I’d first like to thank OCCCO for considering me for this award. You’re an organization that must at times find your work challenging, fighting the good fight in a part of the country that doesn’t necessarily want to see problems, particularly the problems that you’d like to underline. So thank you, very, very much for your efforts.
I am receiving the “Housing with Dignity” award here this truly lovely banquet.
But I’m forced to ask myself, what does it mean to house someone with dignity? After all, what we offered at St. Philip Benizi Parish during these past several years was simply a place to crash and to sleep, often enough, literally, “under a tree.”
Yet, I suppose Dignity when it comes to people begins with … the Biblical “Shalom” (Peace, peace be with you), or since I am a Servite Priest and we American Servites have been responsible for the Catholic Church’s mission in KwaZulu in South Africa, it begins with even the more basic Zulu greeting: “Sawbona” which literally means “I see you” and the acknowledgement / response “Yebo” which means “Yes Sir, [I exist].”
We exist of course even without such acknowledgement from others. Yet it is so much easier to exist with such acknowledgement.
Our great contribution at St. Philip Benizi Parish to bringing awareness of the homelessness crisis in our midst was simply that for two years we didn’t throw anybody out who came to our doors, and that even after enormous pressure from both without and even within the Parish, we continued to accompany those who came to us, even as they no longer slept on directly on our grounds. “If you get arrested / cited, please take a picture of your citation and text it to me,” I told the people even as we were closing our grounds to people who continued to have no real place to go. “By the Boise decision if a jurisdiction has no place to offer you, it can not punish you for sleeping on a sidewalk.”
And so it is … dignity… I see you. I / we know, continue to know, that you exist.
This act of acknowledgement of the Other’s existence as the first step of re-establishing the Dignity of someone who’s by and large lost it, was underlined to me in the aftermath of a memorial service that I was asked to preside over recently.
It was held at La Palma Park in Anaheim for a woman named Michelle White who died on August 25, 2019 at the not altogether far away Bridges at Kraemer Homeless shelter. Since Michelle had apparently put as her address that of the shelter, the OC Coroner did not list her as having died “without fixed abode” (even though she had been a resident at a shelter when she had died). Hence even the Voice of OC, under pressure from outside (previous lists of names of the homeless deceased had been challenged and we could always defend them by saying that the names came directly from the OC Coroner's office), asked that we _not_ include her among the list of the Homeless deceased because her name did not appear on the Coroner’s list of those who died "without fixed abode."
Some of the residents of the Bridges at Kraemer Shelter wanted her remembered in their own way. And so I was asked to preside over a Memorial Service for her in La Palma Park on Sept. 21st.
Why would they want her remembered? Well, the very night after she had died, another person was already sleeping in her bed where she had previously slept. The shelter’s operators (and one can understand this, there are beds for only 1/3 of Orange County's homeless population), ever strapped for space had simply filled her space, left vacant by her death, with someone else.
Yet Michelle White had been a person, beloved by a fair number of people who had known her over the months and years, both at Kraemer and on the streets, and they didn’t want her to just disappear like that.
And so, as many of the 30 or so people who had attended the service at La Palma Park spoke of Michelle, ever so briefly a portal of remembrance opened in the fabric of the space-time continuum and for a very brief moment a fascinating and lively image of her came back to life. Many of the younger women who knew her at Kraemer considered her to be a mother figure, who had shown interest and concern about them. Her partner of many years underlined that she had a temper, “We’d be walking on the street, she’d be beating on me, I’d be beating on her. People would wonder why. But to us it made sense.” And as I listened to this, I saw also a face of God far more complex, far more inclusive and even far more romantic that any of us would normally imagine. How sad it would have been if Michelle had just disappeared.
We have 7000-10000 people homeless in Orange County and 150,000 homeless in California, more than 500,000 in our Country. Do they matter? Do we?
Both the Buddhists and modern psychologists tell us that the hardest thing to defend is our own Egos. And it is a losing battle. Eventually all of us will die and disappear. A hundred years from now, the vast majority of us will be forgotten as if we never were.
Yet then while we are here, why not celebrate the Garden in which we find ourselves in? And yes, the folks that are homeless, the folks that don’t easily “fit in” are often the ones who give our life spice, variety and beauty. We beat on our weak at our own peril. As we drown them out of our existence, we drown ourselves.
Yes, Dignity begins with a hello, an acknowledgement that the Other, and hence we ourselves, Exist.
