So I began to temper the issue. “Let’s hear what you think is important in life,” I would suggest to my young friends. Often, even the most serious starting point for some kids would end in laughable rants and teasing, and on occasion I would notice Correen smile, or even chuckle. I hoped and prayed that those hesitant grins and giggles meant she felt safe, even with me there. In the days that followed she looked up a time or two around the circle and whispered a comment to the person next to her or shook her head over something dumb said aloud. My heart warmed at every little nuance of her ease and comfort.
But the nights were getting colder and uglier as October frost forecasted the season ahead. And on a wet Friday night, with the fire barely intact in the damp mud, the young man in Pentagrams leaned into the fire, glared at me and snarled, “So where the hell is Jesus now?”
Before I could even begin to fumble a response, Correen stood up and walked away.
The mocking was quick as another young man in the group (fed up with “Devil-boy” as he was mockingly called by this point) responded, “Ya, and where is Satan? He ain’t helping much either.”
I walked over to Correen at the freight skid, with the voices of frustrated and cold youth at my back. I sat low on a squeegee bucket and simply said, “Why?”
I did not need to say: “Why do you stay for every other dark and disturbed conversation?” or “Why does the name ‘Jesus’ terrify you?” or “Why on earth are you out here?”
No. Just, “Why?”
She cleared her throat and with a soft, quivering voice offered me her “why.” I was shocked. All this time pussyfooting around, and all it took was asking a one-word question.
She told me how she went to church every Sunday with her family. How her family would hold hands to say grace before every meal. That her dad would teach Sunday School and help serve communion at church. How every prayer he said—the thousands of prayers she had heard him say—would all end “in Jesus’ name.”
Then she told me that every night after her mom was asleep, he would sneak into her bed and quietly rape his own little girl. From age six until she walked out the door at age sixteen. A decade of torture between her father’s knees after midnight. A decade of hearing him talk about Jesus in the daytime and dreading his footsteps on the squeaky hardwood floor at night.
“So, I just cannot hear that name. Not ever.”
My mind could barely comprehend it. That the “name above all names” could be the spark that ignites physical, emotional and spiritual terror in a child? Where is justice? Where is mercy? Where is hope? Where is healing?
My mind spun in circles, aching for a profound voice to bring—to bring who knows what—to the madness, the perversion, the evil of it all.
I was frantic to find a way to say “Jesus” that she would allow. Chomping at the bit for miracle quick-fix words, I stuttered and paused. “But you see…well, you gotta look at it like this”. Until finally I stopped in my own pathetic tracks, and realized how shameful my agenda was. This sacred moment—what did it require? Surely not me needing to make it feel better for me. And still that is where I went in an instant—“gotta teach her to hear it my way.” As though I had any real comprehension of the magnitude of her outrageous pain. Ridiculous and selfish, and wonderful proof that my own arrogant and religious pride was more than ripe. Another lie about who Jesus really is, found in those scandalous moments of my own self-indulgence.
I stopped. With tears streaming down my cheeks, I simply promised her two things. One: that I would never say Jesus’ name in front of her again. And two: that if ever she wanted, I would do my best to introduce her to the Son of God, who would never ever hurt her.
She nodded “yes” to my first promise and “no” to my second.
Jesus, Immanuel. Jesus, Healer. Jesus, Redeemer. Jesus, Saviour. Loving Jesus. Compassionate Jesus. Profound Jesus. The way, the truth and the life, Jesus. Surely the miraculous Jesus I claim does not need language to touch our hearts. All those battered times we all face when language means nothing, when Jesus is Jesus no matter what words I use or don’t use.
Correen only lasted on the streets of Toronto for two or three more weeks. She did not want my help. She could barely handle my presence. She never spoke to me again. No doubt, embarrassed that she had told me too much, and reeling that I couldn’t just have nothing to say. The last time I saw her she was hesitantly panhandling on a busy street, when an angry businessman stopped just long enough to call her a “lazy bitch.” She just kept her head low. As though staring into the late-night fire once again. I stood to the side, weighing out what I thought was my best shot at comfort. I could see her nervously looking at me out of the corner of her eye, longing to be left alone. Snared by the presence of two men jointly representing the one who crushed her soul: a suit and tie bringing abuse and a church guy with too much to say.
Like so many, she left without notice—the same way she arrived.
Where was justice? Where was mercy? Where was hope? Where was healing? Where was Correen? I have no idea. All of them lost.
Has she ever smiled or giggled again? Will she? Can she ever trust a man again—any man? Should she? Pass by a church without shaking? Can she? Hear a prayer without crying? Without weeping? Will the words of a stumbling Christian or a homeless Satanist revisit her most?
Then I think of—no, I cling to—the wonderful story of Jesus at a gathering, when a bustling group of children were brought to see him. To laugh with him, to play with him, to be safe with him. To be children with him. The bumbling disciples interfering—no way, too busy, too important, too this, too that. But no, not Jesus. He said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” (Matthew 19:14)
The kingdom belongs to children like Correen who endure unspeakable agonies. Children the ages of Correen through the decade her father undid his pants and slid into her bed. Children like Correen when she cried herself to sleep knowing her entire world was wrong, wrong, wrong. Children too scared, too uncertain, too innocent, too much a child to know what to do.
These words of Jesus are easy to rhyme off, and I have heard them babbled haphazardly from countless pulpits. But they are shocking words to dare and believe. Astounding words that speak into eternity—far, far away from the sickness, the anguish, the torturing of a body and soul. Where no Jesus will hurt her. Where no Jesus will lie to her. Where no Jesus will abandon her.
Jesus only as Jesus, no matter what words are used. Finally, where she can find wholeness. Justice. Mercy. Hope. Healing. And the promise: For the kingdom of heaven belongs to Correen.
5. Like Bigfoot, Like Elvis: July 2002
The Lake Huron region is like no other in Canada. While the world-renowned Muskokas, directly north of Toronto, have begun to unfold with small towns turning into franchised small tourist cities, the northwest regions reaching to and along beautiful Lake Huron have remained mostly unchanged.
The drive from Toronto to my father’s birthplace is peppered with slow stops in sleepy towns. Single-streetlight towns that boast corner stores with worn wooden floors and metal-dome Coke signs over the doorways, quaint knick-knack and craft shops with ornate verandas, and gas stations (still called service centres) where, more often than not, a friendly ol’ someone in a mesh John Deere hat will saunter out to wash your windows. Between these towns, single lane highways with dusty shoulders weave around endless acres of farmers’ fields, slow-moving cattle and rusty, tin-topped barns.
As an adult, born and raised in the frantic city, even after a childhood of making this drive on every holiday weekend and school break, it still feels like plopping onto the wide rolling set of an old black-and-white television