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.

Postscript to "being from Toronto" (or, My big fat apology to AJL)

A while ago, I wrote about something that, at the time, kinda bugged me a little bit. It was about assumptions and outward appearances - specifically, those of a racial nature. I took a little incident that was, in the grand scheme of things, not really as bad as it could have been (or, not as really as bad as it ever was) and wove it into a grandiose post about racial uneasiness (which by the way, I do feel somewhat reassured on, after conversations with people like my therapist).

And now, thanks to that wonderful literary device known as "retributive justice" (or what some would just call Karma) I find myself falling victim to those very same assumptions - not quite racially based mind you, but they were assumptions nevertheless, and that they weren't racially motivated doesn't make them any less wrong.

...Take 3

So fast forward a few months after the aformentioned incident. Since then, he and I actually got be pretty good friends and while I didn't knew him extremely well outside of our Christian Fellowship group, we knew each other pretty well, well enough to trade friendly barbs and jabs here and there as only two fans of Monty Python and the Holy Grain could.

Anyway, the other night we were conversing and he brought up a comment I'd made earlier about how I found him quite intriguing (which was actually what I'd said). As if he read my mind, when I was trying to answer his question of why I found him intriguing, what he said was something to the effect of "Well, it's probably because I'm not what you expect..."

And well, that's right - he wasn't what I'd expected at all. Lo and behold, we had much, much more in common than I'd thought - shared general socio-political interests, shared theological interests, attitudes and experiences, even shared experiences and thoughts concerning The Opposite Sex...oh and of course, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Oh, and we've both developed a liking to Rickard's Irish Red.

Closed-minded facist Bible thumper? Au Contraire. As a matter of fact, someone for whom I've developed a profound amount of respect. Not that I didn't respect him a lot before, anyway - but now it's like that respect has taken on a newer sense of depth. I compare how I think of him now to how I thought of him, say, when I first met him, and it's so wholly embarrassing that I could ever have thought that. I mean, what else would you expect someone who's a leftist/socialist "Liberal Christian/Reformed Catholic" anti-war and pro-women's/LGTBQ rights wacko, so used to congenial ostracism and polite isolation (or downright hellfire-and-brimstone righteous indignation) when he first meets one of the people coordinating and heading up the local Christian group? If you've been through more than your fair share of Christian hatred and intolerance then I'm sure you know what I'm getting at, but nevertheless maybe you're also probably thinking of the kind of feelings I really should have had, but didn't - the feelings should have been there instead of an emotional sensation akin to a caged animal thinking that the fanged baddies are all around him.

If there's a moral to be learned from all of this, it's that we are so comfortably perched on our moral high horse when we accuse people of making undue assumptions and prejudices based on first principles that we never truly see the forest for the trees - we end up being guilty of the same sins we accuse others of making (something I'm sure I've opined about before, but in my usual fashion probably forgot about). Come to think of it, that's quite a bit of the root of why we're so downright unpleasant to each other, isn't it?

Nevertheless, what I can only offer is a tip of the hat to my friend for a wonderful evening's conversation, an humble apology for my own embarrassing sanctimoniousness, and, a resolution that next time, I'll try to do just a little better than before.

"...Don't you take this from me/I'm still wanting your face on my cheek..."

I had some pretty good entries lined up for posting - no, really, I did. I use the past tense because my hard drive crashed last night, leaving me without 30 GB worth of files and two steady months' worth of work, emails and other various miscellanea. And yes, I know the lecture about backing up. So please, just don't say it.

I know I've opined before on The Chrysalis about how my study of biological history reflects my own personal history, but lately I'm thinking about it for different reasons, not in terms of how I grew up with my dad but in terms of how I grew up with other people. I find myself thinking of past mistakes I didn't fix when I should have fixed them (or just shouldn't have made at all), and past people I cried over who in the grand scheme of things weren't really worth the tears I shed.

It's times like these when I look back and can see in my head all of the friendships I've made, past and present, which worked, and which ones didn't. I remember all of the fights I had with Paulina, wondering if that would be the end of it once and for all, and yet somehow still ending up with a wonderful friend who had a unique understanding of how I'd been feeling that few people could have. I remember getting nice little PM's from Jo on BIOME or a brief little email from Catherine asking how I was (which, even though it was one line long, I could readily imagine being asked in her bubbly voice from a face capped in a knitted hat, peering sweetly at me beneath wide thin-rimmed glasses).

I think about all of those people (and a lot more of course), and I realize just how much like them my few friends are here; people who actually feel happy when they're with me, people who look forward to spending time with me, be it five minutes or five hours. It feels nice to really be wanted by someone doesn't it? We don't really appreciate that until we're in a place where we aren't really wanted, or just ignored completely, and it's then when you're thankful for all of the little smiles you'd be given by a friendly face in an empty hallway or a busy cafe.

And then I think about the friendships which didn't make it - or at least, the ones which I tried to make work but ended up seeing fail right in front of my eyes. I can think of the emails or instant messaging sessions telling me The Truth about how people would feel about me, and just how deeply hurt I was. I remember most vividly when someone actually did that to me and how, for weeks afterward, I'd felt sad and depressed over hearing it.

I keep thinking over and over about how I could have or would have changed things, and I can imagine in my head an idealized notion of what things would be like if I'd done the right things, at the right time. I talked about this to my therapist on campus and she told me about how, after you go through the little checklist in your head (well, my head actually), ticking off all of the things you did right, you then realize that at the end of the day, maybe you didn't really screw up as bad as you did - and maybe the fault isn't all yours to take for yourself.

It's for this that I left Toronto. I'd felt like I'd had this threshold of failure and awkwardness inside of me, and the past two years had filled me up with that to the point where I was about to burst. "Never change a winning game, but always change a losing game." - that's what Dan's tennis coach told him once. After so many years of trying to play with a shitty forehand against a stream of volleys, I've decided that it's time to try out my backstroke.

Lorem Ipsum, and All That Jazz

Ok, so for the benefit of the small percentage of the small percentage who read my blog, know me in person and don't know what's going on...I'm moving. Or rather, have moved. I tried to keep this a little under wraps because I didn't want to actually start talking about it until I'd had all of my i's dotted and t's crossed. Well, I'm not at that stage yet (HR hasn't cleared my paperwork and my residence building on campus is still under construction) but I'm far enough along to say that yes, I once and truly have now moved on from the University of Toronto and Toronto, and on to the University of New Brunswick and Fredericton. I suppose I should leave a final coda message on The Chrysalis, but right now I'm feeling both tired and lazy. And besides, with the exception of one person to whom I feel particularly connected to, I've notifed everyone I've wanted to notify about the details and circumstances of my move - everyone else I know can just bite me for all I care.

I don't know if I'll keep up with the same kind of style I'd been using earlier. The whole evolution/creation thing is tired, and it seems like I can't say a word about my feelings without someone getting annoyed and pissy about it - so, I'm going to play it by ear a little until I find a happy new equilibrium.

I leave home for a few days and look what happens...

A funeral home royally fucked up a Chinese grandmother's funeral burial, Steve Harper's frolicking with Toronto Firefighters (AIDS epidemic? What AIDS epidemic?), a bright and promising 13-year old boy is stomped on and beaten to within an inch of his life, a dangerous criminal considered by Police to be "Armed and Dangerous" simply walks away from his West-End Halfway House (WTF is he doing out here if he's damned armed and dangerous anyway?), and two people nearly get killed in hit-and-runs (oh yeah, and there's a stabbing in there too).

And you still wonder why I want to get the hell out of Toronto?