Sublime

What person who does what this woman does has not been there? How I admire them and cherish them. I see them each day, serving in a variety of ways, dealing with the heartbreaking realities of the poor: frustration; violent transference; physical and mental sickness; rejection; police harassment; loneliness; hunger for food, friendship, and purpose

on a visit to New York City, he saw hungry-looking men sleeping in alleyways, as if one foot were already in the grave. “These people are Les Miseràbles of America,” he wrote to his parents in September 1965. “People that don’t make it in America’s social race to succeed are simply run over.”

God, I pray first of all for the brothers and sisters in this jail, that you might strengthen them. I pray for the people who come to the Downtown Chapel to get something to eat and for the staff that provides for them; I pray for all the poor; I pray in thanksgiving for all the people who help me here and for Father Gary, who comes to see me. Plea

I was struck by how the deprivations that people experience can lead to eccentric kinds of compensation—like the hoarding syndrome of some of the poor.

Except that there was a French photographer right opposite who was very much into noticing everything: an elegant, willowy man, with a name impossible for Americans to pronounce—he invited them to call him Harry—and a Leica 35 around his neck. Henri Cartier-Bresson had wandered the area all morning; he’d shot a group of women chatting outside on Gr