The vacant city lot was dry and barren with nothing on it except for the body of a man lying on his back. It was over 90 degrees Fahrenheit with the late morning sun beating down with the ferocity of a desert climate... and yet it was Canada in July. One of my traveling companions avoided glancing to the side where the man was. I pleaded with him: we have to stop. He responded dismissively that it was "just a bum." And that was when we parted company in more ways than one.
I walked toward the man, scanning his form to see if there were any weapons that could be used against me. Work boots tattered, navy blue work pants, and a heavy barn jacket over his shirt, he laid there motionless. I studied his face, a strange bronze-copper color, with beads of sweat across his forehead. He had a beard, but I could not tell his age. I wondered if he was an indigenous Canadian. He did not look like any race I had ever seen before. As I studied him quickly, I stated the obvious to my traveling companion who was now a few feet away from me: "we have to see if he is alive." And so my friend kicked his foot.
Yeah. No kidding. I shouted: "Don't kick him. Just watch to see if his chest is rising and falling." (I may not be a medical genius, but I think that is a basic barometer of life that is a little more humane than kicking him.) The guy appeared to be breathing but did not stir. He did not gasp or flinch a muscle of his hand or anything. I turned and sprinted to the building next door: a laundromat.
Behind the manager's counter of the laundromat, a thirty-something woman chatted with a man in a light, disengaged way. I think the technical term for it is "shooting the breeze" but in any country it really was kind of just ordinary flirting. I was out of breath a bit from my sprint as I burst through the door, reluctant travel companion behind me and still a nonparticipant in the errand of mercy. I forced out my words: "Do you speak English?" If she did, she decided it would be a bit of fun to pretend she did not.
With my thumb and pinky I made the universal symbol for telephone ... which is also the Hawaiian symbol for "hang loose, the waves are great today." I know NO FRENCH. Whatever I had from a brief unit in Junior High had completely vacated my brain. But I took a stab at Spench, my basic Spanish with a French accent, thinking she might understand "Policia," - plus, hand gesture for phone - "Call Policia." She could not have possibly been less interested in my earnest plea. She smirked at me like I was a fool. A man at the dryers turned and said, "can I help?" I asked him to please call the police for the man outside. I took him out and pointed at the semi-lifeless form on the dirt. He said he would take care of it and I left it with him.
I was, frankly, a little rattled at this entire interchange. But almost more disturbing than that was my companion's lack of interest in the whole business. You see, for the past few days as a small group of us traveled to a major Canadian religious shrine, he and I were having an ongoing, shall we call it a "linguistics disagreement." When we had arrived at the shrine on Saturday, we stood before the biography of Brother Andre Bessette which was engraved on a large bronze slate... in French. My companions were bi-lingual Spanish-English. I am an English-as-first-language with a smattering of education in conversational Spanish, Biblical Greek, musical Latin, and swear words in Polish. So my insistence that he stand with me and we try to decipher the biography which was in French was met with: "I don't speak French." I countered with: "I don't either, but Spanish is a romance-language and some of the words you can actually SEE are similar." He wasn't buying it. He was deeply religious and didn't give a rat's bum what the biography said. Why were we at this shrine anyways?
And THAT is the under-pinning of the Sunday morning encounter with the guy on the ground. We had actually JUST walked out of Mass and the Gospel was the story of the Good Samaritan. I understood that much from looking at the printed French gospel passage in the missalette: The Good Samaritan helped a man he found alongside a road who was beaten up and left to die. I had heard this story many, many times in English so I knew the point. Religious people walked right by the man in the story. A priest, a rabbi, a someone else, all walked by and left the guy - it read like the beginning of a golf joke. But, truly, who was the "someone else" in the story?
When I saw that guy on the ground and insisted we respond, I was making sure that I wasn't the "someone else" who walked on by. Here was the moment to respond. I may have missed others accidentally, I missed at least two because I was afraid to get involved, but this one I would NOT miss. Over the years since then, it has given me cause to ponder the great quote of G.K. Chesterton:
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.
It has been found difficult, and left untried."
It seems to me, some people spend a lot of time praying and don't ever take the vehicle out of neutral. And as someone once quipped: "Even God can't steer a parked car." We wouldn't mind if God used us to preach to the nations, to do healing crusades, to drive out demons, to have television shows and radio spots. We wouldn't mind that at all. And yet, He often just needs us to be present to the moment of need that is before us. He needs us to not live like Christian zombies going through the motions of devout life, without ever really kicking it into gear.
Perhaps that is radical. But that is the Message we were given. And it changed the known world when it first began to be lived out loud two thousand years ago. May we always have the courage to do the right thing the first time. May God have mercy on us for the times we fail, and may the angels cheer us when we succeed in being His children and doing what He would do for those in need around us.
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