THE CHRIST-BEARER Maybe we are all somehow Saint Christopher. Maybe carrying each other is carrying the Christos is why we are here.
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here is an icon I keep on a shelf above my desk. It is of one of the oldest saints in the history of Christian iconography: Saint Christopher. My namesake. I only learned the legend of this figure behind my name two years ago, from a homeless youth I met in San Francisco’s Mission District. He needed a ride to L.A. and folks at the agency I was visiting told him I was headed that way with my sixteen-passenger church van full of colleagues and ex-gangmembers on our tour of various gang ministries down the West Coast. This homeless youth — or “gutter punk,” they like to say — wore pants as shiny as blacksmith’s leather with soot and oil from a hundred nights under park bushes and by freeway onramps. His long black matted hair stuck out from his trucker’s hat with its deeply curved bill, tattoos his sleeves. “No way!” he glowed. “My name’s Chris, too! And this is my dog.” A huge pit bull jumped up onto the bus’s rear bench. “What’s its name?” an annoyed former gangster in my crew asked as the reeking animal crawled over his shoulder. “That is his name,” Chris said. “My Dog.” As we sailed down the dark I-5 freeway, past miles of monocrops and rest stops, Chris told me the legend of this martyr from the third century who had become the patron saint of travelers. According to tradition, he was a wild man, tall and strong, who lived by the side of a river and helped travelers cross to the other bank. One day, so the story goes, a child came to the riverside and asked for his help. He was all alone, like an orphan. When they reached the middle of the charging river, the child on his shoulders felt heavier than any other Christopher had borne over the water before. It felt as though he were “carrying the weight of the world” on his back. When they finally arrived safe on the other riverbank, the man had one of those epiphanies: this small child now facing him had been Christ in disguise all along. And just as suddenly, the child then disappeared. This is how he became known in Greek as Christoforos, or the Christ Bearer. When our dirty bus parked along-
By Christopher Hoke side the star-paved curbs of Hollywood late that night, Chris thanked us and said he needed to go make a call at a pay phone for a friend to pick him up. He and My Dog disappeared into the city’s moving lights and we never saw them again. I have since recognized this saint he told me about — the bent-over figure with a staff in his hand and waves up to his knees, a child on his back who is radiating holy light — on many small necklaces worn by the Roman Catholic migrants in the foggy agricultural valley where I live. These people have left their homes in Mexico and crossed the treacherous Border to pluck a new life from the North, one plastic bucket of pennies-a-pound blueberries at a time. San Cristobal is the tiny santo kissed on their sweaty fabric pendants and tucked back into T-Shirts as these families cross impossible distances and barriers, from one life to another, uncertain if they will make it alive. The painted woodblock of Saint Christopher, now above my desk, has become a symbol for me and my vocation. I live alongside a large salmonladen river in the Northwest, and like my namesake, I am tall, though not very wild. As a jail chaplain and pastoral worker among young gang members I meet in the facility and on the streets, I have found my work in accompanying these North American orphans through turbulent legal and existential transitions. I walk with them through their criminal and immigration courts, through drug and alcohol treatment programs, through relapses, job interviews, drivers’ tests, broken hearts, emergency rooms and shotgun wounds, maternity wards, parenting classes, baptisms, and often, finally, into my own home to raise their children together with me and others. The icon’s imagery helps me see a simple narrative in all this: the homies are crossing over from one life to another. And what strengths I can offer — like my education and privilege as a tall, white male with no criminal record — enable me to navigate the lawyers’ offices, streams of paperwork, cross-currents of collections agencies, court payments and fees at every department. These all 18
comprise an intimidating barrier to a vulnerable young man with tattoos secretly wanting a better future. In the slightly bent Christopher figure, I see a shape for my ache as well: not just weariness from ferrying guys all across town in my car, but an invisible spiritual weight, another’s anxious heart and restless dreams that temporarily have no footing, r iding on and trusting my own flexing hope, barely fixed on what I see just ahead. In this legend of the river-crosser, there is a spiritual geography of transition. It is a metaphor I can hold like a map. It helps me see where we are: when I sense one of these guys in recovery suddenly cling to me in a choking relational grip through months of transition, and then when I sense an ease and his weight suddenly slides off. I know we have crossed that river when we see each other face to face, on the same level, as friends, as members of my community, my household, and even my wedding party. And at this point we share the radiant sense that somewhere in the middle of those late nights and jail visits, the long drives to impossible court dates and laughter beside a river where we’d fish, the weight of terror we bore together was filled with a mystical presence we did not understand at the time. That is what I see in those traditional yellow circles looming behind the heads of the ferrier and child in the icon. Not crowns of saintly status, but the simple shape of intuited mystery. Those yellow circles are what have kept me going back and forth between the jail and the shared housing all these years. It is the curve of invisible, ecstatic presence that the human eye could not recognize at the time. It is the indefensible knowledge that the stuff of heaven I’ve always sought was, for a moment with this criminal youth, heavy upon me. In this legend, then, there is a shape to the hiddenness of God. A shape rather like a lonely kid wanting to be picked up on the side of the street. Chris Hoke is a jail chaplain and gang pastor with the Tierra Nueva ministry project in the Skagit Valley of Washington state.