It's easy enough to live in a big city, go about our daily affairs thinking we know the intricacies of our society and yet remain remarkably ignorant about "the poor in our midst." Irene Pfeiffer, Board member of the Mustard Seed Street Ministry, speaks for many when she says, "I live in a nice home, drive a fine car and wear pretty fancy clothes; up until recently I knew nothing about homelessness." The homeless don't rate block headlines on the front page of the paper, they don't shout from the rooftops, and they don't set up barricades in the streets.

You may have to look down alleyways to find them. One member of the staff of Calgary Mustard Seed did just that one morning on the way to work. First he saw a pile of couches, mattresses, and blankets piled up in a dark alley. A knot of homeless people had spent the night there. At another place, a young man and his dog were curled up under a wet pile of blankets. Farther along, yet another young man, skinny and shabbily dressed slouched along the alley, holding the hand of his haggard-looking, pregnant girlfriend. The SEED employee later wrote, "The plight of the poor scares me...as I look into the eyes of such fragile people...God forgive us when we are arrogant enough to think we are better or more valuable than the man who sleeps on the concrete steps."

It's well known that poverty is endemic in India, where in some cities like Calcutta, people live their lives on the sidewalk and often die there. And in the favellas of Sao Paolo, Brazil, families live in squalor in shacks with no fresh water, no toilet facilities, and no health care. But surely in a prosperous and thriving country like Canada homelessness is becoming a thing of the past. Or is it?

Sad to say, it is not. In The Mustard Seed newsletter of Christmas 2002, the statement was made: "...conservative estimates suggest that 200,000 Canadians - men, women and children - are homeless." In burgeoning Calgary where shiny new cars plug every major intersection with gridlock at 5:00 p.m. and where exotic houses in the suburbs have sprung up like mushrooms in the rain forest, the situation is no better. In June 2002, a newspaper report read, "...the city's homeless population has increased by 34 percent in the past two years." Further, in 2002, over 14,000 people spent a night in a homeless shelter or on a cot. "This isn't a guess," said Floyd Perras, Operations Officer of The Mustard Seed, referring to the figures showing a 29 percent increase over 2000.

Words slamming the obscene contradictions of wealth and poverty in Canada have been voiced by many, but supremely by Gerald Vandezande, a volunteer spokesperson for the Campaign against Child Poverty. Vandezande says, "Homelessness is a form of violence. It's physical torture for people in the face of the overwhelming richness they witness in fellow Canadians." Equally damning was an article bearing the title "Hunger in a City of Riches." One statement went like this: "...Marilyn is one of several thousand people who every day go hungry in Calgary, a city regularly and loudly trumpeted as a city blessed with abundant riches..."

So what does it mean to be homeless, to live on the street, to depend on handouts and welfare? Most of us worry about our retirement savings, whether we can afford a second car, where we will spend our next winter vacation. What if one calamity after another strikes us? Suppose we were to lose all our savings, our family, our house and possessions, everything? When tragedies like that engulf us and don't seem to relent with time, how can we possibly cope? With hope waning as things get no better, what can we do? Many people are left with an emptiness and feeling of despair. Victims of such cruel blows can hardly be blamed for seeking temporary relief from their abysmal state by resorting to drugs or alcohol.

Admittedly there are repeaters and freeloaders and pretenders and ne'er-do-well's among the homeless, but few people deliberately choose the life of the street. The lives of most people coming to The Mustard Seed for help have been devastated by job loss, divorce, broken homes, incarceration, sexual and physical abuse, mental illness, and addictions. Many of them are the working poor, struggling to get by on minimum wage; decent food, clothing, and housing are beyond them. A 2002 study estimated that half of the city's homeless population was employed.

Rick Tobias, director of Toronto's Yonge Street Mission, was right on target when he said, "No one comes to our organization because things are going well; they come because something has gone terribly wrong, 'dad beat me, John raped me, I got sick and lost my job, I can't give up drinking, nobody wants to hire me.' All the stories are bad news, but sometimes there are happy endings."

Marlon, formerly an architect who had to give up his profession because of illness, ended up on the street before joining the staff of The SEED. "There's a lot of humiliation to life on the street," he said. "People look through or around you, never at you." The sense of complete failure, of being utterly worthless, can be overwhelming. For Floyd Perras, who has worked at The SEED for ten years, the greatest sorrows have been caused by the self-inflicted deaths of half a dozen street people he had gotten to know well. "At times they seemed to be doing alright, then they would sink into the pit. The constant reverses, the rejections, the mental illnesses, the addictions, the failures one after another eventually caught up with them," said Floyd.

Some people choose the life of the street. At the age of sixty-eight, Henry Williams sleeps in shelters in the winter and outside in the summer. He picks bottles and cans for the cash he needs and allows himself one day a month for drinking beer. A recent article described him as being, "happy with his homeless life."

Herb Kroeker, a businessman now in his eighth year on the Board of The Mustard Seed, admits he was once filled with doubts about helping street people. "We feed them and they go on and on, repeating their mistakes," he said. Later he got to know how superficial his understanding was. "I gradually began to realize that in most cases it was not their fault. Over 80 percent of them have been damaged and hurt and rebuffed, and many have lost the ability to change their lives." A skeptical student at Mount Royal College visited The SEED one evening at the time the main floor was overflowing with people having supper. He sat down and began to talk with a lonely old man. They talked for two hours. Then the old fellow bought him a coffee. Later the student wrote, "To buy those coffees he spent his last few coins. That changed my attitude forever."

Gertie Clarke of Red Deer's Loaves and Fishes ministry goes so far as to say, "You might just find some of the best people among the homeless. Give them a decent chance, some skills, and a chance to build up their low self-esteem and you might get a surprise." Pat Nixon has said some pretty astounding things about his homeless friends, "We get so much love from these people, the people most other people despise." Love from the lowly? As long as Pat is around, no one at The SEED will write off or give up on "the people others despise." After all, how many times did Pat stumble and fall, and stumble and fall and...?

Pragmatic as he is, Pat Nixon believes that the gulf separating us from the homeless may not be on the Grand Canyon scale after all. He says, "We're all closer to street people, maybe six or eight missed paycheques, than we are to the lifestyles of the rich and famous." For Pat and his team, the most challenging task is to convince the rest of society that street people don't deserve their circumstances and that efforts to get homeless people back on their feet will reward everyone. He has been blessed with a fleet of ordinary persons and families who have been prepared to leave their comfort zones and help in a myriad of ways. And he believes, "they have found joy in the process."