THE AROMA OF COMPASSION The following is from a book I am reading called Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. Highly, highly recommended. Here is a taste: Jesus was not a man for others. He was one with others. There is a world of difference in that. Jesus didn’t seek the rights of lepers. He touched the leper even before he got around to curing him. He didn’t champion the cause of the outcast. He was the outcast. He didn’t fight for improved conditions for the prisoner. He simply said, “I was in prison.” ...The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place — with the outcast and those relegated to the margins. (72) • — • — • Once the homeless began to sleep in the church at night, there was always the faintest evidence that they had. Come Sunday morning, we’d foo foo the place as best we could. We would sprinkle I Love My Carpet on the rugs and vacuum like crazy. We’d strategically place potpourri and Air Wick around the church to combat this lingering, pervasive reminder that nearly fifty (and later up to one hundred) men had spent the night there. About the only time we used incense at Dolores Mission was on Sunday morning, before the 7:30am Mass crowd would arrive. Still, try as we might, the smell remained. The grumbling set in, and people spoke of “churching” elsewhere. It was at about this time that a man drove by the church and stopped to talk to me. He was Latino, in a nice car, and had arrived at some comfortable life and living. He knew I was the pastor. He waxed nostalgic about having grown up in the projects and pointed to the church and said he had been baptized and made his first communion there. Then he takes in the scene all around him. Gang members gathered by the bell tower, homeless men and women being fed in great numbers in the parking lot. Folks arriving for the AA and NA meetings and the ESL classes. It’s a Who’s Who of Everybody Who Was Nobody. Gang member, drug addict, homeless, undocumented. This man sees all this and shakes his head, determined and disgusted, as if to say “tsk tsk.” “You know,” he says, “This *used* to be a church.” I mount my high horse and say, “You know, most people around here think it’s *finally* a church.” Then I ride off into the sunset. Roll credits. The smell was never overwhelming, just undeniably there. The Jesuits figured that if “we can’t fix it, then we’ll feature it.” So we determined to address the discontent in our homilies one Sunday. Homies were often dialogic in those days, so one day I began with, “What’s the church smell like?” People are mortified, eye contact ceases, women are searching inside their purses for they know not what. “Come on, now,” I throw back at them, “what’s the church smell like?” “Huele a patas” (Smells like feet), Don Rafael booms out. He was old and never cared what people thought. “Excellent. But why does it smell like feet?” “Cuz many homeless men slept here last night?” says a woman. “Well, why do we let that happen here?” “Es nuestro compromiso” (It’s what we’ve committed to do), says another. “Well, why would anyone commit to do that?” “Porque es lo que haria Jesús.” (It what’s Jesus would do.) [sic] “Well, then…what’s the church smell like now?” A man stands and bellows, “Huele a nuestro compromiso” (it smells like commitment). The place cheers. Guadalupe waves her arms wildly, “Huele a rosas” (smells like roses). The packed church roars with laughter and a newfound kinship that embraced someone else’s odor as their own. The stink in the church hadn’t changed, only how the folks saw it. The people at Dolores Mission had come to embody Wendell Berry’s injunction: “You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.” (72-74)
Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 06:28:19 +0000
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