"I'm hungry," she told me. "I haven't eaten in two days. I'm waiting to be cleared and placed in a shelter. I'm homeless." She said it without hesitation or guile, just simple honesty. Her hunger drove her. I guessed that she was in her late 'teens, early 'twenties, tops.
I bought two sandwiches and two cups of coffee for both of us and invited her to sit at a tiny table out of the cafe's steady traffic. As she munched on her sandwich and wrapped her hands around her hot cup, she told me her story.
Later that day, an agency person came to retrieve her and bring her to a shelter. The woman asked me if I could locate the young girl: we searched and we couldn't find her anywhere. She had disappeared to sleep under a church stairwell, a bridge, an abandoned building - anywhere to get away from the pouring rain and cold. The woman from the shelter and I took a moment to mourn the missed opportunity and this young girl's certain fate. She was subject to anything out there. But for a few hours, she had been warm, fed and heard without judgment. Perhaps that's all she wanted. I'll never know.
Later that evening, I parked my car to meet my husband and a friend for dinner. Not five seconds passed when a man approached me and asked me for money so that he could "go and get something to eat." I dug in my wallet and gave him whatever was left of the cash contents and said a few words about staying warm. He thanked me and disappeared into the night. God only knows if he spent the money on food but that wasn't my call to make. And then it struck me: why hadn't I invited him to dine with me, my husband and my friend? I still don't know the answer.
We can give someone who has nothing something to eat or even hand them food. We can put money into the 'special' collection on a Sunday morning that will go to feed our hungry or purchase the myriad prepared baskets of foodstuffs sold at the counters of super markets, pat ourselves on the back and tell ourselves that we've done our job. We've helped to feed hungry people. But sharing a meal with a person who is homeless is a much deeper, a much richer experience that offers insight into our own deep poverty and dependence on the mercy of God. We're all poor in one way or another and we all look for comfort in one way or another.
Until every belly is full and every person knows that they have a community of friends, the reign of God is a long way off. We have our mandate in today's reading from Isaiah: "Comfort, give comfort to my people, says your God." (Isaiah 40: 1, 3-5)
"We cannot love God unless we love each other and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship." from The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day
Come, Lord Jesus.