What's Your Dream?

Recently I was in Maryland, sitting at a Starbucks hoping for traffic on the north bound 95 to clear a bit so I could continue my trip from Virginia to New York. It was going to be several hours before the evening rush hour would end, so I was reviewing my email and working on various projects in the busy little coffee shop.

After a while, I became aware—audibly—of two people sitting behind me. They were talking to each other in tones that conveyed a clear affection for one another. Person A was asking Person B about B’s aspirations, about their dreams. It was hard to make out the details, and at this point they hardly matter. What attracted my attention was the deep concern that A expressed in knowing B. In fact, A kept pressing B “come on, is that what you really want?” B seemed either reticent, or unsure (probably both.) Person A was keen to know what made B tick, and A wasn’t about to let B avoid the issue.

My attention to their conversation ebbed and flowed over the 45 minutes or so that they sat behind me, and eventually I heard chairs scrape the floor and they left together. I did not turn and look, so I will never know what A or B looked like. But I do know that there existed between them that most essential and rare of all elements, real human compassion and understanding.

It made me stop and ponder. I’m eaves-dropping in a public place, and in front of me and everyone else in that room these two were engaged in loving one another, right out in the open. Person A and person B were really exposing themselves and their care for each other to public scrutiny.

Jesus did that. He was willing to show his love for people even though it exposed him to criticism by others. Once there was a woman who had been caught in flagrante delicto abed with a man not her husband. This was frowned upon pretty severely at that time. She was dragged to Jesus and accused. In a famous bit of what turned out to be sand painting, Jesus turned the tables on her accusers, and when they were all gone, he asked her “where are your accusers?” She shrugged her shoulders and told Jesus she didn’t know. He shrugged his shoulders and said “I don’t accuse you either, you are free to go. But do this: live differently.”

Do you see he did? Jesus ran off her accusers, and then asked her what she thought. She wasn’t sure what she thought. But Jesus pressed her to “live differently.” This was loving the woman. She was meant to be humiliated and subject to scorn, and in a very public way, Jesus in effect was saying “use this event to transform you life”.

Real love has two parts. One part is not accusing. The other part is asking the person to live outside their current paradigm. To do it all differently. Most of us get the first part, it’s the second part that is tough to handle. That’s the part of love that most of us don’t get. Its hard, its takes guts. You don’t find it in many hallmark cards. “To my favorite Uncle: You are loved. Don’t worry that you ruined by birthday by being drunk and puking on the grass. Oh yes, one more thing; You are loved so please live differently.”

Some of us do get the second part, telling people to “live differently” but we don’t do it while we are living the “not accusing” part. To NOT accuse someone you have to know them. You have to know what they’ve done so you can not accuse them. You have to know what they are made of. Jesus knew exactly who this woman was. It wasn’t that he didn’t know or couldn’t imagine. He knew very well what she’d done. But he didn’t accuse anyway.

“Tell me your dreams” has to come from a place of knowing, so you can tell someone “stop holding out, I know you have dreams.” Loving someone is hard when you know who they are and what they’ve done. When they stop being dream people and start being as human as you are.

And to love them where others can see. Wow. That’s hard. But it’s not impossible. I know this, because I heard someone doing it, right there, out in the open at Starbucks.

Brand Loyalty

Even the most causal reader of this blog would not have missed that I have a certain preference for Starbucks brand coffee and the establishments from which they purvey their particularly piquant version of America’s favorite hot beverage. Nothing against Pete’s, or the Coffee Bean, or Seattle’s Best, or all the little boutique purveyors of the oily brew, but Starbucks is my considered choice. This preference of mine has given me pause to ponder about why anyone develops brand loyalty. One would think that these loyalties are naturally developed on the basis of the quality of the product offered, or the fine level of service. But I think more often than not, those obvious criteria are not what drives a man to stake a claim of loyalty toward this particular coffee or that particular nerve tonic.

A particular man may in fact have a marked preference for Plumptree’s Vitiminized Nerve Tonic. Now don’t get me wrong, Plumptree’s may be a fine product, but the man’s loyalty is more likely engrained in habit “They sell it at the health-food store right next to my favorite liquor store” or in tradition “My mother always had a supply of Plumptree’s on hand” or aesthetics “The packaging looks calm and reassuring” (a good thing for a product such as Nerve Tonic) rather than an attribute of the product itself.

The product may in fact be a putrid gelatinous mass from which no sane person would willingly inhale fumes, much less ingest when mixed with prune juice as seems to be the preference of some. But the power of habit, tradition and aesthetics can drive our man to do many things that seem on the surface crazy. By the way, he may well have a stock of Plumptree’s, he probably declaims its many qualities when the subject of Nerve Tonic comes up among his friends, but I’m betting he’s not actually consumed any of the stuff in years. He’d be smarter than that.

He may find out later that his Mother always had a supply of Plumptree’s because she never used it either, and so it sat prominently in her cupboard, right next to Aunt Tilly’s fruitcake which was sent Christmas of ’67 along with a re-used Christmas Card (still taped to the fruity brick) with cardinals and holly covered in glitter.

In my case, I started going to Starbucks because every location had a T-Mobile Hot Spot, a wireless internet connection. I have an account and during gaps between meetings, I can easily hookup and check my email. But I felt weird walking into the joint spreading out over a table and chair with self and stuff and not purchasing anything, so I designed to assuage my guilt in purchasing their cheapest product (admittedly “cheap” here is a relative term) a black coffee. Their black coffee is a pretty stringent affair, and only the stout-of-heart take it on without some form of warm-up calisthenics.

You see, Starbucks coffee beans are roasted so dark, that in the coffee business, their nickname is “Charbucks.” It is occasionally difficult when drinking their coffee black to discriminate between a cup of their coffee and a warmed up cup of the black drippings off my charcoal burning barbeque which collect in the grease trap after it rains. Over time I’ve learned to love that acidic concoction (the coffee, not the barbeque flotsam). And now, the habit is engrained, and I find myself calmer when I’m on the road and I know where the nearest Starbucks is located.

Funny thing, since those early heady days, I’ve armed myself with a blackberry, so my need for email updates aren’t so pressing. I can see it all pour in over my phone. I don’t have to hook-up with the internet to know which client is frustrated and angry. But I still go to Starbucks.

Some people pickup religions in the same way. They go because of habit, tradition or aesthetics. They don’t actually consume the product, but they like the comfort they get from that form of repetition. Other people come to get a connection, with a romantic interest, or because they were in crisis, or because their close friend was there. Along the way, while connecting, they’ve picked up the habit, they’ve learned to drink the strong brew, and now wouldn’t quit for anything.

In Christianity, it seems like Jesus wasn’t interested in our comfort. The faith in many ways is offensive to those not a part of it even though in the west we’ve done a lot to make it palatable and comfortable. We’ve forgotten that Jesus called us to serve. We ought remember who we are, and that we are loved anyway. Confident in that knowledge, we can know who others are and love them anyway. Jesus didn’t ask us to be a chaise lounge, a place where people can recline and take in the Son. No, He said we were his body. An organism, living an vibrant, ready to move, to reach out, to touch, to caress, to love.

Now if you are looking for comfort, if you are looking for scope for your aesthetic need for ritual or beauty and if in that search you bump into the body of Christ, you will probably be put off a bit. You might be looking for the foamy comfort of a latte, and find instead, strong and black, the crippled body of Jesus, doing what it can to engage the world around it.

Of course, if you are someplace comfortable, if you love your particular brand, you have to ask yourself “is this the coffee I should be drinking?” Or maybe more importantly “what draws me here, what is at the root of my brand loyalty, and should I be here at all? What do they serve here? Do they serve here?” And while you ponder that, may I suggest that you slurp on a Starbucks?

The Sounds of Silence

I was standing in line at one of my “mobile office” Starbucks. It’s a place where I often meet the folks I collaborate with. It’s right off the I-5 Freeway in Burbank. Every Starbucks has a tone, a feel, a little sub-culture. This one is often quiet, almost contemplative, though there are frequently a lot of people there they’re all doing what I’m doing—meeting and working and catching up on their email. In that quietness, standing in line waiting to place my order, I began to tune into the music that is ever present at Starbucks. The familiar sounds of Paul Simon’s guitar began to waft through the air.

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

Ah yes. Darkness. Our old friend. And like everything in life, immediately the song wasn’t the song, just like the issue isn’t’ the issue and the pain isn’t the pain. I began to think about how frequently I run to the darkness when the light hurts my eyes. When a friend says a truth so obvious that a total stranger would see it: “you are over committed” and I am immediately defensive. When my beloved wife says “I want to be with you, and when you are gone, I miss you” and I won't admit that I’ve let the urgency of life upend my values, and I’m playing on the wrong side of the ball. When a spiritual leader says to me “I worry that you have your fingers into too many important things” instead of admitting that there is a kind of arrogance in my being ready with a prompt opinion on every matter, that I don’t and can’t know everything, I lash out and say that it’s not my fault if I’m the only one who prepares mentally for the issues of the day.

The barista in front of me--with raised eyebrows--broke my rumination and said “What can we make for you today?” I wondered if it was the first time she had spoken. Probably not. I blushed and ordered my grande drip no-room.

I found an empty table near an electrical outlet (a requirement if I’m going to be there for more than say an hour), sat down and plugged in. The coffee is always too hot to drink for the first few minutes. I fill cooling time with plugging-in and logging-on.

My hard drives spun up and Art Garfunkle’s bell like voice blended with Paul Simon’s. They sang on:

“Fools", said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence

I looked around. Everyone there was working away, talking quietly with a colleague, or reading, or typing or writing. They had nothing but silence for me. Again, the song wasn’t the song, the issue wasn’t the issue, the light wasn’t the light. I realize that what most people don’t want is words that teach or arms that reach. They want to be left alone. They are happy in their own silence, happy in their own darkness. Occasionally, they get stirred up, they have a crisis, something goes wrong, and they break out and begin to wonder “is this it?” but most of the time, they aren’t keen on the being engaged. And here’s the horrible part. Neither am I. “What I really want is to be left alone.” I don’t like meeting new people; I don’t like engaging people I don’t know. I’d rather not think of them having complex lives like I have, having frailties as debilitating as the ones that I have…because if I don’t think of that, I don’t have to worry about engaging them.

Jesus was really good at engaging people right where they were. He stood in front of the temple during a festival where these large clay pots full of oil would burn and cast this yellow glow over the people in the courts. As they were lit, he stood in front of the crowd and said “I am the light of the world.” Talk about using the materials available to you. Later, when people were concerned about what to eat, Jesus said “unless you eat me, you can’t live, regular food won’t sustain you.” These statements really confused people. The light isn’t the light? The food isn’t the food? Jesus is? Today, if Jesus were here, he might stand up in a Starbucks and say “If you really want to charge up your life, you have to drink me. A vente quadruple shot Cappuccino won’t make a dent, you have to pour ME into one of those white cups and keep sipping.”

If he did, it would confuse people. But some of us would scratch our heads and think “there is something about this that rings true, I can’t exactly put my finger on what it is….” And in the moment of wondering; when we admitted that we knew that we didn’t know, the truth of it would come crashing in on us. That’s how the sounds of silence work. We are searching, we are reaching, even in our hiding we are keeping watch out of the corner of our eye for that glint of the light that is THE LIGHT. All of us are looking. Many of us substitute the truth for something that we’ve formed that looks vaguely like the truth.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls"
And whispered in the sounds of silence

Help me to walk away from the things that aren’t the things. The stuff that isn’t the stuff, the love that isn’t the love. Help me to hear the sounds of silence. Help me to see that Jesus is completely relevant at this moment. Yes, he once was a great moral teacher, but that’s not all. He is, today, our link to the whispered words. He has poured himself into the white cup with the green logo.

Singapore Roast

I was in Singapore a few weeks ago. My first morning there, we went to a Starbucks. It was walking distance from the hotel I was staying in. I was pretty amazed. The coffee tasted exactly the same as it does in the states. That’s really pretty remarkable, because in the hotel, and everywhere else--the coffee in Singapore does not taste like the coffee that I know and love. I’m not sure why it tastes different, and I’m not sure that it’s bad that it tastes different, but it does.

I felt so happy that I had the Starbucks, and I thought “well, that at least is right.” And suddenly I realized that I was playing the part of the ‘ugly American’, who thinks that the right way is the American way, that the only way is the American way.

I’m honestly surprised that my mind ran along that path, that I had that train of thought. You see, my family and I have lived in lots of places overseas. Tokyo, Bangkok, Jakarta, Las Vegas. Not visited, but lived. And when you live somewhere else for a reasonable length of time, you learn that different is normal. So I was surprised that I had the ‘ugly American’ thought.

It quickly passed, and I remembered what I already know. That my normal isn’t ‘THE normal.’ That in some sense, there is no ‘THE normal.’

My Mom owned her own business when I was a teenager. She was a partner in a fabric store. Something happened to her that bears on all this. She was ordering fabric from a supplier in Texas, and talking to someone there with a lovely soft drawl. They concluded their business, and the woman on the other end said to my Mom “I just love talkin’ to y’all out there in California; y’all have such a lovely accent!” My mom thought “wait a minute; you have the accent, not me!” Almost immediately, she realized that accent is a matter of perception.

So, when it comes to coffee, or breakfast foods, or accents, or even matters of spirituality, there isn’t normal.

People who have been in the church know that you get that feeling of ‘normal’ when you go to a particular church for a while. You get that feeling especially when you grow up in a particular church. But hopefully at some point you go out, and you meet other people of the faith, and you attend say a black church, or a high church, or a low church, or a rock church, or a church of artists, or a church of therapists, or a church of egg-headed theologians, or a church of Japanese speakers, and you begin to think how few people in the world are normal. From there you progress through the “I’m not the normal one,everyone else is” and on to “everyone is normal”, and finally to you might arrive at “no one is normal.”

The problem with the concept of normal connected to church is the problem of God. You see, God, in the Christian mind, is beyond what we see and understand. To us, He is not completely knowable. And, if we are to have a relationship with Him, which is honestly the whole point of the Christian Faith, then it stands to reason that this relationship will be pretty unstable. We’ll be constantly bumping into this infinite God who is ultimately unknowable, and that will be an unsettling and not a ‘normal’ relationship. One reason we do church is so we can get together with other people and encounter this unknowable God in whatever limited ways we can, and get to know him a little better. So probably church done right is always a little unsettling, and there certainly isn’t anything normal about it.

The other reasons we do church is because we can get to know this unknowable God better by getting to know other believers. It’s weird, but we are called His Body. We believers are his physical presence. When you meet other believers and get to know them, this is when you really begin to understand that there isn’t anything normal about this Body.

But we are drawn to the normal. We yearn for it. We love it. We want the comfortable. We want the coffee we know, served in the cup we know, by someone with an accent we know, whose prayer ends “in Jesus Name, Amen,” just like normal prayers end.

In my better moments, I’m not satisfied with all that. In my better moments, I want to know God more, and to know more of this unknowable God, I’m going to have to be willing to set aside the normal, the comfortable, the known, and find in other believers, the uncomfortable, the weird, the accented; and learn to love that. By this I hope that I will gather in more that was previously unknown by me of this ultimately unknowable God.

Of course, that sounds good, I want to be courageous, I want to stretch myself. I’m completely willing to do the hard work, with one caveat. There must be a Starbucks in walking distance.

I meant it to be funny

Yesterday I was in a Starbucks in Pennsylvania. I was ordering a Grande Drip Coffee (my usual at Starbucks) and the barista asked about how I like my coffee. Usually they say "room for cream?" but this one asked me "do you want it black?" I immediately said "yeah, black...like my heart" The barista started, and her eyes widened for just a moment.

I realized that the humor of this was lost on her. She wasn't quite sure what to make of this strange phrase. Of course, like everything I say and do, it’s not original with me. In the Simpsons, Season 5 or something, Mr. Burns has a meeting with his Attorneys, and offers them coffee. One of them accepts it and Mr. Burns says "you want it black, like your heart?" It’s always stuck with me.

I do like black coffee. I love Starbucks black coffee. And parenthetically, my heart is black. That barista's eyes went wide like saucers because it’s weird to admit. No one likes to be reminded of it, but all of us have a black heart. We aren't really to be trusted. We all prefer the bitter over the sweet, the tragic over the brightly comic. Sin and Death over life. It’s why more people know the kid in the hockey mask with the chain saw than know Pollyanna.

It’s that black heart that connects us to reality. It’s what reminds of us of who we are, that we come from the earth. Life isn't idealistic like Star Trek, where everyone knows what they're doing and are all insanely competent and controlled. In real life Lt Ohura comes to work depressed and irritable because her husband has left her, and at lunch she sits in the corner of the bar telling her worries to Sulu while having four grey goose martinis and then she comes back and tells Capt. Kirk that he sucks as an actor--and for once--for once in his damn life would he please think of someone besides himself?

Actually, that is an episode of Star Trek I'd like to see.

The Christian church is too much like Star Trek. Everyone is controlled, everyone is competent. No one ever comes to church depressed and irritible. If someone does, the rest of us avert our gaze and wish they'd go away. Or, if we are really controlling, we will grab the irritable one and drag them into a corner and pray for them, to try and exorcize the demon of honesty out of them. We can't have that happen at church.

Fifteen years ago, a guy showed up at my church dressed as a woman. The pastor came up to him and said "Hey, what's up?" The guy had been coming for quite a while. We all knew him, he sang and played guitar beautifully. But this day he was having a crisis, and apparently this was one of his ways of coping. I admit, dressing as a woman isn't probably the best way to cope. The pastor was really trying to be loving. But the guy left that day in shame, and has never been back to church. I've always been sad about that. He showed up, really needing something, and even though no one said boo to him, his shame was so great that he never came back. Because he knew. His idea of church is a place where Ohura always is calm and Sulu always steers perfectly, and everyone wears the proper uniform. He knew that he had broken that, so he's never come back.

I've wondered on and off if I should call him, but I never know what I would say. And now, its been 15 years, and it feels too hard to bring it up. And so, I've done nothing.

Jesus was a guy that understood our black hearts. He told the woman caught in adultery "I don't condemn you." Wow. Then he said "go and sin no more." Double wow. He had enough love and credibility that he could say both. Really, if you think about it, it’s the only way to really love someone. If you say “I don’t condemn you” but leave out the other part, you are also saying “what you do doesn’t matter to me.” If you say “go and sin no more” but don’t tell the person you’re not condemning them, then you are really saying “you embarrass me, get out of here.” The message of condemnation is clear.

Church should be a place where we can talk about our black hearts...where no one's eyes widen when we say that we are made of dirt. Where they nod and say "mine too" and we laugh and move forward. The Church should be willing to serve Coffee dark and black and bitter, and not blush too much about who we really are. It should be a place where as Lincoln said we are called to "our better angels." Where we can redeem the moments when our black hearts show through, which they seem to do pretty often.