A Frank Conversation with The Carpenter’s Kid from Nazareth

by Rob Goodale

Dear sir: I don’t understand you, man.

I hear your words -- how you greet people, how you make them feel welcome. I hear how you know exactly what words every single person most desperately longs to hear. How you comfort. Reassure. Challenge. Provoke. Say yes. Say no. Make demands. Offer second chances… thirds, too, when necessary.

I watch the way you move -- with a quiet ferocity, a mission of a man, every step carefully measured and precisely placed. Every sinew and fiber of your being sings of your purpose, which is at turns perplexing and terrifying. Pointing to people and calling their names, asking strangers for help, fiddling around in the dirt. Not a moment or movement wasted. Every moment and movement wasted.

I watch the way you don’t move -- content to sit at the table longer than anyone else, waiting for things the rest of us cannot imagine. Remaining dumbfoundingly still, receiving each wandering, tear-filled eye. Hiding out of sight, just beyond the door, somewhere in between sleep and wakefulness, just in case a lonely wayfarer realizes they’re looking for you.

I feel the way the entire room gravitates toward you -- whether you thunder and shake with the tempestuous force of every storm literally ever all combined into one, or rest with a placid serenity that would make the glassy surface of a country pond at dawn blush for causing a scene.

I feel the way five minutes with you carries me six and half nautical miles farther than I have any business sailing in this weather.

I feel the piercing, blinding shame that screams through my heart as I see my reflection in your eyes and recognize, in a moment of unspoken understanding, that I have failed you every day of my life.

I feel the even more humiliating ache in my bones borne from the equally unspoken understanding that, in the end, you do not care about my failures, so long as I am not too proud to see them and greet them like friends who, in another life, used to be enemies; to let you take them and do unimaginable things with them, things that will surely sting a bit and which the neighbors may find horrifying.

I hear. I watch. I feel. And I do not understand a speck of it.

What are you doing? Where are you going?

And (this question burns ineffably in my soul)

May I come along?