- There's nothing sadder during the whole year than to
spend Christmas at a shelter. Not that it's any better the rest of the
year, but there's something about the hustle and bustle, holiday crowds,
festive lights and Christmas caroling that makes the humiliation, the hopelessness,
the alienation all the more painful at this time.
-
- A shelter is a place where nobody owns anything and no
spot is special. It is dreary and joyless. The noise is deafening and the
stench unbearable at time from unwashed humanity. If despair and hopelessness
had an odor, it could be found in a shelter.
-
- Christmas means Santas, garland, ornately decorated trees,
velvet-bowed gifts, Christmas windows, Christmas shows, exotic trips, and
lots of Christmas cheer. Christmas was once a time of neighbors talking
and laughing on downtown city streets. In the luminous glow of Christmas
lights, children played catching snowflakes on their tongues. There was
a hushed silence as neighbors gathered around the Nativity in the park,
as church choirs sang, "Silent Night".
-
- Today, Christmas is celebrated in the concrete fortress
of the nations malls. No snowflakes here in a controlled environment of
blinking gadgets, artificial geysers, aluminum trees, plastic lights, speciality
shops and a garish Santa fixed high on a cardboard sleigh, filled to the
brim with empty packages.
-
- There's a determined intensity, a quiet desperation,
as programmed consumers (no longer neighbors) are caught in a neon web
of ersatz dreams, with fixed stares, painted smiles and winter tans. Who's
real and who's not? We're the mannequins or maybe the mannequins have become
us, it's all so confusing.
-
- Sensory input is on overload. Automated toy dolls echo
forth in hollow sounding monotones, "I love you. I love you. I love
you." Plastic cards delay payment until another time. I am lost in
a mad technological fun house, forgetting my exit color.
-
- The sacredness and mystery of it all has been replaced
by artificial symbols and traditions. Religious symbols are banished to
the private world of the personal, the home, the place of religious gathering,
impoverishing us all. In their place, non-threatening and acceptable we
have Frosty the Snowman, Bullwinkle, Spider Man, Rudolph, Santas of every
size, grotesques elves, plastic wreaths, plastic icicles, spray snow, theme
trees and plastic mistletoe. In removing the symbols we've also removed
the meaning. Giving has now become grasping materialistic greed. Expensive
lists, are presented with yammering demands from teenagers, college students
for ski trips, or summer beaches, for drinking and frolicking. Gone are
the symbols and traditions that remind us of simplicity, giving and sacrificial
love. In its place a bizarre glittering travesty!
-
- Perhaps it's the deprivation, the poverty, the degradation
or just plain awfulness of a small family huddled in the darkness of a
stable, surrounded by smelly animals, and impoverished shepherds that is
abhorrent to some in today's materialistic world? There was no room in
the inn, but there was room in the stable. The inn is the gathering place
of public opinion, the focal point of the world's moods, the rendezvous
of the worldly/moneyed, the rallying place of the popular. The stable is
a place of outcasts, the ignored, the forgotten, the almost impossible
things. Divinity is always where we least expect to find it.
-
- If Christ should deign to visit us this year, would we
find Him at the mall, on the Riviera, in mountain ski lodges, or bedded
down at one of our finer hotels? I would venture to guess No. Perhaps He
would choose an abandoned car housing a forgotten veteran, a decaying tenement
or a decaying, drab shelter amongst the sick the poor and the lowly.
-
- I remember a past Christmas at the shelter. The faces,
white, black, some gray from weariness or illness, were etched in stoic
longing and loneliness. The remnants of the donated food from area office
parties, lay untouched on a nearby broken plastic tray. The muted sounds
of "Joy to the World" echoed forth at that midnight hour from
a blurred black and white TV. Some covered their ears, some silently wept,
others hummed along, eyes closed, perhaps remembering a time long ago when
they belonged and were loved on Christmas Eve.
-
- Teresa, her bruised face swelling from an earlier beating
on the street, lay in a crumpled heap on the bench, feverish and coughing.
As I put a blanket on her thin shaking body, I wondered that she hadn't
been killed as yet. {Note: Teresa murdered five months later}. Henry, an
elderly Black gentleman, brandishing his cane through the crowded community
room looked like an escaped scarecrow on the lam. In a whirlwind of decaying
leaves falling from his outlandish attire he demanded better service or
the Mayor would hear about it. Martha, eyes rolling back in her head, clutched
her Christmas package of socks and gloves in her crippled hands, all the
while singing her own song that had no beginning or end, stopping only
long enough to laugh at some inane secret thought. Margaret (middle aged)
her dirty blond hair pulled back in a severe bun thumped her Bible, damning
everyone to hell for their sinful, slothful ways. You had to admire Margaret
for her imaginative creativity. Having no dentures, she'd worked diligently
one night cutting strips from a two-liter Pepsi bottle. With a razor blade
she cut the appropriate notches so that it had the appearance of teeth,
painted them with white-out, then affixed the flexible strips to her upper
and lower gums with denture adhesive. As long as she didn't eat she was
fine.
-
- Richard pacing back and forth, becoming more and more
agitated with each dire warning from Margaret, finally turned and in his
affected French accent, pronounced that the finer hotels he was accustomed
to staying at would never allow such rabble in their establishments. Margaret
meantime was to to Revelations and the four horsemen paying no heed to
Richard's outrage. Daniel, a small fastidious man like a nervous ferret,
hovered in the shadows of the outer hallway checking that the blankets
stuffed around the door were still in place. Daniel felt as long as he
kept his distance he couldn't be identified as being a part of broken humanity.
Frank, with his thick coke glasses, once a prosperous businessman, suffering
a mental breakdown, checked his pile of New York Times, for messages from
the CIA. Andrew, the final authority when any dispute arose, straightened
his red bow tie and said, "Enough is enough, you're all a bunch of
loony tunes."
-
- Suddenly I became aware of something very unusual in
a shelter amidst all the busyness, activity, pain and despair. Suddenly
there was a silence and the sense of a Presence. For the very briefest
moment in time there was an awesome feeling of holiness, and at the same
time of love, joy and Peace that surpassed all understanding. In that moment
there was a knowing that we were equally loved and not forgotten. All was
still and silent, the midnight service on our blurred TV had come to an
end with a last verse of song....
-
- "Then pealed the bells more loud and deep; God is
not dead; nor doth He sleep! The wrong shall fail. The right prevail. With
Peace on Earth, good will to men!"
-
- Jude Moriarty
- Claremont, NH
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