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