I reached a moral low

I was in the supermarket, in the line for the deposit machine, with my empty bottles.
“Can I have your bottles?” a stranger asked me.
“No,” I replied.
“Why not?” he tried, a bit surprised.
“I want to hand them in myself.”
The man walked away and I inserted my three bottles in the machine and got a voucher for € 0.45. 15 cents each. It felt not good, maybe especially so because the amount was so minute. Of course I could go looking for the man and hand him the voucher, but I also didn’t do that. A bit ashamed I left the supermarket.

In the city where I live I regularly and always turn down beggars. Every time I do that, some lyrics from a song by Joan Osborne pop into my head:

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin’ to make his way home?

I think somewhere in my youth I was taught that turning down a beggar is a very un-Christian thing to do. But then I remind myself that I’m not a Christian, so I’m not even a hypocrite. Let me pay taxes and let the municipality deal with them.

While I always knew that this way of thinking was way too convenient, I just got reprimanded by none less then Pope Francis. He died today, and in the obituary from The Guardian he was quoted as follows:

“The attitude we must have towards the poor is, in its essence, that of true commitment. This commitment must be person to person, in the flesh. It is not enough to mediate this through institutions … They do not excuse us from our obligation of establishing personal contact with the needy.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/21/pope-francis-obituary