This is my friend: Norman. Norm died a couple of weeks ago. He was what America calls 'homeless'. Which is a terrible misnomer for the people who (as the English put it) 'live rough' on our streets.
In my experience there are three kinds of people living rough:
Those who find themselves there through failure or circumstance and who are trying desperately to escape.
Those possessed by the twin demons of mental illness and mind bending drugs - often both and often hard to tell apart - except that those possessed by drugs die faster.
And then there are the outliers like Norm.
I don't know Norm's back story but by the time I met him Norm didn't really fit into either category. He wasn't anguished and struggling nor did he appear to be possessed by 'demons'. The Norm I knew seemed to be at peace: with his situation, with others and with his God. Norm lived underneath the freeway in a small tent, not far from the church. He worked at church every week, directing traffic and parking cars. He also was a regular attender at the monthly 'Homeless' Barbecue that I help at. That was where this photo was taken.
Norm and I spoke often. Usually about the weather - whether it was hardest to live rough in a Houston summer or a St. Louis winter - we agreed to disagree about that. Or about the parking traffic and how otherwise intelligent church goers couldn't follow simple directions. Sometimes we talked about the church and faith and while I never pried, I know he was a believer. I always looked forward to seeing Norm with his wry, enigmatic smile. It's how I imagine Abraham or Moses must have looked after crossing the Sinai.
And so far as I could tell, Norm was at peace: with himself, with others, with his life. It's what made him such a unique figure at church. I believe that to know Norm was to get a glimpse of what the Essene monks of biblical Israel must have been like. As I understand it, the Essenes took vows of poverty, living in the wilderness copying scriptures (it's where the Dead Sea Scrolls come from), praying and communing with their God. Some scholars believe Jesus was an Essene. John the Baptist probably was.
Whether or not Norm was really like an Essene, Norm's existence had a singular quality: He was in some fundamental way beyond the cares of this world. Most of us spend our days struggling, grasping, getting, justifying - always chasing something or someone. But Norm didn't. He was past all that. As if he was standing on the boundary between this world and the next, looking with bemusement back on the roaring bedlam he had crossed.
