Gates, Walls, and Chasms: Dives and Lazarus Part III

An irony of the Dives and Lazarus story struck me.  Dives’ Hell was simply an extension of the way he had chosen to live his life: separated.  In life, he trusted the wall to keep Lazarus on the outside, away from himself.   In death, he found himself wanting contact but being sentenced to isolation.  He was so distressed by heat and thirst that he wanted the dirty beggar to dip his scabby finger into water and touch his tongue!  My, how his aversion has melted in the

heat!  And his thoughts, even in his distress, stretch to his brothers, who he wants to warn.  But alas, the separation on which he thrived in life now vexes him.

I’ve already confessed that I easily see myself similar to Dives.  I feel the same aversion, the same desire to put up walls.  And I look at the gift that the homeless are to me, even now, here in Traverse City.  We moved here from the obvious urgency of Detroit and I was without my job that placed me tangential to that urgency, in a role that put me in the opening of Dives’ wall, from which I could look on either side.  I could sit with people of whom Lazarus reminds me – sores and all.  And I could sit in my office with my nice neat ideas.  And I could learn that ideas alone could become a shell, a protective layer within which I felt comfortable and unthreatened.  But the people I saw, and the people who called me on the phone and saw me on the street seduced me out of that neat, tidy, ordered, and incomplete world of ideas.

If we, like insects, live within our shells, we may be impervious to threat, but we will not grow.  If Sartre claimed that Hell is Other People, I would counter that Growth is Other People.  Those homeless in Detroit – and now these homeless here in Traverse City – are bridges across the chasm that would trap me in a hellish heaven of retirement in a beautiful place, where I might much more likely become like Dives, living in lavish isolation and ersatz bliss. FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.