Diesel-Powered Epiphany

“Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.” -From Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton

If your daily commute to and from work is done in a car, you won’t hear a homeless man improvising a song about kleptomania. Or see a bearded man of Middle Eastern descent wearing a pink jumpsuit carrying barbells. And you definitely won’t see a 400-pound bisexual man talking about wearing skirts to church and how he likes women but finds men cuter.

When I decided to park my car and ride the bus to work, my reasons were mostly practical. Gas was inching above $3 (this was in February), the red lights in downtown Louisville I seemed to always hit in the morning were grating on my nerves, and my concern for the environment was coming even more into focus.

I hadn’t really considered the deeper implications of a twice-a-day commute to work via a form of public transportation that, unlike a city subway or a cross-country train, is neither urban chic nor romantic. The bizarre characters I started meeting, the odd political conversations overheard and the smells of cheap perfume and body odor led me to develop both an appreciation and an aversion to bus riding I never considered when a $60 gas receipt first sent me over the edge.

The appreciation I discovered was for the sheer diversity of the experience. The aversion developed courtesy of the smells, attitudes and appearances of people I would in my fleshly selfishness much rather ignore.

When I first encountered a man in a wheel chair, my first thought was to be annoyed with having to change seats and the added time to my ride home. My thoughts were not contemplating the reality of a life lived by someone without the choices or freedom I enjoy, or the annoyance he must face every time he has to wait, first for the ramp to come down and then for the bus driver to buckle him in.

More recently, when a woman started spouting off about being “court ordered” and how a bisexual woman had put her cat to sleep, instead of pondering the hard life she was living and her obvious desire to be listened to and loved I caught myself being thankful I had not chosen a seat on the other side of the bus where she was sitting.

The guy with the pink jumpsuit and the barbells? I’m ashamed to admit it, but the Donald Rumsfield-inspired “could he be a terrorist?” thought did cross my mind.

As callous as this may sound, facing the truth of my unedited thoughts and feelings has taught me how much easier it is to say you love and care for the poor and the downtrodden on the fringes of society when they are on the other side of a soup kitchen line or on the receiving end of a donation. Riding the bus has broken down that barrier for me.

People ride the bus for different reasons. When I started I was living with a family in a wealthier part of town with a scarcity of sidewalks and bus shelters. I rode the bus next to a lot of well-dressed professionals with more zeros in their paychecks than mine. For them the bus is most likely a way to avoid rush hour traffic and downtown parking fees. Many even ride for free because of an arrangement between the bus company and their employers (envious of this arrangement, I recently talked my employer into subsidizing my bus pass instead of my parking). On this bus route, I found talking to people who were my neighbors and middle-class peers at home and at work relatively easy and rarely awkward.

But since I moved closer to downtown, I’ve switched to a bus that rides through lower income areas. Instead of seeing the segregation of society in the homes and apartment complexes from my car window on a morning commute, I see it in the people with whom I now ride to work. I’ve discovered why it’s so much easier for people living in the suburbs to condemn the poor and wonder why they can’t just get off welfare and pull themselves up by their bootstraps when they aren’t sharing a seat with them on the bus.

Like Merton realized half a century ago at the corner of 4th and Walnut streets, my bus encounters with strangers who would otherwise remain hidden from my life of middle class comfort have taught me that we are members of the same human race equally needful of love, grace and forgiveness. Beyond saving gas money and wear and tear on my car, I’ve learned something about what it means to love these strangers even when they are awkwardly interfering with my personal space, producing unpleasant smells or talking loudly and ever so politically incorrect on their cell phones.

Just the other day, a guy on the bus told me he was going to slap the shit out of me because I accidentally bumped him with my library book. I wanted to tell him that his girlfriend was ugly. But even in my anger, which led me to take a different bus for two days to avoid him, I was reminded of this newfound perspective I owe all to the choice of parking the 2002 Hyundai Sonata now gathering tree sap and debris on the tree-lined street outside my house.