It was a dream. Needless to say, it was not a vision. If I ever had a vision I would likely run for the psychiatric couch, not to a pope.

I cannot remember whether it was a day or a night dream. 

The city hung heavy over us all. I was lifting a lantern before an immensely crucified Christ at the end of an alleyway. All around me was fog and shadows and the grating noises of the city. What city I do not know, though it had the “feel” of London, maybe Paris.

The Crucified said nothing. He was simply there. His eyes were closed. I stumbled backwards, disoriented, and made my way as best I could through the dimly lit city streets. I wanted to tell everyone but I could not speak. Try as I would my tongue was paralyzed. ANC I was shunned.

Through the debris I walked, the lantern barely illuminating a mouse gnawing on a decaying chunk of bread. I saw a mother, a very poor woman, breastfeeding her baby. Her loneliness staggered me.

Another woman, apparently a prostitute, was bending over, talking to a man in a car. On the ramp a man pulled his cart up a hill and eventually disappeared into the night. There was nothing I could do.

Cut now to wakefulness. 2004. I am at work, a place of shelter for the homeless. This is real. A man comes in. I have to do his Intake. He was young, in his early thirties. Handsome. Italian features. He tells me he cannot live like this. I asked him to tell me his story.

In brief, he was addicted to heroin and had a severe gambling addiction. Not long ago he had a good job, a nice car. He showed me a picture of the car. He told me he had gotten into a bad accident and was injured. He received a hefty settlement from the other fellow’s insurance company.

Money in hand, however, proved too much. He left his job thinking he would win big this time and took his girl friend to Las Vegas. He gambled away every last dime in little more than a week or two. Because he had to feed his addiction he was now lost, without a job. He had lost the house … the car. Everything. My heart bled for him as he recited the tragedy, his eyes to the floor the whole time. He didn’t want to be a “bum” and was ashamed.

I told him he was not a bum, that he had only made some terrible mistakes and that he was young. There was time to confess and repair the damage and we would help him. He said he was having some dangerous fantasies: like walking in front of a truck maybe; throwing himself off a bridge. I pulled my seat closer and tried to look straight into his eyes. Think of Sharon, I said (not her real name). She loves you. Suicide can also be an act of hostility to those left behind, even if it’s not intended … Don’t do that to her, I implored.

I told him he needed courage now, that we have all made mistakes, some of them terrible, and that only if we lose hope are we doomed. It could be grist for the mill of life instead. He was free to show courage now, I told him.

He stared at me, silent. Silent as the grave.

I made him promise he would not hurt himself, and we could get him help. He promised but refused to go into the hospital. Time, I hoped, would help him recover enough perspective until we could help him. He promised, though  it was far from clear whether he meant it. I wrote up that this man needed very urgent psychiatric and (spiritual) intervention.

Cut to the following Tuesday.

I walk into work and was told to brace myself. My friends on staff told me that a car pulled up in front of the shelter the previous day and that this same man was found blue in the back seat. Some friends of his had helped him from a motel into the car, and that while he seemed in fair condition when he left, he soon fell into the heroin “nod”,

They thought at first it was only that. An ambulance was called as crowds gathered around the car. His girlfriend was hysterical. “He’s gone!,” she cried.. They moved her away.

An autopsy revealed he had died of an overdose of a combination of legal and illegal drugs.

My heart sank into the depths. He had promised. But he was too weak, too ashamed, to keep the promise I think.

I attended his funeral. He was cremated. The impoverished, when cremated, are put into a small black box that looks something like a very small stereo speaker. I could not take my eyes off the tiny box. Just days before he was a living, breathing, albeit hurting, soul. There was nothing we could do.

He was an organ donor and left his eyes and some other organs for those who needed them. A final act of love I cling to in Hope.

Around his resting box were pictures of him as a youth, so handsome, athletic, luminous eyes, so full of promise. Barely the eyes I saw on Thursday.

“But for the grace of God,” the cliché goes, “goes I”. On the lips of the self-righteous it can be a careless cliché. But who can deny its terrible truth when sufficiently pondered?

A friend once said that some people take a left turn in life, and some take a right
turn, and we don’t know why. Maybe it was a tragic chance meeting with the wrong friends, maybe a secret agony, maybe a nexus of compulsions and guilt that needed, short of genuine medical attention which eludes so many, self-medication.

Seldom in my experience is it simple wickedness, even if I have seen my share of rascals too who set traps for others and for themselves. In this case though, as in so many others, the man seemed to me more a victim of his weaknesses (and, yes, of the recklessness born of them) than one of those wretches. Beyond his own personal demons, he may have been a victim of that pernicious materialist philosophy which says that without the house, deck, pool, and car you are a “loser”. You have nothing to “show for yourself.

God save and spare us from such superficial heartlessness.

John Paul II said over and over that a democracy without spiritual and existential values is little more than a thinly guised new form of totalitarianism. It is not democracy which will save the world but, if at all, only a democracy which is infused with the conviction that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, a democracy which understands the life-affirming implications of that realization. A democracy which finally realizes the need for the natural and moral laws of creation.

Jesus

We are all full of contradictions, hypocrisies and stumblings. We can only hope that we are stumbling upwards towards the Kingdom, and not backwards where we would only have to start again.

Many today do not understand dogmas. But they can understand Jesus. So Jesus comes first –to give Hope, of victory, of salvation. (Mt 11:28-30; Apoc 3:20).

Dogmas come afterwards and people grasp them as best they can.  I do not see Jesus giving theological exams to sinners in the Gospels, even if dogmas rightly and immutably enshrine the ineffable truths of the Faith.

I  read an interview with Alexander Solzhenitseyn, the great Russian dissident
and prophet, conducted by his most recent biographer and great scholar, Joseph Pearce. Again I was struck by that prophet who refused to let even the West off the hook just because it wrongly thought he flattered us.  Prophets like Solzhenitsyn work above flattery and the usual obligatory polarities and factionalisms. He knew that only the spiritual values ofthe Gospel can feed man’s deepest hunger and rescue him from the propaganda of all totalitarian, materialist, claims, whether brutal, as in Stalin’s time, or whether more subtle as in the temptations of our time on this side of this ocean.

I see so much in common between that prophet and JPII who dared to tell the world years ago in the face of all kinds of totalitarian propaganda: “Be not afraid!”

SH

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