Mary of the Garden, Tonight

May 1st is May Day, Worker’s Day, St. Joseph the Worker feast, the day of the Immigration march and the first day of the month of Mary, the mother of Jesus and the mother of God. This year, however, in looks like another chilly and rainy day not the beginning of the month of May flowers. Maybe we need to pray to Mary for warmer and sunny weather that will brighten our lives and bring May flowers.

The statue of Mary in our garden backyard is surrounded by yellow daffodils during the day and shines with a solar spotlight at night. It is strange that the sun of the day, little that it is, brings energy to light the statue of Mary by night. Maybe there is a lesson we can all learn from this light of Mary, to savor all the bits of light we can, so when the darkness comes we can shine.

A probable homeless man was sleeping outside a Starbucks in downtown Milwaukee today. A policeman was called, woke up the man up to question him, the policeman took out his nightstick, the homeless man grabbed it and a scuffle broke out. The sleeping man wound up dead with 10 bullets fired by the police officer.

An investigation will follow but this tragic death of this still nameless man reminds me how dearly we need police training to deal with the poor and persons with mental illnesses. Our former police chief was involved in this type of training for all police officers but the present one and the mayor rather invest money in what they called “data driven policing.” Incidents of police shooting unarmed persons have increased over the years. This man, without a name so far, is just looked on as useless, a nobody, a tragic victim, of no importance.

Maybe the sleeping man downtown was a worker who had lost his job and found himself living on the streets. His days had become dark and blinded with rage when the policeman woke him up. We may never know what happened but we know that we need to bring some light to this dark event and insist that, once again, our police officers are trained to be sensitive to homeless and ill.

How many more deaths will it take of unarmed persons dying from police action before we wake up and do something to bring light to the darkness?

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