Stranger On A Bus
Aug. 21st, 2015 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dedalus_1947If God had a name what would it be?
And would you call it to his face?
If you were faced with Him in all His glory,
What would you ask if you had just one question?
What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us,
Just a stranger on the bus,
Trying to make His way home.
(One of Us: Written by Eric Bazilian, and sung by Joan Osborne – 1995)
“Oh God”, I said to myself, easing into the patio chair near the corner of Burbank and Van Nuys Boulevard. “I’m next to a crazy man!”
I had just set down my “Grande” coffee cup atop the outdoor patio table of a Starbucks café when I looked up to see a man seated in a corner, talking loudly and looking up into a cell phone he was holding in his extended hand.
“Turn away from sin, brothers and sisters”, he said, “for only hellfire and abomination awaits you. This is the consuming fire that never stops and is never quenched, because it feeds on your sins and addictions. No one can save you but the Lord, our Holy Father. There is no Purgatory, no halfway house to rescue you when you die. There is no second chance. If you die in sin you will burn. There is no salvation without the Father. The Pope is an abomination! There is only ONE Holy Father, and that is God. So repent my brothers and sisters, forsake your sinful ways! Put down your drugs, put away your pornography and lascivious thoughts, and accept our Lord, Jesus Christ as your God and Savior.”
The seated man delivering this soliloquy appeared to be middle aged, wearing a ridiculous red sun visor with black printing all over it. “UTUBE” in big, bold capital letters adorned the crown, with the remainder of his internet address written in smaller letters on the bill. He wore dark sunglasses, on a world-weary, unshaven face, and he was dressed in a blue surgical tunic with more handwritten information, giving his phone number and email address. When he finally ended his solitary address with a perfunctory “Thank you”, I quickly recovered my coffee cup and retreated to another table and chair that was sufficiently removed from him, but not far enough to completely mute his spontaneous outbursts. As this coffee house evangelist put down his cell phone and settled into his chair, greeting customers as they passed, I was able to catch sideway glances of his antics and speculate about him. He was a homeless man, I decided, and a self-ordained preacher with a YouTube blog filled with short homilies and biblical aphorisms. A revelation of some sort had changed his life and given him the mission of publicizing, preaching, and cajoling endless streams of Starbucks customers to repent and accept Jesus into their lives. I also realized that I was becoming increasingly annoyed. I had come to Starbucks after dropping my car off for service at a nearby Subaru dealership, and was looking forward to a quiet hour or so of reading and sipping my coffee until the work was done. Instead a ceaseless string of greetings and religious platitudes, an unsolicited litany of welcome and goodwill, were harassing me:
“Good morning sister, God bless you”.
“Good morning miss”.
“God loves you, brother”.
“Have a good day sir”.
“How are you today miss?”
“Beautiful day today miss, God bless you”.
“Christ is our protection”.
“If I see a crime, I report it”.
I found it hard to concentrate on the book I was reading. His loud words were distracting, his friendliness annoying, and his behaviors were eliciting odd looks from other customers, and ridiculous thoughts on my part:
“Is he panhandling or just crazy? Is he trying to compliment these women or hoping to pick them up? Good luck if they’re pickup lines, because one look at his getup would turn any self-respecting woman into a pillar of salt. Was he anti-Catholic with his Purgatory and Pope remarks? And what did that crack about reporting crimes mean?”
In frustration I put away my book and searched my backpack for something else to do to take my attention away from this man. The situation reminded me of a term sometimes used in my wife’s family – The Greaney Curse.
Curses usually involve the supernatural invocation of some form of penalty or suffering on a person or family for the wrongs done by an ancestor. These curses usually drive members of the family into depression, murder, or suicide. That is the dynamic of a curse, its cause and effect. It is “a solemn utterance intended to invoke a supernatural power to inflict harm or punishment on someone or something”. The famous curses I recalled quickly were Edgar Allen Poe’s story and movie called The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Mummy’s Curse, with Lon Chaney Jr. Both movies involved punishments meted out on the offspring of the originally accursed person. It always struck me as unfair, that the sins of the father were passed on to his children, and they were forced to suffer the consequences for acts they never committed. However the Greaney Curse was different from other curses, because it turned this definition on its head, and became a strategy for coping.
The Greaney Curse was the belief that all members of my wife’s Irish-American family were doomed to pay the price for some long-forgotten, ancestral sin, and forced to suffer the eternal punishment of consistently sitting next to the wrong person on a airplane, dealing with the wrong person in an airport security line, or sitting next to, or in front of, the wrong person in a theatre. Surprisingly, this curse never led to depression or despair. Instead, when it was spotted and identified by a family member, they turned it into comedy. The annoying situation was perceived as being SO absurd and SO ridiculous, that it became the seed of a story that had to be shared, compared, and repeated by siblings, aunts, and cousins. I’ve been at countless family parties and get-togethers when one recitation of a cursed situation sparked hours of laughter and mirth, with everyone trying to top each other with their worst manifestation. It was through the lens of the Greaney Curse that I began seeing this coffee house evangelist in a new light. The situation certainly did not reach the level of being a true qualifier for the curse. I was not trapped in a plane or in a theatre with this man. I had choices. I could move or I could leave – or I could see him as someone other than an irritant or nuisance. So I decided to observe him more closely. My rummaging about in my backpack had unearthed an old Moleskine travel journal that I had used to note observations and essay ideas, beginning in 2007. My last entry was dated July 11, 2008. With an unexpected burst of writing energy, I turned to a blank page in the journal and began writing down more observations of this man and my subsequent reactions.
My “Utube” friend was now holding open a student composition book and showing it to customers seated inside the café, looking out through the large plate glass window. When he caught me peering at him, he turned the opened notebook in my direction so I could read the words printed in big block letters:
“THE BIG EARTHQUAKE IS COMING, CALIFORNIA”.
“THANK GOD FOR COMPUTERS AND COUNSELING”.
Chuckling as I turned away to write these words down in my journal, I heard him resume his litany of biblical quotes and proverbs, each ending with the refrain of “Thank you”. When I looked again to see whom he was addressing, I discovered that he was actually speaking or looking into his cell phone, as if recording each message. Was this a clever strategy to loudly proclaim the gospel without appearing completely crazy?
All this time, everyone in the vicinity of the patio preacher ignored him, until a short man wearing a white t-shirt and faded blue jeans finally challenged him in a brief verbal exchange trading biblical quotes. He lost. The preacher was too quick, too dogmatic, and too confident. He simply overwhelmed the t-shirted man with passage after passage, some sounding suspiciously more like proverbs than authentic quotations. He ended this encounter with a line from the Gospel of John:
“Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. No one can come to the Father except through him.”
“Do you really think that’s true?” the white-shirted man asked, conceding defeat with a shake of his head.
“I don’t just believe it, brother,” the preacher concluded, “I know it’s true.”
Who are these men, I reflected to myself, who frequent Starbucks and other cafés, spouting biblical phrases and religious platitudes? Are they homeless bums, lazy panhandlers, or undercover saints? At one point in his exchange with the t-shirted man, the biblical blogger had admitted to being “20 years sober”. Was he a recovering alcoholic who experienced his spiritual awakening upon reaching the 12th Step of AA and was now carrying the message of God to others? Was this his mission? I couldn’t answer any of these questions, but I suspected that to write him off with a simple generalization was too easy, too dismissive, and too smugly wrong. Instead, I found myself asking some final questions: “Was this man more than an annoying encounter? Was he a ‘messenger’ of some kind?
In the course of a day, I take note of no one in particular, except for people I already know. Sure I look at the men, women, and children around me, but I tend to dismiss them with little more than a glance, and write them off with a single descriptive word: big, young, old, cute, tall, or short. Which people break through our cloud of indifference? Well obviously this unknown “crazy man” did. He might be odd, but some of his words rang true, and he certainly got me to write. He reminded me of an old TV series we watched in the early 2000’s called Joan of Arcadia with Amber Tamblyn, Joe Mantegna, and Mary Steenburgen. In the show, Joan, a high school teenager, weekly encountered a different manifestation of God, each with a different message. God appeared to her as a skater, a Goth, a cute boy, an old lady, a garbage man, a dumpster diver, and as a Nigerian doctor. More than the messages in each episode, what I found most valuable was the idea that we all have the potential of daily encounters with God, or with God’s messengers. We simply have to wake up, look beyond our prejudices and presumptions, and notice them.
As I made my way back to the dealership to recover my car, I thought back on my encounter at Starbucks and considered what I was leaving with. I had arrived with the intention of reading a book, and I left with the desire to write a story about a stranger. He was a gift.
And would you call it to his face?
If you were faced with Him in all His glory,
What would you ask if you had just one question?
What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us,
Just a stranger on the bus,
Trying to make His way home.
(One of Us: Written by Eric Bazilian, and sung by Joan Osborne – 1995)
“Oh God”, I said to myself, easing into the patio chair near the corner of Burbank and Van Nuys Boulevard. “I’m next to a crazy man!”
I had just set down my “Grande” coffee cup atop the outdoor patio table of a Starbucks café when I looked up to see a man seated in a corner, talking loudly and looking up into a cell phone he was holding in his extended hand.
“Turn away from sin, brothers and sisters”, he said, “for only hellfire and abomination awaits you. This is the consuming fire that never stops and is never quenched, because it feeds on your sins and addictions. No one can save you but the Lord, our Holy Father. There is no Purgatory, no halfway house to rescue you when you die. There is no second chance. If you die in sin you will burn. There is no salvation without the Father. The Pope is an abomination! There is only ONE Holy Father, and that is God. So repent my brothers and sisters, forsake your sinful ways! Put down your drugs, put away your pornography and lascivious thoughts, and accept our Lord, Jesus Christ as your God and Savior.”
The seated man delivering this soliloquy appeared to be middle aged, wearing a ridiculous red sun visor with black printing all over it. “UTUBE” in big, bold capital letters adorned the crown, with the remainder of his internet address written in smaller letters on the bill. He wore dark sunglasses, on a world-weary, unshaven face, and he was dressed in a blue surgical tunic with more handwritten information, giving his phone number and email address. When he finally ended his solitary address with a perfunctory “Thank you”, I quickly recovered my coffee cup and retreated to another table and chair that was sufficiently removed from him, but not far enough to completely mute his spontaneous outbursts. As this coffee house evangelist put down his cell phone and settled into his chair, greeting customers as they passed, I was able to catch sideway glances of his antics and speculate about him. He was a homeless man, I decided, and a self-ordained preacher with a YouTube blog filled with short homilies and biblical aphorisms. A revelation of some sort had changed his life and given him the mission of publicizing, preaching, and cajoling endless streams of Starbucks customers to repent and accept Jesus into their lives. I also realized that I was becoming increasingly annoyed. I had come to Starbucks after dropping my car off for service at a nearby Subaru dealership, and was looking forward to a quiet hour or so of reading and sipping my coffee until the work was done. Instead a ceaseless string of greetings and religious platitudes, an unsolicited litany of welcome and goodwill, were harassing me:
“Good morning sister, God bless you”.
“Good morning miss”.
“God loves you, brother”.
“Have a good day sir”.
“How are you today miss?”
“Beautiful day today miss, God bless you”.
“Christ is our protection”.
“If I see a crime, I report it”.
I found it hard to concentrate on the book I was reading. His loud words were distracting, his friendliness annoying, and his behaviors were eliciting odd looks from other customers, and ridiculous thoughts on my part:
“Is he panhandling or just crazy? Is he trying to compliment these women or hoping to pick them up? Good luck if they’re pickup lines, because one look at his getup would turn any self-respecting woman into a pillar of salt. Was he anti-Catholic with his Purgatory and Pope remarks? And what did that crack about reporting crimes mean?”
In frustration I put away my book and searched my backpack for something else to do to take my attention away from this man. The situation reminded me of a term sometimes used in my wife’s family – The Greaney Curse.
Curses usually involve the supernatural invocation of some form of penalty or suffering on a person or family for the wrongs done by an ancestor. These curses usually drive members of the family into depression, murder, or suicide. That is the dynamic of a curse, its cause and effect. It is “a solemn utterance intended to invoke a supernatural power to inflict harm or punishment on someone or something”. The famous curses I recalled quickly were Edgar Allen Poe’s story and movie called The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Mummy’s Curse, with Lon Chaney Jr. Both movies involved punishments meted out on the offspring of the originally accursed person. It always struck me as unfair, that the sins of the father were passed on to his children, and they were forced to suffer the consequences for acts they never committed. However the Greaney Curse was different from other curses, because it turned this definition on its head, and became a strategy for coping.
The Greaney Curse was the belief that all members of my wife’s Irish-American family were doomed to pay the price for some long-forgotten, ancestral sin, and forced to suffer the eternal punishment of consistently sitting next to the wrong person on a airplane, dealing with the wrong person in an airport security line, or sitting next to, or in front of, the wrong person in a theatre. Surprisingly, this curse never led to depression or despair. Instead, when it was spotted and identified by a family member, they turned it into comedy. The annoying situation was perceived as being SO absurd and SO ridiculous, that it became the seed of a story that had to be shared, compared, and repeated by siblings, aunts, and cousins. I’ve been at countless family parties and get-togethers when one recitation of a cursed situation sparked hours of laughter and mirth, with everyone trying to top each other with their worst manifestation. It was through the lens of the Greaney Curse that I began seeing this coffee house evangelist in a new light. The situation certainly did not reach the level of being a true qualifier for the curse. I was not trapped in a plane or in a theatre with this man. I had choices. I could move or I could leave – or I could see him as someone other than an irritant or nuisance. So I decided to observe him more closely. My rummaging about in my backpack had unearthed an old Moleskine travel journal that I had used to note observations and essay ideas, beginning in 2007. My last entry was dated July 11, 2008. With an unexpected burst of writing energy, I turned to a blank page in the journal and began writing down more observations of this man and my subsequent reactions.
My “Utube” friend was now holding open a student composition book and showing it to customers seated inside the café, looking out through the large plate glass window. When he caught me peering at him, he turned the opened notebook in my direction so I could read the words printed in big block letters:
“THE BIG EARTHQUAKE IS COMING, CALIFORNIA”.
“THANK GOD FOR COMPUTERS AND COUNSELING”.
Chuckling as I turned away to write these words down in my journal, I heard him resume his litany of biblical quotes and proverbs, each ending with the refrain of “Thank you”. When I looked again to see whom he was addressing, I discovered that he was actually speaking or looking into his cell phone, as if recording each message. Was this a clever strategy to loudly proclaim the gospel without appearing completely crazy?
All this time, everyone in the vicinity of the patio preacher ignored him, until a short man wearing a white t-shirt and faded blue jeans finally challenged him in a brief verbal exchange trading biblical quotes. He lost. The preacher was too quick, too dogmatic, and too confident. He simply overwhelmed the t-shirted man with passage after passage, some sounding suspiciously more like proverbs than authentic quotations. He ended this encounter with a line from the Gospel of John:
“Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. No one can come to the Father except through him.”
“Do you really think that’s true?” the white-shirted man asked, conceding defeat with a shake of his head.
“I don’t just believe it, brother,” the preacher concluded, “I know it’s true.”
Who are these men, I reflected to myself, who frequent Starbucks and other cafés, spouting biblical phrases and religious platitudes? Are they homeless bums, lazy panhandlers, or undercover saints? At one point in his exchange with the t-shirted man, the biblical blogger had admitted to being “20 years sober”. Was he a recovering alcoholic who experienced his spiritual awakening upon reaching the 12th Step of AA and was now carrying the message of God to others? Was this his mission? I couldn’t answer any of these questions, but I suspected that to write him off with a simple generalization was too easy, too dismissive, and too smugly wrong. Instead, I found myself asking some final questions: “Was this man more than an annoying encounter? Was he a ‘messenger’ of some kind?
In the course of a day, I take note of no one in particular, except for people I already know. Sure I look at the men, women, and children around me, but I tend to dismiss them with little more than a glance, and write them off with a single descriptive word: big, young, old, cute, tall, or short. Which people break through our cloud of indifference? Well obviously this unknown “crazy man” did. He might be odd, but some of his words rang true, and he certainly got me to write. He reminded me of an old TV series we watched in the early 2000’s called Joan of Arcadia with Amber Tamblyn, Joe Mantegna, and Mary Steenburgen. In the show, Joan, a high school teenager, weekly encountered a different manifestation of God, each with a different message. God appeared to her as a skater, a Goth, a cute boy, an old lady, a garbage man, a dumpster diver, and as a Nigerian doctor. More than the messages in each episode, what I found most valuable was the idea that we all have the potential of daily encounters with God, or with God’s messengers. We simply have to wake up, look beyond our prejudices and presumptions, and notice them.
As I made my way back to the dealership to recover my car, I thought back on my encounter at Starbucks and considered what I was leaving with. I had arrived with the intention of reading a book, and I left with the desire to write a story about a stranger. He was a gift.
Curse
Date: 2015-08-21 06:49 pm (UTC)Thanks Tony for clarity!
RE: Curse
Date: 2015-08-21 07:49 pm (UTC)