He was loud, he was drunk, and although I could not understand him, his lack of respect for personal boundaries was making me nervous.
I checked the faces of my fellow train passengers, and they ranged from apathy to concern, but mostly they tried to ignore him. A few had moved away. He seemed more interested in the pretty girls, so I puffed up my physique a little, hoping to dissuade him from engaging my wife. He was yelling in Spanish, of which I spoke none, and which made him feel a little more menacing. I'd already been robbed on a subway train in Madrid a few days before, so fear was taking over and I was looking for an exit.
Some of the things he said were clearly disgusting the locals, for that set of reactions seems universal. It was a mixed group of what seemed like commuters and tourists. Some dressed in the comfort-oriented clothes cherished by tourists. Others, more fashionably dressed and non-plussed by the theatrics I assumed were perhaps inhabitants of the area. I could only imagine what he was saying as he made his way down the train car closer to our seats. I didn't know this particular person, but I felt I'd seen enough in my life to "know" the basic situation. Contempt for him began to saturate my thoughts.
I was riding a train to Barcelona in the first place, because we had been visiting the legendary Monestario de Montserrat. This is a cathedral and religious community built 900 meters up in a mountain in the 12th century. Legend has it the holy grail was kept here for a period. But it's more recently famous for it's statue known as the "Black Madonna". Visitors can file by and touch the foot of the statue, with the hopes that it will bring some kind of blessing to them for having made the pilgrimage to the sacred site. There are claims of miracles over the centuries in this hallowed place.
After visiting the statue, I felt nothing, except perhaps a sense of confirmed skepticism. Relics like this have never much inspired me. And I even felt somewhat alienated from other religious people who seem to find connection with these sites so meaningful and even mystically gratifying.
Perhaps it was because we took the cable car to the top of the mountain instead of making the hike of several miles up the mountain on foot.
Perhaps I carried with me an unrealistic notion that God would be hanging out in European cathedrals because they're really old and beautiful and somehow more apt to capture the presence of a deity than the newly minted "auditoriums" of evangelical Christian churches.
Perhaps it was my skepticism going in to the whole experience, that caused me to miss whatever it was I was supposed to experience.
And while I felt a certain awe for the devotion of monks who laboured so tirelessly for this place, as well as for those who have preserved it for the centuries since, I couldn't completely quell the uneasy feeling that God seemed so distant in a place we expect her to inhabit.
Such abstract reflections quickly vanished when the intoxicated gentleman on the train ride back made eye contact with me, before taking up residence in the seat across the aisle. Now I could smell the mix of alcohol and filth, and virtually taste the distress of his existence. He sat down next to an elderly lady and began to wax eloquent.
Unlike the other passengers she made eye contact. She listened. There was a softness in her face and demeanour towards him. After several minutes of earnest listening, she asked him a question. I couldn't tell what it was, but it stopped him cold in his tracks. For the first time in thirty minutes of train ride he was silent. We all began to watch as the quiet transpired.
"Abrazo" he said, with tears forming in his eyes.
Somehow I knew what he was asking. Perhaps it's because "abrazo" sounds so similar to the English "embrace", that I knew he was asking her for hug. The eyes of the train focused on the drama unfolding in front of us. But without hesitation this humble fellow passenger rose to her feet and opened her arms to him. She held him in her abrazo for as long as he needed. I don't remember how long it actually occurred. I think those of us witnessing this act of love and compassion soon averted our gaze as if to hold sacred by granting privacy the intimacy that was taking place in our midst.
I feel fairly certain I encountered God on the train to Barcelona.
I'd been disappointed to find God missing in the cathedrals and relics, but found him instead in the love and compassion of an old lady toward what seemed to me someone pathetic and frightening. No matter what cynicism was perverting my mind at the time, I could not miss the meeting of heaven and earth when when one when human gave generously of her love to another human that most of us were despising. At the end of my train ride I started another journey; one of looking for and finding God out amongst his creation and especially among his people.
Like all journeys it's had highlights and it's had forgettable moments. Times of boredom and despair, and times of wondering if I'm on the right track, or if there even is such a thing as a spiritual journey. But God keeps showing up in the most unexpected places. Or as Nadia Bolz-Weber calls them, "all the wrong people". God shows up in the saints and the sinners, the self-proclaimed faithful and the self-proclaimed atheists, and sometimes I get the strange sense that she shows up in me.
Recently I've even found God showing up in church buildings, in congregations, and in the lives of religious people of both great faith and great doubts. After meeting God on the train, I often assumed that God had abandoned the religious and was only showing up in weird and unexpected places. Sometimes when we've been hurt by people and institutions we can start to assume he can't be there in the midst of those places or those people.
But as fans of the film The Big Lebowski will recall, "The dude abides"
Wherever love is shown and wherever love is needed, "the dude" abides.
And sometimes "the dude" converts hearts of ordinary religious folk like me. Giving us a new story to live, and shaping us into the kind of people that somewhat resemble the old lady on the train to Barcelona. Helping us to become people who are not so afraid that we might embrace the world and its brokenness.
