The Distressing Disguise
No one sees Thomas or Sunshine or JD. People pass by them all day long, some on bikes, some in cars, some on foot. But no one sees them. The police look for them, sweep their camp. But no one sees them.
Thomas is turning 40 this September. He’s been on the streets in Portland for four years. He’s tall, 6’4”, with blue eyes, a mop of reddish-brown hair and incredibly good posture because of a titanium rod in his lower back, the result of surgery after a logging accident in the town where he grew up. He rides a beat-up bike, and usually is pulling a trailer of some sort, pieced together from a shipping crate and a wheel chair that he found on the shores of the Willamette River. He hauls things for his friends all the time: pallets, plywood, whole camps, whatever and whenever people ask him. He cracks jokes about his life: “My parents always said I would grow up to be a hobo under a bridge. If only I could send them a picture to say, ‘Mom and Dad, look at me now!’” In general, he seems upbeat about life, even if angry about the police, or being swept, or watching friends die of fentanyl overdoses.
Thomas is easy to spot, but hard to see. When you ask if you can pray for him, he usually just asks you to pray for everyone out there. Sometimes I wonder if anyone has ever seen him. Not seen the tall homeless guy on the bike with the trailer, but seen Thomas.
The police don’t see him. Oh, they look for him, and when they find him—at least this is his side of the story—they beat him up. But they don’t see him.
Even those who live in the same camps as him don’t see him. They see his willingness to help. They see his antics. They see his drug use. But they don’t see him.
The same is true for Sunshine. No one sees him. Sure, they might notice his tall, slender frame, his dark hair and well-trimmed black beard. They might notice that he’s sitting alone on a sidewalk, head in his hands. But they don’t see him.
I almost didn’t see him the first time I met him. It was last September, a warm evening, and we were giving out soup. Three of us were across the street, where there were a lot of tents, and Marcela said to me, “Are we going to offer some to him?” I assumed that he was sitting there because he was really high, but I went to ask, and he said, “Yes, please. Thank you.” When I brought the soup, I asked if I could sit with him on the dirty sidewalk on 17th, in the dusk. “Sure,” he said, barely lifting his head. I didn’t even see his face that night, though we talked for an hour.
For 17 years, no one has seen JD. He is 33, with blue tattoos all over his neck and face, short, curly hair, and sparkling brown eyes. He looks like he’s 15 or 16. For the last four months or so, he’s given up. He burned down his tent with all of his belongings in the middle of winter. “I just got tired of having stuff,” he says, and now he wanders to others’ camps for the night, or sleeps curled up on the streets in only a blanket, shivering, more often than not high on fentanyl. But in his little backpack, along with his drug paraphernalia, he keeps an image of Divine Mercy.
It’s easy to see that they are addicted to drugs. It’s easy to assume that they are criminals. It’s easy to be repulsed by their dirty bodies, their blackened fingers, their tarp-covered tents.
But it’s hard to see them.
To see them, one has to spend time, to wait, to stay, to listen, and to look. Beneath every tarp-covered tent, there’s a story to uncover. Between every hit, there’s a hurting heart. Behind every fierce façade, there’s a crushed childhood.
If your heart is not completely hardened, their stories will break it. And they’ll tell you, if you’ll take the time to listen. If you’ll go back week after week. If you aren’t repulsed by the smell or the filth. If you don’t back down when they try to push you away.
They won’t understand why you keep coming back, at least not at first. They don’t believe they’re worth it. They don’t believe they’re worth more than the life they live right now. When they open their hearts to you and tell you more about themselves, the things they think are most hateful, they won’t understand why you don’t walk away. And when they really let you in and then get scared you’ll hurt them, they’ll try to push you away. Or avoid you. But if you stand firm, if you refuse to identify them as addicts or criminals, as homeless or felons, then you’ll start to see them.
You’ll start to see not only the person in front of you suffering from homelessness and addiction, and not only even the person who still bears open wounds from childhood. But the person in front of you, the heart, the truth—all the things that make him or her lovable, all the beauty and goodness of the soul. And you’ll really start to love the person in front of you, with a love that won’t budge, a love that won’t give up.
And, in that love, maybe they’ll start to see themselves, too. Not as what their parents did to them. Not as what the world says of them. Not as what passersby shout at them.
They’ll start to see that they are worth more than needles and abuse, filth and hopelessness.
They’ll start to see who they are. Beloved sons of God. Princes of the Most High. The imago Dei itself, clothed in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor.
by Sister Teresa