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Week of January 24, 2006 Session 1 Street Scenes: Glimpses of Old Town
A-1 The bus became so packed that Phil, still standing, was pushed back a few seats. In the semisilence of a bus full of tired workers heading home, he asked loud and strong, “How long you been a priest, Gary?” The heads turned to look at the phenomenon of a real live priest, as if there were a giraffe on board. “Since 1971,” I responded. Phil: “I am going to say this before God and you and the whole bus: You are one bad dude.” The people on the bus applauded. What a show: God as a witness, a giraffe-like priest, and an outrageous extrovert from the streets. Not your everyday cast of characters on the late-afternoon and dreary number nine. We got off together and gabbed a bit about another great minister he had heard recently. “Now this guy preaches the word. You’d like him.” He embraced me with his big, gangly body and was off down the street. Yep, that’s me: one bad dude. [94]
“What will this child become?” asked Elizabeth’s neighbors about the child who would become John the Baptist. Did a Mexican momma and daddy and all their neighbors once—in hope—ask this same question when a babe was born in some obscure village, the same child now on the streets of Portland, tracked down and arrested by the police? A babe then, now caught up in the tentacles of drugs and the relentless power of drug enforcement. [95]
He once said to me, “You are the only father I have ever had.” He never knew his real father—the only father figures he had were his mother’s lovers, who had emotionally tossed him to the wind like a cigarette butt out the car window. I do care for him, and I understand the gaps in his life thanks to my own experience of growing up with a severe and demanding stepfather. Cal has had to overcome many obstacles. In these moments with him, when evil men have taken advantage of him, I think of those lines from Isaiah, which are applicable to many of the individuals of the streets who must grow up and try to make it in a country of instability: Flying backward and forward like bewildered nestlings. Isaiah 16:2 [95f]
It is true that the church must be in many places and with many people, but it is the poor who will reveal to the church—dramatically and poignantly—the nature of its heart and mission. [96]
The poor teach me that serving them is not just some sort of Christian imperative. Rather, it is in serving them that I can discover, like the church, what is best in my own heart. [96]
I take it all personally. If a woman or a man is abused, then I am abused, and if I don’t feel that way, then I want to feel that way. If your flesh is lacerated, so is mine. God has arranged the body so that more 4ignity is given to the parts which are without it, and so that there may not be disagreements inside the body, but that each part may be equally concerned for all the others. If one part is hurt, all parts are hurt with it. 1 Corinthians 12:24-26 [98]
One Saturday night, two men started a shoving match below my third-floor window. It was just one of a million in-your-face confrontations that occur in the throes of the street. Like usual, it was all machismo and shouting. Suddenly one man pulled a knife, and I was looking down at a new and perilous situation. The potential victim then shouted at the knife wielder, in a voice that echoed off the tall buildings and over the 2 A.M. traffic noises, “You can’t kill me, motherfucker. I’m already dead.” The “dead” man, whom I see periodically as he moves among the dope dealers, turned his back on the knife wielder and walked away into the night. There are lots of self-perceived dead people walking around on the streets. Society has names for all the nameless brothers and sisters of the night: addicts, bums, panhandlers, crackheads, hookers, wackos. Many consider themselves dead because no one ever told them about the beauty of their lives. As I tried to sleep that night, I thought of the small replica I have of Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son, the kneeling returned son weeping in the arms of his father. And later, the same father said to his other son, “Your brother here was dead and has come to life; he was lost and is found” (Luke 15:32). [99]
One evening I was waiting on the corner of Broadway and Burnside, looking, I suppose, a bit disconcerted and needy. I was going to a very heavy meeting where there would be lots of conflict. As I waited for my ride, two Bible-packing, perpetually smiling, glazed-eyed gentlemen approached me. They hit on me, so to speak. One of them asked me, “Do you like Mexican food, brother?” “Sure,” I responded. “You looking for a restaurant?” “Oh, gosh, no,” he said. They both guffawed. Turns out that they were in the hunt for people they could take in their van to their church for a meal of burritos, tamales, and tacos. With, I presume, evangelization for dessert. I turned them down, looking nervously for my ride. At that point I was given the consolation prize: one of them put his hand on my shoulder and said, with the smarmy assurance that only “The Saved” seem to have down cold, “It’s okay, brother, Jesus still loves you.” Yeah, you are right, my friend, Jesus does love me, but the means and story of that love are so different from anything you can imagine. I guess I will never trust these guys because they are here today and gone tomorrow, and the poor need consistency of commitment. I don’t doubt their sincerity of intention. But there is a tendency among some religious groups to analyze life on the streets—and the response to that life—in simplistic terms. This is not a quick-fix world, despite God’s power. And when the poor don’t get it right away—that is, that sweet Jesus loves them—the born-againers leave the scene, shaking the dust from their feet. Rather than listening to the Spirit in the poor, these proselytizers listen to their own safe, untested selves and to their own self-congratulatory gospel of salvation. In doing so they miss the bruised hearts of others. They miss, I think, the heart of Jesus, so complex, open, and long-suffering. [100f]
Those friends in my life whom I cherish and who cherish me are channels of God’s love and power. When God has comforted me, it has occasionally been through an idea or a prayer, but it has more often been through the touch and care of a friend, as Titus gave to Paul. Martin Buber says that we are created along with one another and directed to a life with one another and that by means of our brother and sister creatures we find our way to God. Man, is that ever true of me. My friends have been the ones who have pulled me through some absolutely awful moments, and they have been the people in whose presence I have found my most delirious moments of happiness. [104]
Go
in Peace: Celebrating Mass in Old Town
Background view: The Soup kitchen at St Helen's, Lancashire Background Midi: Some
Children See Him |
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Radical Compassion: Part 2 Epiphany to Transfiguration Radical Compassion: Part 1 Pentecost to Christ the King |
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Discovering Jesus daily
