Saturday, February 1, 2014

Dignity

There is something about living in a city that changes the way you look at people.
Something about being able to hear the homeless people on the streets at night.
Something about listening to their conversations as you fall asleep. 
Something about waking up to their cries at 2 a.m.. 
Something about knowing that a drunken fool is messing with them again. 
There is something about watching a teenager run past in front of your apartment with an armed guard running after him. 
Something about watching that teenager turn the corner out of sight and the guard stop perfectly in your view on that same corner. 
Something about watching the guard pull the trigger, and not ever knowing what happened to that teenage boy. 
There is something about watching a mentally challenged homeless person be restrained and bullied.
Something about watching those bullies throw water on his head as he stands there helpless.
Something about knowing that there is nothing you can do about it because you are a minority female in the most dangerous country in the world. 

There is something about knowing others that will change the way you look at people.
Something about the way the guard at the fast food joint under your apartment makes sure you are safe every night. 
Something about the way your neighbor down the street offers you the last of the food in their house. 
Something about when students from a pueblo of about 20 kids come and ask your advice about how to talk to the girl next door. 
Something about the homeless man who will sit and talk with you for hours about anything and everything.


There is something about working with children that changes the way you look at people.
Something about their innocence and purity of heart.
Something about the way they search your eyes for love. 
Something about their desire for adventure, to seek, to learn, to love.
There is something about a child that's been neglected.
Something about the way you can see the hurt in their eyes. 
Something about seeing them misbehave and knowing that it is because of the hurt they have previously experienced.
Something about watching them mistrust the love that they are given.
Something about seeing these same qualities in many adults.

There is something about receiving a message from a teenage girl hundreds of miles away that says "I love you so much, and I just wanted you to know"
Something about remembering that only a year before she had said that she would never love anyone again.
Something about knowing that the message was only sent because she knew it would be well received. 
Something about realizing that she has finally learned to trust and to love again.

There is something about real and true interactions with others that will change the way you look at people. That will make you see that every human is worthy of dignity. Poor or rich, free or enslaved, man or woman. We are all One in Him. 

"Social justice can be obtained only in respecting the transcendent dignity of man. The person represents the ultimate end of society, which is ordered to him:What is at stake is the dignity of the human person, whose defense and promotion have been entrusted to us by the Creator, and to whom the men and women at every moment of history are strictly and responsibly in debt" 1929 Catechism of the Catholic Church