The Golden Ass

Today, I was sitting in my car on the side of the road preparing to see a patient...

I won't soon forget the image in my passenger side view mirror of a person lying face down and motionless, one shoulder in the grass and another on the sidewalk. The image of his head turned to one side so that his nose was face down into the dirt impresses me with that choice that comes to us in the awful daring of a moment's surrender, when I am confronted with the fantastical nature of imagining myself to be in control. He clearly didn't choose to have his bleeding eye socket laying up against the concrete while his mouth lay open, kissing the dirt.

Though the one or two popping sounds that came out of nowhere just prior that didn't register as anything readily recognizable will probably fade into my memory like their echoes among the government project buildings around me...

We have this falsely reified, stereotyped image of "hard" black, violent males. I remember Harry Grammer telling me about traumatized kids who, when they get out from South Central and into nature, let their guard down after about the third day and start to play in the wonder and grace of openness and vulnerability to what and who is around them.

I likely also won't soon forget, in my side view mirror, the image of this young, black male, in his weakness, blood dripping from his face, putting all of his life into trying to get up on one knee, holding his arms out, palms up, as though not only asking for help from his friend but pleading, from a much deeper place in his very existing, quest-ioning whether he is seen and known. His friend stooped down to at once not know whether to hug or help him. I imagine he didn't mind getting blood on his jacket. Some things fade into unimportance when we're confronted with what really matters.

There's an uncertain openness to the moment when you see the clash of death with life on one knee, vulnerably looking up into the eyes of an equally helpless friend, and your brain hasn't had time to put the pieces together into an ordered scene in which you can make sense of a narratable event.

That moment is like the essence of contemplative prayer. This traumatized kid, his friend and I locking eyes through my passenger side window, both not knowing not only if we're about to get shot too but if that's what's even happening, this is the moment that captures the essence of contemplative prayer. We could not see and didn't know what was, what is, or what is to come.

We were together at the mercy of the event that occurs in that moment of creation when death and life clap together like the sound of an echoing gunshot that will fade out of memory while what will remain will be the image of one with whom the traumatized Son of man identifies moves up on one knee from dead to living, to receive his inheritance.