This note is NOT about who is NOT Family to me. It is about the
unexpected, amazing, Gospel foretold insights I'm getting as to who
IS Family toward me.
A higher percentage of these otherwise homeless and penniless guys
that staff the Infirmary, and other parts of the shelter, in return
for a room, and maybe food, genuinely care about me and my
outcomes more than any other group, segment, classification... I can think
of in my life.
These are really rough dudes, with lifelong really TOUGH environments,
whose toughness, unfairness, cruelty of backgrounds I can't begin
to imagine.
"Blest are the poor." In many cases it took a good 2-3 months for them
to warm up to me - an obviously grotesquely overprivileged (ok, not in the
$$$ dept - that's gone) in education, childhood home life, elite adult
life....
Of course I made no attempts toward this warming of relationship - I just
attempted to be the Loving Brother, harsh, austere, hermitish... Brother
I attempt to be with every breath, to every one, as the need presents
itself. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.
But unlike school classmates, hospital staffs, prior suburban community
acquantances... it is among the poor that I find the closest to a Family
relationship, in how they react to me - the staff here, the 1 or two other
inmates here, and my sisters and brothers on the street... as a class.
Why? Why does someone raised in a drug den behave differently than
one not? What these brothers may see as deprivation in their lives, is exactly analogous
to the 'deprivation' of the child NOT born, raised, living in the drug den.
They are deprived of affloholism, leaving much more of their humanity
in tact, than we over-privileged as a group.
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