Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for
you from the foundation of the world;
For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye
gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in
prison, and ye came unto me.
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we
thee an hungered, and fed thee? Or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? Or naked and
clothed thee?
Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto
you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my
brethren, ye have done it unto me.
— Matthew 25:34-40
This afternoon, waiting for the crosstown bus at 79th and Third Avenue, leaning wearily against the shelter support — a long wait — I saw Christ.
It was a very simple, sharp vision. Coming toward me across the intersection, an old man in a gray raincoat and a stitched, narrow-brimmed cloth hat lost his footing, slipped, and fell to the pavement. Not close enough so that my instant reflex was to reach out and pick him up — not so close as the man who was bending over and touching him, nor as the girl in green who had made a gesture in his direction and after a moment, looking anxiously at the light that was about to change, kept on walking. For me, there was a gap, a moment of reticence, of unworthiness or pudeur, and then I ran out. Between us, the other man and I got the old man to his feet. For a minute he seemed limp — at least resistant to being helped — and I observed to myself that his dead weight, which I was struggling to get upright, certainly represented a great deal more than the fifteen pounds allowed me by my cardiologist.
Somehow the two of us steered him to the curb. The street was strangely silent. There was no honking, no expression of impatience from cabbies or truck drivers nor people in sports cars leaning out of their windows, urging us to get out of the way.
Once we got him to the curb and standing shakily, traffic resumed. The other helper, assuring himself that the old man was ambulatory and that I was willing to take over, moved on. So I was left with a trembling, gray-haired man with two brutally scraped and bleeding hands and a great bleeding lump on his forehead which he was trying to cover with his hat. There had been a cheap black-bean rosary under him on the street, which I had picked up and stuffed into his pocket as I pulled him to his feet, and he was clutching three crumpled dollar bills in one hand, and in the other, a bright yellow plastic bag obscenely stretched by what turned out to be a half-gallon of cream sherry, miraculously unbroken (the reason he was out in the first place, or one reason, although there was no telltale smell of liquor on his breath).
I asked him where he lived, and reluctantly — “they mustn’t know about this” — he admitted residence in a nursing home a few blocks away.
I volunteered to take him there by taxi but, no, he said, he would prefer to walk. He said he was missing his cane, which he believed he had left in the liquor store off the corner where he had bought the sherry. He hadn’t. The young man at the cash register said yes, he had been there not too long before but had left nothing behind. We looked along the counter and by the door. The young man gave me his card and asked with a distressed look in the old man’s direction if there was anything else he could do. There obviously wasn’t.
And so, the taxi once more refused, we tottered off down Third Avenue, Christ and I. It was Christ, of that I was convinced, heading for another liquor store where he had made his first visit and decided he could do better on the price. Indeed he had — saved twenty or twenty-five cents, he said bitterly.
We talked as we walked, and I heard only some of his answers, spoken in a hesitant upstate murmur. He came from Cazenovia. He had a brother in Syracuse. He had been at the home for almost ten years. I revised my estimate of his age upward. What had he done before? He said something about the Christian brothers — whether he was one or simply lived with them, I couldn’t make out. His mother had been forty-five when he was born. He had had a sister who died of erysipelas. That was about it. He had a fit of trembling. Wanted to know how his forehead looked. Did it show? I tried to wipe the blood off but it kept coming. The angry knob was growing on his right temple. We pulled his hat still lower on his brow to cover it.
I offered a taxi again, a doctor — we could go to the hospital down the avenue. He refused with an emphasis reinforced by panic and stood straighter to demonstrate his recovery. We finally came to the liquor store he had visited earlier. I waited outside with the yellow plastic bag while he went in — he didn’t want them to know that he had made his purchase elsewhere. No sign of the cane.
We went on another block or two and, avoiding the front entrance of the nursing home, rang the bell at the back door. Eventually someone came — an Irish attendant — not uniformed. He asked what had happened, where he’d been, not critical but concerned. They had been worried. Francis — that was his name — asked to go to his room on thirteen, and he wanted me to take him. No nonsense about the thirteenth floor being the fourteenth at this last stop before eternity. So I took him up to thirteen, past the expressions of tactful concern along the way, past the doors, open and shut, where other men and women, older and frailer, were waiting like Francis in a place that was quieter than a hospital, cleaner and brighter than a residential hotel, for what came next.
He had a single room with bath, simple and comfortable, with a crucifix over the bed, holy pictures on the walls. He wanted to give me something for my trouble, groped in his pocket. I tried to tell him as gently as possible that it had been my pleasure, my opportunity to come to his assistance, that he had already given me much more than I deserved. But how do you tell Christ that he is Christ? You don’t. You just consider the times you have been Christ yourself in the past and will be in the future, squeeze his shoulder in a gesture of reassurance, and close the door gently behind you, leaving him sitting there on the edge of his bed still wearing his bloodstained hat.
From The Parabola Book of Healing, with an introduction by Lawrence E. Sullivan. Copyright © 1994 by The Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition. Reprinted by permission of the Continuum Publishing Company.
