Call and Response
The Buggy Man's Spiritual Jazz
by Stephen Muse, Ph.D.
George Smith was known in Columbus, by those who did not really know him at all, as the "buggy man." After years of seeing him pushing his overflowing grocery cart along the sidewalk or lying slumped over it, covered in overcoats in the July heat, he had become a fixture in many people's busy lives-a kind of spiritual toll booth passed on the way to work and coming home again.
After he landed in the hospital, the local paper published an article about him because so many people missed seeing him on the streets. Turns out in his younger days he had been a musician and it seems he even owned a house he didn't live in. Long after he had stopped playing saxophone in local clubs with a group called Spot Rivers and the Nightingales, for unknown reasons he had taken a gig on the streets playing silent jazz that tugged hard at people's souls pulling in opposite directions-the kind of spiritual melody that makes a person feel love so deep down in the heart that you want to exchange your body with the first leper you meet and on the other hand you want to pass on by as if the person was invisible and already dead.
What is the source of this strange power of otherness that crosses our familiar paths bringing us into confrontation with wild and sacred places we so often and easily ignore? Wandering pilgrims who call no place home and have no names except the ones we give them in our efforts to tame their effect on us are the ones we want to contain in some kind of box that mutes the questions stirring in our hearts from having too close an encounter with one so totally other that it might shake up our comfortable world. We want them to accept a little food or a little do-gooding to release us from the pangs of conscience that if given free reign, threatens to spread out beyond one homeless person to encompass other ills in our society - like our forgotten vets who at one time were estimated to make up about a third of the homeless men in America, because after they've done their killing for us we aren't willing to hear their stories and help them find their way back home into our lives and their own.
We want to assuage the nagging still, small voice deep within that asks why one out of thirty Americans are in jail - more than five times the number of any other nation on earth. A substantial number of these are mentally ill persons and people of color. Inequities and injustices linger on systemically in our nation in invisible places hidden behind the wonderful successes of a few public icons. We are far more comfortable with extravagant corporate profits for companies who ignore negative externalities in the form of needless deaths and injuries to our environment, and exploitation of third world peoples who pay the price for the comforts that end up supporting the illusions of the first world's superiority, as though somehow all that advantage is purely the result of hard work and Divine blessing. Denial of society's dark side is a form of societal post traumatic spiritual disorder - a kind of collective dissociation and denial.[1]
The call of conscience aroused by this one man's presence, if we really listen consistently and deeply enough to what his music stirs in us, might entail much more than a singular act of kindness. Mahatma Ghandi refused to offer handouts to the poor. Jesus wandered about Galilee homeless raising questions about religion and God's love, until governmental and religious authorities felt threatened by his spiritual jazz. Socrates suffered a similar fate for questioning what people thought they already knew about life.
Though a world famous leader, Ghandi realized he could only midwife transformation without violence by sharing his people's hardships. Otherwise his help and the changes of his nation on the verge of freedom from British imperialism might simply become another kind of financial colonialism that missed the fact so articulately expressed by Australian Aboriginals, that "If you have come to help us you are wasting your time, but if you have come realizing your liberation is bound up with ours then let us work together." Jesus predicted that whoever really followed him could expect a similar fate. Is it wise to believe things have changed in our time? Ownership (business) and control (technology) of the world is not liberating it.
George Smith refused all handouts. He was offended by the action. By God's mysterious power at work in the faith of people's hearts, his was a prophetic voice and presence in Columbus, Georgia. Prophets of all ilks do not cotton to being toned down very easily, or co-opted into the mainstream so we can all go back to sleep in the warmth of our collective privilege - we Americans on whom last count 32 times more resources of the world are lavished per capita, than all the rest. We are used to this. We expect this. We feel entitled to this. It has been increasingly so since the founding of our nation. But at what cost?
The "buggy man" challenges us to explain why someone has to push a loaded cart around, covered with layers and layers of unnecessary heavy clothes and even sleep standing up, holding on to his possessions. He is a Jeremiah lamenting his people's chains, going naked through the streets, and by his very actions and startling presence shedding the clothes of civility, thereby showing us our bare-naked spiritual slavery to the Emperor of Mammon and his minions.
What was the oft repeated 'news' this past Christmas as Christians celebrated the mystery of the god-man child birthed in a cave because at the time his family was homeless? One wealthy beyond imagination laid everything at the feet of the ones rejecting him. Swaddled from the beginning by the chains of our sin and the poverty of our love, growing up with our burdens, Jesus challenges humanity to find a way to live together in community by a love that exceeds human ability; a love that called him to give his own body and blood for those who hated him. Why do we hate him? Why do we fail to protect him from those who do? Because he reminds us how much faith God places in the human heart and how much hope God has that human beings will become who we are created to be. The cost of such faith, hope and love is eternal and unendurable beyond human strength. It calls for a relationship with One who is more than human but only meets us in the place where we truly understand we are human - our vulnerability.
The headline news on TV and in the papers on a daily basis of market swings and the latest burglary, pollution or murder ignores all this eternal verities stuff that Jesus preached. The real news repeatedly bandied about, marking the birth of the Savior, was as one writer called it, the "lackluster holidays." Why lackluster? Because Americans didn't consume enough! Consumption is the great reckoning, the measure of our civilization's success--even of our civil religion's celebration of the birth of our truly homeless and invisible Messiah.
So what is the remedy? A few short months later and we celebrate Easter. Is it just an excuse for more consumption? Give us our daily bread? More tax cuts for consumers so we can buy more? Bailouts for Wall Street gamblers who already make four hundred times the average wage of the workers in their companies? Without increasing consumption, the American economy begins to go into recession. Yet it is the disease of over-consumption of what is unnecessary for becoming fully human that keeps America and the global economy spinning like a top, driving up health care costs and Prozac prescriptions- creating a need for boredom-breaking computer games of violence that all major health associations agree injure our children's psyches. Because these add millions to the bottom line, we ignore the danger of this insidious 'drug' which is even more serious to our society than some of those we spend billions trying to prevent coming across our borders. Could it be that what so disturbs us, like Pogo, is that our eyes have beheld the buggy man pushing an overstuffed cart full of useless junk... and he is us?
George Smith is a modern day specter of John the Baptist and we see him there on the edge of the wilderness looking out from the shadow of our civilization as we drive our gas-guzzling greenhouse gasifiers back and forth to church every Sunday and to work every day, laboring increasingly longer hours in order to make more money to buy more things we don't really need and probably won't take care of. We see George and his buggy on the way back and forth in this maze only to hear this voice crying out from the wilderness in our own hearts- for sobriety and a willingness to bear the tension inherent to the fact that Esau and Jacob, Hyde and Jekyll, the pauper and prince, indigenous and American, Palestinian and Jew, and all the divided hidden parts of my own soul and of my community cannot remain apart from one another forever. As our vanishing indigenous peoples realize better then most, we are one flesh; we belong to one earth. We do not and cannot own the earth and life any more than we can or should own each other.
We are life and part of the body of Christ. The farther we are from understanding this, the starker and more bloody will be the cut of our conscience awakened within by the vision of these silent, spiritual saxophone players who, as the Holy Spirit, are "like the wind which goes where it will and you know the sound of it...but you do not really know where it comes from or where it goes." So it is with George Smith, the saxophone-playing buggy man. You hear his melody and can't quite get the trill of its glissando out of your mind. Perhaps because the sound comes from the Holy Spirit and catches fire with the heat arising in one's own heart which knows it is somehow connected with our Common Creator...a love supreme...and with every common human fate.
Play on brother. Play on!
[1] (2007) Muse, Stephen. "Post Traumatic Spiritual Disorder and the False History Syndrome." InCommunion. http://incommunion.org/articles/essays/post-traumatic-spiritual-disorder-and-the-false-history-syndrome August, 2007.
