The Holy El
Some of the holiest moments for me happen on Chicago El trains–maybe because trains are among the few places that I can’t connect to my voicemail or email, and so I’m forced to pay attention to something besides what’s coming across my Facebook newsfeed.
Most of the time the experiences are little things. I notice the way a man is holding his face in his hands and I wonder what’s going in his life and I feel a discernible nudge to say a silent prayer for him. Or I laugh out loud at a paragraph in a David Sedaris essay and someone asks me, with a smile, “what are you reading?” and we have a short conversation. Or I’m sitting in an extremely smelly seat, it’s wet and moldy and close, the guy next to me is eating a salmon and onion bagel, it’s very uncomfortable, but an old woman opens her purse, takes out a bottle of lotion, and rubs it into her tired hands and in so doing fills the space with a wonderful lavender scent. And I say: thank you God.
Sometimes the experiences render me speechless and make me think differently about ministry. Like the time, a couple summers ago, I was sitting in the catacombs of the city, waiting on the redline train downtown. I’d finished my first meeting of the morning and was on my way north for my next one, and I sat there forever, on a bench in the hot tunnel, waiting, and a man walked down the stairs, disheveled, a few plastic bags on his arms, and I heard him say to himself, It’s so hot down here. Why is it so hot down here? He was walking down the tunnel, and I was praying: please, please, please don’t sit by me. I don’t want to talk. And of course he sits by me, and says hello. I say hello. He says: Are you on your way to work or on your way home from work already? I said, I’m actually between things right now, and he says, almost relieved, Oh, me too, me too. It’s so hard, isn’t it? I mean, sometimes I deliver pizzas in Rogers Park for some money, but I don’t have work now either. If you want, he said, I could put in a good word for you at the pizza place…maybe they need someone else.
That was a holy moment of an entirely different order, when Jesus was talking right to me, out of his poverty, seeing me as a fellow human being and actually caring about how it was going for me.
We all have our shadow sides, and part of mine is that I can live too much inside my own head. I dwell there and worry there and try to fix everything there. But when I can get outside of myself, or better put, when something else gets me outside of myself, I am every so often met with something better than I could ever expect or imagine or manage: the extraordinarily ordinary presence of God. And that presence makes my life so, so much better.
Peace,
Trey
trey@urbanvillagechurch.org