The radical Gospel response to the deep challenges of homelessness: unconditional love

Not everybody can do what I am doing. That was the assurance I gave myself. I was living in a nexus of small Andean towns, periodically providing relief and aid for the scattered population. In addition to teaching classes for the parish, the parochial school and the local seminary, I helped transport warm clothing to communities so remote that they do not appear on Google Maps and facilitated medical mission trips for them as well. I would ask myself, Is this not the height of love? In what other place in the world could I love to such an extreme? As it turned out, a man named John in Denver, Colo., would show me the answer.

When I returned to the United States toward the end of 2014, I took a position at Christ in the City, based in Denver, in hopes of continuing to help those who are neglected and forgotten. This non-profit offers Catholic formation to young adults, particularly with the aim of helping them to know, love and serve those experiencing homelessness. They are more than volunteers because their fundamental goal is to be and encounter Jesus on the streets, which is why we refer to them as missionaries. I viewed this as a noble mission, but I could not have imagined anyone suffering more than those of the Altiplano, so I expected the work to be less intense than my time in the Andes. It did not take long for me to discover the deeper poverty that afflicts the human heart, and it cannot be cured by any commodity.

On my very first day of work with Christ in the City, my team was assigned to meet with a man named John. Arriving at the meeting spot, John walked up to us with very deliberate, stiff, exaggerated movements that heightened his already palpable intensity. His voice was often raised because he was partially deaf and he could not hear himself speak, but it sometimes seemed that he was screaming at the rest of us. Oftentimes, he really was screaming at us.

John’s speech was often unintelligible, likely influenced by having lost all his teeth and by the difficulty of hearing his own voice. These challenges in communication consistently compounded his frustrations. In addition, John suffered from schizophrenia, which he was able to treat by medication. When I considered all of these challenges, alongside the fact that he was living on the streets, it was natural to have compassion for John, who seemed so alienated from human connection.

Unfortunately, the way John treated people did not always garner empathy. His behavior was often irascible, volatile and unpredictable and was exacerbated by his struggles to overcome the effects of his prior use of crack cocaine. My first day with him revealed the pattern of years to come. John would become enraged by something, yell for everyone to hear, then storm away or demand to see someone of higher authority. The missionaries were often able to de-escalate his aggressive behavior, but only temporarily. Considering his habitual struggles and behaviors, the most normal errands were insurmountably difficult for John. It was hard to imagine him ever leaving the streets.

It did not help that John’s circumstances were evidence of lost possibilities. His threatening behaviors led to his expulsion from practically every homeless resource in town. He had lost his social security card 10 times. (I learned that this was the maximum number of replacements a person could receive in their lifetime.) It seemed that John had exhausted even the most basic opportunities to get off the streets, and when an occasional relapse of substance abuse occurred, it was natural for him to feel hopeless.

John is emblematic of a truth we have long observed at Christ in the City. Many observers are inclined to assign homelessness to a certain cause, like substance abuse, mental health or job loss. These are undoubtedly factors, and John is representative of nearly all of them, but his challenges ran deeper than that and our response needed to do the same. We helped build relationships with other organizations we partnered with, reconciling and mediating difficulties they had with John. One amazing day, John was given his 11th social security card, which I consider one of the most miraculous things I have seen on the streets. He was able to get an ID, receive medication, maintain sobriety for extended periods and find a legitimate form of income. All of these, unfortunately, were eventually lost.

Mother Teresa often pointed out that the poverty of the Western world is much more difficult to remedy than what she experienced in Calcutta. “We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love.” I have seen its dire truth with my own eyes, both in the poverty of the Andes mountains and the affluence of the United States. It is intuitive, after all, that each problem must be faced on its own terms. Hunger can be remedied with food, sickness with medicine, impoverishment with money, and so on. John repeatedly received help in every area of need, but none of these resources were sufficient, individually or collectively, to relieve John’s woes. There was one other thing needed to try to alleviate John’s deepest aches: an unconditional commitment of love.

And so it was in relationship with John that I encountered the radicality of the Gospel. John put me in daily contact with the audacity of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which requires the renunciation of human standards of fairness and love in exchange for a divine standard. Throughout my time at Christ in the City, I have been yelled at, threatened, spat upon and struck, among other things. John himself was the source of many of these incidents, and a constant reminder that human love alone cannot always free someone from their struggles. Even my most heroic efforts were not enough to summon the love I desired to offer John. This love I wanted to give was not something I could find in myself. Rather, it was one that had to be requested from him who is love.

Amid so many ups and downs, a steady stream of missionaries were able to see in John what many, including John himself, struggled to believe. John was created in the image and likeness of God, and he bore within him a worth and dignity of inestimable value. This dignity was not contingent on his behavior, which often obscured it from our human sight. The eyes of faith allowed us to see John a bit more as God saw him: a person who shared in the purpose of life we all have been tasked with: to love and be loved.

John was graced with this love until the end of his days. When his health began to fail him, John moved to a nursing home, and eventually to hospice. Approaching the end of his life and helped by the missionaries’ testimony, he requested baptism into the Catholic Church. He enjoyed a surprising recovery for a brief time, which allowed him to speak with the missionaries about the God who had always loved him, even when all other loves had failed. John passed shortly after in the company of generations of Christ in the City missionaries, who were given the grace to love him until the end.