Blessed are the poor for theirs is the kingdom of heaven?
He is a bloke I knew from a soup kitchen once.
He changed his name by deed poll to show his concern for the environment. For the sake of anonymity I will call him N.
When he found out I had been overseas to visit family he gently chided me for the effect on the environment of the plane travel.
One night, to save electricity, he turned everything off at the power point when we left, including the fridge which held four shelves of frozen soup.
Another time, on finding out I was intending to throw out the leftover food, he insisted on taking the half filled pot of pumpkin soup to ‘recycle’ it.
Curious, I followed him out and found he had scattered it across a small garden bed at the back of the church.
‘N’, I said, shocked, ’it will still be there when people come for church’.
He insisted I was wrong, loftily waving his hand and assuring me that ‘the insects and the birds of the air would eat it’. They did not. Dried orange patches remained for weeks. No one else seemed to notice.
He is the most gentle man I have ever met.
A tall man with an air of brooding violence and frequent outbursts of abusive language was loudly proclaiming that Gina Reinhardt was a [censored] one time.
N piped up in her defence, saying that everyone had good qualities.
Who could help liking him?
He comes in smiling. He speaks with great enthusiasm about his latest campaign for the betterment of humanity – most recently a twitter account to bolster his efforts to encourage people to vote informal as a protest against the mean and unpleasant nature of current politics. He loves animals.
One evening he was delighted that the soup was green – ‘God’s favourite colour because it is the colour of the environment’. Another he was reading a book about 13th century monastic history.
He asks after my family members who he hasn’t seen for years. He remembers what I was doing over a decade ago. He is joyful when things are going well for me and sympathetic when they are not.
I asked him if he was religious. Yes he said. He had been to a Hillsong service recently. I asked what he thought about it. He said that there seemed to be a lot of emphasis on money. He added as an afterthought that Jesus was poor.
Jesus said blessed are the poor, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the people that hunger and thirst after righteousness, and the peacemakers.
N scores on every axis.
He also demonstrates every single one of the fruits of the spirit; love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Jesus mentioned two other groups who are blessed.
The mournful. The persecuted.
He is these too.
He is therefore, by my calculation, eightfold blessed and filled to the brim with the spirit.
Late one night we stood in the street in the cold talking.
He told me that his siblings were very successful and he had found it difficult in comparison, that it was hard not having a career or a job.
I asked him why he wasn’t bitter?
He said that the situation for homeless people was pretty good, lots of shelters and places to get food.
This is absolutely the first (and last) time in many years of talking to homeless men that I heard anyone say anything like this.
I asked him did he get patronized and looked down on?
He said he did, but you got used to that.
His dream is to live in community, in the country, in a place that grows organic food.
He found such a place a few months back and went off to live there. However it didn’t work out.
I asked why?
He discovered after a while that there was a sexist attitude to women as part of the community.
So now he is back in the city. Refusing to live a life inconsistent with what he thinks is right. Campaigning to improve the tone of politics.
And so I drove back to my heated flat and he walked off into the dark.
