Many years ago, I heard the story of a school principal in South Africa who quit his job rather than submit to the school’s apartheid policy of racial discrimination. His friends told him he was crazy, but he said, “One day I am going to meet God, and God will ask me, ‘Where are your wounds?’ If I reply that I have no wounds, God will ask me, ‘Was there nothing that was worth fighting for?’ I could not face that question.”

At school I was told that before the advent of radio and television, the great novelists such as Charles Dickens would write their books to be read around the fireplace in the evening. In so doing they would make their chapters short enough for an evening’s read and closed with a cliff-hanger.

I have always wondered about the names they choose for sports teams: the Vikings, the Giants, the Predators. Vicious sounding names that strike fear into the hearts of the opposition.

Often, we do not see the softer side of people’s nature as they put up a facade of toughness and independence. This is especially true on the streets where the law of the street is, “Don’t show weakness, don’t show compassion.”

It was a different time and a different crisis, but in the small village of Bronte, Ont., work was hard to come by in the early 1950s.

Driving downtown, the weather forecast came on the radio: “The temperature tonight is expected to plummet to a low of minus-14 degrees with a windchill factor making it feel like minus-25. The health department has issued a warning that at these temperatures frostbite to exposed skin can occur within minutes.”

I was driving to Nova Scotia with my wife Ria several years ago when we stopped at a garden centre. Since I cannot tell a weed from a wallflower, I hung out in the knickknack section where people can find garden signs that say things like, “I don’t remember planting this.”

There is a sense that protection is required when we step out into the unknown darkness of life, whether it be the darkness of suffering or of a lifestyle tinged with fear and regret. Traditionally the Church has called upon the angelic hosts for such protection. 

It was one of those nights when I was challenged by Pope Francis’ insightful observation in The Joy of the Gospel: “The Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas.”

We all have a longing for a place to call “home.” For people who spend many aimless years living on the streets, “homelessness” is more than a condition of the body, it is a condition of the soul. 

I have become used to the cacophony which inhabits the downtown of the city and usually treat it as background noise as I walk around. 

In 2006, after 20 years of stellar work with the Out of the Cold program to shelter the homeless, its co-founder was not impressed.

A Catholic, a Baptist and a Mennonite walked into a bar and the barman said, “What’s this, some kind of a joke?”