Blue Bird of Happiness?
Last night at a campus ministry meeting, Daniel wandered in. Daniel is half crazy. He is drunk as often as he can beg money off people to be. He smokes as often as he can bum cigarettes off of people. (Which is good for my friend Brandi, as she is trying to quit; she never has them on her any more because she gives them all to Daniel.) Daniel also smells bad and is usually quite dirty. This is not because he is homeless; contrary to popular belief, most of the homeless people I’ve met are pretty clean and don’t smell very bad at all. It’s a sign of something not quite right mentally if they don’t keep themselves clean. I mean, there are plenty of places for them to do so.
Daniel decided to make quite a disturbance tonight, The students were gathered around a lovely center display lit by over 100 tealight candles in sconces; they were going on a spiritual “journey� (aren’t we all? that’s what life is) around the room with the Children of Israel as Brandi spoke and read from her Bible. That’s when Daniel hit full auto-rant.
He made all his typical claims: that Jesus was his brother; that Jesus was back, and was he pissed; that he and Jesus were going to get revenge on everybody for murdering him; that all of the natural disasters recently were that revenge, and the only reason one hasn’t hit Cincinnati yet was that Daniel was here; that he was the Trinity, Alpha and Omega, and he was sick of people looking down on him and talking down to him on the street and in our cafe because he knew everything and he didn’t have to be told anything. He was God.
Don’t we all think that we are God? It is only the Daniels of the world who actually come out and say it.
This time he added something new, though: “I’m so sick of you all talking about the cross and how my brother died like it’s beautiful. It wasn’t beautiful! And yet you celebrate it and sing songs about it like it was this wonderful thing. I’m sick of it. I don’t want to hear it any more.� He was repeating himself over and over again, in the way that he does. My friend Eric came over and told him, “You’re right. The part where Jesus died wasn’t beautiful. But that’s not what we celebrate. What we celebrate is that he’s alive again! He died, but then he came back to life. That’s the beautiful part.�
But Daniel didn’t get it.
Nobody really gets it.
Daniel, with his addictions, his mental afflictions, his pain, his filth, is a microcosm of the city. He may even be a microcosm of the whole world. And there are just so many problems that I don’t think I can reach Daniel; I don’t think I can reach this city. I don’t even know where to start. Tonight, I sat there and cried like a baby for the pain and despair I could feel attacking Daniel’s spirit; for the pain and despair I see down at our food panty day after day.
My first day on the job at FOCAS, I went to the window and absent-mindedly stared out. After a moment I realised what I was looking at: on the fire escape was a little dead bird, lying with his beak raised in a mute appeal. It was obviously only a day or so dead. Over the weeks, I have watched it slowly morph, becoming less and less a bird, and more and more a skeleton. The feathers grew thinner and less fluffy. It rained; and I could see the limp little body and some of the wing bones where the long, larger feathers had dropped out. It snowed, and he was covered in a little white coverlet. The snow melted, and then froze, encapsulating him in a film of ice. The ice melted again, and the feathers are so thin and limp, plastered against him, that his little frame is showing through. His comrades perch and play and squabble about him, oblivious to the fact that they will one day share his fate.
Sometimes I think the whole city is a dead bird. I can see it slipping away from us day by day. Why do I even try? What good can I do? It’s already dead! But then I think back to the books written by the ancient Jewish mystics, what we Christians call Prophets, and think of the dry bones in the desert restored, and becoming as flesh.
And I get up the next morning, and I go to work again.
January 26th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
Keep in mind that “reaching” someone and “fixing” someone are different things. We tend to confuse them. We can reach Daniel, but we can’t fix him. We tend to prefer fixing, but that’s not what we are called to do.
January 27th, 2006 at 10:28 am
hi. thanks for making me cry today. yikes, girlie. that was such a beautiful and emotional post… you are in my thots and prayers this day.
January 29th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
I got a great reminder at church, today: “We are the ones who we have been waiting for.”