Regarding Vincent -- a short essay.

The text below is slated for an email I intend to send to the iVCF youth worker and the only remaining friend I have at VCF.



When I first heard of Vincent, I was told to avoid him. They never told me why -- only that he was someone who the rest of us didn't need and didn't want to talk to. I tried to ask the people I knew at the Group but the answer they gave me was evasive, misty, as if a dense complicated fog of "umm" and "er" had been thrown up to foil my quest for a simple answer.

And then one night I finally realized why.

When he came into the room, the meeting was already a half-hour underway. He came in with a friend of mine, almost gingerly, as if each and every step was a fight against some primal instinct that upwelled within him, compelling him to do something that was almost certainly unpleasant. Like the Red Sea before a desperate Moses, the circle parted way and gave him a wide berth. Some smiles were exchanged, though only half-hearted. He was a thin, wirey young man, his face boney and his eyes neatly contained within circular thin-rimmed glasses. His shirt, and coat were grey, all grey, perhaps an advertisement of what he was going to bring coming into this meeting, and what he was going to take away with him coming out. But what really struck me was his face -- an oriental face, but one without the bulbous joy I had seen in the faces of his countrymen and countrywomen. The skin on his face had been tightly bonded to the bone of his skull, giving him a sleek, streamlined look. But there was no mistaking what it radiated. A profound sense of loss, as if someone had jabbed a fat syringe into his head and pulled back on the plunger, draining away all emotion of happiness, leaving a cavity to be filled with a dark remnant, a growing anger.

Yes, anger, and it was his anger that I now remember them warning me about. A strained, controlled anger that burst out in radiating quanta of negativity, in every contrary statement he made against whatever some wide-eyed, beautifully freckled and athletic girl stated about her faith in God and Christ. Tension filled the air and a dull pallor was eventually cast. Even the wide-eyed girls and boys who were there were silent.

I don't remember her name anymore, but one of the youth leaders tried to enact some form of damage control. She'd interject and correct him, tried desperately to quell and silence any discussion, the frantic fear in her voice made all too clear that soon a fight would break out. But would it? We were after all, a meeting of young Christians, come together to discuss their faith.

"Discuss their faith"... and of course, in any proper, mature discussion, we are bound to expect dissent. Is it proper to destroy such dissent?

And then it was clear to me, right then and there. In a meeting where a world was painted in rosy shades of glorious, happy colors, Vincent's sadness was not welcome. It was an unwanted presence that could not be tolerated, the sudden thunderstorm that rains out the biggest game of the year. Vincent had used his grey and splashed it all over the happy, bright, rosy-colored painting of Christianity that the bright-eyed, athletic young men and women of the group had tried to paint for all of the weeks that I attended those meetings. They tried to contain Vincent, to somehow isolate him, so that his infectious sadness would not weaken the fire for God that had been set. And all the while, he was left, his head looking down, his legs held tightly together as he sat, the expression on his face set in stone.

Almost a year later, I'm left with the memory of the night of that meeting, seeing in Vincent's face all of the anger, sadness, jealous, pity, and depression that I have carried with me in my journey as a "Christian". I've seen Christians capable of unbelievable and unfathomable acts of cruelty and inhumanity -- the shooting of abortion doctors, the sanction and encouragement of sexism, racism, homophobia, war, violence, and conflict; the ignorance of reason and the worshipping of ignorance. God is an entity of hate, I am told. God so hated the world that He sent a flood, a flood after the holiday celebrating the birth of His Son, to annihilate the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, to joyously cast down His suffering upon millions more. Entire cultures, whole nations, whole races of people are to be nothing but fodder for Winepress of the Wrath of God. Yes. Hatred is good. Because God is good. And God is hate.

And so I am left with a question: what is to be done about the Vincents of this world? The people who, like I, are supposed to have the light of Christ within them? We are a disenfranchised people, people who want to believe but yet cannot believe or reconcile that belief to a hatred which is all too real, a hatred and quest for violence and terror which instills in us not fear, or anger, but an overwhelming sorrow. It is a sorrow that we cannot simply whitewash with sterile words of kindness and happiness.

I am told that those who spew hate and war in the name of God are only but a few Christians, simply a marginal few. But where are the ones who rise to fight them? Where are the Christians who choose to take up their crusade not against the perceived satanic nature of Harry Potter, or the exposure of Janet Jackson's breast on national television, but against racism, sexism, greed, war, homophobia, and all of the offspring of closed-minded bigotry?

I'm left with just a realization that Christianity can't pained as a rosy, brightly colored, happy painting. It can't be a simple as a black-versus-white, us-versus-them quest for spiritual warfare, where God can so nonchalantly cast into the fiery Hell those who do not or simply cannot worship at the same altar as the people who would have you think that they and they alone are privvy to the mind of God. I have seen this spiritual warfare, with preachers and pastors scrambling to gather and use the ammunition of rhetoric and scripture, and it is just as terrifying as any demon or devil or Satan that any human mind can conceive.

I know that Vincent and I are only just two people. Two people only united in their common sadness and lament at a religion that to them, appears to be only father and farther away. But we are growing in numbers, with every word of hate than is spewed, every feeling of separation and indifference that is put up to separate You from Me. There is a divide, a growing divide, between we, the spiritually poor, and you, the spiritually rich. Like panhandlers with their hands outstretched for change, all we need or ask is a sign, any sign, that humanity and common decency do indeed exist amongst the chaos of the darkness that we carry with us from day to day. In this world, in this life, our impoverishment lies within our hearts and minds, a poverty I wear around me as I struggle to find another reason to get out of bed and live through yet another day.

That night, when the small group meeting ended, I packed my things to go home, but when I turned around, Vincent was gone. Just gone. I wished I'd given him a hug before he left. No one else in the room was ever going to do it...why not me?