God is here. He helped us find our hotel. I should explain.
This has happened a couple of times on this trip already, a trip during which I am reading John Van Sloten’s excellent, The Day Metallica Came to Church, whose thesis is that God is active everywhere. You see, we have been driving this car, a Hyundai i-20, pretty small car for someone who is used to driving a Camry. Even though the transmission is standard, I know how to drive it. I’ve even become numb to paying 1.75 Euro per litre (or $2.45 Canadian). But when the street signs, when you can find them, are in Greek, and the traffic zips around seemingly unfettered by rules, it is fairly easy to become lost. We have. A few times.
The first time we ‘suddenly’ found our way was on our way back from Philippi. We had stopped at a large ‘Carrefour’ (read: Walmart, again) and were a bit disoriented. Our directions were in our hotel room and we were using our collective memory to find our way back. Seemingly out of nowhere, our exit appeared, we crossed a few lanes and were off the hiway and into familiar territory. Yeah God!
But this time, on our way into Athens, it was a bit more extraordinary, even a dull sot like me learned a little about the Providence of God. Our directions had us going 21.9 kilometres into the city, then 2.1, the 450 meters, then 200 and so on. Somewhere around the 2.1, we lost track of which street we were on; not a good thing when street signs are few and far between. Just as I was losing my cool and retreating to a slightly quieter side street to gather my head and plan strategy, Carol called out: “There it is! Aristoteles Hotel!” Sure enough, it was. Yeah God! Again.
After settling in to our ‘spacious’ hotel room, we dropped the car off at the local Hertz office (another harrowing drive) and began our walk back to the hotel, a simple 2 kilometre stroll through a neighbourhood in the shadow of the Acropolis, through our hotel’s more seedy neighbourhood in daylight and we’d be settled in for the night.
Except, not so settled.
We walked back to our hotel around 7:30 pm. It was still light, but the shadowy side of the city was beginning to show it’s face, or perhaps more accurately, their faces. Two I remember are these: a young girl prostituting herself and an old woman with one side of her face so badly bruised it was shocking. The young girl’s eyes were vacant, as if her soul and spirit had long departed. She couldn’t have been more than 15. I wondered where her father was. Then, I wondered where her Father was. In my traffic ‘mini-racles’ I had declared God present. In the face of such sadness, I was forced to wonder. The older woman, maybe 60, sat at the edge of the street in Vathis Square, the most drug and prostitute infested square in the city. I wondered what sort of evil had been inflicted upon her face that it was so badly bruised. I wondered what sort of evil had been inflicted upon her self-esteem that she hadn’t left town but was still here in its saddest spot. Again, one wonders in moments like this, “Is God really present everywhere?”
“Yes”, my faith says, hoping to drag my mind and experience along, “but where?”
G.K. Chesterton has written (and I paraphrase, though only a little), “When a customer picks up a prostitute (he used the words, ‘visits a brothel’) he is actually searching for God.” I find it hard to swallow as I try to erase the 15-year-old's face from memory, that the men who misuse her are actually reaching for God. It seems too perverse.
My impulses want to grab the vermin who inflict this kind of pain by the scruff of the neck and throw them on a garbage heap, in Greek, a Gehenna. In English, Hell. I want to, like the Dutch and Jewish wanted to distance themselves from Hitler, claim to have NOTHING in common with 'them.' I am not, by nature, thinking there is some form or kind of redemption possible for them. Or that they reflect or respond to the glory of God.
But Chesterton was working with thoughts on Calvin’s “seed of religion” and how we all have this desire for God, misspent in too many ways. Chesterton would have said that the customers of this child-prostitute were created with a desire for God, and by their actions showing in the most broken way how that desire, inappropriately directed, leads to the greatest of evils instead of the heights of glory.
In a sense, that was what Paul encountered in Athens 2000 years ago. Instead of worshipping the Creator, the learned philosophers were directing their hearts’ deepest attention to the thoughts of mythological gods captured in stone.
When Paul encountered what he did, he declared, “God is here” in a message accommodated to their yearnings. Which leaves me wondering, “What should or could be said to the men who hire these street children?” How would you tell them, “God is here, but not that way?”
Which brings me back to the topic of Gehenna. As much as there is measurable moral distance between the Jewish prisoner of war and Hitler, between me and the prostitute's 'john', when viewed from the vantage point of God's inapproachable light, one's a speck and the other is a smudge, both deserving of Gehenna, or Hell.
The gracious truth, all the more glaring in the deepest darkness of Athens, is that Jesus demonstrates pure unprostituted love for ALL of us, not simply by having his face bashed and bruised but by submitting his entire body, and his life, to the cross and the tomb.
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