Clothing the naked with more than clothes

Something seemed different about the giving tree in my parish this past Christmas. One after another of the tree's tags requested a gift of diapers and baby wipes.

Jan 29, 2016

By David Gibson
Something seemed different about the giving tree in my parish this past Christmas. One after another of the tree's tags requested a gift of diapers and baby wipes.

I always warm to a giving tree. Usually I pick a tag from our parish's tree that requests new shirts or maybe a jacket for an 8- to 12-year-old. It's a great feeling to offer something small, but really "cool," to a child who needs it and may well enjoy it.

But this time, moving from tag after tag, I kept seeing "diapers" and "baby wipes." I searched for one listing shirts, socks or jeans. But then something clicked. "I like this idea," I suddenly realized. So diapers and wipes it was.

There was more than one reason for my reaction, I suppose. Deep in the recesses of my mind, a message undoubtedly started to replay, reminding me of my amazed discovery decades ago, soon after becoming a father, that diapers definitely were not cheap. To make matters even worse, there were those darned containers of baby wipes that had to be purchased over and over.

From day one in a newborn's life, parents face the great task of clothing their child. It begins with diapers, onesies and blankets, but in short order moves on to shirts, pants, sweaters, hats, socks and -- dare I say it -- shoes. But let's not even talk about the high cost of children's shoes in this brief article!

All parents are called to clothe a child, though not only with clothing attire. Theirs is a call to clothe a child with love, continual care, protection, essential knowledge, a sense of self-worth and a home where smiles are not rare.

That means parents are called to become practitioners of the corporal works of mercy. By definition, a parent is someone who clothes the naked.

The call to clothe a child in all the ways that matter has a way of consuming whatever a parent can muster in terms of time, energy, faith, hope and material resources.

But naturally, true love and care for children is not the preserve of those able to call all the necessary material resources into play. The call to clothe a child fully, however, can prove particularly taxing for parents whose lives are marked sometimes or all the time by poverty.

The church's current Year of Mercy invites the entire church to consider thoughtfully the realities that parents, and others who are poor, confront.

In the Gospel and for the faith community, the poor represent a mystery that demands attention. Pope Francis made this point when he asked the entire church to spend a year contemplating the meaning of mercy and traveling along contemporary paths of mercy.

In an April 2015 letter formally declaring the Year of Mercy, the pope spoke of it as "a way to reawaken our conscience, too often grown dull in the face of poverty." He looked ahead to this year as a time to enter "more deeply into the heart of the Gospel, where the poor have a special experience of God's mercy."

Pope Francis spoke explicitly of the mystery of the poor on an earlier occasion. Christians must "embrace the mysterious wisdom that God wishes to share" through the poor, he wrote in "The Joy of the Gospel," his 2013 apostolic exhortation.

"We are called to find Christ" in the poor, "to lend our voice to their causes," to become "their friends" and "listen to them," the pope wrote.

Just as parents clothe their children not only with garments but by embracing them in a manner that respects them as images of God and nurtures the best within them, aren't there multiple ways to clothe the poor by enhancing their sense of self-worth and demonstrating respect for their God-given dignity?

Could this holy year prompt informed discussions about how to clothe people with needed education, jobs and health care? Is this a time to ask what kinds of courageous support in local communities might help vulnerable people on society's margins to take a chance on a different kind of future?

In the face of poverty, actions "speak louder than words," the Catholic bishops of Indiana said in a spring 2015 pastoral letter on poverty. This is especially true, they added, "when we intend to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give shelter to the homeless and provide employment, education and health care to all members of our community."

The bishops added, "We want to offer hope to all who suffer, and we seek to build a just society."

The poor are not the only worthy beneficiaries of a corporal work of mercy like clothing the naked. The simple mention of this specific way of acting mercifully, however, definitely calls the poor to mind and highlights the Gospel's view of them.

In "The Joy of the Gospel," the pope said: "We have to state, without mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor."