Woe To Us

We lie in our beds in the dark. There is a picture of the children on the bureau. Our clothes hang in the closet. There is a patch of moonlight on the carpeted floor. We live surrounded by the comfort of familiar things, sights, sounds. When the weather is bad, we have shelter. When things are bad in our lives, we have a place where we can retreat to lick our wounds and pull ourselves back together again, while tens of thousands of people, thousands of them children, wander the streets looking for some doorway to lie down in out of the wind. "Woe to you that are rich," Jesus said, "for you have received your consolation. Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger. Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep." It is a text that is not often preached on to people like us because it cuts too close to the bone, but woe to us indeed if we forget the homeless ones who have no vote, no power, nobody to lobby for them, and who might as well have no faces even, the way we try to avoid the troubling sight of them in the streets of the cities where they roam like stray cats.

• from Secrets in the Dark