My Good Friends,
I’m a fan of the Audible platform for books. My very first listen was The Godfather and from there went on to revisit the classics, To Kill a Mockingbird, mostly all of Steinbeck, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein among dozens of other genres. I am currently engaged in a 1959 novel from Walter M Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz. It’s interesting how Miller came to write this post-apocalyptic novel. During World War II, he served as a radio operator and tail gunner aboard an American bomber and participated in the bombing of Monte Cassino, the ancient Benedictine abbey in Italy. Its destruction deeply affected him. After the war, Miller converted to Catholicism, and years later that experience helped inspire his novel about monks preserving faith and human knowledge after a nuclear catastrophe.
While listening during a walk this past weekend I came across a phrase of his from the book, “But dignity overshadows poverty”. The phrase appears when Brother Francis visits the Pope in New Rome. For a brief moment, Francis notices the Pope’s threadbare cassock, the worn carpet, and plaster missing from the ceiling. The papal surroundings are undeniably poor, yet poverty almost disappears beneath the dignity of the person and the meaning of the encounter. Miller is not denying the poverty. He is showing us that it is not the most important thing in the room.
Volumes can be written on poverty and Miller’s small phrase powerfully speaks to how we at times see the poor and homeless today. When we encounter someone sleeping beneath an overpass or carrying everything they own in a backpack, poverty is usually the first thing we notice. It can become the only thing we see. Yet behind those circumstances is a person with memories, disappointments, humor, faith, talents, and hopes for tomorrow
Homelessness can take away comfort, privacy, security, and opportunity, but it cannot erase human dignity. We see that dignity of those struggling on the streets of Tampa, in the person who carefully gathers their few belongings each morning, carrying all their worldly processions in a worn-out cart or well-worn backpack. We encounter them every day outside our church as well as inside participating at mass. They endure the uncomfortable heat of nights and days, all weather conditions, suspicious looks, harassment, rejection, and uncertainty, yet somehow get up and continue forward. And who’s to say that they themselves, in the reality of their situations and circumstance, don’t practice gratitude? Indeed, “Blessed are the Poor.”
We should never romanticize poverty. There is nothing noble about hunger, untreated illness, or sleeping on a sidewalk. Those conditions call for both compassion and practical action. But the perseverance of those who endure them can teach the more fortunate something important. We sometimes allow a delayed delivery, an inconvenient appointment, or a disappointing meal and other first world problems to ruin an otherwise good day. Meanwhile, people carrying far greater burdens, literally and figuratively, continue to laugh, help one another, and begin again.
Perhaps we should borrow a page from their playbook: practice gratitude, complain less, appreciate ordinary comforts, and stop confusing what we possess with who we are. Most importantly, we can look people experiencing homelessness in the eye, greet them, listen to them, and treat them as brothers and sisters rather than problems to be avoided.
Poverty may be plainly visible, but it never tells the whole story. If we learn to look more carefully, dignity can overshadow poverty—and compassion can overshadow indifference.
Peace and All Good,
Fr. Zack
