Rain

…and Other Things that Unite Us

“While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

~ Romans 5:8 ~

Rain is coming. The pain in my hip tells me so. I’ve recited that joke ever since I was a little kid, mocking the elderly. But now, firmly in middle age, I don’t find it half as funny. It’s more annoying and another reminder that old age is undefeated. It erodes stalwarts and softies all the same. Although I’m not sure I’m either.

Regardless, here soon, the clouds collecting just above the buildings, blotting out what was once a blue sky with hues of gray, will begin to cry, weeping sheets of rain on sinners and saints alike. No one excluded or avoided because of race or creed, gender or “rather not say.”

Which reminds me of the Sermon on the Mount. When Jesus, ever the killjoy, commands us to love our enemies and even pray for them, reminding his delinquent disciples that even God allows “the sun to rise on the good and the evil, and sends rain on the just and the unjust” (Matt. 5:45b). An odd illustration to make a clear and simple point: more unites us than divides, regardless of how we perceive it or feel about it.

Amidst the declarations of heaven and hell, saved and something else altogether, there are threads in creation that unite us. All of us. Regardless of our caste or color, our denominations or our designer clothes. Certain components of creation, given and governed by God himself, teach us that in our beginning God loved us, everyone us, and still weaves his pleasure and provision into our lives, disregarding how we respond.

Which can be hard to accept. For I have certain enemies who I wish didn’t have access to God’s gifts. And certain persons I envy that seem to hoard all His blessings. No, I don’t believe anyone earns their salvation, but I could be convinced some deserve greater portions of God’s pleasure in the present. Especially when something happens to me, be it big or small, a wound or even an inconvenience.

I had a rock in my shoe today. Walking down the city street, pricking at my big toe. Not puncturing it, just poking it enough to remind me of its presence with every pace. The pain wasn’t unbearable or anything, but just enough to demand my attention.

Several times, I stopped on the sidewalk, leaned against a parking meter, tapping my toe on the curb, trying to jostle the pebble to the open space between my toe and the end of my shoe. Yet, without fail, after three or four strides, the stone had worked its way, once again, back to my heel.

I sighed audibly at the unseen intruder bent on blistering my foot, attempting to announce to anyone who cared: I was in pain. Or at least inconvenienced. Or maybe just irrationally annoyed, fighting away the self-centered “Why me?” But, for whatever reason, I refused to stop, remove the shoe, and extract the unwelcomed intruder. I endured it, bracing for the rain.

How often do we do this? All of us. Endure the uncomfortable or potentially damaging with unreasonable obstinacy. Does this also unite us? Or just complaining about it?

A scholar once complained to me that the only defect in God’s creation was sleep. He was adamant that sleep was a complete and total waste. A flaw overlooked by the great I Am. And he fully intended to confront the Lord about this at a later date.

But I just couldn’t agree. Sleep, like eating or excreting waste, is another one of the great equalizers. Another marker that reminds rich and poor, young and old, that, on some level, we’re the same. Not greater. Not lesser. Not more or less significant.

In fact, sleep is uniquely humbling. For at least several hours a night, we’re all reminded the world will go on just fine without us walking in it. Without question, sleep is abnormally adventurous. We all close our eyes believing air will still fill our lungs and gravity will still do its job of tethering us to God’s green earth. Indeed, sleep is a small marker in the liminal space between this day and the next, reminding us: we all live by faith.

And I find that comforting. In a world of isolation and increasing divide, crumbs litter life’s path with evidence of innate interconnectedness. Republican and democrat, pro-choice and the infertile all need community. A fact, I’m confident, even the most ardent introvert will admit. After all, a need for connection is what creates groups and categories like introverts and extroverts anyhow. Interconnectedness is simply another thread that unites us, overlooking our uniqueness even as it honors it and preserves it. A thread of truth I cling to as a plumbline anchoring me to heaven as I navigate earth’s inequalities.

Food is another anchor. I eat only two meals a day, but I love the idea that every person, for the most part, pauses for three segments of each day to sit at a table for a type of Eucharist, celebrating the fact that, deep down, in God’s economy, we’re all the same. United by the mystical craving to eat fruits from the earth that populated the world before sin and thereafter.

We all must eat. Even the panhandler we ignore and overlook.

Which is unfair. I often remind my students and myself that the houseless beggar didn’t raise their hand in kindergarten and proudly proclaim, “Homeless!” when asked, “What do you want to be when you get older?” They, too, had dreams, even if they’re now broken and buried under layers of clothes and aluminum cans in a pilfered cart from Wal-Mart. They, like me, sleep. They, like me, long to eat. They, like me, breath and will one day die.

Which is another equalizer that doesn’t discriminate: death. It doesn’t skip some because of their swelling trust fund or prioritize others because of their persistent scowl. Death finds all, unites all. And so too, to some extent, does its inverse: life.

We were all born. Maybe not “once again,” but at least for the first time. All of us began in a womb, whether hospitable or hostile. All of us took a first breath, tested our voice, and took up space in this world as our own. In this world divided by hate and hurt, the well-fed and the malnourished, the plush and the war-torn, the magnificent and the mourning, the well-to-do and the long-forgotten.

Indeed, it’s easy to forget there’s more that unites us than divides us. Especially when each breath after the first seems so incongruent to others who seem to have it better than me.

I just saw a lady on Newbury Street in downtown Boston, strutting in high heels with luxury dripping down her shin-lengthed wool coat. Her bejeweled sunglasses disguised her eyes, but it was clear: we were not the same. We didn’t eat in the same restaurants, shop in the same stores, dream about the same retirement, or grace the same car lots. In the same world, we lived in different realities. And it was obvious.

Halfway down the sidewalk, though, she abruptly stopped, elegantly placing her hand on a no parking sign. Clearly annoyed, she pulled off one of her pumps as her Louis Vuitton bag dangled from her arm. She cussed a time or two, looking around as if to make sure no cameras were catching her unfortunate moment. And with a flick of her wrist and one more expletive to boot, a small little rock rattled out of her shoe and onto the sidewalk.

And at just that moment, I felt the first drop of rain.

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