Cosmic humor

I ask, is God's humor distinct from his justice? I'm guessing not and here's why:

Yesterday I purchased a biography of Mother Teresa because I think she's about the closest thing to the faith of the Patristics and their practice that we've seen in recent times. I read the first 70 pgs yesterday evening. Toward the end of that reading session I found the following passage:

"If an increasing number of occupants of the home for the dying began to recover it was not because Nirmal Hriday [the home] could provide efficient medical care which hospitals could not. There were those trained doctors and nurses who came to work there on a voluntary basis who were horrified at the failure to observe the kind of fundamental rules of hygiene which would protect the Sisters from infection and the 'patients' from contaminating each other. The Missionaries of Charity were not to wear gloves to touch the maggot-ridden bodies of the dying, any more than they were to hold the lepers at arm's length because they were tending the body of Christ. One anecdote which Mother Teresa loved to tell and retell was of a young novice who was sent for the first time to work in Nirmal Hriday, who returned at the end of the day with shining eyes, protesting her joy that she had been touching Christ throughout the day."

This passage falls on the next to last page that I read last night. Then, not twelve hours later, who walks into morning prayer but L, perhaps the most notoriously smelly homeless drunk in our city. We've known L for a while. He shows up for prayer, asks what day it is and if we can buy him a beer, and then disappears for a few weeks. He has in various prior appearances passed out on the church steps, yelled irately at one or other of us, and chugged a glass of raw eggs for breakfast. I once saw him wandering drunk in city traffic three times in one day in substantially different locations of the city. One story circulating among those on the street is that the cops don't hassle L anymore because once when he was picked up in a police cruiser one of the officers proceeded to vomit in his car because of the smell. Maybe it's true, if not in fact at least in spirit. He generally looks as if he has been unconscious in a ditch for a few days. His mood swings from disoriented and inquiring to outright belligerence. Another story has it that he has been banned from all of the local convenience stores because of his propensity to lose his temper and throw things.

Anyway, L walks into our little church and has a seat in one of the rear pews. I find it endearing that he positioned himself so: merciful and endearing. Even from that position his scent quickly diffused around the small sanctuary. After prayer C and I spoke with him over breakfast and I offered to go buy him some new clothes (to replace some utterly soiled garments) if he would come back to evening prayer to pick them up. He agreed, so we collected his sizes from him and proceeded to shop at the thrift store after lunch.

L showed up promptly for evening prayer, while I was speaking to another of our local friends (he told me some of the stories about L). L took his position on the pew, adamant that we have service before he would change clothes. After prayer I walked him around to the parish hall (he had forgotten how to get there since breakfast... it's less than 50 feet and the buildings are attached), and got out the new socks, underwear, shirts, pants, etc. He needed help getting his shoes off. No problem. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a good head for figures, at least as clothing sizes go, so the pants were several sizes too small in the waist. He insisted on trying on all three pair, despite their all being the same size. A particularly comical moment (which failed to strike him) was when he came out of the bathroom asking for help in buttoning the pants, for which the button and button-hole were respectively closer to his hips than to his navel. No chance, buddy. After some convincing he put back on his "ratty ol' britches" and proceeded to dress himself. He couldn't get the new socks on, so I helped. His feet had sores on them, at least patches I assumed were sores because they were an opaque black and looked abraded. The smell was, hmm, memorable. His ankles were swollen, almost too much for me to get the socks over them, and his legs were covered in scars. He said he had a rod in his left shin from some long ago accident. No details.

I asked if we could get him a motel room so he could get a shower and clean up. Maybe we could get a nurse to come have a look at the more troubling wounds. But he wouldn't have it. "No, thank you, sir," he kept saying. C helped him button up the new shirt that we got for him. Unfortunately, he kept his undershirt, a medium-weight long sleeve knit shirt that he had worn for I think probably at least a year underneath his sweater (yes, he's been wearing a sweater in the South all summer... he said it was "kinda warm").

Tomorrow we'll go get him some pants that fit. And I'll try again to convince him to let us take him to clean up some. If only there were a shower at the church.

The point here is not that L stinks, but that L is precisely the guy I need to be alongside while reading Teresa's biography. So, I say that God is humorous because I almost laughed when L walked in this morning precisely because of my choice of reading material the night before. There will be no easy tests today, no charming, well-kept homeless to chat with. And it only seems obvious that the humor of the situation is also its justice.