Yesterday we were at Win-Dow Burgers in Belmont Shore.

If you know the place, you know the line. Twenty minutes, maybe more. There is a line when they open and a line when they close.

While we were standing there, a homeless woman was digging through a trash can looking for scraps of food.

I didn’t notice her.

My son did.

Once he pointed her out, there she was. Right in front of all of us.

People were standing in line talking about whatever people talk about while waiting for a burger. Looking at their phones. Looking at the menu. Talking to their kids. Just living their Saturday.

And a woman was digging through garbage for something to eat.

What gets me now is how completely those two things were able to exist next to each other.

Not hidden somewhere. Not something happening in another neighborhood, another city or another country. Right there. A line of people waiting twenty minutes to purchase food, and a woman a few feet away searching through what those people had thrown away.

And somehow it wasn’t the biggest subject in our lives.

It wasn’t even the biggest subject in mine.

Then a young man and woman asked her if they could buy her something to eat.

She said yes.

When the order was ready, they brought her a burger and fries. She sat down on the ground in the blue striped part of the parking lot where you’re not supposed to park and ate her lunch.

She drank water.

For some reason I keep thinking about the water.

Everyone around her had sodas. I had a Diet Coke. She drank water.

Maybe it meant nothing. Maybe water was simply what she wanted. But that little detail has stayed with me.

This morning I started thinking about some very old words.

Hillel taught that what is hateful to you, you should not do to another.

Jesus taught that we should do to others what we would have them do to us.

Muhammad taught that none of us truly believes until we love for another what we love for ourselves.

And long before that, the Greeks had xenia, sacred hospitality protected by Zeus. The stranger was to be received. Fed. Protected. The person standing before you mattered even when you knew nothing about them.

Thousands of years.

Different religions. Different gods. Different civilizations.

Different words saying something remarkably similar.

And yesterday, in a parking lot in Belmont Shore, all those words became a burger, fries and water.

I’m sad that I didn’t see her first.

I’m sad that my son had to make me see her.

And I’m sadder that we have built a world where a woman digging through the trash beside a line of people waiting to buy food can become part of the scenery.

Because I don’t think the people in that line were bad people.

I was one of them.

Maybe that’s what bothers me most.

We can become accustomed to almost anything. We learn how to walk past things. We learn how not to look. We learn how to continue a conversation while something that should stop the conversation is happening ten feet away.

But my son saw her.

And two young people saw her.

They didn’t solve homelessness. They didn’t ask how she got there. They didn’t debate whether giving her something would encourage dependency. They didn’t need to understand housing policy, addiction, mental illness, economics or any of the other enormous questions we attach to homelessness.

There was a hungry person in front of them.

They bought her lunch.

Maybe after thousands of years of religion and philosophy, there really isn’t much more to say.

The words have been written.

See the person in front of you.

Then decide what you’re going to do.