loneliness and fear, why would you dare to hope? When the music of hope is drowned out by the noise of a death march, why not shut the music off forever?
Words do it no justice, perhaps because the hum of hope is gentle and healing. The purr of a harmonious calling. The early resonance of a soundtrack for binding up the brokenhearted in which the hurt of hope can be soothed.
But just as the splendor of music can be diminished by simple disregard and disrespect, hope can be grotesquely distorted and warped. Nothing squelches hope like an onlooker’s arrogance and pride. Nothing mugs hope like lukewarm pity. And nothing spoils hope like ignorance. All too often, those of us who have been spared the unthinkable tragedies of chronic abuse, isolation, addiction and rejection expect simple answers from those who have experienced these incredible hurts. “What happened? What will fix it? And what will it cost?” We want them to sum up the problems and give us the answers. Waiting in the wings for the answers we like, with timelines we deem reasonable. Answers we can claim and endorse when they fit our values and agendas, when in fact the true hum of hope includes the silent and spectacular victories of simply making it through another day.
Hidden in the cloak of daily survival and existence is where hope plays its most significant role. In the fatigue and discouragement of all-day-ness and every-day-ness—this is when hope is the anchor that keeps life from being swept away. We cannot wait until lives become epic, movie-ending creations. It’s so easy to exploit someone else’s life story by manipulating it into a nice neat package. A package we want boxed, bowed and presented without ever having been near their pain or the battle that, more often than not, secretly rages on. Counting on people to simply rise up and start over like cats with nine lives.
But cats only have one life, and hope doesn’t work that way. Real hope transcends all measurement only when we share in it. Not when we simply attempt to watch it magically occur in someone’s life, or wish for it from a distance, but when we participate in it. Not when we simply hear the humming, but when we hum along.
Hope, says Webster, is “The virtue by which a Christian looks with confidence for God’s grace in this world and glory in the next.”
My heart hears it like this:
Confidence: the reshaping of hope from a passive, wishful notion to its rightful place; the pitch-perfect bass line of hope’s song.
Grace: the sweet extension of hope borne out of the brokenness that each of us owns; the captivating melody of hope’s song.
Glory: the certainty that God has an astounding plan and celebration that reaches far beyond what we can even begin to fathom; the thrilling crescendo of hope’s song.
Confidence, grace and glory that include all boys and girls, men and women; built on the firm foundation of being in relationship with the life-giver. The very place where I believe God extended himself so that I could know for sure that hope is real was in a homeless baby born in a stable, who grew to promise the hope of abundant life, before he sacrificed his own. Abundant life is without a doubt the most undervalued and unappreciated promise ever made.
Even as I share these thoughts at the outset of this book, I fear two things. That those who call themselves Christians or “Jesus Followers” will assume this book is just for them. And that those who don’t will assume it is for someone else.
But this is not so. What follows is extended to all for consideration, deliberation and reflection: those who believe there is no God, those who hate God, those who struggle with God, those who believe in another one, and those who believe in him as Abba Father alike, convicted by an incredible remark made by Mahatma Gandhi: “If Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.”
In spite of my own astounding inadequacies as a Christian and a human being, my faith is based solely on Jesus Christ. Not on Christians. Not a single one. And while I believe he was and is the Son of God, many of those I know who think he was just a great man can’t help but agree that he is a role model beyond compare.
Ultimately I believe in a God who is as relevant in the gutter as he is in the church. As miraculous in the ditch as he is in the chapel. And as beautiful in a rat-infested alleyway as he is in a glass cathedral. Anything else is hopeless. And nothing else makes sense.
I have no theological degrees or formal religious studies. I attended two community colleges in unrelated studies, and graduated from one. My beliefs and theories are born out of an education I had not anticipated as a young man: sneaking through crack-houses, weeping at hospital bedsides, strolling through alleyways after midnight, gigging at biker rallies, empathizing through prison bars, waiting at bus terminals, explaining myself in police stations, laughing beneath bridges, tripping through abandoned buildings, peeking into squats and shanties, leaning into gullies and ditches, serving at a camp for deaf children, living as a family man, and more than four decades of taking in Sunday mornings from the first five pews of a very decent, century-old church at the crossroads of a volatile community.
While I have occasionally altered names and locations to guard identities, these pages reveal snapshots of real times and places, bodies and faces, sonnets and odes that could easily be lost in the shadows of a population too hurried to notice. Fragmented glimpses of fragmented lives, where hope is anything but shiny and bright. Unpolished. Crushed. Twisted. Bent hope.
But somewhere in the wrinkles of every brief account, hope continues to hum. It continues to breathe. Often shallow breaths at best; even the faintest final breath, whispering one more note in the music of the soul.
Bent hope—inviting us all to be part of the music.
1. A Kid and a Coffee Cup: December 2005
“Hope is a passion for what is possible.”
I should think the last image in Søren Kierkegaard’s mind when he wrote this statement more than a century and a half ago was a panicked boy swimming in the sewer water of the most multicultural city in the world. And still the philosopher’s words were undeniably, even if unexpectedly, a tailor-made fit for the boy, the time and the place.
Thomas’s body was covered in sludge. Long dark trails of brown, clumps of black, and a glaze of translucent yellow. His shirt and socks were rolled in sopping balls lying next to his curled sneakers. Everything soaked. Everything shriveled and dirty. Ripe with the stench of waste and toxins. High on a flat rock, facing the unfamiliar pool below—a boy, just a boy, who had lost everything.
The summer of 2005 went on record as the hottest in decades. Showers and breezes were elusive at best. Far away from the mid-winter gasps of street sympathizers—“Oh, the cold, this cold, surely this deadly cold is the worst of all worsts!” That is the pebble in the shoe of every mind that stops to consider homelessness across Canada and in the northern United States. Around the beginning of February, people who ask me nothing about my homeless friends all year long will inevitably ask, “How do they survive? How do they bear it?” And no doubt, it takes the fortitude and will of a prize-winning bull to push through it.
But lost on most people, more often than not, is what it takes to survive the heat. Not just heat…but inner-city heat. Heat that not only comes from above, but from below. The sandwich heat that traps a body between the sky’s ball of fire at full volume from above and the hellish pavement and concrete from below. Endless baking pavement. Endless simmering concrete. Endless heat that refuses to let up. Captured in the day and stored in the solar tar by night.
This was the oppressive heat that drove Thomas to the Don River. One of the few stretches anywhere near the city core that reveals more green than grey. A seam through the
