The Despised

Today we come to you, Lord, we, the despised.
We are not a sorry procession, but a repugnant one.
We do not even arouse compassion, or hatred, tenderness or sympathy.
We are simply despised; we disgust people.
The leper arouses compassion.
The fiercest criminal stirs up hatred or terror.
But there is no place reserved for us in the catalogue of the works of mercy.

I, Lord, am a drug addict.
For all practical purposes, I have resigned from the human race.
I have lost all hope of regaining my self- control, of becoming myself again.
There are other people who have drugged, not their bodies, but their consciences and hearts.
But nobody despises them. At worst, they are feared.

I, Lord, am a homosexual.
I don’t like women.
Now and then, I go with another man.
I commit fewer sins than my brother who certainly does like women and who even takes up with other men’s wives.
Bur no one at home or outside turns their nose up at him; they don’t find him repugnant; on the contrary, sometimes they even admire him.
But everyone, both men and women, shy away from me.
And I am acceptable only to someone who, like me, also feels that he is cast off by normal society.

I, Lord, am a drunkard.
But a poor one.
I’ve been on the bottle for many years.
They don’t want me at home because they’re ashamed of me, and so I’m left to stagger around the streets like a sick dog.
When people see me coming, they hastily cross to the other side of the street.
Even a beggar occasionally has the consolation of having someone approach him and, although hurriedly, put a small coin in his hand, which, as you yourself had told us, is also in your hand.
But nobody comes near me; except perhaps a policeman to hustle me off to jail.
Yet, Lord, there are others who also get drunk, but they do it at exclusive parties in the suburb and, because they are influential, people only laugh good- naturedly at their drunken antics.
They are readily forgiven and, if necessary, excuses are found for them by their hangers-on, who covers up for them.
No policeman ever lays a finger on them.
I wonder – am I more repugnant when drunk than they are, just because I get loaded on cheap wine, while they do it on expensive whiskey, vodka and gin?

I, Lord, am a prostitute.
I can’t claim to be one of the girls, not any more.
Because now I’m old and fat and tired.
I have no one now to pay the rent of an apartment for me and buy me nice things.
I am one of those who have to satisfied with what the ‘customers’ feel like giving them.
I no longer have a nice apartment to entertain my clients in, and I don’t have the money to advertise in the newspaper as a ‘masseuse.’
I have to be satisfied with hanging around cheap bars in the slums or on street corners in the cold and the rain, hoping that some poor wretch will be willing to pay me a few coins for the remnants of my favours.
People passing in their cars look down their noses at me and quickly turn away so as not to meet my eyes.
I am despised even by the high-class call-girls who, glittering with jewels and wrapped in furs, glide by in big cars driven by their very respectable ‘patrons.’

I, Lord, have been excommunicated in your Church.
I can’t receive the sacraments, as do the criminals and money-grubbers and oppressors of the poor.
Nobody even dreams that I may perhaps be at peace with my conscience.
Didn’t the Church of your day excommunicate you?
There are others who defend more heresies than I; who even boast about their atheism; who exploit your Church and who live off her without believing in her.
But they are admired and respected.
They don’t carry the shameful mark of excommunication in their foreheads, as I do.
Perhaps this is because they have friends who stand up for them, or because they know how to be more diplomatic than I, professing in public what they betray in private or in the dark places of their consciences.

We and so many others whom the society does not even pity; we, the despised of the earth, who arouse neither hatred nor pity nor fear, but only disgust, today we come to you, who are sinless, because we believe that, if you do exist, you will not despise but will even forgive us.

We aren’t trying to hid or make excuses for the sins that have caused us to be cast off by society.

We only hope that perhaps you, who not only forgive but also excuse, will be able to avoid humiliating us further and to tell us , as once you told the man possessed by the devil, that saving us will let others see your glory and mercy in us.

Remember, you said you came to save what was lost.
And who is more lost than us who do not even arouse pity?

Sometimes, a ray of hope lets us dream for a moment that perhaps you may bring yourself to love even us and to find under the filth and grime some traces of your own likeness.

Forgive us, Lord, if we are sometimes tempted to think that you do not exist.

It’s not easy to believe in your, whom we cannot see when all our fellowmen, who we can see only too well, turn their eyes away from us in disgust so as not to have to look at us.

Forgive us also if, as very seldom happens, we find someone who does not despise us and even hold out a friendly hand to us, so that we feel tempted to confuse him with you and adore him as our God.

Forgive that idolatry.

But would it be really idolatry?

If someone succeeds in loving what everyone else despises, doesn’t he thereby become you yourself presented and living among us?

O Christ, have pity, at least you, our Lord and our Brother – have pity on us, the despised of the earth.

+Juan Arias
Prayer without Frills