Isaiah 35:4-7
Psalm 146:6-10
James 2:1-5
Mark 7:31-37

The Living and the Dead

Many times I have shared from this pulpit the life I lived in two worlds: in one world, Masses celebrated in what used to be called "million-dollar churches" and in the other, Masses celebrated in humble, candle-lit rooms amongst Haiti's poor; in one, people walking briskly to their cars after receiving the Blessed Sacrament, and in the other, tears streaming down Haitian faces as the Lord becomes present with the Host elevated to the utmost reach of a sincere priest; in one, affluent people coming to church Sunday wearing the most casual (not to say revealing) attire, and in the other, the poorest people on earth scrubbed cleaner than clean, shining, and wearing that one suit of clothes, that tasteful suit of clothes, that was only to be worn when approaching the Altar of God.

Before my life-changing journey to Haiti, where I had hoped to spend my last years, I had known the tender-hearted poor and the sincerity of the human person reduced to its vulnerable essence. As chaplain to a large public university, I had led an annual ministry to homeless people in Boston. I would bring a moving van, full of clothes we had collected, and school buses of college students all bound to Boston Common, where we would set up a large clothing store on the sidewalk, and a shoe store on wide and deep steps of the Cathedral where students would ask our unwashed and disheveled customers, "May I assist you in trying on shoes, Madam? We have some nice ones that have just come in!" "May I help you find a nice jacket, Sir? .... Oh, this one looks splendid! ... It's really you!" How quickly we forget what it means to be called "Madam" or "Sir" or even to be looked at with pleasant intentions and treated with respect and deference. These were blandishments our customers had not experienced for a very long time.

Do you know the tender hearts of those who live out on the streets? They have been "living rough," many in commando-like survival mode (where many of these men learned it). For that reason, from afar they may seem hardened or surly. But looks can be deceiving. Sitting on a sidewalk, living beneath the attention of others for months and years and many years, is humbling. Just to look at another person at eye level who pays attention to you as a fellow human being, who actually speaks to you in a tone of kindness or solicitude, after years have gone by since hearing your name .... you cannot imagine how this stirs the lonely human heart.

The process of poverty is a scraping away, a removing of all the defenses that most people depend upon to remain aloof: the respect commanded by the well-spoken and well-dressed, the air of importance, the beautiful clothes and accessories, or even the limousine. "Dress for power," people say. Polish the King's English to command a room. With all this scraped away, what remains is a human body which continues to function, a bared heart, for consciousness and feelings continue, and .... that is all, for the networks of relationship often elude those who live on the streets. And this baring and vulnerability, this reducing to essences, teaches us that relationship, the stirrings and needs of the heart, is the one, necessary thing.

By contrast, affluence has the effect of building up callouses upon the heart. Comfortable, solitary lodgings, overabundance of food, electronic gadgetry, leather-upholstered car interiors, and self-sufficiency all combine to erect a fortress, as if the point of prosperity were to overcome the need for relationship. At no time in U.S. history have so many people chosen to live alone. Households of one dominate the U.S. census. People commuting alone to work is the norm ... some installing mannequins in the spare seats, so they can use the preferred commuter lanes on the highways. Consider the scene of four teenagers sitting around a table together nominally to "be together." Yet, each stares into an electronic device that points her away from real and shared relationship. I suppose this scene is so common as now to be a proverb. And I have read that something called "avatars" dominate the web, so people no longer need to be themselves but rather some other, invented someone. The goal of affluence manifestly is isolation: to live completely alone, and if one becomes sick, to hire people so that we can be alone. We screen phone calls, texts,and emails, and finally we die perfectly alone. Such affluent lives are lived inventing realities, even identities, whose beginning and end proceed from, and then die in, the self-enclosed mind.

In the U.S. this mass retreat into selfhood includes defection from God. For in this country more than 80% of the population attended church in 1960. You recall 1960. On Sundays every downtown area in the U.S. was empty. The only masses of cars were near to the downtown churches. Today, the U.S. is a country that worships God scarcely at all. The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion reports that the true number of church attendance in 2017 was 17.7%. The greater the affluence, the more the human person is apt to withdraw into a world of isolated fascination and distraction. But the only reality, the only permanence, and, yes, the only holiness is evaded, eluded, and then lost. For surely both Great Commandments are nullified in this spiritually deadening process. In this, depictions of Hell come to mind: dark oblivion, the loss of all relationship, the end of hope, and the complete and permanent absence of God. Yes, many have rejoiced to experience a foretaste of the Kingdom. But be assured that a foretaste of the Dark Kingdom is no less real. If it is nothing but Heaven all the way to Heaven, as St. Catherine of Siena has written, then surely it is nothing but Hell all the way to Hell. And we begin to understand the purpose of Jesus' teaching, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Mk 10:25). And we begin to understand the rich man burning in unquenchable fire while the beggar Lazarus, whom he abused, takes lasting comfort in Abraham's bosom, heart linked to heart (Luke 16:19ff).

Ironically, it is poverty which strips away deadening influences. The splendid lodgings, the packed refrigerators, the television, the laptops, the iPads, the smart phones. All are stripped away. And one more thing. The heart becomes broken, and the callouses of indifference that have deadened the heart become cracked and fall away, revealing pink flesh below, which is the heart's original state. No. Poverty does not make one hardened. Poverty makes one tender as the barriers that separate us from deep feeling and from God collapse.

It is affluence which hardens, affluence, which shows us the dangerous mirage of self-sufficiency, affluence, which promises splendid isolation and the private pursuit of pleasure and ego. Some sociologists have called it affluenza emphasizing both disease and epidemic.

I recall, visiting New York City one winter evening as a college student. A friend and I came upon an old man lying unconscious on the sidewalk. Snow had covered him with footprints veering to the left and right in the snow with none coming within two feet of him. We picked him up and dragged him to a doorway, and we looked in each other's faces and shared the same, unspoken thought. What do we do with him? The police do not want him. The local hospital does not want him. The people of New York have ignored him to the point of death. We ourselves were out-of-town visitors. Do you drag an unconscious, indigent man on to the bus? My friends older brother rolled his eyes, for surely we have committed some as-yet-unlearned sin offending sophistication and indifference.

Forever after, I saw two New Yorks, a tale of two cities. One was an enclosed world of well-appointed apartments, door men, restaurants, museums, and Broadway shows. Visitors looking through this highly polished lens would say, "I just love New York!" With great skill they must never look at the majority of New Yorkers who are the working poor, the unemployed poor, and the blasted poor wearing rags and lining the sidewalks of Canal St. and the Bowery, starving and freezing to death on a winter's night. Visitors might say, "Oh, that changes the whole mood! Now my trip to New York has been ruined!" Or .... "Are they dangerous?!" With great skill one must navigate through the poor of the world being careful never to see them.

Do you know where one meets with the warmest hospitality? It is among the poor. Why is this? Perhaps it is the heightened awareness the value of a gift, of a single sweet potato or a cool sip of water in a Haitian hovel ... so proud that they have a room that they live in. Giving away what one has is not a process of subtraction; it is addition ... of sharing, of sharing what is important. A recognition of friendship. Or perhaps it is the wisdom that comes of life-at-its-essence. Stuff is not what matters. The connection between two hearts .... that is what matters. In Haiti you will see men walking down the street holding hands. It is not a romance thing, but rather the unvarnished and simple desire for connection. You will see people taking their noontime naps draped upon each other. It is not a body thing, but a heart thing. If we are to say that it is a love thing, then it is love in the sense that God loves us. And these same people love God with an intensity and devotion and sincerity that one will rarely find in the so-called First World.

I have heard it said among affluent observers that the poor are more religious because they have more need of God, whereas self-sufficient Westerners do not suffer from this childish dependency. Self-sufficient?! .... from God?!. The very statement betrays the disease of isolation and self-delusion, which only affluence can bring about. Anyone surveying the scene in the U.S. today can plainly see how badly God, and God alone, desperately is needed. Compare Haiti to the U.S.? That is to compare the riches of the spirit to an utter poverty of faith. No, the poor love God because they have received a gift, the gift of a heart that is still tender and pink and exquisitely sensitive, a heart much more like God's. For they love God with all of their hearts and souls and minds because they are closer to becoming God — our God, Who was born of homeless and outcast parents, Who was a refugee on the road of flight as a vulnerable infant, Who was raised by an elderly stepfather and marginalized mother, Who would have nowhere to lay his head, and Who would die as a beggar owning neither the clothes on his back nor a grave in which to lay His lifeless body.

Have you seen the little poor man in rags, Il Poverello, St. Francis, embracing Christ as He hung on a cross? Long before this, St. Francis had suffered from affluenza. He had labored under the youthful delusion of the grand and of adolescent immortality. But God had broken his heart. God had opened his eyes. God had made him exquisitely sensitive. And when he emerged from this furnace that had stripped away all insensible excess, God embraced him and called him a son, and commissioned him to rebuild the insensible Church. And ever after, St. Francis stripped away every affluence he saw, requiring his followers to do the same, that they might empty themselves as the Son of God had emptied Himself of every royal and divine prerogative ... because He loved us and asked us to love Him, with a heart fully bared to the world.

In the Son of God we see a life that calls us to "sell what [we] possess and give [it] to the poor" (Mt 19:21). That is, He did not call us to make nice contributions to soup kitchens or homeless shelters (though this, surely, is commendable). No. He calls us to get on the wavelength of the only real world, to break through from our personal fog, to open our eyes to Him and to those He loves, to see the world that suffers and starves, for, certainly, this is the state of most of the world. St. Matthew records that Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor in the spirit." The Lord calls us to a spirit of poverty: to a particular focus, to see the world through the right lens and not to ignore or navigate around the only thing that is important.

On the night He was betrayed, He broke the bread before He consecrated it. And He seeks to break our hearts before we can be consecrated to His purposes. For He knows that until that happens, until the callouses upon our hearts split wide open revealing pink flesh, then we will be distracted in the deadness of affluence, whitened sepulchers, and we cannot be of any use to Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.