By Dan Elijah Vazquez

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others…”

(excerpt from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”) 

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He handed him the coffee he had asked for, a bacon egg and cheese on a croissant, and a blue Gatorade. 

“Stay hydrated,” he said softly, and walked away.

The other man stood motionless with his gifts in hand as his eyes followed the generous spirit making his way across the parking lot. As the laborer got into his car, the man who was panhandling by the entrance to Dunkin Donuts set down the food and drinks carefully and rushed out to catch the kind stranger before he left. 

The laborer had just started the car and was about to step on the gas when he heard the tap at the window. He looked up and saw the man he had given breakfast. 

“What’s up?” he said, after rolling down the window.

“You gave me more than I asked for. Why?” said the beggar.

The laborer raised his eyebrows and shrugged, “God’s been good to me. Gotta pass it on.”

The sun had just risen and it was directly in the laborer’s eyes, so he squinted as he struggled to maintain eye contact with the beggar. For his part, the beggar squinted right back at him, in search of understanding. He knew what the driver had just spoken was an all-important truth that few learn and fewer understand, and so he asked him, “Who taught you?”

What a question. 

Indeed, who had taught him? Who told him to ‘give alms to everyone who asks?’ Who told him that ‘the sun rises on the just and the unjust’ alike? Who told him that our karma is collective, that we’re all going to hell or heaven—together? 

He may as well have answered: Walt Whitman, Jesus Christ, or Khalil Gibran.

But he simply said, “Life.”

After all, he never met these men or even sought their wisdom. Their words found him—in school, in an old journal belonging to his mom, and on a Facebook post that came across his feed. 

By the unfolding of serendipity, or by divine design, he had learned that it was his duty and salvation to give without scrutiny and remember that he has more in common with the beggar than appearances would suggest. He did not just believe this on the authority of the wise men and their teachings, but he felt this to be true deeply, painfully. 

A veteran of the psych ward, a regular runaway in his adolescence, a thinker of thoughts that scared him, a man whose moods pulled him to Icarus’s heights and melted his wings too—who could he trust? Certainly not himself. But in his brokenness, on his knees, his own wailing sounding to him like the revelation of his soul, he discovered the impossibility of an arbitrary world and a meaningless life. Because when you hear the music of your soul, the stakes of these daily choices between good and evil become apparent, the difference between peace and misery is realized, and so is the necessity of a love so big as to cover the expanse of the universe but so infinitesimally small as to be present in every atom. Love that can, will, and has done everything—even relinquishing unlimited power to join in solidarity with our suffering (in the cruelest manner) only to come back to life and prove the point: our situation is never hopeless. 

Yes, this love is real. This love is holy. This love compels us to share. 

Because if we say ‘No, your plight is not my problem; you deserve your lot,’ we do not understand ourselves: custodians, not owners… we do not understand what we possess: gifts, not merits.

But the laborer just said “Life.” 

Because some things can never be understood intellectually. Some things aren’t meant to be considered, but felt. Some things can only be grasped when weeping. 

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“Jesus wept.” (John 11:35)

Dan Elijah Vazquez is a lifelong resident of Newark’s Ironbound district. He spends most of his waking hours at the local county parks, either doing maintenance work on behalf of Essex County Park System or playing pick-up soccer with other guys from the neighborhood. His late mom and dad were both educators in the city of Newark.

Featured image: Dan Elijah Vazquez