A month ago I began spending some time on the street as the “neighborhood” grew. I was told that we could best accompany them with sandwiches and fluids. We have had adequate bread recently and access to lunch meat to make the sandwiches. The past three weeks we have distributed around 100 sandwiches and 16-20 ounces of drinks to persons who have build this neighborhood. Last week a conflict ensued to distribute excess food and drink, so we needed more presence to hand out the materials and tighten our distribution system so as not to cause conflict and upset the fragile equilibrium that the neighborhood had established. Each night the tents went up; each morning, by 6:00 am, the police come by with the wake-up call, the tents come down, the people clean up the area, and the day proceeds. Their presence has also opened up parking spaces as others fear of the “homeless” kept the spaces unoccupied!!!

As I pulled up yesterday, I saw what I feared had happened – the tents were gone. Carole was waiting for me to tell me the events. The FBI had sent four agents to clear out the area! (I heard that they were very gracious in asking people to leave), and move people to another side of another building that is more invisible. As I learned more about the situation, the technicalities of the situation emerged – those on the streets know the law. They had taken up residence around the post office and library -- federal, not city property. The cities jurisdiction was limited over the space and they did not have authority to move people off the property. Evidently what happened was eventually the “feds” were called, and without enthusiasm they asked the “tent city” to move farther from the tourist Gas Lamp district to a less accessible side.

As we were winding up, I was told by one of the members of the community that one man who had received a sandwich was laying on the side walk in his own urine across the street behind the post office. I walked to check on him. It was a person whom I had gotten to know earlier, Richard – a 60ish year old man. He had taken in much alcohol. I looked at his breathing; it seemed steady, and went to move him to a more comfortable position on the hard concrete. He barely stirred, groaned a little, and then sunk back into his drunken stupor. One of his friends walked by and suggested that I call 9-1-1 and tell them I was a pastor. I thought the police would arrive and take him to “sleep it off.” Instead an ambulance arrived. The EMT’s were male, in their 20s-early 30s, very professional and prompt; one was white, the other African-American.

I asked what would happen to Richard. The white EMT said that they would take him to the hospital; he would be examined, treated, and released and then “we will pick him up again tomorrow night – we pick this man up all the time. There are 200 hundred just like him a couple of blocks over” – one could hear the moral disgust in his voice. The African American man remained quiet. They loaded Richard and took off.

I’ve reflected on this experience in light of the moral options provided by liberal political theory. The “right” would insist upon the moral responsibility of Richard; leave him on the streets to suffer the consequences of his addictions. The “left” would say that it is the state’s responsibility to care for him in his addictions to provide opportunities for future choices. Both presuppose a “buffered self” – Richard’s good is seen in terms of his “freedom” – his choice to live as he wants, even if it is in his own self-medication via alcohol. The right looks to keep such a freedom and its consequences tied together; the left to keep the option of freedom through ameliorating the consequences. In the process the expenses for Richard’s care in a stretched medical system show that his self is anything but buffered – as experience by those who wait in the hospital waiting room for 6-8 hours for treatment as the doctors.

I know Richard a little, not well. He can be a gracious, kind man. He obviously has fallen into alcoholism that have stolen his freedom – defined negatively as the ability to chose his own good and positively as defined as his ability to do what is genuinely good. Ironically both the moral choices of treatment leave him as buffered, alone, isolated – most likely what is at the basis, with other traumas as a result of both his choices and his circumstances, of his self-medication. The practices of both the right and left, the two sides arising from liberal political theory, reflect the same philosophical anthropology, perpetuates the very struggles that it seeks to solve in Richard’s situation.

Wednesday morning I came into school trying to process the evening – FBI, Richard, the EMTs, my own moral responses. I talked to Mark Wright who asked, “What is a Christian response?” I stuttered, stammered, drooled a little. Then I thought of the Missionaries of Charity. I said, “How about the church getting gurneys and picking up those passed out due to alcohol downtown and taking them to a place where they could have some medical oversight, a clean place to sleep, wash and dry their cloths, give them breakfast. Get someone there to listen and write their biographies – give them a history as human persons made in the image of God. And then release them again for the day. If we have to pick them up night after night, so be it. Let them know the unmerited, unending love that God is as seen in Jesus even as the “unworthy poor”. Of course, we all would have to learn some medical skills and would need person committed to the task as vowed members to show God’s unmerited charity. In the process we could relieve some of the stress on an already over-stressed urban medical system.

I don’t know if this is an idle dream or even possible. I have no idea of the implications or unintended consequences of such an endeavor. Yet it seems to me that the Missionaries of Charity provide a model within India for those who are the most outcast in our culture – the abjectly poor, urban drunk in an unconscious, alcohol-induced stupor – the epitome of the “unworthy poor.” Christ was there in the weak, stupor, groaning body of Richard; it seems that the church should be there as well, not merely to make him “worthy” but to model the love of Christ who while we were yet sinners, died for us. Maybe it would even provide an opportunity for a genuine freedom for Richard to show and become who he really is - - a human person created in the image of God, one for whom Christ died, and whom the Spirit calls back to God the Father through the Son.