This is the first in a series of posts over the next 24 hours looking at poverty in Austin as part of Blog Action Day 2008.
On the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, today is the memorial for St. Callistus I. Callistus was a third century pope whose life didn't seem to be leading to the Chair of St. Peter.
Callistus was a slave and apparently, not too great of one at that. He was entrusted with money, only to lose it. He was jailed, only let out of prison so he could make the money back.
Yet, after a rocky start, he was freed, befriended the current pope and entered the priesthood. He himself became pope upon election of the clergy of Rome.
One major critique made of him was that he was too merciful to sinners.
Today, we celebrate something who is impoverished in his time who became the16th pontiff of the Church. When he was a slave, did his master see this potential in him? I don't know, but how often do we see the potential in slaves today? True, legally, no one owns another as a slave, but the poor are the slaves of today. They are slaves to a socio-economic reality that looks down upon them for their lot in life—no matter how they came to it. They are slaves to the assistance programs that are offered and their insane rules and regulations.
In Austin, it is hard to go far without having the poor with you. The homeless. The unemployed. The underemployed—the working poor who have jobs, yet do not earn enough to make ends meet. Very often, we ignore them. We pass them with our windows rolled up along the access road to IH-35 or we look through them as they work for us, thinking of them as servants rather than people.
The local topic related to Blog Action Day is putting a face to the poor in Austin. I can't do that for anyone, but it isn't hard to do. Look for the guy on the side of the road. Or the one sleeping on a bench downtown. Look at the middle-aged man who is bussing your table at a restaurant.
They maybe poor, but that isn't the only thing about them. With the right person caring, they might not become the next pope, but maybe they'll be able to surprise you with their potential.
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