Seeing Sideways

Originally posted on the Ruminate Blog on 1 February 2017: "Seeing Sideways"

It was raining again when I walked out of church—a slow spritz that would invoke a guffaw in the saturated NorthEast. But in California it was, Oh yay, rain! I smiled, raised my umbrella, and headed across the street.

And I saw him standing there. Facing the church, holding a ragged cardboard "help" sign. My first thought: Panhandling, of course. He knows how to 'guilt' people! Get them coming out of church, stoked with a good sermon on 'doing unto others.'  But he was directly between me and the parking lot, and to evade him would have looked obvious. Yeah, evasive. We know it well.

So I walked directly up to him. I was almost surprised to look into the face of someone as alert and "normal" as other folks zigging past us. Not one of the usual street people. His eyes were intensely blue, clear, observant—the word benevolent occurred to me. Strangely, because he was seeking our benevolence. Here he was, slightly shivering, damp and uncovered, and he might have been handing out bonbons or tracts, for the look on his face. 

Not a tinge of down and out.

"Hi, my name's Jerry.* I'm an ex-Marine, on disability, and the checks quit coming. I'm trying to get through the legalese and straighten it out. I'm supposed to have more surgery." His declaration was quiet, well-modulated. He stopped and lifted the cuff of his knee-length khakis. His leg was distorted, and a thatch of scarring ran from ankle to mid-thigh, where it disappeared under cover. He looked straight at me. "Afghanistan. I survived. Got patched up, discharged. And lost my home, lost my address, pension, medical . . . lost it all." It was matter-of-fact, direct. "I need a bus pass to go get help. A monthly pass—so I can go back and forth and deal with all the government paper work and stuff."  He explained it all carefully, his reason for asking.

"Where are you staying?" He obviously wasn't rumpled and unbathed, unshaved.

He gestured behind him. "Oh, there's a shelter a few blocks down. No computers, nothing but a free bed. Me and 250 other guys." He smiled ruefully. And then he grinned. That surprised me—the way he shrugged off the hardship of his predicament.

"God knows where I am. The bus will take me where I need to go." He said it quietly, carefully. He was watching me closely.

And I knew: He was a believer. Jerry came to us, to believers—not complaining, but directly presenting his need. Directly focused on what we could do to get him through. Our brother.

We talked a bit more about that—the Connection. I dug in my wallet and handed him a small wad. My husband came by, assessed the basics and added another bill. A sister scurried over, carrying a jacket, and helped him into it, adding a bright purple "girlie" umbrella and a quick hug. We all laughed at "purple." With a suddenness that amazed me, we were a small, brief family—HIS people standing there, damp and undampened by weather or "whethers." It was a meeting of Minds, of mindsets that were timeless, that were set in Place, in focus, over 2000 years earlier.

This man wasn't a beggar wheedling. He was our brother, setting himself before us, whole and broken, trusting in our broken wholeness. Jerry was our unfamiliar friend who needed a daily ride to the right place for the right reasons.

Because God knows where he needs to go.

Our adult class this morning focused on indifference: What it has done to the world we live in, to the people we live with—nearby or distant. The Jerry's of our world have been defeated by indifference. By bureaucracies that regularly ignore/avoid too many "Jerry's." By nations preoccupied with real or supposed exigencies, and cities that have grown apathetic about the "dregs of humanity" that litter their sidewalks and make everyone uncomfortable simply by being. And we, by our preoccupation with the nitty-gritties of our own lives, and yes, by our own care-less-ness. I have often been guilty.

The Good Samaritan comes to mind here. His inner eyes weren't focused on his own pending situation—the why's and wherefore's of his journey, the occupation and preoccupations of purpose. The man, a pariah himself, had "sideways vision" too.

He checked the ditches, walking by.

The things that compel us, distract us, attract us, and fret us—these effectively bind our larger thoughts, blind our wider vision, dim our compassion, our rightful determination. The barriers to our benevolence. We do not clearly see the peripheral "other." Not really. Only smelly, messy, chronic, dysfunctional other. We measure lives by what they have become, and seldom wonder how they got "there," how their lives unraveled, how the right people crossing the street at the right moment (one infinitesimal example) might have changed the outcome.

We overlook the poverty that hovers over the Appalachia's, the dead-end tenements in too many cities, the hovels adjoining crop-fields, the wretched encampments that metastasize beneath freeway overpasses and spill onto our urban avenues.

And the why's and wherefore's escape us. The endless poverties spin on and out―all for 

the want of a horseshoe nail.**

For want of a nail the shoe was lost. 

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the message was lost.

For want of a message the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

"For want of a battle the Kingdom was lost?" Yes! Yes, it was, is that. His Kingdom lost.

Indifference is the missing nail. We fail to see sideways, and then perceive attentively, the deteriorating state of humanity—the poverty, home-grown and world-wide. Here, it has become simply a familiar backdrop to daily life. Across the barrier of seas, the tide of refugees rises and never wanes. It begins to engulf everything.

When humanity is ready, ultimately, to fight the right battle, to face the inner myopias, to call out—cry out to see through a glass less darkly, to wage peace against the war within and with-out . . . HE will raise us up from the dust of our ploys and pretensions, from the honest griefs and struggles that engulf us. His Kingdom will take shape before us, finally, our eyes clear-seeing.

This is my ultimate "take-away" from a brief encounter with Jerry, a solid-wounded man standing  in a drizzle on the curb across from where I worship. Where I head every Sunday to celebrate and petition the GodMan who sees everything—sideways and inside out. 

Everything.

The One Who rescues because He lay flayed and splayed in the dirt, finally, before the nails—helpless and spat upon. The Rescuer whom we abandoned at the cross. Who comes to us over and over to heal both our abandonment and abandoning, to awaken us, His hurting and hurtful world. To save us from this long indifference.

HE knows where and who we are, each of us. He will take us where we need to go.

                                                            *          *          *

*Name changed for the sake of privacy.

**This ancient proverb, in various forms, has been quoted and repeated for varying uses over the centuries, particularly in Early English writing. Benjamin Franklin also made note of it.

                                                                                                         

beneath His cool shadow: An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal now available from Wipf and Stock Publishers and on Amazon. Used with Permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

This excerpt has been previously published on the Blog of Ruminate Magazine on 12 August 2016.

* * * *

Afternoon shadows stretch from tree to tree, and I am sitting beneath their shelter. The radio thrums with the passion of Rachmaninov; my feet waggle automatically to my favorite passages.

Bliss . . . The concerto soars to its conclusion.

And then the news intrudes. From the sublime to the ridiculous? No, no―not ridiculous! Vicious. More and ever more, death is becoming a mordant and morbid exposition, an endless parade of phantasmagoria. From every quarter of the globe comes word of new atrocity, new frenzies of violence and hatred. From far-away, unpronounceable places, from our comfortable suburbs and, of course, at the bleakest cores of our communities, where despair so often spreads on a turbulent tide.

Anger spews from mouth to mouth, group to group to city to nation―and bursts like wildfire from the barrels of guns. Such pervasive violence, such undeclared, personal or group vendettas were virtually unheard of some decades ago, beyond the nation’s battlefields―and not or never on such a scale as this.

We humans are a haunted race . . . .

But it has always been there, been here. Within us all. Christ said as much when He walked alongside us. He saw through the thin veneer of our inherent goodness, our presumed civility―saw how humanity behaves when the heat is turned up, when the pressure is turned on, when the “spigot” is turned off.

It is, now, “the best of times―the worst of times.”

In a world of technological miracles and legislated manners, we still look in the mirror and see, shadowed as they are, the savages who dwell within us.

We die for each other; we lay down our lives for each other―when we believe in Life.

We kill each other―when our souls have died, when we are afraid of death.

We do either, daily, in small ways, with a quick, instinctive impetus that either creates or destroys. All that we carry, all we have nurtured within us will tell its tale.

Violence. The children . . .

The faces of children are the hardest part. We want to gather up the little ones―the innocents, the real victims―gather them in our arms, shelter them, kiss their cheeks, rock them until the fear leaves their eyes.

Oh, the children! When, or if they grow up, they may well kill each other.

Jeremiah wept over Jerusalem long before Christ came to invade it with His wash of tears:

“’Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen; they will be brought down when I punish them,” says the Lord.

He went on talking to Jeremiah, to us: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.”

Only beneath His cool shadow do we find surcease from our heated hearts and ways. Here upon this small and Spartan ranch there is a peace that can only be called luxury. Often during the days I remind myself of this privilege. And when the guilt for being here, for having this, engulfs me―and it sometimes does, when so many have so little―I walk out upon the meadow, where I can see for a great distance. It helps. I stand silent, overwhelmed with the pain I see, yearning over life upon this heated earth, willing such a peace as this upon the world.

Willing a Sabbath rest upon the world.

“Peace, peace . . . .”  It will not come easily, such a Sabbath.

Above me the branches fidget lightly; their shadows dance easily, back and forth, across my outstretched legs. On the radio, the concerto rises and falls in its lessening and strengthening, like a turbulence of thunder . . . .

Like a fervent storm come down upon the airwaves.

Like a great and lovely storm, a cleansing.