Vincent Redux

As one of my personal heroes, Stephen Jay Gould once said, "The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history." As if we didn't need reason enough already, one reason to be good to others which I have always found deeply compelling is that singular acts of wrongness have an uncanny tendency to quickly have effects grossly disproportionate to their true size. History and our own personal experience is full of examples of instances where simple words or actions have led to profound personal and/or professional tragedy.

Three years ago, one such action sent me out of the trajectory of the VCF group at Toronto. It involved a young Chinese man, probably a second-generation Canadian like myself; someone who like me at the time, carried within him a deep and painful emotional burden. His name was Vincent. I won't go into details, going back to old wounds like how I'd pick at a dried-red scab. All I can do is link back to the original post I wrote on him back at The Chrysalis. The act wasn't directed by him at us, but rather, I feel it was directed by us at him. And I really do mean "us" especiallly including me - there's no sense passing judgement on someone else if you don't submit to the same gavel yourself. It was clear that he needed something from us, and after all the time I've had to think about it I don't know quite what it was - companionship? Friendship? Love? - but I do know that when we, or should I say, I, had been challenged to rise to the occasion, nothing happened. The disappointment I felt compelled me to leave for good. I've not seen anyone of them ever since with the exception of a few friends, and to this day I still think and wonder about them.

For reasons I still can't fully grasp, I took the whole of the text from that post, and sent it in an email to the VCF staff worker we had at the time, a woman I hadn't seen in years - and had left behind in a reclusive vanishing moment, left to expecting me, but never seeing me. Remarkably, about a week later, she sent me a reply, thanking me for my willingness to share such a deeply personal story with her. The rest of the email was terse and succinct - she would forward the concerns I'd voiced at the next executive meeting and present my case before them. Thank you, farewell, and goodbye. At the time I perceived a thinly veiled hostility draped in curt politeness, but now in retrospect I feel that it was her way of dealing with what amounted to a complete core dump of a mind in an email, sent her wey by a curiously melancholic student she met once who never talked to anyone, and who never got talked to.

It wouldn't be fair to fault the VCF group there for what happened. I see myself probably reacting in the same way as the staff worker did if our roles were reversed, and it's only natural to assume that a Christian group servicing a university with over 60,000 students spread across three campuses and seven colleges has a set of challenges not seen in a group serving UNB and STU. The staff worker I knew there was an incredibly wonderful and vibrant woman who would always light up a room that she entered. Perhaps the fault was my own for not taking the risk to reach out to her.

Still - I can't get out of my mind the image of Vincent, captured in a snapshot in my mind that I hastily and furiously typed out on my blog. I can't get out of my mind the emotion of bitter desolation he exuded and how they so well resonated with my own that it almost seemed like our hearts were beating in sync with each other. I wondered how it was that, if we started out the same way in our faith, I had been able to hold on while others I had known and met like myself and Vincent continued to suffer and fade, their faith or whatever remnant of it that was left gently slipping away. How could God allow others to suffer like that, while at the same time letting me retain my faith? I couldn't accept the idea that God could be like that. Then I remembered the old French proverb that "God helps those who help themselves", that God never gives us a problem or a situation that He knows we couldn't possibly handle. Perhaps God does give us the tools that we, the spiritually depauperate, need to survive in our faith as Christians; it's only up to us to recognize what they are and how to use them. Maybe that means I had my mind attuned in such a way as to do both, meanwhile Vincent may simply take a little while longer. I don't know at all.

I asked a few people I met this weekend to pray for him. It still isn't the same as the hug I wanted to give him all of those years ago, but perhaps it goes some distance to make up for my own failure to be there for Vincent when he didn't even know that he really needed me. I pray that he will find the peace that he seeks. For the disillusioned, the angry, and the broken and the sad, peace is often the only thing we can ever hope to strive for.