By Logan
The author of this beautiful letter to the editor, which appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, calls its readers to have compassion for a particular man experiencing homelessness in the Bay Area.
The author notes how the man and his dog appeared on hyper-local social media app NextDoor. Commenters on that site had compassion for the dog but conflated the man with his disorders: poor, addicted, mentally ill. She describes him as "cast away" by society. She then proceeds to humanize the man by recounting parts of his life: how he ended up with a dog in San Francisco, how he struggles with heroin, and how he attempts to move out of addiction into something better.
I personally found the letter affecting, but every week I have interactions with many people in very similar circumstances to this man and his dog. I know them by name. I am primed to accept the reality of the man's situation. My compassion for the man proceeds me before I ever become aware of him.
As I finished the letter, I found myself visited by an image of someone with quite different priorities from my own. Those commenters on NextDoor exist in Denver just as they do in San Francisco. Their comments about people living their lives in public spaces are just as stridently self-assured of the moral failing and public nuisance of homeless folks as the ones described in the letter.
I imagine a housed man and his own dog living in a building in the same neighborhood as the man in the letter to the editor. He went from college at Stanford to a six figure developer job at Twitter. The middle-class culture he grew up in now has a decidedly upper-middle class aroma. And yet, the rent is too high, the days at work too long, his relationships too shallow (mostly conducted on a screen) and directed by FOMO more than genuine connection.
Millions of young people exist in this reality.
For this cohort, the suffering man sprawled on the sidewalk is a pin puncturing every well-crafted facade and stabbing at the heart of poverty behind the degree, and the job, and the daily updated Instagram feed. The pain of encountering another person's suffering might be an encounter with grace. Instead, grace is ignored or avoided via an array of automatic defense mechanisms: fear, anger, self-righteousness, moralism, dark humor, cynicism. Any chance at revelation is quashed so that they might go about their day without their ego being destabilized.
I am not sure about the value of the editorial for someone like the hypothetical tech worker I've suggested here. Can anyone's mind really be changed, much less their heart?
In Exodus, we're told Pharaoh's heart was hardened by God. Perhaps the hearts of so many urban dwellers are hardened to save them from the shocking revelation of their own poverty as they are slowly prepared by odd letters and chance encounters to be pierced by the light of truth.
And then what? Well, into relationship you go: to be refined, further refined, clarified, made transparent so that you and others can see the light inside and by it see the image of God in your neighbor—whether they sprawl or spin.