I had just come from a really uplifting, substantive, nuanced conversation over coffee with a young man who is brimming with ideas and passion to bring God’s love to the poor, underserved and overlooked on our city’s largely minority southeast side, when I came upon the street preacher. But more about him in a minute.
A black man who grew up in the Chicago projects and didn’t expect to live beyond 20, my friend is now nearing 30, with a wonderful wife and young daughter, a thriving college ministry on the local university campus, and a heart to bring God’s message of hope and peace to the people who need it most. He talks of putting tutors in the local elementary school, advocating for people who struggle with housing and getting enough food, and building up local leaders. His zeal is infectious; a tall guy with broad shoulders, he leans forward when he gets excited (which is often), his eyes gleaming bright, and he speaks with the poetry of a born preacher, calling the loose federation of friends and supporters of God’s vision for the city’s poor the “brown and down.” “We’re either brown, or we’re down with our brown brothers and sisters,” he says, smiling widely.
I left the meeting feeling uplifted and buzzing with excitement to see where my friend’s desire to serve God takes him in the coming months and years. I left, dare I say it, feeling proud to be a Christian (though one who tends to run blazing hot and arctic cold) and to see what the Good News—in good hands—might look like.
And then, there was the street preacher.
As a university town, my city is pretty liberal and accepting of all manner of eccentricities and eccentrics. There was the homeless man festooned in a rainbow assortment of clothes, buttons with slogans and a most awesome bowler hat who called himself “Chicago” and wandered downtown one summer making friends with everyone he met. The woman who played the only three songs she apparently knew, and badly, on the xylophone under my office window day in and day out for most of another summer. Another woman a few weeks ago who stood silently, in full geisha regalia, for an entire day, bowing to offer a slip of paper with a fortune in exchange for coins dropped into a wooden box at her feet, never explaining what she was up to. An attorney who dresses up each day like an early 20th century dandy, as if every day were Halloween.
Occasionally on popular bar-hopping nights for students in the full throes of the school semester, a guy with a Bible will stand on a corner muttering condemnation and hellfire to the bemused passersby. But this was something new, something different.
First, the preacher set up shop in the middle of downtown, in the middle of the day, in the middle of a workweek. An assistant had set up an elaborate sound system in a space used for family-friendly concerts in the summer. Christian music—the bland, forgettable, repetitive, emotionally overwrought variety frequently heard on music stations with “life” or “joy” in the call sign—blared out of large speakers wrapped in plastic sheeting to protect them against steady, gray, autumn drizzle. Love songs about Jesus and heaven pounded out of the amped up speakers, rattling the windows of nearby shops and businesses and prompted people to give the space wide berth to protect their hearing and nerves. After about 30 minutes of this, and without lowering the volume a single decibel, the minister stepped up with a microphone, a heavyset man in a black trench coat and fedora, and in a booming, strained voice began—well, as near as I could tell, began preaching. You couldn’t actually hear many of his words, as he competed with his own music. But the lilt and timber and familiar sing-song cadence of a tent revivalist, the occasional drawn out “yes jay-susssss,” made it clear this guy was out to win souls for the Lord.
It went over about as well as you might expect. Those who didn’t glare at him for disturbing the peace--and I can’t overstate how invasive the blaring music felt in the relatively small space of the pedestrian mall--simply ignored him. Whatever he thought he was accomplishing, whatever fever dreams told him to deliver the message of salvation in this particular way on this particular day, he was really just confirming a caricature of all that’s wrong with modern, Western, polemical Christianity. Unlike my young friend, he was making the Good News sound like bad news: like hate, anger, judgment. Like a threat with a gun to the head.
I mention all this because I’m at a precarious point in my own faith, which after a difficult divorce last year, has felt like so much play-acting and wishful thinking. Somewhat inadvertently, my church played a part in tipping over the first domino that started the end of a 19-year marriage. I prayed to God again and again to keep my wife and me together. But for some very complicated reasons, it wasn’t to be, and I went from bereft, to furious (with the situation, with my ex-wife, with God), to simply not caring anymore. In the span of a few short months I lost a wife and marriage, an intact family, a church community, and my faith.
A spiritual person by nature (and a neurotic one, too), I’ve practiced Buddhist meditation and mindfulness the past few months, and it’s been incredibly beneficial. By sitting in silence for five, fifteen or thirty minutes most mornings, focusing on my in-breaths and out-breaths, and observing thoughts and feelings that arise without attaching narratives to them (my life is awful, I’m a bad person, everyone hates me), I’ve stretched my capacity to be at ease when I begin feeling groundless or the energy in the people around me gets a little weird or trying. A stub toe is a minor pain, but it’s less likely to be proof that I’m a klutz, that I’m uncoordinated, unloveable (believe me, my mind can go to the worst case scenario in the blink of an eye).
And yet, that familiar tug, that beckoning whisper so unlike the ranting of the street preacher, that invitation to come back home. A recent series of “signs” (an invitation to support my friend in his local mission work, to serve on the board of a new non-profit that seeks to serve Africa). Above all, a year after my divorce, the feeling that it’s time to move on, to stand up at last, to figure out how I want to spend what remains of my life, to use what remains of my strength, my mind, my love.
But I know going home won't be easy, and going back to the community where my marriage's deconstruction began may prove, ultimately, impossible. The conflagration of the past year has left me tender, raw, stripped down and with little interest in or capacity for theater, magical thinking, or clap-happy triumphalism. The real good news, when I think about it, is this: that wasn't Jesus' gig, either.
Maybe there's hope after all.
