Bent Hope - Tim J Huff

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cats only have one life, and hope doesn’t work that way. Real hope transcends all measurement only when we share in it. Not when we simply attempt to watch it magically occur in someone’s life, or wish for it from a distance, but when we participate in it. Not when we simply hear the humming, but when we hum along.

      Hope, says Webster, is “The virtue by which a Christian looks with confidence for God’s grace in this world and glory in the next.”

      My heart hears it like this:

      Confidence: the reshaping of hope from a passive, wishful notion to its rightful place; the pitch-perfect bass line of hope’s song.

      Grace: the sweet extension of hope borne out of the brokenness that each of us owns; the captivating melody of hope’s song.

      Glory: the certainty that God has an astounding plan and celebration that reaches far beyond what we can even begin to fathom; the thrilling crescendo of hope’s song.

      Confidence, grace and glory that include all boys and girls, men and women; built on the firm foundation of being in relationship with the life-giver. The very place where I believe God extended himself so that I could know for sure that hope is real was in a homeless baby born in a stable, who grew to promise the hope of abundant life, before he sacrificed his own. Abundant life is without a doubt the most undervalued and unappreciated promise ever made.

      Even as I share these thoughts at the outset of this book, I fear two things. That those who call themselves Christians or “Jesus Followers” will assume this book is just for them. And that those who don’t will assume it is for someone else.

      But this is not so. What follows is extended to all for consideration, deliberation and reflection: those who believe there is no God, those who hate God, those who struggle with God, those who believe in another one, and those who believe in him as Abba Father alike, convicted by an incredible remark made by Mahatma Gandhi: “If Christians would really live according to the teachings of Christ, found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.”

      In spite of my own astounding inadequacies as a Christian and a human being, my faith is based solely on Jesus Christ. Not on Christians. Not a single one. And while I believe he was and is the Son of God, many of those I know who think he was just a great man can’t help but agree that he is a role model beyond compare.

      Ultimately I believe in a God who is as relevant in the gutter as he is in the church. As miraculous in the ditch as he is in the chapel. And as beautiful in a rat-infested alleyway as he is in a glass cathedral. Anything else is hopeless. And nothing else makes sense.

      I have no theological degrees or formal religious studies. I attended two community colleges in unrelated studies, and graduated from one. My beliefs and theories are born out of an education I had not anticipated as a young man: sneaking through crack-houses, weeping at hospital bedsides, strolling through alleyways after midnight, gigging at biker rallies, empathizing through prison bars, waiting at bus terminals, explaining myself in police stations, laughing beneath bridges, tripping through abandoned buildings, peeking into squats and shanties, leaning into gullies and ditches, serving at a camp for deaf children, living as a family man, and more than four decades of taking in Sunday mornings from the first five pews of a very decent, century-old church at the crossroads of a volatile community.

      While I have occasionally altered names and locations to guard identities, these pages reveal snapshots of real times and places, bodies and faces, sonnets and odes that could easily be lost in the shadows of a population too hurried to notice. Fragmented glimpses of fragmented lives, where hope is anything but shiny and bright. Unpolished. Crushed. Twisted. Bent hope.

      But somewhere in the wrinkles of every brief account, hope continues to hum. It continues to breathe. Often shallow breaths at best; even the faintest final breath, whispering one more note in the music of the soul.

      Bent hope—inviting us all to be part of the music.

      1. A Kid and a Coffee Cup: December 2005

      “Hope is a passion for what is possible.”

      I should think the last image in Søren Kierkegaard’s mind when he wrote this statement more than a century and a half ago was a panicked boy swimming in the sewer water of the most multicultural city in the world. And still the philosopher’s words were undeniably, even if unexpectedly, a tailor-made fit for the boy, the time and the place.

      Thomas’s body was covered in sludge. Long dark trails of brown, clumps of black, and a glaze of translucent yellow. His shirt and socks were rolled in sopping balls lying next to his curled sneakers. Everything soaked. Everything shriveled and dirty. Ripe with the stench of waste and toxins. High on a flat rock, facing the unfamiliar pool below—a boy, just a boy, who had lost everything.

      The summer of 2005 went on record as the hottest in decades. Showers and breezes were elusive at best. Far away from the mid-winter gasps of street sympathizers—“Oh, the cold, this cold, surely this deadly cold is the worst of all worsts!” That is the pebble in the shoe of every mind that stops to consider homelessness across Canada and in the northern United States. Around the beginning of February, people who ask me nothing about my homeless friends all year long will inevitably ask, “How do they survive? How do they bear it?” And no doubt, it takes the fortitude and will of a prize-winning bull to push through it.

      But lost on most people, more often than not, is what it takes to survive the heat. Not just heat…but inner-city heat. Heat that not only comes from above, but from below. The sandwich heat that traps a body between the sky’s ball of fire at full volume from above and the hellish pavement and concrete from below. Endless baking pavement. Endless simmering concrete. Endless heat that refuses to let up. Captured in the day and stored in the solar tar by night.

      This was the oppressive heat that drove Thomas to the Don River. One of the few stretches anywhere near the city core that reveals more green than grey. A seam through the city where a dull wind can find its way north and south, to and from Lake Ontario. And just enough murky water that when one squints his or her eyes a bit of elsewhere-ness can be imagined.

      Not clean water. Certainly not healthy water. But water all the same. The Don has been abused like most urban rivers. Early in the twentieth century, industries such as paint factories and paper mills bled their waste into the river. As did more than 30 sewage treatment plants. Though much effort over the past few decades has gone into bettering the river and surrounding forest lines, even now, storm water is the primary source of the river’s pollution. It makes up nearly three-quarters of the river’s flow—and carries the waste migrating from freeways and driveways, backyards and truckyards. Untreated and directly into the waterway.

      Still, for Thomas, there was plenty of leafy shade there. Mature trees and a sense of oxygen, non-existent in the core of the city. A bit of resistance to the conquering sun. Thomas was there, in the shade of a shrub, counting change from a coffee cup, when the sky was finally squeezed. Not a gentle squeeze. Certainly not an anticipated one. It was a shocking bear hug from behind. What one television weather anchor called a “spontaneous late-summer torrential macro-burst.” What simply felt like the inevitable result of a demolished dam hidden beyond the clouds. It didn’t rain in drops. Or even buckets. It came down in thick sheets of blinding, pounding rain. Apocalyptic rain, both unpredicted and unforgiving.

      That same Don River runs in tandem to the Don Valley Parkway; the city’s only freeway running north and south. The rolling motorway dips deep near the river in several spots resulting in enormous flash-flood zones during severe downpours.

      On this day, the rain simply had nowhere to go once it landed. In addition, the excess streamed into the natural basins from the ill-equipped sewer system. One of the great dim pools rose beneath the unofficial sky-high border to “downtown proper”; The Bloor Viaduct, known well for its history of suicide jumpers. Right where Thomas was.

      The late night television news would ultimately show police on jet-skis and wave-runners, rescuing stranded drivers who had abandoned their submerged automobiles and shimmied onto concrete bulkheads. Homes some 20 kilometres north had basements under four,

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