The Far Side Of The City

Tío Rafa is in a place on the far side of the city and the last time anybody went was March.

Nobody in that family would tell you they have abandoned him. Nobody thinks that. If you asked any one of the seventeen adults in it, they would say a version of the same thing, and every version would be honest.

His sister says Marisol goes. Marisol went twice in the spring and then her husband had the operation. His nephew says he keeps meaning to and the traffic across town at any hour is brutal. Somebody sends money for the extras, which is real and which everybody quietly counts as a form of going.

And there is an assumption, unspoken and load bearing, running under the whole family: somebody must be going.

It is nobody's fault. That is what makes it so hard to fix. A family of seventeen is a machine that distributes responsibility so evenly that it can arrive at zero without one single person doing anything wrong.

Rafa is eighty six. He was the one who taught four of them to drive. He paid for a wedding in 1998 that nobody could otherwise have afforded and never once mentioned it afterward. He has a photograph of a fishing boat by his bed and he will tell you about it if you ask.

It is August now.

Five months, seventeen adults, one man in a day room on the far side of the city.

I was in prison, and ye came unto me

Jesus describes a scene at the end of everything and He lists six things, and the sixth one is the one nobody expects to be in a list like that.

Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.Matthew 25:36

Take that where you are sitting. You are the one who can go, and nothing else is outstanding. The word says I was in prison, and ye came unto me, and the verb has a journey in it, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept that face in front of you since May.

Ye came unto me.

Not: you sent something. Not: you thought about me. Not: you made sure somebody went. You came. The verb is physical and it involves a journey, and the whole list is made of things that require a body arriving somewhere.

And look at where the list ends. Prison. The place that is furthest, most awkward to reach, most institutional, hardest to feel useful in, and where the person you are visiting can do absolutely nothing for you.

A day room on the far side of the city, at visiting hours, with a television on too loud and a man who repeats himself, is that room. It is exactly that room.

So take this where you are sitting, and know it is not my accusation, it is what is written: you are the one who can go, right now, this month, and nothing further is required to qualify. His word says I was in prison and ye came unto me, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept Rafa's face coming into your mind at odd hours since about May.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who was met by God at a meeting he did not want to attend, and what came out of it was not a feeling but a timetable, and the greater part of that timetable pointed at people nobody was going to visit.

Prisons for fifty years. Debtors' gaols. Pit villages. He sat with individual men the night before they were hanged, which is the purest hour there is: nothing can be fixed, nothing can be repaid, nothing can be reported afterward.

He organized ordinary people into small groups whose actual work was visiting: the sick on their own street, the imprisoned, the old, the ones no institution had a category for.

The name that got fastened on those people started as a joke about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the warmth went across the city rather than around the corner.