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What I Learned at the Stoplight

by Marion Fernandez-Cueto in Homemaking on Tuesday, August 10, 2010 6:00 AM

We’ve all seen them: those lone, scruffy figures at intersections and freeway underpasses holding bent cardboard signs, asking for a handout. Their faces are as cracked and blistered as the sidewalk. Their meager possessions lie tangled in a bucket, sack or grocery cart behind them. Most of the time, their hands aren’t even outstretched; those long vigils in suffocating summer temperatures belie the fact that it’s only the rare driver who rolls down his window to engage.

Here in Houston, it’s hard to drive more than a minute or two without passing one of these hopeless, hapless individuals. I used to dread the encounters, wincing inwardly as the traffic light inevitably turned yellow and forced me to a stop right in front of one of those PLEASE HELP signs.

For one thing, I didn’t know how to help. My loose change wasn’t going to reverse the course of this stranger’s life, I’d reason; it might even enable it. At the same time, even dollar bills seemed like a paltry response to the misery before me: passing money from my comfortable, insular, air-conditioned world into those scarred, eagerly trembling hands only emphasized the abyss of privilege between us. My every attempt at generosity only left me feeling guilty, helpless and frustrated.

Not giving was even worse. On the rare occasion I was carrying cash, refusing to share some made me secretly feel like a jerk, which in turn necessitated all sorts of reasonable self-justifications (“I really can’t afford to help everyone I meet ... He would probably just spend it on drugs or alcohol ... We’re already donating to charity—that’s much more effective.”)

When I truly had nothing, however, I found myself wishing for a mere nickel to assuage my shame. Either way, I‘d avoid eye contact, eventually pretending that the pleading human being on the other side of the window simply didn’t exist. It was easier that way, and when the light turned green after an agonizing interval, I’d accelerate with relief.

One day, I understood something that changed my outlook—and my tortured commute—forever:

One of the main reasons I had become so ambivalent about giving to beggars, I realized, was a misplaced sense of responsibility. When asked for help in these haphazard, drive-by situations, I often felt overwhelmed by the seemingly insurmountable problems of the other person’s life, and the pathetic limitations of my own response. I wanted to change that life and magically “fix” the poverty confronting me. I wanted to ensure that my response was perfectly tailored to the situation too—that I wasn’t being duped or taken advantage of; that I was giving neither too little nor too much.

And because I knew I couldn’t ensure any of these things, I often decided to do nothing at all.

That was the problem, I realized, because it wasn’t this stranger’s life I was being called to change at these moments.  It was mine.

It was my heart and habits that were being tested here; my prejudices, my fears and my unwillingness to see Christ in His most distressing disguise that was being challenged. Standing before me was another child of God, and what mattered was not first of all the efficacy, appropriateness or size of my response, but the love that characterized it.  “Love,” as St. John of the Cross writes, “is the measure by which we will be judged.”

This simple epiphany freed me. I stopped fearing these daily roadway encounters, and began to offer what I could—a bit of money, some snacks, fast food coupons, or directions to a nearby shelter or food pantry. Sometimes all I had was a prayer, and an apologetic gesture. But as I opened my hands, I was astonished to find my heart opening as well. Each lone, scruffy figure became, not a problem to be fixed, but a person to encounter and acknowledge in all of his broken humanity. 

Love indeed is the measure. As followers of Christ, we can disagree, I think, about the best way to help the poor around us, but we cannot use fear, indifference, greed or cynicism to circumvent the Gospel’s clear and simple commandment: “Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away.” (Matthew 5:42) 

Christ knows our responses will often be woefully inadequate—He said Himself that the poor would always be with us.  But He also said we will only receive in the measure with which we give; that we love Him only to the extent to which we love our neighbor.

“We must be saved together,” wrote the French Catholic essayist Charles Péguy. “Together we must arrive before the Good Lord.  What would He say to us if we arrived alone, if we came home to Him without the others?”

I thought of that quote some weeks ago, when, still unemployed, we pulled to a stop next to a begging Vietnam vet on our way to Sunday Mass. Handing some change out the window, I was stunned when he gently pushed it back into my hands.  “No way,” he said, gesturing toward the car seats behind me. “You’ve got little ones back there. You take care of them, now.”

And while the traffic light lingered on red, this weary old man and my delighted toddlers laughed and waved and blew kisses to each other. Their mutual glee, the light in their eyes, glows within me still.

—Marion Fernandez-Cueto writes from Houston, TX.  She was baptized into the Catholic Church in 2000.

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