“Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgement at how they carry it”
Father Gregory Boyle

I sat last night with a wonderfully gentle, humble man just a couple of years my senior. He did me the honour of trusting me with his story. He had fled from a war torn country to avoid, I believe, conscription in to a fight that wasn’t his. He left behind his teaching career, his home, his life and most heart breaking, his pregnant wife and 3 kids. Belfast has been home for two long years and just this week, smile unquenchable, he tells me that his family have joined him. He got to meet his youngest daughter for the first time. We chatted and laughed and I couldn’t help beaming for his joy, while internally weeping for his pain and all the time recognising that I was in the presence of someone much more resilient than me.

It’s a feeling I have often as I encounter those society has pushed to the margins, those who the world might deem “poor”. My gosh, they know some things that I don’t. I doubt my heart could bare two months away from my family never mind two years. I fully believe I wouldn’t survive a week on the streets of an unknown city never mind a decade. I have no idea what it feels like to have home be a place of violence and fear. I can’t count the number of times that the burning question on my lips has been “how are you still standing?”

It makes me so frustrated when I hear people talk about those they’ve never met with judgement and derision. It cuts me deeper still when I notice that judgement in me. I am trying to train my heart to be in awe; to notice, not just the choices made but the weight behind them. Of course it is true that we all have choices. We all choose how we live each day and therefore reap the consequences, good or bad – but the simple truth is, not all choices are equal. My choices have never once been about survival, my choices have never had to be made with the weight of trauma on my shoulders. Not all choices are equal. Most of us, if we really look behind the surface are a product of choices we did not make, could not make, but that were made for us and I find myself lucky enough to have had those choices be for the positive. The poor are not always that fortunate and yet, faced on a weekly if not daily basis, with choices of survival, they survive. They move forward, they know resilience at a hero like level and I can only stand, as a student, in awe.

As the great prophet Bruce Springsteen says there are “things that can only be found, in the darkness on the edge of town.” There are lessons to learn, parts of life with Jesus to be discovered that I can’t learn without the poor to guide me. I often wonder when Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you” was it less a statement and more an invitation, for surely He knew that the kingdom comes as we stand with those on the margins. It’s in those mutual connections where we are transformed, where we learn from each other, reach what the other carries and where a different kind of community begins to form.

Not all choices are equal but what if we chose to stop seeking to help or fix or even serve but chose instead to stand with those on the margins. What if we sought to give of ourselves and to receive in return what the other carries?