Light from Darkness

Just as black holes draw everything into themselves, light with the same irresistible nature reaches out to everything.  Light is effusive and generous.

Eleven have died here in Traverse City in 2014, eleven who lived on the streets.  Most of them were addicted to alcohol.  Most of them were people I knew enough to see their faces as I type this.  And I can see in my memory’s eye the way their bodies moved when they were in the well-lit and caring shelter, and the way they moved when they were on the street.  In the dining room of the shelter, they were off the booze and on their meds and they were well fed and warm and clean and groomed. Two specifically come to mind, the two most recently deceased. 

Glenn was perhaps 40, his light complexion and beardless round face almost cherubic.  Quiet in my class at the Inn, and almost as quiet in the conversations we had at dinner, an occasional smile would escape from behind his curtain as a faint, momentary hope would make its quick trip through his resigned mind.  Despair would be too active a word for his emotional character. There was a passivity, a helplessness there.  But at the Inn his face showed these sparks of emotional activity when we’d see each other.  On the street his ruddy complexion increased the boyishness of his face, made it seem even more obscene that he would be on the street, living under bridges or in tents.  But oh, how red his eyes were in his constant intoxication!  Mine watered when I saw his, trying to cool themselves as his seemed so hot.  No sparks on the street.  His mind seemed to have receded into the layers of clothes that kept him from freezing, below the outer grime of his winter coat, beneath the odiferous layers of clothing.  Glenn was struck and killed by an unfortunate motorist into whose path he had stumbled on his way to the rotating shelter in a church in a nearby town.  He didn’t want to be too late to get in.

Don was in his mid-60’s, but looked much older.  He called himself “Hobo Don” because he had been a classical vagabond for most of his life, “riding the rails” in his youth, having fled his abusive home in his teens.  He was a sage, having absorbed bits and volumes of idea along the way.  He was not one to chatter, to violate quiet with useless words.  But how we would enjoy conversation about humanity, about values, about the darkness of the world and the brightness of human promise!  He would tell me his story, and want to hear mine.  He would look me in the eye and connect mind to mind, soul to soul.  His intoxication was as classic as his “hobo” persona.  The first time we had a conversation, he had been lifted out of a snowbank by a mutual friend, and the armless chair there in the back of the local coffee place required him to intentionally balance himself to keep from falling out.  Yet while his body was at its limit with the booze, his mind and spirit seemed in perfect balance.  I told him that he had a gift of intellect and wisdom that his drinking impeded.  He told me stories of the wounds that he suffered in his adolescence, hurt that drinking dulled.  “If I stop drinking, I’ll die”, he said to me.  One evening a few weeks in the rotating shelter in a nearby church hall, I joined him as he stood amid the other street people and those serving them dinner.

“How ya doin’, Don”, I asked.

“I’m having a hard time with judgmentality” he said, with intellectual simplicity and directness. 

“Whose” I asked, thinking that he was upset about others judging him, or perhaps a gulf of estrangement between those served dinner and those serving it.

“Mine” he said, and let his eyes say the rest; no words necessary. 

Don died in the hospital, his heart unable to sustain his body. 

This is my personal darkness - these two and nine others who were in the shelters a year ago who have died on the streets, in the hospital, and even on the toilet, having taken an overdose to end his life after he had caused the death of another to be killed.

But we who believe are called to put on vestments of light, to go into their darkness not to heal, or certainly not to fix, but simply to be with those in the shadows.

Just as black holes draw everything into themselves, light with the same irresistible nature reaches out to everything.  Light is unstoppable.  

The coming of Light into the dark world is what we long for during these darkest of days. 

And carrying of the Light is that to which we are called.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.