Homeless during holidays - 'Crying out to heaven' at Christmas time

Recently, in my old hometown in Eastern Montana, a man died of exposure. According to news reports, he was a Wal-Mart employee in Miles City, homeless and living in his car when the weather plunged to 27 degrees below zero. He was an employee of the month in a previous job, according to the local newspaper.

We tend to shrug off the homeless when we see them pushing their shopping carts or holding up signs asking for money. They’re mentally ill, we assume, or drug addicts. But I know from experience that a lot of the homeless are like that man who died in Miles City: struggling to make it, but not quite able to.

For the six-and-a-half years I was homeless once, I never had a shopping cart, nor did I have mental illness or drug problems. I was just a regular guy out of work in a poor economy from 2002-2008. I did writing work while living out of my pickup truck at campgrounds in California in the winters and Montana in the summers, but I never made enough to rent an apartment until I hit Social Security retirement age and qualified for low-income senior housing.

For many homeless, when you don’t have much to start with, it’s easy to fall off the edge. Once on a bench outside a coffee shop, I ran into a homeless guy I had seen before at a hostel on the California coast when he had a suitcase and was clean shaven and flirting with women. This time he was dirty, after sleeping in a field, and had several days worth of beard. He was panhandling for money, having sold his sleeping bag to buy food. He hit people up for money and asked if they knew of any day construction jobs. I bought him a cup of coffee and told him I had a truck I slept in and was doing freelance writing work when I could get it and that my situation was temporary. He laughed and said, “You’re in construction now.”

I generally spent the winters in the desert near Palm Springs. At my then church there, I used to come across a very skinny homeless man who attended services and then asked for money afterward, claiming he needed it to treat an eye problem. A priest once told parishioners not to give him money because he used it to buy drugs. I used to also see him outside the post office begging for money. He was a likable guy and I used to tell him to go to rehab for his drug problem. “I know I should,” he said. One day, I read in the paper that he had been found dead, sleeping in the entryway of a drugstore on a cold night.

I met a thin, homeless guy in Palm Desert when he stopped by a small chapel’s lunch to complain. He spent his days collecting aluminum cans on a bicycle, his giant plastic bags filled with cans hanging over the handlebars. Recently, he said, he had stashed some bags behind a dumpster at the chapel’s main church down the road to pick up later. But when he returned, his cans had been thrown out by the church. He said he was told never to come onto the property again. I invited him to sit next to me at the lunch and have a free meal. The two priests in attendance just ignored him. He said he never asked people for money or had welfare, but proudly said he collected cans so he could support himself and always bought a fast-food meal every day.

I never panhandled for money. But once when I was homeless, a wealthy woman gave me some money to check into a Motel 6 for a couple days. Another woman once forced a 20-dollar bill into my hand, even though I told her I didn’t want it. She was a saint to me. I never saw her again; never forgot her kindness.

Another time, I was behind a car in Palm Springs that grazed a homeless man at night. I stopped to offer help, but the guy ran into some brush in the desert. I called 911 and he refused to talk with the firemen or to be treated. He came out later and I talked with him to make sure he was OK. He patted me on the arm for a thank you. Later, I found my shirt had blood over it and I had to throw it away, but didn’t mind.

Every homeless person has a story. When I was a young newspaper reporter in Montana in the 1960s, a guy living in a shanty used to come into the Missoulian office every night in Missoula and pound away at the typewriter, always a nonsensical letter he would give to an editor. Recently, I wondered about him, long dead, and discovered from a former colleague that the man had been babysitting his young brother decades earlier when the house burned down and he never was himself again due to feelings of guilt.

Another time, while at the same newspaper, I met a man in a mental institution who drew paintings partly in his own blood and sold them for cigarettes. A few months later, I saw him walking down some railway tracks in Missoula naked, having been let out as cured. I phoned the police, who picked him up. Human beings are impaired, just some more than others.

I’ve been in an apartment for five years now this month. It took three-and-a-half years of being on a waiting list to get my place. Currently, hundreds of people are on the waiting lists for subsidized housing at each of the apartment complexes in my area. Even in Montana waits can be years.

When I lived at campgrounds while homeless, I saw families with children who were doing the same thing. A school bus picked up one child at the campground entrance. I met a guy living in a boat parked in the desert and a woman recuperating in a tent after cancer surgery. I myself recuperated in my truck from knee surgery after a car accident. In Montana, I met homeless people at various campgrounds around the state.

In recent weeks, the new pope, Francis, has been speaking out about poverty. He says he wants a church for the poor. That will take some doing. I am Catholic, and I went to Catholic Charities in California when I was homeless and couldn’t get any help getting a roof over my head. Later, a Jewish organization helped me.

I worry that it’s becoming easier and easier to ignore homelessness. My town of Rancho Mirage, a high-income desert resort city, has some low-income housing (not enough) because state law mandates it. But while the city is happy to offer sweet financial deals to developers of high-end businesses, as it did in two controversial cases recently, it draws the line at having shelters or programs in town for the homeless. Would it be so hard to offer a spot for homeless people to go to during the day for a shower and lunch? The homeless shelters in this long Palm Springs Valley are relegated to the extreme east and west ends, to North Palm Springs and to Indio, many miles apart. There are no homeless services in between in the rich tourist corridor where people don’t want to look at the homeless. I’ve seen homeless people washing their hair in the bathroom sink in a McDonald’s.

In Montana, many towns don’t have emergency housing for the homeless during the cold winters. In Miles City, after the working homeless man, Wesley Mark Selby, 58, died in his car in the cold a city councilwoman began organizing an effort to have an emergency homeless shelter there in the winter months, according to the Miles City Star. Bless her.

Thinking about the homeless this time of year brought to my mind the story Jesus, whose birth we celebrate, told about Lazarus, a homeless man who died at the door of a rich man and went to heaven to the “bosom of Abraham.” The rich man had denied Lazarus even the scraps from his table. When the rich man later died, he was sent to the “netherworld” where he was in torment. He cried out to heaven asking that Lazarus dip his finger in water and put it on his hot tongue to cool it, but he was told by Abraham that would be impossible.

Whether we see that story as metaphor or literal truth, it’s worth thinking about this Christmas season and to recall that Jesus said that what we do for the least in society (the hungry, the poor, the ill, the naked, the stranger), “you did for me.”