A spirituality for the discarded
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When you're sweaty and muddy after a day in the sun, you won't care where you sit so long as there's shade. That’s the excuse we used, anyway, when my brothers and I plopped down in the gutter in Maunabo, Puerto Rico.
We spent the whole day shoveling and mixing buckets of cement by hand. Guided by a group of skilled local Puerto Ricans, we helped rebuild walls and ramps with a group of lay women and men from a church in DC. Hurricane Maria had hit Maunabo hard 5 years earlier, and families were still rebuilding their homes and their lives.
The summer heat was brutal, and between the flecks of cement and our sweat, our clothes were soaked through and crusted over. By the day's end, all we wanted was a seat. And that was when the gutter found us. The ground was dirty, sure, but so were we.
I often find myself winding up in these neglected places with my brothers, on some vandalized park bench or street-side curb, loitering around sharing some gas station food perhaps or just catching up. But that day in the gutter, tucked away on an island in the Caribbean sea after a hard day’s work, that was magic.
There are those of us who still see beauty in the gutter or the alleyway, in those little tucked-away places that few appreciate or admire. Philip K. Dick (PKD for short) was one such admirer, a sci-fi writer who inspired such movies as Blade Runner and Total Recall. He grappled with questions about empathy, human dignity, even God. He wrote in a letter,
I am myself an outcast, a creature who sees the divine in the trash of the gutter: a sparkle of light in the weeds, a rustle of color - I suddenly sense a Presence that knows me as I know it. [...] Yet I see more, I sense the holy, and I feel awe; I feel the beauty of this trash and these weeds [...] as if I have seen very clearly that God loiters at the busy intersection of the mundane, speaking from rocks and beer cans, discarded debris.
PKD himself lived a somewhat marginal and chaotic life. He struggled with mental illness, hallucinating a giant head in the sky, abused drugs, was married five times, and opened his home to a band of wayward souls and misfits. But in the messiness of life, PKD felt the mysterious presence of God. He explored theology in many of his novels and short stories, even using his friendship with James Pike, a controversial Episcopal bishop, as the basis of his book The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
There is something Franciscan about seeing God in the little messy things of life. 800 years ago, Francis of Assisi wanted to be an outcast too, a "lesser" brother to be exact. But Francis had to learn how to appreciate the "lesser" things. When he was young, the sight of lepers would be enough to make Francis vomit. But when Francis began taking the gospel seriously, he embraced the lepers and lived among them, turning what was once bitter for him into sweetness.
I don’t think Francis or PKD were romantacizing the poor and the outcast. I think they were seeing beyond their judgments. Seeing through their own deceptions, past their prejudice. PKD believed that God spoke through the trash and weeds, through the things most people often ignore. And certainly for Francis, embracing those people or places that we disdain or fear and recognizing their inherent beauty is not just a spiritual exercise but an act of justice.
Wasting time in the gutter with my brothers was by no means an extraordinary act of charity. It was something simpler, more base. In those few blissful moments of rest, we brought laughter into an otherwise deserted place.
There are people all over the world who are in a gutter of their own, who need a friend to pass the time with, a sandwich or snack to share. What could it mean for our communities if we were all that presence for someone else? If we started looking for the beauty in every stranger and dared to travel down every road? Maybe we would find God there, looking for us too.
Tyler Grudi is a Franciscan Friar ministering in NYC
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