Yesterday, I was walking down Wabash Avenue when I homeless man approached me and said, “I don’t want any money. Could you just listen.” Well, I didn’t, but just kept going on. But something within me, an intuition, a “voice” perhaps, compelled me to turn around and go back to engage this human being who simply had something to say to me.
I approached him and asked him how I might help. He repeated that he didn’t want my money he just wanted to eat. He was hungry… very hungry. I asked him what he wanted to eat and he replied that he loved tacos. Nearby was a chipotle restaurant which which we both entered. I asked him to do the ordering, which he did, repeatedly saying, “Thank you. Thank you.”
What happened to me on Wabash Avenue was a beautiful expression of conversion, Metanoia, for I “turned around” to “see” that homeless man in a new light. He was transformed into Christ. I turned away from my own self- centeredness and to a focus on the “Other.”