I took my lunch hour too early today. Others' schedules left me with no choice but to make myself eat something between 10:45 and 11:45am. I deliberated over microwaving my can of minestrone, bought some taco-spiced tater tots and grabbed two handfuls of free cracker packets before finally trying to find a place to sit down. I rarely -- well, really never until today, so only now can I can I say "rarely" -- sit in the school food court area. I deal with people all day and sanity demands I find a place to eat my lunch in beautiful silence, reading literature or magazines to keep my mind busy so I won't fall asleep (which I sometimes do anyway). I hide in a small chapel only a handful of people on campus probably know about or a 3rd floor cubbyhole and when that's occupied, sometimes a 3rd floor stall. Today, though, didn't feel like carrying my food and other items all over the building. Our food court is on the second floor but someone thoughtfully installed a closed-off balcony, assumedly for smokers. No one was out there when I went to sit down so my place was determined. Sure, the temperatures were only in the low 50s but for me that's perfect when I'm wearing a sweater.
I sat out there slurping hot soup and reading The Brothers Karamazov but couldn't help hearing a loud voice. Is that guy preaching?, I wondered. I stood up and looked around. Sure enough, out on the plaza just to the west stood a man wearing a yellow slicker in the gray drizzle. His words shot through the air clearly. He was preaching, all right. What he was saying I easily recognized as almost identical to the set of cliches, context-pared Bible verses and key phrases prevalent in the fundamentalist circles within which I spent my first twenty years.
This rhetoric, this vitriol, this near-cult mentality brings about flashbacks that consist of a strange mix of awkwardness, discomfort, a creepy pain-loving hedonism akin to Nine Inch Nails songs, childhood nostalgia, searing memories and a set of instilled reflexes branded onto me so well they're still closer to instinct than learned behavior. Maybe like Johnny Cash singing "Hurt" or Gram Parsons singing about "The Christian Life," so many things stirred together.
A couple guys sat down at another balcony table. I heard them and others walking by below making fun and laughing at the preacher, the man who shouted with little response, hardly any positive response. I saw one young man walk to him, hug him, talk for a moment, then walk away. No one else really approached him. His rhythm familiar, I could still feel what paths he would take in his speech, where he would drive next. People were outright poking fun. Not to his face, but almost.
What they don't know, what they could never understand, is that this fuels the fire. The fundamentalist protagonist thrives on negativity. Sure, his religion is based on negativity more than anything else and negativity brings him a martyr's glory. Sneers validate him and his message and the version of God he serves. Nothing legitimizes the prophet like a little scorn.
I wish they'd leave him alone. Not because I sit and cheer for him but because removed as I am, I understand the situation and know it's only furthering both themselves and him in negative directions. Even in conservative Nebraska at a university where surveys find the students are far more to the right than the professors, most kids still have a healthy disrespect for anyone more spiritual/religious than themselves. Even though few would ever really disparage Christianity as a whole, the majority of students seem to tip the nose at anything and anyone different from themselves. Sure, they go to church on Sunday and maybe Campus Crusade or some somewhat hipper evangelical young adult ministry with an edgier, more "extreme" moniker but anything outside of that is strange and, therefore, something to laugh at or flat-out point out as wrong.
Our preacher, though, shouting in his raincoat, singing gospel songs off-key and inviting students to "Come forward and receive Jesus," I don't want to laugh at him. I was trained to be just like him for so many years and I sense a sort of comaraderie. Mostly, though, I'm embarrassed for him. He's doing something and saying something he believes in deeply and I admit to admiring him for that, I suppose. I feel ashamed for the man, though, because his methods are tacky, inexcusably tactless. Even worse, I believe in the same bottom line, essentially, in the grand scheme of things and I know that his faith is different but strong. No, I feel embarrassment because he's oblivious to his own lack of propriety and I'm ashamed because I long ago realized that street preaching in today's culture can rarely be done without involving some sort of frantic lunacy. I'm not talking about a public rally but rather ranting and raving at anyone, everyone walking past. In ancient cultures a street prophet was commonplace, often legitimate. Today he disqualifies himself from the public discourse by virtue of his methods. Nostalgia attempts to force comparisons between his plaza pleas and John the Baptist or Ezekiel or Jeremiah, prophets I was taught to follow both in message and in method. In an era of fractured Christianities, however, the street preacher froths and foams, bellowing out both trite phrases that simplify Christianity into distortion and nonsensical metaphors intended to pull at emotions. Maybe most people laugh and a few of us feel sorry and embarrassed for him for the same reasons: he's convinced he's right and we know he possibly can't be but his words and mannerisms leap into our faces and demand some sort of reaction. No one can pretend he isn't around. Some of us can't go on with our continuous chain of meaningless insignificancies. Others of us find it impossible to be good little enlightened semi-relativists because fundamentalism insists on being regarded as right or wrong, period. A few of us, however, recognize the shade and smile, remember our own struggles and pray for a soul who, right or wrong, is pleasing his God, even if he's partially invented Him.