We still matter, don’t we
Do you wanna feel how it feels?
Do you wanna know, know that it doesn’t hurt me?
Do you wanna hear about the deal that I’m makin’?
by Kate Bush
Durham, NC. A couple years ago, before Covid, when they were still allowing them, before the city ‘cleaned them out’, there was a homeless encampment on a brushy spit of land by a highway interchange near downtown Durham. One block away from multiple churches. A short walk to government offices. Nine people living inside tents, enduring icy rain and stares, thrown bottles and trash, turned faces and curses.
I stopped by to give out gift cards for McDonald’s, thinking they could use them to get inside, escape the elements, buy something to eat or drink. Or just have a place to sit. We all like a place to sit. A favorite chair by a window. A couch to stretch out on. ‘Our’ pew at church. ‘Our booth’ at a favorite restaurant. That particular seat in a local coffee house. We feel out of sorts if we go to claim one of these and find someone else in it, don’t we? I know I do. ‘My’ place is taken. What am I going to do? Where do I go now?
One woman stepped forth and accepted the cards for the group. The others zipped back inside their tents – it was cold. She thanked me and stood there, waiting. I stood there too, wondering if there was something else I should do.
Of course, I should have invited her under my roof. I know all the reasons not to invite a stranger into one’s home. I know the rationales. I also know offering momentary, transient shelter in a fast food restaurant isn’t a solution either. It’s a deal I made with myself, to not have to look too closely in the mirror.
I asked her how she was doing – that worthless question – and she answered with the lie we all expect, “Fine.” We stood there awkwardly a little longer. I thought about what I should say next. Finally I asked her, “What do you really need?”
It turns out, she needed a simple invitation to talk.
Words poured out of her like rushing water. She’d been on the streets in Durham for a month, having spent years chasing a daughter who after bouts of treatment and relapse finally fled, chasing fentanyl. This mother spoke of how opioids had taken her daughter. A month ago this woman had heard – from someone, somewhere, she wasn’t sure anymore – that her daughter was in Durham, living under a bridge, or on a bench in a park, or crashing in some apartment where the daughter would trade what she needed to trade for a couch, a needle.
… if I only could
I’d make a deal with God
And I’d get him to swap our places
Her family wanted nothing to do with this woman. Thought she was foolish for giving up her life, losing her job, her house, everything. To chase a ‘junkie’ daughter. They washed their hands of the mother, too, this family. Her friends.
But the woman remembered the sweet baby who cooed as she nursed. The little girl who placed her hand atop construction paper and traced out a shape that would become a reindeer. “We had little tea parties with little cups from her dollhouse.”
This woman chased her daughter “down the nights and down the days…down the arches of the years…down the labyrinthine ways…” Down to Durham.
How can you give up on your babies?
How can we give up on anyone?
I knew a woman once whose son murdered someone in a tragic accident of passion and self-preservation. He came home bloody. She washed his clothing, twice, treated his scrapes, sent him to bed. Loved him still, through the arrest, the trial, the execution.
Christians are celebrating the Christmas story, the tale of the birth of a child whose preordained destiny was to be tortured, beaten, and nailed to a cross at an age when he was just entering into his adulthood. While his mother watched, helpless. We think of the baby, of course. But it’s a story about mothers, too. And fathers. A family who was homeless, then became refugees fleeing for their lives to a foreign country, feeling to protect their child from the slaughter of thousands of innocent children that this one birth set in motion.
Growing up, I never thought of that part of the story. Christmas was my favorite time of year, and I still love it, but I have seen too much now to just greet it with unbridled wonder, and I know that’s sad. But back then it was the only time of the year when I felt people were trying to find happiness, were thinking of others, were determined to focus on that which soothed, comforted, brought joy and awe. It was a time of magic, with hopeful stories of ghosts visiting misers, grinches and snowmen and Potters, shepherds following a star, kings offering gifts to a child in a stable. Holy nights. Angels singing. Bright lights strung outside people’s houses, window displays of green and red clad elves, decorated trees, ornaments, tinsel, plates of cookies and glasses of milk for Santa and reindeers, store aisles full of exotic candies and baked treats. A baby sleeping peacefully amidst the turmoil.
A child born to save us from ourselves.
Oh, tell me, we (all) matter, don’t we?
