Stories and Texts for Nothing Book

Is there any hope for the hopeless misfits, the castoffs, and the downright pariahs of our modern inner cities?

Maybe not, Samuel Beckett seems to say, and certainly NOT on our own high-falutin terms!

But do we then just pray that God will sort them all out?

No. And I know of many a good Franciscan brother, or manager of a downtown homeless shelter, or even one of the kids who helps out full-time at a l'Arche community, who will tell us we can at least try to UNDERSTAND them.

THAT we CAN at the very least try to do!

And who says our shibboleths are more real than theirs, ANYWAY?

Once, in the late 1970's, I approached a panhandler in the market centre of centre town. He was in his sixties or seventies, ragged and unshaven, and he asked me for a bit of spare change.

No! I said to myself.

Buy him a good lunch - you haven't eaten yet, I told myself, and your break is a full hour.... Go ahead and DO it!

So I marched him into a Kresge's Five and Dime - back then you could order a hot chicken sandwich for under five bucks.

Well, I should have told the girl to hold the pie on his order... a bit too rich, in his state of half-stupor.

He lost it in a back alley on the way back to his begging spot.

But, man, was he grateful.

He even shook my hand... which I promptly lathered and washed with hot water the moment I got back to the office! But when we were at Kresge's I honestly didn't CARE who saw me there with him.

To me at that moment he was a struggling kindred spirit.

We CAN sit down with these people, our dark alter egos, even if only to share a good cup of coffee and a few hearty (though maybe a bit condescending?) laughs over our picayune differences, and appreciate them for what they're trying to accomplish in their lives - the wholesale salvation of their souls.

Or, Beckett seems to say, 'you can come with me and vicariously enter into their gentle souls on one of their crosstown aimless midnight rambles.

'I'll even let them tell you their stories - as their wearied, bedraggled souls tell them to me in their eyes...

'You'll see how amazingly tender-hearted these folks REALLY are.'

And who knows, we may even see that - horrors! - these guys are really quite a lot more HUMAN than we are!