The first time I tried hitchhiking I was 23 and standing on the edge of a highway running through a small town in Iowa. The car pulled over with the window open. “Do you need a lift?” I had been waiting a long time and I eagerly exclaimed, “That’d be great!” “Then stick a jack up your ass!” .
Looking back I should have known. It was a kid driving an older model, big boat of a station wagon. He could barely see over the steering wheel. 35 years later I can still see his face as it tore away: horn rimmed glasses, a bowl line haircut, laughing at me. He had passed me back and forth several times. It was such a small town that the main street was only about a quarter mile long. Along with that there was probably no town cop and he was no doubt too young to have a license yet. In a small rural town the only after school program can be getting in the family car and cruising the strip. Me standing on the edge of the road only added a new character to his routine. It must have taken him those few drive bys to think up his rejection punch line.
But I had been in training to learn to handle such rejections. I was in the Jesuit novitiate in preparation for priesthood, having recently completed the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola. The Exercises were contained within a 30 day silent retreat where I learned to contemplate desolation and see it as the way to consolation. I fought back against the silence and its scolding to get me to sit still. I am a doer. I like to get things done and the idea of sitting and meditating for 30 days without talking had me squirming and looking for a way out. I became the clown at the silent meals with the other novices using contorted faces, flicking food, farting and whatever else I could bring out of my bag of sixth grade humor trying to get them to break down in laughter.
When I sat in my room and tried to pray it just felt stupid. So not me. This way of knowing God must be reserved for those more refined and capable than me. “Lord I am not worthy” had me angry, fidgeting and eventually climbing out the window onto the roof. It took the Minnesota winter on the rooftop to send me back into the building. Down into the basement, down into the boiler room. Dark. I found a metal folding chair. I was still a little squirrely but it was day 8 now of 30 and I was ready to sit. The heat and the darkness helped. The boiler chugged, wheezed, and clanged. It was like an industrial age sweat lodge. The dry heat parched through me. I stripped down to Hanes. It was still stupid, but I felt if I at least created a physical foe to endure then I could make a game out of it. Now it was about sweating it out. This went on for days: Prayer time going down into this brooder of Genesis waiting for the bang of creation. And nothing really happened. I was just doing time. Crossing off days on the calendar.
I was over half way through these Spiritual Exercises when it happened. I was sitting in that folding chair that I had by now put a pillow on. I was quite fond of such a dark darkness that didn’t need me to close my eyes to feel. I just stared wide eyed into the darkness and each day the darkness seemed to push out further, revealing new horizons of nothing but dark. I kept walking into these horizons day after day until finally I felt the weight and could barely walk. I was weighed down by an overflowing arm load of junk. Rusty, broken, unfixable. I began to see that I was carrying all the doubts, fears, self loathing, rejections of my life. It got heavier and heavier and I could barely stand. Then a building emerged ahead. I strained toward it. It was an old, decrepit shack with a rickety porch and hulks of old rusty cars and equipment piled in the yard. The place had no paint. The boards had weathered to gray. I stumbled up the steps, drawn through the door. Inside were old shelves heaped with more junk like my own. Creaky floors, dust and cobwebs over everything.
I thought the place was long abandoned, but then I noticed facing away from me a hunched over figure in the back corner sorting through more junk. He seemed a continuance of the dust and weatheredness. Smoke stained white hair. It looked like his bones were sagging him downward, slowly losing against the pull of gravity. He had an unusually large hearing aid on his bulbous ear. How could anyone be so old? I was exasperated like where in the world am I now and what am I going to do with all this junk? I couldn’t hold it any longer, dropping the pile that kicked up a dust cloud. I shouted knowing he was probably too deaf to hear me: “Do you want any of this junk?”
It was the nimble pivot of a grace filled dancer. The face turned to me and all I could see was a tender affirming smile and a soft yet unwavering light that was beyond young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, black or white, this or that. I have never felt so much love than that moment of light, but I still doubted and thought I needed to yell again louder and whiningly to be heard, “ Do you want any of this junk?” The voice softly reassured me with a knowing smile “ Of course I want it. It’s you and I made you.”
And that was it. It left me with tears flowing into the sweat. I sat there longer thinking there would surely be more to come. Further light. Further conversation. Maybe a Q and A. I never saw that face again. I sat through the rest of those 30 days and nothing happened. But the squirm was out of me. I didn’t need anything more to happen. I was content to just sit knowing what I now knew.
It took me to write this to realize it as I look back on the 35 years since it happened, but I am wrong to say that I never saw that face again. That face is all expansive and showing up in stories. And everybody’s got a story. If there is honesty in the telling then that junk is dross for beauty, that everyman’s brokenness is the cog that turns outward into communion, that rejection is the way to compassion and resiliency. That face is in everyone I meet if I take the time to listen closely and see them walking in seldom straight lines from desolation into consolation.
I drive a bus now taking youth on adventures that help them venture out of their bubbles into the glad heart of serving others and the joys of nature. There is a quiet confidence and self knowledge that comes from taking up the adventure and seeing it through. Sometimes I see the boy from that little Iowa town with the bowl cut and horned rimmed glasses step up on the bus. He sits right behind the driver seat and prods me on as we pick up speed and roll beyond the town limits into those dark horizons upon horizons through the night drive.
Giddily waking up he exclaims the dawn light, soft and unwavering.