DJ lived under an overhang near Grand Central Station—a sharp, shambling man under the shadow of a cold monument to Art Deco’s excess. When he was in high school, a friend of mine got to know DJ and relished their time together. Though homeless, he asked questions; you could tell he paid attention: “how did your chemistry assignment go?” “how’s the SAT treating you?” They would talk for an hour or more while my friend and his brother waited for a train to an outer borough. Even as adolescents, they could discern some unspoken good in just sitting and shooting the breeze with a man otherwise left ignored and alone underneath his overhang.

They grew closer. DJ told them about his deceased wife and daughter, about his time in the military, about the payout he was waiting on from the life insurance company. Even if it seemed like DJ could be a bit fantastical, he was worth the time of day. No one is without his imaginings, after all. Sometimes religion came up. DJ was Catholic, attended the ordination of a local Dominican priest, who had sheltered him during a horrific blizzard—he even lit up with joy when the Holy Father himself descended on the City in 2015. My friend had gotten him a ticket.

In spite of his colostomy bag, stuffed with unsanitary, street-soaked toilet paper, he wanted to see il papa. One problem: he had nowhere to put his bags. Thus my friend and his mates found themselves searching high and low for somewhere—anywhere—to put DJ’s stuff; all so he could catch a glimpse of Francis. Just as Mary and Joseph found no inn, so DJ found no place for all his worldly possessions. He missed the pope and, not too soon thereafter, died of a heroin overdose. My friend—only 16—had no idea DJ struggled with addiction. But that didn’t matter: now a priest had to track down his body and drive the ashes up to his, as it turned out, living wife and daughter. In the end, my friend got to tell them DJ was a good soul, who loved God, went to confession, and gave his precious time to some high school kids; he loved, even if the world refused to love him back.

His story is the story of so many of our world’s homeless—at best forgotten, at worst trampled. I have not experienced homelessness myself; I have, however, spent most of my life living in and around New York City—a place of unimaginable, inhuman suffering, though it is not even close to being the worst of its kind in the United States.¹  In the City, between volunteering, taking subways, and just plain walking around, I felt myself move through an embodied cycle of self-interrogation—hope, love, grief, helplessness, anger, and despair—every day that I continued to show my face in the city that never sleeps. I found no Christian answer to homelessness, no panacea for our poisoned Mitsein. I found, rather, the ways in which our urban cramp domesticates, degrades, and—finally—alienates us, robbing us of our hope and faith by robbing us of any connection to the least of these.

I lived in Harlem, a historically Black neighborhood in Upper Manhattan. Like so many gentrifiers making excuses, I moved there because I didn’t have much money, but did happen to know four other people who would be willing to share one bathroom and one kitchen. Being a bit far from the center of things, I had to walk and take the subway to get anywhere. No matter where I went, I would see the homeless, sometimes tucked away sleeping in the cold, other times aggressively begging for money, and, still other times, quiet, meek, sitting, waiting on God or Godot. My first thought was to try and help. I would give what little I had; I volunteered at a soup kitchen. This worked for about a day. It soon became clear that for every dollar I gave there were thousands I could not; a sense of hopelessness settled in. This unsettled me and, in turn, gave way to a zealous anger. Walking past a million faceless suited specters and high-fashion children of the overpaid and under-conscious, I began to question how and why any of these people—rich, effete New Yorkers or embittered homeless—could demand any of my time. The contrast of highs and lows, of conspicuous consumption and undernourishment, invited a spirit of something more than anger—of wroth and rage.

One woman paced constantly around my apartment building. She was thin, frail, and wild-eyed—strung out, yet spry, exhausted and sallow even as she pinballed from person to person. Most often, she invited my anger, though I never said anything to her face. She wanted money very badly and nearly every day. I could not walk on my block without her shouting me down and begging. Some days she’d storm off in a huff, indignant that I didn’t have any money; others, she would follow me down the block and even into stores, asking me to get cash back if I bought a sandwich with my card. Her nerve, her insistence, her—above all—resentment of my inability, and eventual—I admit it—unwillingness—to give her help infuriated me. Before long, I found myself distressed, choleric at even the suggestion that someone might break into my hermetically sealed bubble of a day and demand so much as a word from me.

I developed a quiet respect for the homeless man I saw at the same subway station every day. He sat, cross-legged, with a little cup in front of him, on good days wishing passers-by well; on others, sunken into himself, he would remain still, only glancing up now and then to show commuters his glassy eyes. “Here,” I thought, “is a person, who, unlike anyone else, respects my privacy in this modern Gomorrah.”

But, of course, I knew this was wrong; I knew that my anger at the woman outside my apartment was really an anger at what the City was doing to me and everyone else. The tall buildings, cramped subway cars, and untold wealth severed each of us from the other, making any contact feel like the violation of some hated, though now coveted, natural right. I remembered Christ’s words in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats; I knew that I was not just denying the hungry, the thirsty, and the naked. I was despising them for being there at all.

So, I came to an uneasy shame, which soon gave way to hopelessness. My annoyance passed and I didn’t mind having to walk the streets; my body, however, remained still one among millions of others, freely floating away from my neighbors. Despair ensued, this intuition that my environs had molded me into an all-consuming hatred—Sartre’s “Hell is other people.”²  What had been rage became resignation, a hopeless foreboding that made me the likeness of the Levite on the road to Jericho.

Such urban ennui is ultimately an experience of one’s own body and the bodies of others; it becomes one’s relation to space and time. I distinctly recall once finding myself at the Dunkin Donuts across the street from my apartment. While standing in line, a middle-aged homeless man with eyes staring halfway across the City, greeted another man—an African immigrant—with a hearty blessing, the name of God constantly pouring from his lips. Eventually, he got to the point: he needed money. The immigrant professed that he helped him almost every day, but today he had nothing extra, just enough to buy his lunch. The homeless man flew into a fury: “you’re no man of God! You don’t love God and you don’t love me!” It only stopped when another patron reprimanded him. I was frozen; even now, the very thought brings tears to my eyes. What response—let alone Christian response—can someone have to this: the suffering of one street-dweller shared with, superimposed upon, the struggles of a generous immigrant barely getting by himself.

This is the truth of our cities, not least of New York: suffering is ubiquitous, infinite, unforgiving, and insolent. Paralyzed stupefaction dominates in a Satanic inversion of the Transfiguration.

Now back in the suburbs, I am reminded how easy it is to forget the extent and toll of suffering in our cities, especially among our homeless brethren. Out here, we paper over such obvious pain. We learn to ignore it, to pretend our communities are stable and inviting, built in conjunction with our next-door neighbors. But such a notion obscures who our true neighbors are. Our cities dehumanize, but they also reveal. They rend the veil of our self-delusion, force us to confront those most closely fused to the image of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. As with Moses, if the seeing does not destroy us, we can only return from the desert filled with the Spirit, prophesying against the demonic construction of a mammon-loving world gone mad.

Attribution: Tomas Castelazo [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

‍