New Testament Reading—Mark 1: 1-8
The first story the acclaimed writer Lee Stringer wrote was about love. The story begins in a cluttered apartment. A man is trying to get pills from a friend. The pills are to be the means for his suicide. He wants to end his own life before the AIDS virus does it for him. He eventually gets the pills from his friend and goes to a park where he lies down to “fade away on the grass.” The man, however, begins to feel a sense of guilt. He begins to feel the need “to apologize to the world because he has to die in public.” Being homeless has left him with no other choice. He regrets that “someone will have to come along and pick up” his dead body. His sense of regret is doubled as he thinks of the friend who gave him the pills. The two have never admitted to being friends. They have spent a lot of time together but this time was principally used in “putting each other down.” Nonetheless, the man laments that he will “never have the chance to tell his buddy that he loves him…and that he’ll miss him.”
The remarkable part about this story is not so much the story itself. It is who wrote it and how he wrote it and under what conditions. At the time that Sringer wrote this first story of his entitled “No Place to Call Home,” he himself was homeless. He lived in a narrow crawl space underneath Grand Central Station in New York City. His makeshift abode was filled “with blankets and books.” It was “fortified…with enough cardboard baffles to hold any rats at bay.” This abode that Stringer calls a hole was the starting place for the chain of events that eventually led to his becoming a writer. The story unfolded as follows: Stringer is searching for an implement to run through his crack pipe, so that he can smoke the remaining residue of crack. Frantically, he digs around in his hole impatient for another high. Finally, his hands grasp onto something: a pencil. It does the trick. He has another high.
Some days later he is sitting in his hole again with “nothing to do.” He pulls out his new instrument for more efficient crack smoking. It then dawns on him that under other circumstances this instrument is a pencil. As if seeing it for the first time, he realizes that it has “lead in it…and you can write with the thing.” Immediately, Stringer begins digging around in his hole searching for an old notebook. He finds it, and he starts writing. He gets into it. He writes and writes and as he does so the writing becomes easier and easier. Stringer recalls, “Pretty soon I forget all about hustling and getting a hit. I’m scribbling like a maniac; heart pumping, adrenaline rushing, hands trembling.” He discovers that for him writing is like getting high. Before he knows it, he has written a whole story, the story I just told you.
The story about this story, however, does not end there. After he re-reads and re-writes his composition, he is struck by how much he feels the main character’s pain. He finds himself “practically in tears.” He also feels compelled to visit a friend. He gives his friend the story to read. His friend is the hyper-critical sort. He never likes anything Stringer does, so Stringer anticipates a sarcastic remark. The remark never comes. Instead, his friend finishes reading and quietly places the story down. He then asks Stringer, “Do you love me?”
You see the two friends in the story are a lot like Stringer and his friend. They are used to putting each other down, and now, like the man lying on the grass in the park who realizes his love for his friend, they approach their own moment of truth: Do you love me? Is there a special bond between us as friends? Stringer reflects, “The only real difference between the story and me and my friend, come to think of it, is that I’m not HIV-positive and I’m not dying. But my friend is.” When Stringer’s friend asks whether he loves him, Stringer is overcome with emotion. He never even thought that his friend would care one way or another about whether they had this special bond. In an unpredictable way, Stringer’s story about finding love amid despair leads to a real life story of love found amid the ruins of skid row.
The remarkable impact of the initial pencil-scribbled story on Stringer’s life does not end here either. Stringer takes his story to the office of Street News, a newspaper written and sold by homeless people. They take the story and publish it in their next issue. A few months later Stringer has a regular column in the newspaper. Eventually, he becomes the paper’s editor, and eventually, he becomes a renowned author featured in everything from People magazine to The New York Times, from CBS to NPR.
In his own way, Stringer became a John the Baptist. He came from the unkempt margins of society. He came from the urban wilderness that exists in the subterreanean depths below Grand Central Station. Stringer might not have come proclaiming the same good news that John proclaimed, but he did come proclaiming news that was in another sense not only good but strikingly similar to John the Baptist’s news in its message of a reconciling, forgiving love that brings forth new worlds of being. For Stringer, the tool that facilitated the dawning of this force of love in his life was writing. Stringer would later co-author a book with Kurt Vonnegut that brings forth the theological dimension of this. In their book, the two authors talk about how for them writing is “like shaking hands with God.” In fact, that is the title of their book.
Not all of us are able to literally write our way into a new experience of God’s love in our lives, but I believe there is a larger, metaphorical sense in which all of us are able to do this. All of us are the authors of our lives. Everyday each of us writes out our own story in how we choose to live and make meaning out of life. In his book with Stringer, Vonnegut says that the times he has taught writing whether it be at a writer’s workshop in Iowa or at Harvard he does not look “for people who want to be writers.” He looks “for people who are passionate, who care terribly about something.” If they have these key ingredients, the language and “the right words will arrive.” I like to think that finding our call in life is like this. It is about finding what we are passionate about, what we care terribly about.
Finding our call in life can sometimes be difficult. We can get off on the wrong path amid a society that sends us all sorts of competing messages about what it means to be a success and how to find happiness. At such times, it might be helpful to journey into the wilderness away from it all, to find our inner John the Baptist and get excited about the love God gives to us. We might just find our selves frantically searching and grasping for our pencils and notepads as we re-write our lives.
Not long ago, Eunita and I volunteered to go with Dave and Judy Slocum to Operation Nightwatch in Portland. Operation Nightwatch is a program that provides both food and a worship experience for homeless persons in the downtown area. That night I delighted in watching the volunteers and the guests interact with mutual grace and hospitality. There was Eunita passing out extra muffins to the guests as they laughed and joked together. There was Roger, the pastor, who graciously worked with a mentally ill man in helping him to stay during the worship service without the man bursting into laughter at jokes none of the rest of us could hear. Then, there was Dave and Judy who brought enough homemade chili, salad, bread, and cookies for over thirty persons. In all of these instances, I saw signs of God’s palpable and stirring love in the self-giving passion and care of those present. That experience in what some might call the wilderness of homelessness in Portland was enough to get my own heart beating once again.
So this Advent season, write your own story of love. In doing so, don’t fear the wilderness. Find the rich meanings of life in unlikely places. Encounter the world with open hearts, and soon you will find Jesus arriving with all of the grace and generosity that God’s love brings. Amen.