The Crutch
Scenes from the Street, part 1
How many times have I heard or read things like this by skeptics of faith: "Christianity is for the weak." "Believing in God is a crutch." I agree.
My friend Simon is a Bulgarian Jew, living in Barcelona. He's an old man and can't walk very well. Whenever I cross an intersection with him, we need to be at the corner right when the light changes from the red man to the green man, and even then it takes him the whole light to get to the other side of a normal street. I asked him once if it hurt to walk. Amazingly, he said "no": it is simply that he has lost full movement in his hips. He's due for a hip surgery, but the doctor says that, if he isn't in pain, there's no need to do the surgery, so Simon still hobbles along.
Needless to say, he needs a cane. When I first met Simon, he used a wooden cane, but then, one day, it broke and he had to go without. Someone loaned him an umbrella to use, but one day it rained. I didn't actually see Simon walking on the street that day, but he told me about it. As he was talking, I tried picturing the scene in my mind. I pictured something not unlike an Ingmar Bergman film or a play by Samuel Becket: Simon, creeping along the wet pavement, rain pouring down, using his umbrella as a cane. His covering from the rain was unopened and it was on the ground, not in the air. Later, he told me that umbrellas do not make good canes, because when it rains the umbrella tip slips on the pavement, making it dangerous for him to walk. The futility of it all. Tragic poetry.
Then, shortly after that, we surprised Simon: we bought him a nice new cane. It's metal with a nice large rubber tip on the end so he won't slip when it rains. It even has notches in the body of it so that he can adjust the length to suit his particular height. About 3 or 4 days later, I saw Simon in church. He held up his cane, his face beaming, "Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Troy. Thank you, church. Thank you, Jesus!" And then he laughed. You see: Christianity is for the weak. Believing in God is a crutch, and like Simon, all of us with semi-paralyzed walks desperately need it, if for no other reason than to walk in the rain, sheltered and without slipping. The tragic, absurdist piece has a happy ending after all.
"(Jesus) said to the paralytic, 'Get up, take your mat and go home.' And the man got up and went home." Matthew 9:6-7.