Organization: The American University
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.catholic
Date:         Tue, 22 Dec 1992 12:48:08 EST
From:         Jim McIntosh <JIM@AMERICAN.EDU>
Subject:      Homeless at Christmas

I just thought I'd pass this along. It's from the July 20, 1992 issue of
Christianity and Crisis. I'm sorry, but I didn't write down the author's
name. It seems relevant at this time of year, when we consider how Mary
and Joseph were homeless in Bethelem and looking for shelter:

                                 - * -

Recently I heard a radio talk show advertising its next program. They
would, the announcer said, discuss whether Americans had "lost compassion
for the homeless."

I was puzzled at first, then just plain frustrated. Americans have not
"lost compassion for the homeless"! We never had compassion for the
homeless. We had pity.

And that's not the same thing.

With pity, we keep our distance, our altitude, our sense of elevation. As
Reinhold Niebuhr once observed, "Pity is a form of contempt under a thin
disguise of sympathy."

Compassion, on the other hand, is "suffering with." It's similar to the
word *companion*, which means "a person who shares one bread," only in
this case we share not just bread but passion -- pain, isolation, social
disregard, and political disdain.

No, we never had compassion, even when we "went out among" the homeless.
We have remained our own companions -- not theirs. We came home to our
companions and left the homeless to their own passion, their own
sufferings.

All of which brings to mind something Soren Kierkegaard once said about
Jesus's words, "Come here to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and
I will give you rest." Kierkegaard said that in this passage we meet
again the scandal of grace, the grace of the Christ who refuses to be
relegated to the past, but who insists on being our contemporary. We may
want to send tokens of pity out *there* among the hevily burdened. But
Christ invites the burdened to come *here*.

With his hallmark relish for irony, Kieregaard mimics our horror and
disgust, our sense of outrage at this intrusion. Of all the nerve! Christ
invites them to come here! Not to go to the inner-city shelter, but to
come here! "This cannot be done," he says, because "one's entire
household and way of life would have to be altered. It will not do, when
one is living in abundance oneself, or at least in joy and gladness, to
reside together in a home and live together in a common life and in daily
association with those who labor and are burdened." Compassion is
invasive. It will not leave us our privacy.

Now, I want to set the record straight. We don't have the huddled masses
yearning to be warm sitting around the fireplace at our house. So I can't
say we are particularly compassionate. And I don't want to kid myself,
either, confusing the combination of vague regret, pity and guilt I feel
with the invitation to community that compassion clearly represents. I am
not, nor do I recall ever having been, compassionate. Like Kierkegaard, I
find myself standing flat-footed in the presence of this grace, this
fully contemporary Christ, and I have to confess, "The check may be in
the mail, but not the invitation to dine and dwell *here*, at least not
yet.

And I'm not satisfied with that confession.