There's a homeless man who hangs around Tio Alberto's that looks a lot like Ben Kingsley, except for when he smiles. When he smiles, I feel uncomfortable; his face pressed against the glass of the restaurant window, rotten yellow teeth.
Mother Teresa wrote, "The dying, the cripple, the mental, the unwanted, the unloved. Each one of them is Jesus in disguise." But for me, it's a challenge to fight these prejudices. If I'm honest with myself, wouldn't I rather him just go away? Wouldn't I rather keep my spare change for myself?
It's human nature to be self-serving. But what about compassion? I definitely know some people in which this attribute seems to be so effortless, so defining, so much a part of their actions and who they are. And just because you don't want to give some poor man a couple bucks so he can buy more booze, doesn't make you devoid compassion. I'm a cynic, and I've been disappointed many times, and it's hard to balance being trusting, and not being taken advantage of, and to not be jaded by time and experience. Dave Eggers wrote in You Shall Know Our Velocity! about being reticent to give money to a seemingly sardonic teenage boy in the street, wanting much more to give to his sweet younger brother, even if it might end up in the same place. "But you're crass, you see," he said to the boy.
A woman earlier this summer almost got me fired from my job. We worked a shift together at the restaurant, and she left an hour before we closed. When I counted the money from sales that night, we were $80 short. This is way too much money to have mistakenly given away, and I'm very particular about how I handle the register. My boss concluded it was stolen and needed to be replaced. The woman I worked with had only worked at the restaurant for 1 week, she is 31 years old, single, but has 6 children, with several different partners. She lives alone and does not have custody of any of her children, and it was known before she started work that she had problems with drug addiction.
She counted her tips, her long bony fingers clutching the bills, refusing to give part of her share to the dishwasher. "I need the money," she said, "unlike you, I have bills to pay, and you're just going to spend your tips on the mall." Like I only have a job to kill time.
I remember being stressed and belligerent that night on the phone, telling Brian, "She's not nice, respectable, or respectful, and I'm not going to take the fall for someone I barely even know." I've worked at this restaurant the past 3 summers, and I've never been short over $5. He told me he knew I had integrity, and fired her instead, only with suspicion. I was grateful, but I also felt awful. I still wonder from time to time how she is doing. If she has a new job. If she's making it by.
Yet even when I doubt things like church politics, Adventist education, tithe, or state of the dead, nothing inside of me has any doubt that humanitarianism, kindness, mercy, or benevolence is anything but vital and wonderful. Maybe the idea of karma is imperfect, but it does hold some truth. While it would be easier if things could be this mechanical, not everything in life is such a gamble. Sure, we can't help someone who doesn't first want to be help themselves. But Christ surrounded himself with lepers, prostitutes, and tax collectors. Who, I am sure, many of time, acted how they were expected to, rather than how they wanted. And I've read responses from lots of people, that, even if they don't believe He was the Savior of the world, they still think He was a beautiful philosopher. And I wonder to myself, how did He do it? How can He just forgive and forget? How can He love unconditionally? How can I be more like him?
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