Opinion
Just my brother
By Harry Davidson
After several days of kayaking, I was waiting at the Kodiak airport to catch the late flight back to Anchorage when I saw some of the first television images of the devastation in New Orleans. It was astonishing. Here is a whole region of our country, where hundreds of thousands of our neighbors are suddenly displaced. Hundreds of thousands of people forced from their homes, simply looking for a place to sleep and wondering if they even have a home to return to. Overnight we have been forced to redefine the meaning of homelessness in modern America. Yes, we are the most affluent society in history and that is certainly one of the problems one faces when trying to define contemporary homelessness. Surely homelessness in America today cannot be compared to homelessness in third and fourth world countries. The degree of suffering and the levels of despair cannot be the same.
Homelessness in the midst of affluence, this is what I struggle to understand. Then suddenly this! A natural disaster that sweeps away, in a matter of hours, all our security and affluence, exposing the frailty of an urban lifestyle built on material affluence that has disappeared with the wind. Homelessness now has a new face. It is the face of middle class, working Americans. It is the face of our next door neighbor.
But I am discovering that my response to the homeless, whether it is to the chronically displaced or those recently cast into homelessness by forces beyond control, must rise out of the same reservoir of compassion. And therein lays our only redemptive response. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy”. Compassion towards the suffering of others is a response of identification. My neighbors suffering has become my own. And at an even deeper level, my neighbors’ suffering has become the suffering of the Divine. In some mysterious way God suffers in the suffering of my neighbor. As I reach out to meet their need I encounter the Divine Presence in the face of my brother and sister. They have mysteriously become Christ to me, while remaining just my brother. Here is the deep heart of compassion. It is built on the foundation of love and identification: love of God and love of neighbor. These are the necessary elements of a sustained and loving response. These are the source of the energy that expresses itself in loving action.
Implicit in this response to homelessness and human suffering generally is a certain understanding of human frailty. In the midst of our pain and misery we cannot save ourselves. It is to our human brokenness that compassion comes on the wings of mercy. This is the highest response we can give to one another. It is the True, the Good and the Beautiful, expressing Itself through our own human frailty. It is a deep mystery indeed.
Harry Davidson was born in Kodiak, raised in Southwest Alaska, and is now a business owner in Anchorage. E-mail: .