person than me, so he has better expirnences. Or, maybe he just leaves out the kind of things that I’m sharing, instead focusing on the positive. I can’t really say.
But, I think it may simply be one of perspective. Shane often states his goal of ending poverty, but his actions are really ones of someone who is going to stay engaged despite not having the answers. My story is more of one who gave up without any end all solution to the problem. Because the truth is, I have some pretty good moments with the poor. And, I think I would have had some more if I had just stayed engaged.
Eventually, I moved out of Zeb’s neighborhood and moved into Daniel’s. Whenever you would walk past Daniel, you should expect to be asked two questions:
- “You wouldn’t have any spare change, would you brother?” If you answered no, then:
- “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette?”
And, even if both answers were no, you would still get a friendly, “God bless you” as you walked away. And, 90 percent of my conversations with Daniel went just like that. But, over time, we began to develop some sense of a friendship. Really, I don’t think Daniel had the memory to sustain any type of long term friendship. But, if you caught him on one of his good moments, then you were his friend.
The thing with Daniel is that he had a very Jekyll and Hyde existence. Sober, he was one of the kindest, gentlest men you could ever meet. But, if he was drunk, as was the case with Zeb, his demons were in full control. And Daniel was a very large man, so he was quite intimidating when he was agitated.
Daniel would always ask you for money when he saw you, but he didn’t really care if you gave him any or not. For him, it was enough if you simply acknowledged him and showed him some respect. Most did, though few every really spent the time to get to know him beyond that conversation.
But, as even at the height of my cynicism, I could never imagine treating him the way some people did. One night, he passed out on the steps of my church, and someone had tied his shoes together. I simply can’t imagine the frame of mind that would cause someone to do that to a homeless man. Another time, I saw someone turn their dog loose on him. And, no matter what part of the block he was on, he was constantly told he had to go somewhere else.
This is just what I witnessed. As I said, I was one of the ones who got to know Daniel a little better. One afternoon, while attempting to do some homework on the porch of my church, Daniel dropped by and joined me, and we ended up talking for over two hours. I can’t remember all that we talked about. Daniel definitely has some mental health issues, but somewhere in all of the fog is someone who is quite perceptive.
He claims to be a prophet. Given the tests of prophecy found in the Bible, I have my doubts to that claim, but at the same time, I seen no attempts at deception. But I also at times wonder if perhaps is claim is true, not that he is a prophet with an oracle from God, but rather that his life has a prophetic slant to it. That he is, in Matthew 25 terms, the least of these.
Regardless, we talked for a long time, and as I said, he was a lot more insightful and engaging that I would have imagined him being. Over the following months, we had more conversations of the 2 questions variety, but we had longer ones as well.
When Daniel was drunk, though, he became argumentative. One of the things he liked to do when drunk was come into our church and pose “theological questions.” They were always trap questions designed to get a good and intense argument going. Debate wasn’t the point. The goal was simply to argue.
It was in these moments you could see just how tormented he was. And, one time, he interrupted one of our Wednesday night services. As all of that was going one, I could feel a presence in the room. I can’t explain it, but it rattled me so much that I was shaking.
However, it was also in these moments that one cannot be “friends” with Daniel in the most usual sense of the word. At these moments, Daniel didn’t trust me. He didn’t like me. And, I’m not even sure he knew who I was.
Which is where we go wrong when dealing with the poor. There is so much talk these days about not simply throwing money at them, but to really get out there and form relationships. I agree, but the problem is that we go in with too many expectations. We think that we are going to go in and fix what ails them.
Daniel isn’t going to be fixed in this lifetime. And, from talking to him, he doesn’t really want to. In some ways, it breaks my heart. But, he’s quite aware that he is going to be fixed in the next life. That gives him hope. But, for some reason, I don’t allow that to be my hope.
I didn’t have the same kinds of expirences as Shane Claiborne because I went in expecting too much. I thought a relationship with Daniel and Zeb would be like one with any of my middle class friends. But, the truth is, all relationships are give and take. But, with a Daniel and a Zeb, the give and take is quite different, because the power, emotional, and economic dynamics are skewed.
My biggest problem was that I didn’t know how to give or receive with these guys. But, they had it down pat. I’ve talked about how they received, but really it’s in how they gave that had the biggest impact on me.
One time, I was hanging out with Daniel. He was talking about his living conditions. Sometimes, he had a person who let him crash at his place, but this guy would end up beating him up and stealing from him. Other times, he slept in one of the parks, but he didn’t like to do that because people would steal his alcohol.
He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a bottle of beer. He opened it, took a drink, and then offered to share it with me. Here is a man who was spent his waking hours trying to collect enough to buy alcohol and ciagarettes, and who one of his biggest fears is that someone will steal his booze. And here he is, offering me, someone who has refused to give him money on almost every occasion, is offering to share all that he has and that which is most precious to him.
And then there was Zeb. On this night, as I looked into his eyes, listening to him call down curses on someone who I was completely unaware of , staring deep into his anger. Then, he looks at me, thanks me, and promises to protect me.
Here is a guy with nothing, in a moment of his deepest torment and anguish, promising me that he would look after me. Yet, wasn’t it me that was supposed to be looking out for him. Then, he hugged me for a long time.
In two realationships where I thought I was the one who was supposed to be doing the giving, it was two men who I though had nothing to offer that ended up being able to give me back what I had lost.
I had found my heart.
[...] the quest for a heart [...]