Going Homeless for the Holidays

Something about Christmas stirs in us a hunger for meaning, a need for renewal. So we make our way to places like skid row, aligning ourselves with the poor.

All around skid row, things are getting tough. The police are becoming much harsher, some enforcing loitering laws with creative abandon. When he refused to “move on” as ordered by police, Clyde, with no home to “move on” to, got a $49 ticket for blocking the sidewalk. He was standing at the curb, next to a telephone pole, on a six-foot-wide sidewalk.

Down on Gladys Street, about 25 homeless people hunkered down in makeshift tents, seeking refuge from the frigid early December cold and rain. Then an edict came forth from City Hall to disperse the homeless. Complaints had been received from the fish company in front of which they slept.

Longtime unemployed disappear from official unemployment figures and reappear on skid row.

New general relief regulations are designed not to meet the needs of these poor but to terrorize them. Those unable to find work after five months of aid are to be left to starve on city sidewalks, where it is an offense to be caught without money to rent a room.

From City Hall to front desks at charities, there is inquiry into the cause of each person’s poverty before there is effort to relieve it. Distinctions are made between the worthy poor and the unworthy, and as to what is good and what is bad. Who, though, will speak to what is bearable and what is unbearable?

Before the birth of Christ, people celebrated the winter solstice by kindling fires in worship of the sun. This ancient fire festival survives today in the yule log.

In some countries, the yule log is the whole trunk of a tree, selected the Christmas before and stored for the next. The log is decorated with paper flowers and bright colored ribbons.

Throughout the world, yule logs will blaze in fireplaces this Christmas Eve. On skid row, wooden pallets will improvise as yule logs for curbside fires to warm the freezing silent night.

And perhaps, as in the ancient past, a prayer will be said, asking that the fire warm the cold, that the hungry have food and the weary rest and that all enjoy heaven’s peace. Then we will bless the log and pray that it will burn forever.