I saw this guy sitting in Union Square every Friday and Saturday during the holiday season, and I couldn't help but wonder why. Each time I saw him, I felt this overwhelming compulsion to go over to him, sit down, and ask his how many people actually sat down and had a conversation. If they did, what kinds of things did they say? Deepest, darkest secrets and sins? that they were having a bad hair day? that the most ordinary things caused them to have an anxiety attack? And what kinds of people were they? Tourists or New Yorkers or lonely people or crazy people or people tired of shopping? If they told him things, how did he listen? Was he silent except for nodding his head? Did he practice "reflective listening" that told them he had heard accurately what they said? Did he attempt to fix or solve their problems, offering advice? And moreover, who was he? Was he a pastor too? Was he somebody selling religion or a fortune teller or a homeless person or sociologist doing an experiment or an actor in a film?
Maybe it was Jesus. That's what I told myself, both joking and serious at the same time. He was a manifestation of God's holy humor, a God who decides to send Jesus into the flesh again in modern day (a la Dostoevsky), as a homeless man in a holiday market holding up a homemade sign that says "Here to Listen." Only the irony is that no one stops to speak to him.
Confession is good for the soul, goes the old saying--only we rarely engage in this spiritual practice with any kind of depth, if at all. We rarely speak our sins to a listening ear. Instead, we will pause for a moment of silence during worship (but only a moment because we can't handle too much silence) before we move triumphantly and thankfully onto absolution. Or worse yet, we prefer to make our confession anonymously to strangers, like the man in Union Square: a modern-priest or messiah ready to hear our confession, and then we never have to see him again. We will send our confessions beautifully written on postcards with images and art to a stranger (see the book PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives by Frank Warren). We will expose our lives to strangers on the internet via blogs or YouTube. We will confess to a church website, but not an actual church of flesh-and-blood people (see the New York Times article on Life Church, an Oklahoma Covenant church which set up a section of their website for anonymous confessions - http://www.lifechurch.tv/Default.aspx?p=635y). In essence, when we confess to strangers or anonymously, we confess into a black hole or vacuum. It's a confession without legs, with no faith community for accountability or support or healing. I suspect that absolution doesn't always come immediately or at least we have to circle our way there; and it matters that you have someone tangible to walk with on the way.
Most New Yorkers love to talk to strangers; you almost have to when you are forced to sit so close to each other in a restaurant or wait in line for hours at that damn DMV on 34th Street. When you talk to strangers, you get to choose what to reveal about yourself. It has the appearance of openness and vulnerability about who you are, and sometimes even your secrets and sins. But it is only an inadequate substitute for confession, and I think that we secretly long for the real thing. At its best, confession names truth, about ourselves and consequences of our choices, actions, and priorities. That naming has power because it pushes us towards the path of forgiveness and reconciliation--sometimes with God, and sometimes with those we have hurt or against whom we have sinned. The hardest kind of confession--the hardest kind of sin to speak to a listening ear--is when we must look the person whom we have hurt in the face and it is their ear that hears our confession. And that can't happen on the internet or on a postcard; it only happens with flesh-and-blood listeners.
I never did stop and talk to the man in Union Square who faithfully sat each weekend near the subway entrance for 4 weeks. Part of me liked the mystery of not knowing, and another part of me (I confess) didn't want to be seen as talking to him for fear of what people might think. I was afraid they would think that I was one of those crazy or lonely or sinful people who had no one else to talk to but a stranger. So whether or not it was Jesus in New York for a visit, I'll never know. What I did discover is that even a modern-day "Jesus" needs someone to listen; once, when I walked by, I saw him holding his sign and talking on a cell phone.
