The Prostitute and Salmon

Two men spent the night with her; how scandalous was that then, how scandalous would it be now. Who knows what compels a woman to become a prostitute.

Maybe prostitution is a lesser evil for some.

I was reminded this weekend of the pain that’s carried in the bosom of people. In the six years I’ve been involved in inner city ministry in Columbus, Ohio I’ve seen the grotesque manifestations attach themselves to the human like a barnacle on the underside of cargo ship.

Two years ago a small posse of homeless folk made their way to our church; they became regulars for many months; Kristina was one of them. She wore pain like the rain-soaked wool coat of a WWII infantryman. She died this weekend after being hit while riding her bicycle at midnight on a busy road.

I remember sitting and talking with Kristina at one point; the anguish of abuse poured from her; it poured like the Mississippi River breaching a levee in a small farming town during spring torrents of melting snow and ice and March rains.

If the account hadn’t been properly framed none of us would have known that the two men didn’t come for sex. What they wanted was much bigger; much more sensual…milk and honey.

Sexually abused as a kid, Kristina built a wall with greater precision than a master mason. Brick by brick she’d constructed a protective minaret. Minarets are those tall, slender, sometimes spiraled towers with small balconies, from which a crier throws prayers. For Kristina the balconies were used to observe from afar human intent.

She built the towers to keep others out. She built the towers to be safe.

Five years ago I met “Tony” who went by the name “T-Bone”. His pain was buried somewhere inside the tattooed tear drop below one eye and the countless bottles of beer and wine and heavier drink that floated from his lips like spun cotton candy inside the spinning bowl.

“T-Bone” died last year. He called me “passer” with a voice full of gravel and as deep as a West Virginia coal mine. He once told me I was a good man.

Twenty-five addicts and abusers from Amethyst House each had their own story of pain; as did Michael from Texas who was HIV positive and Todd, now in Texas, who used to call me on my cell phone day and night and cry…seeking absolution and answers…never having had a daddy.

Renee died lying on her bed two and a half years ago; she was 26, quiet, finding peace in life that had been eluding her…it was as sudden as a sneeze.

I wonder what pain Rahab the prostitute had that drove her to become a prostitute. Quite naturally two men going into her house might have been perverse, but then again, it might not have. No more than a homeless woman seeking solace and safety in sex with both men and women.

For Rahab, was it an arranged marriage gone amuck, a filthy uncle, a maniacal husband like in the movie The Stoning of Soraya M., or, could it have been a matter of economics?

Is the real scandal that people give up on hope?

“Love always…hopes” God spoke through the Apostle Paul.

A third of the way through the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel there’s that name…Rahab…breathed in the same sentence with somebody named Salmon.

Dropped in between the two was somebody named Boaz…son of the two…a former prostitute mother and an obscure father; a father whose life seems as unremarkable as a dimple on a golf ball—just one among many.

But the name Salmon is pregnant with meaning; at least it was to Rahab. The Hebrew word for Salmon is שַׂלְמָה; it means “garment.”

There’s the hope…the garment…used to cover Rahab’s past…somebody accepting her and giving her the life God always intended for her.

We all have a past, we all need a Salmon.

Kristina needed a Salmon…and all the Kristina’s of the world.