Sidewalk Preacher; Sidewalk Artist

It happened downtown.  He was shouting on the pavement, not like a maniac, but as one very caught up in an enthusiasm.  He was preaching the Christian Gospel as he understood it.  He rhetorically asked anyone who might be listening, and it is hard to say if anyone was listening to him, if we knew what he was doing out there?  As we walked by him I said blithely, Okay what are you doing out there.  He replied that God had sent him out here and God told him to preach the Gospel so we would have some means of giving account of our lives when we die.  Respectfully I replied Fair enough, and we continued walking.

We were hit by a sudden stench of marijuana smoke and there were two rather fat, white-trashy looking middle aged men seated at a table with original paintings for sale.  The artist, between tokes, said to us, The world's full of nutcases, eh?  I replied, Dude, we're both Christians.  He respectfully backed off and we looked at his paintings.  He asked if we saw anything that we liked, and I replied that I quite appreciated his interpretations of a wood duck and a pileated woodpecker, two of our most spectacular local birds:






I did mention to him that I myself paint and draw tropical birds.  He didn't seem that interested in any art that wasn't made by him and we walked on.

The conversation that followed was quite interesting.  I spoke with my companion of how for many years I had been embarrassed to the point of extreme disapprobation of that kind of display of fanaticism and proselytizing.  I admitted that I was rather like that as a teenage Jesus Freak, then quickly grew out of it.  As it became fashionable to bash fundamentalists I jumped on the bandwagon and relished along with the rest of society in taking potshots at this easy target.  Much of that time I spent in the Anglican Church where we all delighted in sharing the same hate-on for our less educated but more fervent brethren.

This has changed for me.  I still have reservations about street-preaching and I am certainly in no hurry to turn back into a fundamentalist.  I have reached the conclusion that it is none of my business to judge how another Christian expresses their faith so long as they are not harming anyone.  And who knows, maybe God did tell this guy to preach?  How am I to know and who am I to judge another's servant?  As a Christian I owe this to my sisters and brothers, even if we do not agree on certain salient issues such as same-sex marriage (I am in favour, if you must know).  On the other hand, I tried to think of what we must all have in common: the preacher, the pot-smoking client and I.  The artist and I of course have art in common and a certain admiration for beautiful birds.  I do not smoke pot, though I did as a teenager.  I was also, after my pot-smoking days at fourteen, a young zealous fundamentalist Christian.  But I still was struggling to discern, to identify that discreet thread that seemed to link all of us together.  Then I recalled a certain shadow that I thought I could see in the two men, the street preacher and the street artist and I recognized right away the same shadow that I have sometimes glimpsed in the mirror.

It is a shadow of affliction.  It is a shadow of rejection.  A shadow of marginalization.

A shadow of poverty.

The shadow of the Cross.