Castaway

I think I've mentioned before how unhinged I get when confronted with a homeless animal: the orphan's panic, which also manifests itself as a lifelong preoccupation with tales about the sudden collapse of human civilization.  Yesterday I received a double-whammy, when a young man and his little dog took refuge at our church from a sudden rainstorm.  How happy we were to get some rare rain, and how ironic that it should be falling on a fellow trying to make a safe home for his pup while living out of a knapsack!  We made him come inside, while he tried to insist he was OK under a large tree.  Then the storm knocked out our power, so we finished the service by candlelight, blessedly free for once from the electric organ I've never cared for.

It developed that our young refugee had somehow become separated all at once from his wife, his job, and his home in San Antonio, some 200 miles away.  Normally, I confess, I am not tremendously moved by the prospect of a life so disastrously disordered; I do what I can without a lot of upset, and then typically disengage.  One of my most frequent prayers, not uttered without trepidation, is that my heart of stone should be melted.   It was answered at least in part this week, but even though I knew how much it would hurt, I didn't really know, if you understand me.  Even at the distance of more than thirty years, I retain the most excruciating memories of being at loose ends between jobs, between apartments, profoundly alienated, and casting about with some desperation for a family or society to be plugged into.  It's not so hard to replace any one of those things at a time, but finding yourself cut loose from all of them at once is a disorienting horror: a shock to the core.  And yet, knowing and remembering all that, it still took the presence of the dog to cut through my defenses.

Our church got the fellow set up for the next week in a modest motel with some cash and some food.   He's already made the rounds on foot to look into the simplest sort of job nearby.  Why am I so gripped by his crisis?  I suppose he's pushing two of my buttons very hard:   it didn't occur to him to abandon the dog and leave town, with the excuse that his life had fallen apart, and it didn't occur to him to find a way to live on public assistance.  Instead, he has humbled his pride and asked for help from individuals in his path.  To my way of thinking, therefore, it lies with me now to figure out a way to help him rebuild a shattered life.  He wants so badly to solve the most basic problem of finding a useful function that will earn him the money for food and shelter.  A home, a job, and his dog for family.  These are the things that make it possible to carry on when everything else is stripped away.