Because he was either a bum or an Angel...
I was walking 'home' (or back to my hotel in downtown Vancouver) after my traditional first-morning in 'lonely city' walk to breakfast and the port. I love to see the cruise ships and the people. I marvel at the technology of it all--designed to whisk the people away to another World for the space of a week or more.
All of us trading dollars for life.
(or the semblance of it-- a life 'other' than the one to which we've resigned ourselves)
So I walk, always astounded at all the people and all their stories so unknown to me. "Who are they?" I wonder. What have been their dreams? How are they faring? How do I look to them, all purposeful and astride alone on a morning two thousand miles from my family?
Then I turn my back to the sea and the crafts that take my peers out upon it and walk.
Back home.
And there he was, waiting for me. This city is rife with them. It seems like they stalk every corner, looking for you to make eye contact so they can ask you for money.
On my Sunday walk I often meet an old man who sits down by the port on the steps of the Armani building looking up with puppy dog eyes ill at ease in his seventy-year old face. I've fallen gently in pity with him and set aside a few dollars in my pocket when I set out each Sunday just in case he's there.
He hasn't been these past two times.
I wondered today if he's died or perhaps returned home.
He could be an Angel.
The one waiting outside my Hotel today certainly didn't look like one. He had the rotted teeth of the heroin addict.
(I wondered if he truly no longer 'knows' that we can spot it on him?)
Pretending to be an Aussie picked up and incarcerated for hitchhiking he told me, with tears, that if he didn't get $24 for a bus ride back up to Whistler he'd lose his daughter to foster care and be thrown back in jail for 14 weeks. He said he had documents up in Whistler that the police told him he had to go get and bring back with him to Vancouver to avoid being arrested that fateful second time.
He was clearly lying to me.
And it's the strangest thing to stand face to face with someone knowing they're lying to you; all the while carrying on a debate in my head; should I call him out on it or not? Should I tell him of all the times I've had others like him tell me tales like him in the hopes that I might be one of the softhearted ones who yield and give?
Liar.
And in the calloused moments I think to myself how hard I have to work to earn the money I'm given. Why should I give it to him? Why does he 'deserve' a handout? Especially when all the signs point to the fact that my giving it to him won't beget a bus ride up the mountains but a trip of another kind--one that is slowly killing him, turning him into something less than human along the way.
Man.
But see, I remember Abraham. Remember that he made dinner for three strangers. Remember that they were Angels and that we're told that sort of thing is less uncommon than we might think.
(yes, I believe the fairy tales...)
And I also remember that this faith I hold to so tenuously these days (it holds to me I know) tells me that when someone in need asks me for something I ought not to refuse them.
Jesus taught me that.
But I'm conflicted, 'cause the dude's a heroin addict. He tells me he'll drop the money back at the Hotel tomorrow, not 'cause I asked for it but "Out of respect man. Out of respect..."
And I want to scream at him--
"Cut the bullshit man! My sense of it is my money's going to disappear into your veins. You won't remember me past ten minutes from now. All I did was look at you and nod to acknowledge our shared humanity and now you've roped me into this. Don't talk to me about respect..."
But maybe Jesus will.
(remember)
"Whatever you do unto the least of these my bretheren, you do unto Me..."
God.
So, I walked inside and I wrote him a letter on Hotel stationary and I put $21 (he already had $3) in an envelope with the letter telling him that I thought he was lying to me but that if he wasn't I ask his forgiveness. I told him that, if he was telling me the truth, a note would be more than repayment enough. A note telling me what it was like to be re-united with his daughter because a stranger thought that maybe, just maybe he was an Angel not a heroin addict.
Ya' think?
Could it be?
Could it be, Lord?
I don't know. Probably won't ever.
I do know that I'm deeply saddened now--as if being away from my wife and babies isn't bad enough, I had to have THAT experience today.
Sorrow on sorrow.
(what kind of sorrow has he known?)
And I feel a screenplay coming on because of it. About a guy who meets a heroin addict who turns out to be an Angel. Then later that day, when the World starts crumbling around them both, the Angel returns the favor and saves the guy because the guy saved him. Maybe the Angel was addicted to heroin 'cause maybe he was a fallen Angel and the sorrow of his banishment was too much to bear. Maybe we've gotten it wrong about demons. Maybe they're not bestial, maybe they live among us as the broken and deranged.
Like the conceit from "Men in Black" turned on its head.
There's a story there I think.
(and maybe the guy doesn't remember he used to be an Angel 'cause he's been fallen so long he's forgotten...and maybe he remembers it only when the two of them are about to die and the addict discovers that he can fly, and maybe he flies the both of them up to a city that's waiting in the sky and maybe there they bow before a being who heals and restores them both--the man back into the image in which he was made, the Angel back into the creature of light he was made to be...)
A story about mercy casually given with eternal result.
I'd go see that movie.
And then I sealed the envelop and didn't know what to write on it. I thought about it a moment then wrote, "Michael".
For the Angels.
(crap, and now I'm crying...)
T
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