's wounds

"If God had a face, what would it look like? And would you want to see, if seeing meant that you would have to believe...?" (Joan Osborne)

Let's call him Rothchild. Rothchild is an old man who only sometimes seems infantile. He wears a knitted rainbow toque all seasons of the year and plucks at his prophetic white beard. Maybe you've seen him sailing the streets of Edmonton with his ship of three shopping carts lashed together, piled high with recyclables. A beautiful way to make a living. Yesterday he was navigating his fleet down the steep curve of 101 St, tenacious and systematic, nosing each cart into the bush off the sidewalk, inching them, equal distances apart, closer to the river. One night he came to the shelter and signed for me to fill an empty milk bottle with water. HOT, he scratched on the pavement with his ancient fingernails, cradling the milk jug like a baby. And curled up with it outside the door until the sun rose.

But if you try to give Rothchild a hug, he'll grope you.

Aiden is much younger, perhaps much less hardened. Unlike Rothchild, he still speaks to the world in general. Speaks with a fuzzy lisp because his teeth are so crooked, sometimes flashes a crooked grin. He's so tall he looks like a Roald Dahl character. Lately he's been wearing shorts, for summer days, and long socks, for air-conditioned shelter nights. He pulls them up to his knees to sleep, and always leaves smudges of mud and dried blood on his pillowcases. Aiden's younger sister won the lottery so he buys tickets every day, and communicates his discontent. F---. Why are you people never prepared? -- when we're out of milk and cereal. Yeah, whatever, leave me alone. -- when we're counting him down to morning wake-up. Nice girls' clothes... -- when we're looking through donations for a jacket that'll fit. Last night I did my own share of grumbling and clung to patience, playing solitaire at the same table as him until he conversed in the only way that seems possible these days: Hey, do you guys have a pair of shorts? These ones have a hole.

Oh, Aiden. So much of you is tattered.

Kevin is proud of his scars, boasts of being "white trash." Scares us all, sometimes, with his conspiracy theories -- alien abductions, terrorists everywhere -- and his imaginations of manliness, basically slaughter and rape. I wonder what rampaging music he's plugged into as he rolls his cigarrettes, wonder what wounding was done to him as a young child, to barricade him into these schizoid episodes. Jean Vanier would say Kevin is more true to the logic of his being than I am. Someone stabbed Kevin's sense of value early on, and he's been bleeding self-hatred ever since. I've been shown more love by family and friends than I know what to do with, but instead of freely giving what I've been freely given, I often let that love slide. Nevertheless, there's a clear shine in Kevin's eyes when he talks about his job at Chili's, and I think he just may be the most faithful dishwasher there.

So love can trump logic, even in Kevin.

These are the shuttered, the torn, the crazy faces of God's boys, and I have to believe his healing gleam, even in their wounds. I have to respond to the jagged bits of love that spill out.

For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. (St. John)