{"id":391,"date":"2005-11-30T11:26:48","date_gmt":"2005-11-30T11:26:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hostkabob.com\/vote\/?p=391"},"modified":"2005-11-30T11:26:48","modified_gmt":"2005-11-30T11:26:48","slug":"112405","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/?p=391","title":{"rendered":"11\/24\/05"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanksgiving. This morning while volunteering at the “Storefront,” a Catholic Worker outreach here in Cleveland, we met a man who had slept outside last night — the temperature: 20 degrees. We invited him to our apartment so he didn’t have to sleep outside again tonight. In his mid-30s, he said he’d been hit on the head during a robbery a couple years ago and is subject to fairly regular seizures (but he has not been able to get social security for his disability, yet). While he said his condition makes it hard to hold down a regular job, he works sporadically with a handyman. (He went to a vocational school in Cleveland.) This man’s mode is primarily just trying to survive down here right now, day to day… Last week, deacon Bill Merriman at St. Patrick’s Church in our neighborhood gave a talk on the gospel reading about the end time judgement (Mathew 25). In this scene, Jesus is saying to one group of people that when He was hungry, they didn’t help; when He was naked, they didn’t help; when He was a stranger, they didn’t take Him in… and as a result, ‘they’ are condemmed to Hell. Conversely, as modern day examples of people helping, Deacon Merriman talked about a couple sitting with a dying man at Malachi House here, a home for the indigent who are at death’s door. He talked about another man bringing sandwhiches and blankets to people sleeping on the streets… each an example from the city… A question: <\/strong>If you’re living in the suburbs, how often do you even see people who are: ‘hungry, naked, or strangers? Note: <\/strong>On a campaign tour of northern Minnesota, we met a man and his wife who lived in a suburb of Minneapolis. The man said in prayer he felt convicted about living in a nice home in the suburbs, while the disadvanted in the inner city of Minneapolis (just as we graphically saw in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina) were living is such desperate travail, day in and day out. What’s more, he felt in living in comfort in suburbia and ‘sitting on $15,000 of equity, which he had in his house, he was, in effect, ‘building another barn’ for his excess (another New Testament Biblical reference), instead of helping others who were in need now. So he sold his house, gave the money to the poor, and moved into an old, converted convent in the inner city with a community of people doing outreach to help the poor — including letting some of the poor live in the convent… During an interview with the LA Times in Orange County, California, I said we should “make war on poverty and social injustice.” And this man and his wife would be right on the ‘front line.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanksgiving. This morning while volunteering at the “Storefront,” a Catholic Worker outreach here in Cleveland, we met a man who had slept outside last night — the temperature: 20 degrees. We invited him to our apartment so he didn’t have …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}