Time Squared

It was just past the ides of March when I first visited Time Square. I and several other ministry candidates and I surfaced from a subway tunnel and almost immediately found the, sort of, kryptonite spire from which the New Year’s Eve ball drops. If all roads led to Rome in the first century, all fiber-optics lead to New York in the twenty-first. The brick and concrete of every edifice was a mere framework for Time Square’s splendor. There were billboards like giant wall-posters or studded with incandescent bulbs. Buildings were embroidered or even drenched with light, whether stitched with glowing cords of neon or seething with high-quality media. To say the least, Fred (my new camera) was put to work. I kept stride with my cohort, soaking my senses in the spectacle as I stepped, absently, around people of all shades. One of the others helped me get a picture of myself: in the middle of it all.
A Jewish-pride rally was breaking-out at one end of the square, at the feet of a giant staircase to nowhere. There I was too, with these people I had not known a few days before, clicking shots and posing for group-shots to be clicked, only barely noticing how wonderful it was to be there together. The ladies flashed a collective, luminous smile from a line on the crimson-lit steps. The guys clustered together for some face-time, too. “We,” I thought, “are now in photos together.”
My mind became an iridescent dragonfly, zooming through space and memory and reeking of reverie. I fussed with my camera, then glanced around for the back of a head. I saw only strangers. I listened for the familiar cadence of voices but heard only the chants of the congregants, waving the star of David. “Oh I lost them for a second...” I mumbled, scanning the crowds. I paced first around the stairs, then up them for a better vantage-point, then to a railing where I could rest. Initially, I was punch-drunkenly amused by this development. The scenario tasted like the extract of a G-rated movie-script: “Country Mouse: Lost in Time Square!” I clung to the edge of a metaphorical diving-board, waiting to jump into a quirky line when I saw a friendly face.
There is no scale to gage the magnitude of being alone nor schematics for tracing its dimensions. I plumbed a depth of alone that an autumnal beech in Oceana county* could not conjure. Lake Michigan gave me solitude that starry night, a state of being singular that becomes a spiritual practice. Loneliness, on the other hand, is the emotional state of suffering from separateness or from being separated. There is a bitter but cleansing vulnerability in being lonely, an injection of exposure and need. Darker ways to suffer alone exist, trading exposure for siege. A person can build deep trenches where no arrow can strike; yet strongholds become dungeons. Alone is the state I am in when the insidious whispers uncurl from between the iron bars of my memory.
There is something fascinating and unsettling about these reveries, like spurts of oil escaping the wrecked USS Arizona. Japan surrendered and the reefs grew in Pearl Harbor but the toxic succession of bubbles will not stop. Eighteen years of plotline melted away, leaving impressions from first and second grade. I know that I lived many recesses alone. I am uncertain why. The nose-picking would explain it at first glance but not entirely; one time, I drove away some other children because I was convinced I could become Bugs Bunny if only they would get out of my way. The more separated I became the more my parents consoled me with my own performance. The other children, they claimed, were just not as advanced as I was. So, loneliness never set-in where false-superiority already had its coils around me. As a child among children, I must have cast a chilling halo.
“Yes, but John:” said my Dad, once, “none of the friends you have made since then would recognize that description—would they?”
“I have come such a long way to be here,” I mused, drifting back to Manhattan. I wanted to keep moving, since I tend to be pacer, but the others could have gone in any direction. Reversing direction and catching a train back to Alma House was one option; second, to throw caution to the wind and have a lone-wolf excursion; the third was to keep my butt on its perch. I entertained the thought that the others were somewhere near time-square, searching. Forced to heed the advice I give to campers, I stayed and waited to be found. Each moment the cold nipped a little harder at my buttocks—and my fortitude. I turned my palms toward heaven and put a case forward. Hope wore to tatters and my crowd-scanning collapsed into darker thoughts. A game of blame-badminton erupted: someone had made a mistake. Demons came ripping out of the muck to join in the frenzy:
“John, be an adult; quit playing with your camera and pay attention. Space-cadet...”
“These people just want to enjoy the city; they don’t want to blow energy caring for you...”
“You probably did something creepy that you don’t even realize...”
“Those wankers: you could be back in Alma House studying for tomorrow’s interview...”
“This is the pattern that you fear: so close to connecting on the stairs BUT...”
“...bet they have the nerve to be pissed at you for making them turn back—if they turn-back...”
“There are probably limited spots abroad—maybe you should be relieved they aren’t very—“
But every few minutes another voice would cry out, like a canary in a mine, “LIES! LIES! These are competent, compassionate people! Push back your hurt and impatience—your fearfulness! There is no reason to believe a word of these doubts: have Faith!”
My heart was bungeed to my rib-cage by a thread of raw patience. I rose and paced. If they had gone back to the house or on to the bar I would have to take the subway by myself, anyway. I imagined myself catching the next train so I could go brood. Then, I could envenomate them with mid-western passive-aggression. There was a basement lounge to brew resentment in, alternatively, so that I could pretend I slipped-away on purpose. I recognized that there were additional options to consider. By choosing my attitude by default, I became chained to my emotions. It was crucial that I select my mindset intentionally. I actually wanted my new group to come running and give me hugs, hugs, hugs that lasted. Still, I was drawing curtains around myself to dull the pain of being lonely for them, exposed. In every hypothetical scenario, there were ‘fight’ and ‘flight’ responses. ‘Freeze’ is the third, more uncomfortable option. Staying engaged in that way exposes me to hurt and uncertainty: it requires endurance.
No matter how many times I repeated my brooding reveries, I could not get past the fact that I would be in ministry with these people. No matter what I did or how they treated me, I needed to love and forgive them so we could stay together. The circumstances of my success and my enjoyment and my being accepted and me, myself and I—none of that mattered more than us. I was not lost and they did not lose me: WE were fragmented. The Adversary, going back to the first lie, shifts focus onto our individual state—superior or out-casted (it’s all the same)— but the Holy Spirit wants all of us, together. Grace is available to me but not because I earned it or because it is given cheaply. Grace is given to me for them and their grace is really for me, in part—so WE can all be together with Christ. No curtains necessary.
I imagined them with the bright lights in their eyes, ecstatic and absent-minded for the next half-an-hour, just like I would be: role reversal. A sudden wave of panic would sweep over the group when they realized I was missing and they would search until they found me—because WE are competent, compassionate people.
As it turns out, my role-reversal rang truer than my anxieties. They ran into a cover-charge at a bar and decided to leave. A profound silence reverberated where one of my clever comments should have been. They used their digital cameras to trace the missing piece, John, back to Times Square. Their voices chimed above the din: “John! John!” James, Brinna, Wil, Rachel, Stephanie, Brittney, Debbie, Beth, Marjorie and Nick** were across the street. All of the fear, the pride and the resentment that had congealed around my heart melted away as soon as the first pair of arms came around me.
John: “I’m half sorry that I wasn’t paying attention...”
Rachel: “We’re half-sorry too...”
Brinna: “I almost had a heart-attack!”
That evening cast a new light on the ship wrecks in my past. For the first time, I went beyond the notion of forgiving my classmates for out-casting me and mourned for the WE that never happened. Bulging eyes and four beating wings, I relished every chance to be special—as evidenced by this incredibly obnoxious yearbook quote from high school:
“It is as if a halo of light illuminates and displays me. It shines according to the magnitude of the performance rendered. All ears rest on the performer’s sound and all eyes focus onto that bright spot of brass. The sound within my halo warms and empowers me, yet the brightness of the spotlight leaves me dizzy. I am barely aware of things outside of the halo at that point.”

I really had come a long way by the time we descended back into the subway. I can thank Jesus that I recognized I was only a piece of something: the Kingdom of God. The empty space in my heart, the missing synergy, is something that can only be held in common by people who value WE more than ME and LOVE more than all. When I saw that gang of missing want-to-be missionaries and community-workers appear again, I finally laid eyes on my peers. I was them and they were me and we were us again. We cannot do this without us, we know. For my part, I can hardly wait to expose my loneliness because I trust that these people are competent... and compassionate...

...and have a good sense of humor.

*one of the least populous counties in Michigan.
**Matt and Katie are also part of the collective WE; Katie’s feet were bothering her...