From time to time, folk who were dirt poor appeared at our gate. Because of our humble means, they must have found an affinity with us and were naturally drawn to ask alms of us. But I think Mother’s generosity had much to do with it. During fiestas, whenever her purse allowed, she would feed whoever came to the house, most of them indigent souls from the backwoods, mountain people who, because unused to level places, walked the streets with a bounce.
The ones I remember were the freakish and queer (in the sense that, in a more straightforward time, this term was accepted). The very first, impinging on my three-year-old mind, was Opoy. He walked with a stick and went around begging, but scared the children by glaring at them with flashing eyes. During siesta time, when I betrayed hints of surreptitiously taking off, and the signals never escaped her notice, all that Mother did was mention his name, and I would retract into my shell.
Cousin Ityong came to our place so often that he was served food even before he asked for it. His family worked as sawyers, but Ityong being feeble-minded never learned how to saw timber. Since his parents were itinerant, Ityong often found himself alone and esurient, and walking in half steps for upwards of a kilometer to our house. We did not only feed him, Father paired him off with a harelip who bore him a son in no time. After she had reconstructive surgery and saw herself in the mirror, the girl left Ityong.
And then there were Dureka and her sister, who used their brother Juan’s daily tuba gathering (and morning remittance of our share of the palm wine) as excuse to make Mother’s pergola their hangout and staging point for their day-to-day hunt for charity.
People like them enter our lives, but we keep them on the periphery of our solicitude. We give them food or money or clothes because we want to restrict their botheration to the minimum, and not at all in the spirit of the Rule of St. Benedict, which admonishes that one should “receive every guest as Christ.”
I am awakened to this fact when I read the parable that Jesus told about Dives and Lazarus, which Luke writes about. Lazarus, a poor man, would lie at the gate of the house of Dives, dressed in purple and fine line, who had daily banquets in his house. Covered with sores which the dogs licked, Lazarus hoped for no more than to be given the leftovers. In time both died. Angels carried Lazarus to Abraham’s embrace, while Dives agonized in the fires of Hades.
Seeing Lazarus so full of bliss, Dives asked Abraham to send Lazarus to dip his finger in water and cool his tongue, but Abraham said, “My son, remember that during your life you had your fill of good things, just as Lazarus his fill of bad. Now he is being comforted here while you are in agony. But that is not all: between us and you a great gulf has been fixed, to prevent those who want to cross from our side to yours or from your side to ours.” Dives begged Abraham to at least send Lazarus to his father’s house to warn his five brothers so that they would not suffer his fate. Abraham said that they had Moses and the prophets, and if they would not listen to the latter they would not be convinced even if Lazarus, or someone else, should rise from the dead.
And speaking of sores, a beggar who practically resided on the grounds of a church kept a leg wound festering to gain the people’s sympathy and ensure a steady flow of coins into his can. He resisted the attempts of concerned churchgoers to have his lesion treated. In this, he did not differ from a beggar who had cerebral palsy and was given a wheelchair by a civic organization, who decided to go back to crawling like a worm on the ground, because those who saw him snugly seated in a shiny, aluminum wheelchair were not inclined to give him alms.
I realize that it would be easier to treat these beggars as Christ if they were not so artful and shrewd. But perhaps this is the Lord’s way of upping the ante to test our love.