David Ambroz: From Empathy to Action - How We Fight Against Poverty and Hopelessness.

At the Podium with Patrick Huey

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The Magnificat

There are no real adjectives to describe David Ambroz’s life as a child. Words like filthy, abused, and dejected sanitize the experience of what life must have been like for a seven-year-old David, precariously washing his clothes in the bathroom sink of a Wendy’s. His young eyes anxiously scanning the locked door, hoping that no one will barge in and interrupt his inconsistent cleansing ritual that for a moment, but not completely, removes the foul stench of poverty and homelessness engulfing him and his siblings. A scarcity wrought by their mother, a complex woman fighting her own demons of mental illness. Trying to unravel a system not interested in lives and uplifting humanity but driven by poll tested phrases like “personal responsibility.” Glib, disconnected slogans shouted by well-heeled officials into echo chambers of comfortable, ill informed, and unconcerned agreement. A system that David describes as a pipeline to prison and generational poverty.
This is the gritty and oftentimes unimaginable world of David’s beautiful and necessary memoir A Place Called Home. His story is at times heartbreaking. At times grotesque. And then again hopeful even as the thief called doom lurks in the corner, biding his time. And in these stories, we the reader need a totem on which to place our blame. Someone to stand as factor for our fears of what the lives of people like David trapped in these circumstances mean about us. And since the system is too big, and the well-dressed officials too far away, David’s mom, Mary, has become the focus of the outrage.

This is not Saint Luke’s Mary of the Magnificat, rejoicing in the glory and the power of the Lord at her divine and blessed favor. This is the Mary who beats her kids. Risks all their lives. And drifts into an almost catatonic state, chain smoking cigarettes as her children silently starve. Through it all David has a dream, that the hand of God touches his mother’s head – the way He touched the other Mary’s womb – to still her restlessness and allow the true Mary she is to come through. So he can get to know her. Talk to that Mary. His mom.

Throughout our conversation, the theme of forgiveness is rampant. It is liberal. Especially for Mary. As David says, “I perhaps am too forgiving, but it makes me the hopeful, pragmatic optimist that I am today to believe that we can do better… I will not become numb, I will not become a pessimist, I will continue to believe that we can make the world a better place.”

The dedication from David at the beginning of A Place Called Home reads, “To my mother, who taught me to understand and forgive . . . to conquer one impossible thing at a time.”
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