(no subject)
I guess the first time that happened was sometime in about 2002. The two of us were walking from Onyx to Café Netherworld and we passed a kid who worked as a barback at Onyx. Nathan gave one of his typical friendly hello’s, and the kid shot back something dismissive. Nathan’s hair hang in strings of black in front of his eyes, but it wasn’t enough to hide a glimpse of something brittle that dwelt there. I guess it was hope. At that moment, Nathan was the Last True Goth. While everyone else was jaded: going out to show off the latest fashion or gossip with their drink about drama or how terribly someone else is dancing, Nathan was a Man of Sorrow. The same type of Sorrow that Jesus had when he walked among Israel.
He was a prophet. He believed in the impossible. He proclaimed Jesus everywhere and to everyone. He called fire down from heaven. He held unwavering to truths that were openly mocked in the cultures he put himself into. But those who heard him heard love. He found a way of bringing joy to the most callous of hearts. To the outcast of the outcasts. To those most of us would never believe could have hope.
I came here wanting to believe that the Gospel had a place in any culture, particularly this one. I don’t know if I ever figured out how that worked, but I saw how it worked by watching Nathan. He had more faith than I did. He had more hope that there was goodness inside of every person. I didn’t have the faith to go about inviting people to church at goth clubs, but sometimes I’d point out someone I thought he should invite. I even told him once he should put a Bible on the bookcase at Café Netherworld. It’s there to this day. I wanted to believe that the Gospel has a place in the most desolate and desperate of places. And maybe I’m not the person to make that happen, but I saw in the life of Nathan that the Gospel truly does mean more there than it does anywhere else. I saw in the joy it brought to the faces of those so downtrodden they’d long since lost their masks of jaded indifference and snobby faux-elitism. The life of Nathan and the joy he brought to the faces of so many desperate souls is one of the few evidences I have that the Gospel is more than a Fairy Tale.
Towards the end of his life, his ADD made conversations with him more and more difficult. But every once and awhile he’d say something incredibly wise, and it made me long for more of that. Perhaps behind the confusion that most of us saw most of the time, he knew more than any of us would believe. In the last conversation I had with him, he told me that his ministry was ended. He said that Capitol Hill was filled with evil and that he had to get away from it. A week later his phone was disconnected. I prayed for him on cold days. I was pretty sure he was homeless at that point.
Maybe this is a Fairy Tale, but I’d like to believe that his end was not as desolate as the picture painted by the local paper. I’m not entirely sure why, but many people from Boulder think it is a utopia. I like to think that in his last days, maybe he found some comfort and rest in that utopia. Maybe he was able to lay down some of the burdens he’d placed on himself in Capitol Hill. And one cold morning, the sun twinkling off a trillion crystals of pure white snow in utopia, he went home to meet his maker.