January 14, 2008 by djackson.

The other day I had a spiritual experience when I started to pour myself a cup of coffee in a particular establishment I frequent. Now that’s not in itself too surprising. Marcel Proust wrote a whole novel after a snort from a tea-sodden glob of cookie jolted him miles back into childhood. Well, I didn’t write any novels, but the experience may be worth a blog.

The thing is that at this place I mentioned, you pick your own mug from a rack. They put up a fairly random roster of crockery consisting in equal parts of various gimme mugs from churches, automobile garages, and charitable organizations on the one hand, and the standard brown cups apparently sold in locust-plague quantities by restaurant supply chains. This time, however, something new swam into my ken: two rows of mugs in either avocado geen or an amber shade perfectly poised between yellow and brown. Squat and squarish, these goblets bulged at the sides to produce a puffy, plump effect.

Immediately, I wanted more than anything to drink a cup of coffee from one of those mugs - one of the amber ones. If you had been in line in front of me and reached for the last one on the shelf, it would have required a sharp moral struggle to keep myself from knocking you down and wresting it from your defiling grasp. Had you offered me the choice of a slug of java from one of these vessels or a sip of consecrated wine from the Holy Graal itself, I’d've had to toss a coin.

Why, I wondered, the strong reaction? A glance at the underside of one of these bits of porcelain revealed that it came from the manufacturer’s “Retro Collection.” That turned the tumblers and unlocked my comprehension. You see, I am now old enough that my childhood is, if not downright historical, at least nostalgic. These mugs dated from the early sixties and evoked for me the memory of sitting in my aunt and uncle’s den/dining room in Paris, Texas early on a winter morning during a holiday visit. As I played in my pajamas on the hardwood floor the grownups sat at the kitchen table and talked in low voices and drank coffee from just this sort of mug. (I won’t vouch for the exact configurations. The shape, however, exactly fits a hole in my soul.) Winter sunshine streamed through the windows. The adults seemed calm, content to sit right there through all eternity. I’d never even heard of the Beatles and all the world stood, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase, at a permanent moral attention. Before my rational mind could process the process, my emotions had decided that if I could just lap up some hot liquid from this glass of my own incarnate innocence then the whole world would return to that moment, a vivid instant of perfect peace.

And somehow this all arose from the contents of those mass-produced mugs all of the big people held in their hands or cradled on the table before them. The very steam that wafted from their cups rose like incense from Abel’s first sacrifice before the dawn of homicide. Of course, I wouldn’t have liked the taste of their beverage had they offered it to me - bitter, nasty stuff. I even think I knew this at the time, and that this was part of the experience - the mystery of a grown-up drink that one only grew to like when one had achieved the omniscience children attribute to their elders. I have since become something of a coffee aficionado but I am convinced that no blend of beans I have ever drunk or ever will can possibly taste anything like the feelings that those dregs of plain old Folgers invoke for me.

Wordsworth wrote about something like this in his “Intimations on Immortality”:

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

But every now and again, the old light shines through. When Leo Tolstoy was a boy, his older brother Nicholas told him that carved on a green stick in the forest of their country estate was a secret which would cause all sickness to vanish from the earth and make all men brothers at last. At the time, little Leo believed like a sound fundamentalist that such a carving and such a stick literally existed. “I still believe today,” he wrote as a man, “that there is such a truth, and that it will be revealed to men, and will fulfill its promise.” So powerful was this childhood legend that Tolstoy gave instructions for his body to be buried in the very grove where the mystic stick supposedly reposed.

And now that I think about it, I, too, believe in such a stick. I believe that two thousand years ago God carved on bare planks in letters of blood the record of Christ’s dying love and that if all humanity would truly submit themselves to its message war would forever cease and brotherhood prevail at last. I do not believe the physical object remains any longer in tact or would even matter if it did. (Martin Luther once complained that the reliquaries of Europe held sufficient slivers of the true cross to reconstruct Noah’s ark.) I do believe that the full message expressed there remains valid for the healing of all this world’s wounds.

And now that I think about it, I also believe in the ideal cup, one that holds a drink so rich that it grants eternal life, one that I will drink at my Lord’s table for all eternity. I sip now from its earthly expression, an unconsumated sign amidst an imperfect community, but I do so as an act of faith that one day I will drink it anew in the fully-realized Kingdom of God. And I even believe that mug-moments such as the one that hit me a few mornings back come as reminders of what we yearn for in all of life and can find fulfilled only at Calvary.

I didn’t drink my coffee from one of those mugs. It would have disappointed me.

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January 9, 2008 by djackson.

Still trying to get back on schedule after the two-day trip followed by that bout of illness. One thing it has done is made me late with my New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t invariably make such resolutions, but I don’t invariably shun them either. I hadn’t really thought much about it this time around until my pastor Abba Grover preached a sermon on the last Sunday of the year using Luke 2.52. Veterans of Sunday School will know the one - “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.”

Grover went on, in his deceptively simple style, to talk about what these four areas signify and how we need to seek Jesus daily in order to reflect his advancement in each. He pointed out that the Greek verb translated increase has the image of flailing the arms as one thrashes through thick brush. This encouraged me. New Year’s Resolutions intimidate us because the very word “resolution,” with its militant adjective “resolute” and its dashing verb “resolve,” conjures up the image of triumphant, uninterrupted progress. Most days, I don’t think I can “resolve” to any noticeable extent. I can usually flail, though. So here are some New Year’s Thrashings I’ll share with everyone. I may not hack my way out of the thicket of my own weaknesses, neuroses, and sinfulness. Come December I may schlump toward Bethlehem knee-deep in the same old morass. But I figure as long as I keep swatting at the vines I’ll chalk it up in the win column. So.

WISDOM: I resolve to read less, and especially to spend less time preparing for my classes and sermons. I over-prepare, like a cook who can’t stop adding a dash of this and a pinch of that until tangy becomes funky. I leave so little white space that my students have no chance to contribute. I think I will be wiser if I know less.

STATURE: I resolve to eat at least one dessert a week. I have this real Puritanical streak in me. You know, it was David Hume, the atheist, who said Puritans objected to bear bating not because it brought pain to the bear but because it brought pleasure to the spectator. Like that. Oh, it isn’t a works salvation thing; I don’t think God likes me better because I bake two buttermilk pies and never so much as lick the batter off my finger. I think it may hark back to my days as an aspiring athlete. I figured out quickly that I would never be the strongest or the fastest or the most graceful, but discovered that I could be the most stubborn. So far so good, but somewhere along the line I made endurance a pleasure in itself. At least one dessert a week, with people around.

FAVOR WITH GOD: Well, “favor” here translates the Greek word for grace, and that, the Apostle Paul says is “not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.” So I resolve to quit slashing through the thicket that separates me from my Lord, to turn in my pith helmet and Indiana Jones snarl and instead sit down and wail like a lost five-year-old until God comes and gets me. Still, I believe with Richard Foster that spiritual disciplines are the gifts by which God lets us participate in our own growth. Grace is a gift, not a crap-shoot. So I get to do something. Therefore, I resolve to preach less. No more than two Sundays a month unless the Lord starts sending whales to swallow me up and spit me out in various pulpits. I preached about three times a week for nearly twenty-five years but I don’t despair. I have great hopes that God will forgive me for my preaching ministry. Perhaps there is a sufficient Ash Wednesday left before the Second Coming for the word to be found, for the word to resound even here, for there can yet be enough silence.

AND MAN: I resolve not to get to work before 8:30; well, okay, 8:15 but that’s it. I don’t have to show up any earlier, you know. Our office opens at 8:30 but I have fallen into the habit of showing up at 7:30 or even 7:00. That requires me to wake up no later than 5. This means that I often leave the apartment before either my wife or son are up, and that I tend to nod off around nine o’clock or so in the evening. So I miss the start-of-the-day and end-of-the-day interchanges, the secularly sacred Lauds and Compline of the family opus dei. No more, but understand: this really is a sacrifice, not an indulgence. Early morning is when I do a lot of my writing, before life fizzes around my day like a pack of pirrhana on a pot roast, the tiny teeth of a thousand individual tasks tearing off chunky seconds of time and fleshy morsels of creativity. But last night my seventeen year old invited me to hang out at Barnes & Noble with him to browse books and talk politics and movies - and I had sufficient energy to take him up on it.

“And Jesus thrashed around in the general direction of wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” Back in the days when I still believed in penance and thus played golf, I spent a good deal of time learning that, in the high grass, a machete is no match for a really hacked off teenager with a golf club. By God’s grace I’ll seven-iron my way around in the general direction of the four greens whose flags I have just posted in their respective holes. The pin placement is tricky, the doglegs are wicked and I have a howling slice. I don’t think I’ll shoot par, probably won’t break a hundred, most likely will not beat my handicap. But the fresh air and exercise will do me good, and I might even make progress, and if I swear very quietly maybe God won’t hear me.

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January 8, 2008 by djackson.

Dear folks, sorry I haven’t written lately . . .

The thing is, I’ve been sick. How sick? Well, when I say that since Friday I’ve had no interest in a cup of coffee, those of you who know my java habits will assume I was in the local ICU. It seems that the Lord sendeth flu on the just and on the unjust which means that illness is a bad way of determining who is which. So I’m back at my desk hitting on about four of six cylinders and still not sure into which category I fall.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about being sick, since that was about all I could think about for a couple of days or so. C. S. Lewis actually enjoyed being sick because it provided a kind of de facto vacation. In a letter to his father following a bout of German measles Lewis wrote:

I wonder if you will think me affected if I number a small illness among the minor pleasures of life? The early stages are unpleasant but at least they bring you to a point at which the mere giving up and going to bed is a relief. Then after twenty-four hours the really high temperature and the headache are gone: one is not well enough to get up, but then one is ill enough not to want to get up. Best of all, work is impossible and one can read all day for mere pleasure with a clear conscience.

He goes on to talk about re-reading “some of my favorite Jane Austens” and when I first stumbled on that passage years ago I decided I’d do the same. Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice have been my sickbed reading ever since. This time, however, I sank into a Dean Koontz and I’ll leave it to others to decide what that says about the state of my intellectual development. The point of the quote for me is Lewis’ idea that illness grants amnesty from diligence, a sort of indulgence of the sin of sloth purchased at the cost of a certain amount of physical discomfort. “As soon as puke in toilet splatters, a soul from Purgatory scatters.”

The Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 36, states that sick brothers merit special care but must not dare to work the system.

The sick must remember they are being taken care of for the honor of God. They must not distress the brothers who care for them with unreasonable demands.

Still, Benedict realizes that at the best of times sick people are a pain in the cassock and offers a little Matthew 25 encouragement to the nurses.

Nevertheless, these demands should be suffered patiently, since a greater reward is obtained from them.

The Rule even lightens restrictions for the sick, allowing them regular baths and meat in their diet but cautions that a return to health means renewed discipline.

So here’s how it lines up: I’ve been sick, loafing around in bed reading pulp fiction while Becky beefed up the star-count in her crown by waiting on me, cleaning up after me, and chivvying doctors over the phone so they’d come across with the appropriate potions over the weekend. (What kind of medicine, you ask? Well, let’s just say that the phrase “Up yours!” has now become a medical prescription for me.) Now I’m back on the job, the work has piled up and the semester descends upon me like twenty feet of anchor chain. It’s “Once more unto the breech,” as Shakespeare’s Henry V exhorted his troops. Sloth is a deadly sin, the same as lust, and I dare not tolerate it even for a moment.

But this - just this: perhaps I have a new (though slight, so very, very slight) appreciation for those who suffer besetting illness. I say “appreciation” rather than “understanding” because I wouldn’t presume such a thing. Still, to think of how I’ve felt since Friday night, and then to think of feeling that way all day, every day, for an untold count of days - to know that between the pincer-movement of cause (cancer, perhaps, as has been the case with some of my friends) cure (chemo, radiation, surgery) and the uncertainty of outcome this may be the best I ever feel again - is a meditation that humbles me in the lifelong good health that I am so apt to mistake for a virtue instead of a grace.

We find the mere toleration - let alone the care - of the unwell as a lasting sign of grace. “I was sick, and ye visited me.” Certainly Jesus never wasted his words. We cannot tell who is saved by who gets sick; we can at least get an inside tip based on how we respond to those who do.

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