First Presbyterian Church or Watertown

John 14

“Because I Live”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

April 27, 2008

Sometimes when you see someone who is living in such desperate circumstances it seems nearly impossible not to help them. And more to the point, at first glance the probability of a little help making a big difference seems fool proof. This, I believe, was the initial impulse of a Los Angeles Times columnist, Steve Lopez. Lopez, in a writing rut and looking for something new, happened upon a homeless man in downtown LA. The man stood out amongst the other homeless folks in the section of town known literally as Skid Row because he was playing a violin. Like the glint of irony authors use to tempt the reader to look deeper into a story, so was Nathaniel Ayers and his violin playing beside a shopping cart at the entrance of a downtown tunnel.

Within the span of a few conversations, Lopez realized there was real irony in the story of Nathaniel Ayers. In his book about the musician called, The Soloist, the columnist revealed that behind the violin was a Julliard student who had spent the better part of 30 years ravaged by mental illness. Reading his book I felt the seduction of wanting to know how it was that a man who possessed such an elite talent- Julliard is a bit selective about their students- how could someone as promising as Nathaniel must have been, how could he spend his adult life as a homeless person with a shopping cart, offering his musical abilities to passing cars instead of tuxedoed music lovers in the nearby Disney Concert Hall.

Lopez traced Nathaniel’s mental collapse to his second year at Julliard, then he dug into the years it took him to exhaust the patience of his family in Cleveland ever shifting from house to hospital, and then he stepped into how Nathaniel would spend the last decade wandering around a statue of Beethoven at Pershing Square. Along the way though he came across two unexpected gifts. The first was an understanding of mental illness. Schizophrenia is not an uncommon disease, but the particular challenges it poses and the rather bizarre world one must enter to care for those who struggle with it is not for the curious or the uninitiated.

In the Soloist Lopez does a great job showing how folks like Nathaniel are a person whose body and mind are racked with a disease, but they are people who have a soul not to be equated with mental illness. During the two years it took him to make a real entry into the pain and suffering of a man who knows he could have been a world-renown musician, Lopez sees the good, the bad, and the ugly. Most of the ugly is found in the brokenness of Skid Row.

Nathaniel’s story is unique because of the Julliard piece. But his illness, his homelessness, the way major metropolitans have subterranean worlds filled with drugs, prostitution, and violence, which the mentally ill navigate, is not a unique tale. When Lopez meets Nathaniel he spends his night sleeping under a tarp holding drum sticks to scare away the sewer rats while heroin users occupy his side of the street and crack users the other side like some freakish take on the right side of the tracks. That this invisible world was five blocks from business centers and skyscrapers is a paradox Lopez discovered once he got out of his car to listen to the music.

Yet, the story Steve Lopez tried to convey the most is that he and Nathaniel became friends. He wrote a dozen or so columns about the Julliard string player who worships Beethoven and has a cataclysmic response to smokers and the stray cigarette butt yet while each one exposed more and more of the hard life Nathaniel Ayers lived each day, each one also revealed their growing connection. As Nathaniel’s story unfolds amidst the outrage of a city center filled with violence and suffering, a kind of California Calcutta, what Lopez is really chronicling is how friendship is the key to lifting up someone who is broken.

The first few articles generated nice responses from readers of the LA Times. Los Angelinos sent in violins and cellos, a woman pledged a piano. With each one though Lopez realized the complexity of helping someone as vulnerable as Nathaniel. Giving him a cello would make him a target and thus hurt him more than help him. And this is the sub-plot of their friendship. How can Lopez help someone whose life is so precarious? And then the really hard question, how can he help him and get out, not get sucked into the void of mental illness?

As the months progress, the first question over shadows the second. The writer begins to see that friends don’t help and run; he becomes more concerned about his friendship than he about his convenience. And this is what saves the story in the end. Many, many people have tried to help folks with mental illness only to find the cost of their involvement too high. To reach out to a fifty year old man who is homeless and schizophrenic in the drug infested violent streets of LA will cost him.

Through trial and error and a good deal of patience, Lopez uses music as the way to foster redemption of his new friend. The LA Philharmonic gets involved, even Yo Yo Ma who was a fellow student of Nathaniel’s jumps in. And then something cool happens. Amidst all the donated violins and trips to Disney Hall a profound picture is conjured of how challenging it can be to love. The more Lopez and Nathaniel become friends, the more love becomes the question.

Reading over the selection from John this week I was taken aback by how the command to love and the promise of life were recast by the story of the Julliard man and the columnist.

Jesus turns to his disciples and says, because I live you also will live. I have always interpreted these words in the frame of the resurrection. Yet, reading The Soloist, I couldn’t help but see them in frame of friendship. Because I live you also will live became not so much a promise of eternal life someday, but the way our hands reach out to each other, how to love someone (who is broken) is to say in effect, because I live you also will live.

When Lopez can’t give up on Nathaniel, when the idea that he would suffer more is unacceptable, when he tries to sleep with him on the streets or spends countless hours advocating for him with folks whose days are filled with too many Nathaniels, when he does all of these there is a kind of hand reaching out saying because I live you also will live.

Having worked with schizophrenics I took each setback to heart; I could feel the frustration of discovering the tattered world mental illness imposes. It’s not a “linear” kind of progress or aid.

And then I had this strange question. What if loving people, anyone, is just as hard as loving Nathaniel? What if its just as precarious and we don’t really see it because there is so much we believe is normal? Jesus is not talking to an ailing stranger, to the dying drug addict, or the starving African. He is talking to the people he already loves. He is commanding his friends to love, to say what he says, because I live you also will live.

I can’t think of a better image of this than a German movie called Nowhere in Africa. The film conveyed pretty much the same message Lopez described in his friendship with Nathaniel, but instead of the complexities of mental illness, it’s marriage.

Kathy signed us up for Netflix and for the most part that means we have been watching movies for teenage girls or foreign films meant to expand our horizons. On the whole I have tried to grumble about this whenever I can. But I must confess the year of movies I would never have chosen has been redeemed by Nowhere in Africa. Unlike the bizarre world of homeless schizophrenics in LA, the German film was profound because it was mundane. Although the setting is exotic, Kenya in the 1930s, the real story is so basic: sometimes it is hard to love.

Nowhere in Africa chronicles a husband who loves his wife and how her reluctance to love him makes what should be a good life a hard one. The theme is set by the husband’s father saying to his daughter-in-law, in marriage there is always one who loves more. My son loves you terribly. From that moment on each time where love should have brought joy, joy is ever fleeting. The moments of their life, which should have been simple pleasure, are rendered complex by their inability to love each other without fear or mutual affection.

In the end they find a way to love each other. It comes, in essence, when they reach out to the other in the way Jesus describes, because I live you also will live. They surrender; they yield; they sacrifice not for the gain, but for the other. Because I live you also shall live.

In the Gospel of John the words of Jesus sound so simple. Love one another; abide in me; because I live you also shall live. Yet, what it means to live them, while still simple, is ever so illusive, ever fleeting, appearing and disappearing. Why is it that Steve Lopez wanted to flee once he realized that in order to help Nathaniel he would have to love him? Why wouldn’t that make it easier, more enticing? Why can love render us terrified? Love should have the opposite effect. It should put us at rest, put us at ease, and it can. Love can render life effortless. But who amongst us has not fled when love was the cost, when love was what we must offer a fallen friend, a confused spouse, a child who squanders every gift?

Jesus says love is the new commandment. It sounds so nice. Like the Beatles saying all we need is love. It sounds nice, but love can be the last thing we are ready to offer or receive. We know that love is the only way to bring redemption, but we offer wrath instead; we know that real care means friendship, but we try to offer a polite acquaintance somehow believing someone else will take up the remainder as we can’t love everyone for Pete’s sake.

And love makes it so messy. We are afraid because love makes you want to never give up. The son or daughter who ruins their life is doubly tragic, as we know each stumble and fall we go with them because we love them. Then we talk of tough love, and burnt bridges, and co-dependency and abetting bad behavior, and we struggle and wonder when it will end, when love will actually redeem the broken, when they will take the hand to lift them up instead of biting the hand that feeds them. Isn’t there a better commandment than love?

I spent some time visiting a woman in Washington as she was dying. She was alone. No family. No friends. She was a neighbor of a parishioner. One day I came into the ICU where her body was winding down. After she described reading my last sermon (which I remember thinking, what a bizarre thing to do as you die) and then she said, I had a strange dream last night. I was in this cold, dark place. It was so dark. I felt alone and lost. And then I could see something; I could just make out a shape. Walking closer I could see it was hands, many hands. The closer I came the more hands I could see and then I could feel them lifting me up, taking me out of the darkness. And then I could see it was the people who loved me. They lifted me up; they were all around me.

I will never forget her words for the simple beauty, but also because she died a few hours later. I am always surprised by the way death can make us ready to be lifted up, to be loved, to have someone reach out to us and say, because I live you also will live. I am so surprised to see the way death makes this so palatable, but so often life makes us recoil, withdraw with fear.

Why can loving each other as husband and wife be so fraught with maddening failures? Why is love a commandment, but can never be commanded if it is truly love? Why is that we pause and withdraw once we know that friendship is the key to caring for someone?

The married couple in the German movie set in Kenya were not unique, their struggle was not complex, and yet joy seemed to be ever fleeting from their life together. Steve Lopez seemed to understand the complexity of mental illness without degrees or licenses, he was able to navigate the bizarre world of crack whores and hallucinating, ill-clad folks digging through trash bins, but grasp the demand of friendship, that one was tough.

The dying woman seemed so delighted to be lifted out of the darkness and unto life in the last moments of her life, but I wonder if it proved as easy in the decades prior. Was it as easy for her to experience love, to have someone say because I live you also will live in her life? Was she ready in marriage, as a parent, a friend? Why is it that in dying we live? Amen.