When you first encounter a place like Camden, NJ, a small city with large issues of poverty, homelessness, addiction—-seeing these issues all out in the open, it is natural to look for solutions. That was my impulse arriving in Camden in 2008. So often people would ask for money, a few dollars that would help with this or that situation. Sure, I can part with some change, a couple of dollars, or 25 bucks to help solve someone’s difficulty. You don’t have to live in a broken-down, post-industrial city to run into people hustling for money. At intersections all over America you can drive by people with their hands out, their story summarized on a scrap of brown cardboard.
You learn pretty quickly here that no amount of money begged or borrowed accomplishes what you hope it would. A friend states the reality very plainly: “Every penny of money you give someone out here will be used for drugs,” he says. This friend speaks of what he knows; May 31, 2021, marked nine years clean and sober for him—- after 22 years of active addiction, most of those ripping and running on the streets of Camden.
Following his advice, I began answering requests with the simple statement, “I don’t carry cash.” Sometimes the person will try for the cash from a different angle, or will beg or manipulate, or will drop me and look for another “helper.” But sometimes there is a real shift; we can encounter each other as human beings—-instead of a human and a human ATM. Often we can talk about what is really going on, or point to services in the community that can assist with food, housing, recovery.
I share all of this because we celebrate St. Vincent de Paul this week. The church remembers him as someone who points followers of Christ to the care of sisters and brothers brought low by poverty, hunger, addiction, injustice. St. Vincent was friends with St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane; he was her spiritual director for twenty years. You can see the influence these Salesian friends had on him. He wrote, “We must love God…. But let it be in the work of our bodies, in the sweat of our brows. For very often many acts of love for God, of kindness, of good will, and other similar inclinations and interior practices of a tender heart, although good and very desirable, are yet very suspect when they do not lead to the practice of effective love.” Very Salesian: inspired by the love of God, grounded in meditation on Jesus, and very practical as well.
I do not mean to suggest that I have found a simple solution. I also do not mean to suggest that all “poor people” are the same; there are as many reasons for being on the street as there are people in need. But together with the saints, impelled by love of Christ, we do make an impact, encountering our neighbors, putting love in action. Kindness, gentleness, honest human encounters have real power.
Fr. Mike McCue, OSFS
DeSales Service Works
Camden, NJ
