Fear or Love the Beggar

With warm weather in New York (it was near 90 on Sunday), comes another sign of summer: the return to visible sight of the men and women who don't have homes to our streets and parks.

I'm reading a book by Kelly Johnson, called Fear of Beggars, about the place of begging, poverty, and almsgiving in the Christian life. Johnson's message is that our culture is patently embarrassed and discomfited by begging--so much so that we are desperate to eliminate it. Either we either seek to criminalize begging (the right), or we pursue "social justice" alternatives that would ensure housing and food for all (the left). In neither alternative is there an acceptable place for the very intimate illustration of the fragility of human life that presents itself in the form of the beggar, who makes a personal claim upon another human being and in doing so destabilizes any comfort that what we have is rightfully ours.

Makes me remember another poem--of a young carefree couple in New York and their encounter with a shawl-covered beggar.

Recuerdo
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.