Station 6: Veronica Helps Jesus

Lord, live in me, act in me, love in me. And not in me alone, in all of us — so that we may reveal no more your bloody but your glorious face on Earth. — Clarence Enzler, “Everyone’s Way of the Cross”

I HAVE SEEN THE FACE OF CHRIST — in the aged face of a kindly black woman who answered the door when I was selling door to door in a neighborhood of grinding poverty in Oakland. I prepared to give her my pitch, but she looked with such unexpected and simple tenderness into my eyes that I could not try to make her want something she didn’t need. She looked past my salesman’s veneer, and in her beatific smile I was naked before the devastating love of Christ Himself. It was as if she took attentive, simple joy in my existence, and saw me as God sees me. I mumbled something about how whatever it was I was selling wasn’t something she needed, how I was sorry to have bothered her. I felt like weeping.

I have seen the face of Christ — in the tears and simple, terrible anguish of an 11-year-old kid whose best friend has been killed by a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting. He could only say, over and over, as if saying it would bring his friend back: “He was my friend … he was my friend …”

I have seen the face of Christ in the tent cities of the recently homeless, formerly middle-class people learning to break the spell of isolation and alienation they had accepted without question in the suburbs, who realized — at a terrible price — the fundamental interconnectedness we all share.

And I have seen the face of Christ in the face of a homeless man to whom I had promised an extra cup of Kool-Aid after the meal hall shut its doors. I remembered and took him his cup. The look of gratitude on his face at having been remembered is something that broke my heart. My only thought was, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof …”

I am convinced that the most devastating kind of human brokenness comes from inventing a “them” that is apart from “us.” There is no “them” — not really — but there is most assuredly an “us.” Every fellow human on this Earth, no matter how remote geographically or ideologically, is “us.”

We Americans spend our days immersed in lies. Advertising is ubiquitous. On the train on the way to work, on billboards beside the highway and on television, radio, the Web, magazines, newspapers are advertisements filled with lies designed to tell us that some product they are pitching can fill the emptiness in our souls. Some of us make our living writing copy for those ads. Most of us, to one degree or another, buy into the basic idea being peddled, that the product being pitched can fill the hole in our hearts that can only be filled by deep, selfless, overflowing Agape Love — love that can be most fully realized and perfected in the context of a genuine and loving community.

What do you think is the cumulative effect of the immersive mendacity that fills our eyes and ears and minds every day? That says if we buy a luxury car, have a kitchen that features stainless steel appliances, granite counter-tops and a professional-looking grill, have that kitchen located in a house in a coveted section of an “exclusive” neighborhood, then we can finally find the contentment we’ve been aching for? (Real estate ads, incidentally, can read like a veritable how-to book for achieving alienation from your brothers and sisters.)

This whole edifice exists because, at some fundamental level, you and I have built it — some of us directly, most of us by just going along without meaningful protest or objection, afraid to question (perhaps even to ourselves) the virtue of a system that is our only realistic way of making a living.

Well, here’s a reason for hope: What you and I have built, you and I can change. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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