Sleeper, Awake

It turned cold here yesterday.  The wind blew in with teeth bared, howling down the walkway between buildings as my friend and I hurried toward our meeting inside.  Hunched forward slightly, chins tucked, hugging ourselves against the wind’s chill, clammy bite, we comforted ourselves with the usual chatter.

“You know what I’m going to do when I get home?”  I asked her, shivering lightly.  “I’m going to climb into my softest, baggiest sweats.  Put on my fuzzy pink slippers and wrap up in my electric lap blanket to read a good book.”  The anticipation alone was enough to take the edge off.

It was only later–only after anticipation had become warm, comfy  reality–that I thought of the others.  You know who I’m talking about?

Imagine that same wind wailing into the mouth of an alley, chasing dirty scraps of paper along the cold, puddled concrete.  Picture the light at the mouth of the alley breaking up into murky shadows, gradually fading to black as distance from the street increases.  It’s dark, and it stinks–wet asphalt, drenched cardboard, soggy garbage, urine … an unwashed body, the smell of human misery.

They live in American alleys and refugee camps in the Sudan, these huddlers-against-the windy cold.  They shiver in primitive prisons and crude huts and in the filthy gutters lining streets where poverty is as deep and dark as the Black Hole of Calcutta.  With no warmth to look forward to at the end of their day, they fold in on themselves, wrap themselves in their bony arms, and hang on with chattering teeth.

They haunt me like so many ghosts today.  I’m ashamed I didn’t feel them here before.  Maybe I was asleep–safe in that distant, dreamlike, intellectual awareness that, yes, there are poor people in this world; and yes, we should do our bit to help them.  Waking up is a prickly, painful process; it breaks the heart.

But I think that’s what they need–more than our money, they need our hearts.  They need us achingly, acutely aware that they are us.  They’re not there, they’re here, inside us, always inside us, brothers and sisters under the skin, fellow time travelers.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  Love your neighbor, because he is yourself, not in some half-baked New-Age way, but metaphysically, truly, in every way that counts.  What hurts them hurts me.  It doesn’t get more real than that.

So, I sit here–warm, rust-colored electric lap blanket across my knees, laptop under my fingertips, chant playing on Pandora–aching for them and, thus, for myself; astounded that I should be given so much, when so many have nothing at all; humbled by the Providence that placed me, of all people, in a warm home with every creature comfort.  And I wonder how to move in the light of this awareness, in the face of need and misery so great, they all but bring me to my knees.

Jesus said we would always have the poor with us.  With us.  With me.  They’re with me now, and I’ve never been as sure of anything in my life as I am about the fact that, by the grace of God, I’ll know exactly what to do for them, now that I love them.  Lovers always know.

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