Muck and Mayhem

I was sitting in my favorite meeting-Starbucks (as opposed to my favorite conversation-Starbucks, or my favorite work-on-my-own-Starbucks) about an hour before my meeting was scheduled to begin. Perched in a little alcove out-of-sight but not out-of-earshot I was unwittingly a witness to something unusual. Two men arrived about five minutes after me and sat at the nearest table to mine. They drank coffee silently for a while and when they first spoke I was startled, their voices to clearly present.

I wasn’t trying to listen, but they weren’t making any attempt to conceal what they were saying to each other. One man was clearly in a crisis. His health was compromised due to an addiction of some sort (probably drugs) and he was losing his marriage. The other man was asking advisory questions. “Do you think you can keep your program going?” “If Sarah will have you back, are in able to be in a relationship right now?” “You obviously can’t work, how are you going to pay your legal fees?”

They talked back and forth, struggling to come to terms with all that was wrong. The amazing thing was the man in trouble (and clearly he was a mess) was being as open and honest as you can imagine, while the other man was being very forthright. He wasn’t patronizing, he wasn’t trying to cover his fear, his anger, his discomfort. He also wasn’t acting harsh or trying to shame the other man.

After about 45 minutes of this exchange, they both lapsed into silence. I had been tuning in and out, trying to chip away at my pile of work, but distracted by their conversation and their compelling frankness. A few minutes later, I looked out the window and they were walking out, side by side, heading for their cars.

I took a pull at my grande drip, only to discover it was barely warm. Despite that unpleasantness, I felt a kind of vacant yearning…not for the troubles of the one man, but for the relationship he had with the other. That kind of bald honesty can only exist in the context of love. To love like that is an incredible commitment. To stand with someone else in the midst of their screwed up life, and not run away screaming is not easy. To not shame the other, or provide neat solutions, to just stand with him in the midst of the crisis is stretching yourself beyond the pale.

Of course, I couldn’t help but wonder if that sort of relationship is possible within the church. Obviously it is possible, but how likely is it? Sadly, churches don’t seem to be configured to foster that level of love and support. I think for many of them it’s more important that we appear to have it together, so people will think that Christ is cool, or that he changes our lives to the extent that our feet don’t touch the ground. Most churches aren’t a place where someone can be open about the fact that they are swimming in shit, and their snorkel is clogged. And more’s the pity.

I can’t imagine standing in the lobby of my local church and overhear the type of conversation that I heard at Starbucks. That must change. We have to be a hip-wader clad group of people, unafraid of navigating the muck and mayhem.

MISSING YOU

I’ve been busy lately; I mean the kind of crazy busy that disrupts what little routine I have in my life. These demands on my time have also put me in an odd position, where I’m not able to get coffee. Twice, I made it at home so I could have some. The rest of the time, I've just bolted for the office after not-enough-sleep the night before.

It occurred to me today that I’m thinking Starbucks hasn’t felt my absence. They are there, grinding beans and making high maintenance drinks for high maintenance people, and they haven’t missed me for a moment. The fact they haven’t poured me a grande drip no-room hasn’t phased them. But I’ve missed it.

And in missing it, I’ve thought also about my own personal journey. I’ve not spent a lot of focused time thinking about my spiritual journey. I’ve not been able to think or focus or wonder about the deeper things in life. And I’ve missed that too.

There are people running around who have never had a cup of coffee. They’ve never put it beneath their nose early on a cold morning and inhaled its nutty scent, or quaffed it like a root beer. But they are OK, they’ll survive without this pleasure. Their life is hardly empty for want of the brown brew.

There are also people running around completely dead to the fact that they have a spiritual nature. That their spirituality is a part of them as much as their physical body, emotions and reason are with them, and just like all those other areas, it takes a little discipline to understand and maintain their spiritual side. Unlike the non-coffee drinkers, these folks are not in fact wounded by this lack of awareness. Their lives are distinctly sub-optimal thanks to a lack of spiritual awareness.

But I’m not unaware, I’m just so swamped that I’m not practicing the disciplines as I should. What happens? Well, for one thing, I’m a bit disconnected for the world as I know it, the rich reality that exists when I’m in close connection with my spirituality. But also, this disconnection makes my spiritual muscle atrophy. I stop the practice of discernment I become less discerning. I stop the practice of prayer and I become less peaceful. So, I want to right my ship, steer a better course, and get back to my limited routine.

And of course, in order to do that, I need to have my morning coffee.

The Fairy Queen

Today, I’m blogging from Starbucks. It’s a Sunday, and there isn’t an open table in the place. Everyone is here, reading books, writing at laptops, enjoying the ease that only comes on Sunday afternoons. There is a guy sitting next to me. He has a laptop open, and he’s paging through web pages, he’s wearing an ipod and I assume is listening to music. On the table next to him is The Fairy Queen by Edmund Spenser, about ½ finished, he had been reading it when I walked in the door. He’s obviously going to return to the epic poem, since the book is lying open face-down next to his half finished latte.

You know you can never really tell by looking, but this guy doesn’t seem happy. His facial expression is a mix of boredom and angst. Sure, it would be easy to accuse him of a lack of joy in the midst of all these material things, but I’m going to cut him slack because I’d be pretty morose if I was reading Spenser on a Sunday afternoon. I’m sure there’s a great little morality play that we could pen here about the emptiness of acquisitive living, and some day, maybe I’ll write it. But that isn’t what strikes me about this setting.

What gives me pause is that this guy, 6 feet away from me, is completely unknown to me, and to everyone else in this place. He’s sitting here, alternating between laptop and Elizabethan epic poem, while looking pouty and miserable. For all I know he’s a very fulfilled person, and at this moment filled with the joy reading something in Spenserian Stanza. You see, I can only guess what is going on inside of him, but I’m honestly dubious that he could really be happy with ABABBCBCC.

I realize that we are constantly around people that we don’t know. We don’t live in a culture where it’s easy to know people. If I opened up a conversation with this guy, it’s unlikely that he’d really tell me much about himself. And of course that is as it should be the first time you meet. It takes time to get to know someone, and who knows if I’ll ever see him again.

The deeper truth is that you can really never know what a person is made of based on what you see. Israel had a King way back named Saul, and he wasn’t working out, so God told Samuel to start interviewing candidates for his replacement. The first guy that walked into the room Samuel thought “He looks like a king and smells like a king, so he must be a king.” But God said “keep looking” and Samuel interviewed a bunch more, each time thinking “this guy seems to fit the part” and each time God saying “no.”

Finally, a scrawny runt of a kid shows up, and Samuel thinks “You must be joking” and God said “No joke Sammy baby, this is the guy.” The kid’s name was David. Right after that, David went down the local battlefield and toppled the other side’s number one guy, Goliath.

God said to Samuel “you judge based on what you see on the outside, but I judge based on what’s in a guy’s heart.” And so, as challenging as it might be, I’ll try not to judge someone based on their reading iambic hexameter in Starbucks on a Sunday afternoon. Seeing inside someone means knowing them. Probably the hardest thing we have to do as Christians is to give up ourselves in this way. Most of us don’t bother, because it is so difficult, we have to drop the walls of defense and open ourselves up to knowing people that make us uncomfortable. But it’s the only way to see someone’s heart. Sometimes, we have to suffer through someone's love of the dread poet Burns, or Spenser or God help us Coleridge, so we can get a chance to know them, and then see them as they are. This is what Paul was talking about when he said “I am all things to all people for Jesus’s sake.”

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Here is a quick sample of Spenserian Stanza, an excerpt of a poem by Luke Maynard(who I don't know, but based on this poem admire) which shows this scheme in the best possible light I think.


Pair of Dice Lost
Of Mankind's base ambitions, and its prime
Rhetorical descriptives, image-hoards,
A chronicle exists, details the climb,
A history played out on gaming-boards,
And of the tragic fall, more fell than words
Might e'er describe, or lend a truthful face.
I do invoke thee, Muse of many lords,
Of Milton and of Bradley, in my place
This tale to tell of tragedy and vain disgrace.

In days of yore, and simpler days were then,
Before those demons that now walk the earth,
Nintendo, Sega, as the tongues of men
Know these monuments of electric mirth,
Before the blasted image-box's birth
Was yet conceivèd of those virgins' brains
Who dwell in darkness, greed and monstrous girth
And manufacture myths and coffee-stains,
Great board-games thrived, of which but little trace remains