Teacups. There were always teacups.
Bearing bright rouge bands blending in bizarre and beatific patterns
With sienna and amber; they were beautiful
Fitting, as it were, for the beautiful home
The beautiful city, the beautiful souls,
The souls that came and went
Drinking from Hesed Sophia Ma’el’s teacups.
They had thought the tea infinite. They drank
Deeply, hours upon hours spun out like the yarn
From Hesed’s needles. Their tongues danced with talk
Of ancient wars, strange fictions, the prophet Mohammed
Of Jesus Christ, aged philosophers, arcane secrets
They drank, pouring tea from the beautiful teapot with its
Fiery rouge bands and bizarre sienna and amber patterns
They drank and danced to Summer’s waltz
Changing to Autumn’s foxtrot, they danced and drank
And talked as Winter’s talons gripped the teapot
And danced as Spring betrayed them all
And when they went to drink, there was no more.
Death be not proud though it takes Hesed’s generosity.
Death be not wise though it takes Sophia’s books.
Death be not eternal though it be Ma’el’s darkest work.
For Hesed Sophia Ma’el taught her guests to make tea
And has bequeathed to them the teacups.
I did not want to go through my closet, but I knew I had to. I knew I would find the box. The box that contained heirlooms from a life that I used to know. It was an idyllic time filled with idyllic memories. Late nights with friends, late nights with papers, late nights struggling with my faith… all memories that seem so distant from who and where I am now. It was a time before the world fell apart and before God again brought forth order from chaos.
My diploma was in the box. It had not adorned a wall since the summer before the end of the world. Medallions and plaques signifying the good pleasure and blessing of Carson-Newman’s faculty were in the box. I was loathe to touch them not because I counted them valueless but because I remembered what it was like in that moment to have the world by a string, if even only in appearance. How I have learned that life is never a phenomenon that I govern or control.
But the most important item was the card. It was the last card she ever sent me… ever could send me. I had hidden it away there as soon as I read it. It contained pictures of the good days. The days that she was healthy and happy. The days before that hideous sickness sapped her spirit and her body.
This apartment has been the ground of my healing. I mourned fully in this place. I have come full circle to rejoicing in it. Perhaps the next apartment can house the honors and accolades of the past life, the life that is returning in some ways if not in others. Perhaps the next apartment will find me healing in new ways, mourning in others. Yet I remember how YHVH brought me out of Egypt through the wilderness; I will never forget what this place has meant to me.
Heaps of life, distilled into essence
Measured, poured out, sifted through
Ordered into juxtaposed rows and columns
Hours upon hours, days upon days
Marked by spinning hands and numbers
Hubris’ miasmic vapors
Imbibed by fool and sage alike.
Will they fortify themselves? Will they sacrifice?
Will they make an end in a day?
Coffee spoons and seconds,
The importance of future plans
Tomorrow never comes
Today never satisfies
Yesterday never forgiven
Coffee spoons and love songs
Echo into the long abyssal night
Of a life ever waiting
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
Today is a gift squandered or saved
Today is one less coffee spoon
Today is a bloody X on a fool’s chart
Today is a dance of hands in a circle
Today is a treasure invested in shared lives
But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
what does it mean to be ethical? it has come to me recently, through my reading on the subject, that much of what passes for Christian ethical reflection has much more to do with philosophy and culture than it has to do with being distinctively Christian. over the past 24 hours, my ethical…
Morality is something that my family tried to legislate the way that teachers try to legislate what actions are and are not appropriate on the playground. There is a fascinating grey area to morality and to the playground scrappings of grade school kids. If there is no negative consequence for failing to be moral/ follow the rules, the rules/ morals go neglected save by those few people whose fear of getting caught or sense of loyalty to the authority structure is such that the morals/ rules are respected. For my part, I was one part fear, one part respect. My mother could be and still can be a fearsome force. I do not respond well to scoldings or to shame-engendering events. Yet I have the capacity to love deeply and quickly if the circumstances are correct, and thus my respect is relatively easy to earn if the one seeking my respect has any sort of moral fibre about them at all.
Morality became the trump card of my life, what distinguished me from the rest of my peers. As a middle school/ high school kid, I had a reputation for two things: being painfully smart (which inevitably created a stressor for both myself and others) and being painfully adherent to a particular set of morals which I identified as being “biblical.” As such, I created awkward tensions, situations, and events simply out of my desire to foster those morals in a society that nominally believed in them yet could not seem to practice them. I erroneously blamed their own convictions, thinking that something was wrong with them for lacking the kind of integrity I wanted to see in them.
And then I got to college. I learned that there was no basis for the kind of morality that I had been sold as a child. For a season, I dismissed the notion of morality altogether. I thought that the events of the life of Christ eliminated any need for morality, and Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical helped me get around my qualms with making ethical claims about anything save that a good and life-valuing God calls Christians to call the rest of the world to cease hostilities and redeem the downtrodden. Yet I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there was something I had missed, a way of using the Bible that wasn’t at all what I had been taught to believe as a kid. It bothered me that I did not need Scripture to do ethics or anything else in my life save to get information about Jesus. What troubled me most were these squirrelly little sayings of Jesus:
Matt. 10:34: “Do not think that I came to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.”
John 3:18-21: “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hatest the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been in the sight of God.”
John 9:39-41: Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world so that the blind will see and that those who see will be blind.” Some pharisees who were with him heard him and asked, “What? Are we blind too?” Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin, but since you say that you see, then your guilt remains.
There are many others; these are only a sampling of those passages that gave me pause.
In seminary I found (with the notable exception of Scriptures I) a tired restatement of the critical methodology that I had heard in college. My biggest questions about scripture was not the what of scripture but the why and how. Why does scripture (and by extension the spiritual disciplines, for I had learned the disciplines in college yet lacked a good reason to practice them other than “to be a good Christian,” a relic from the time of my life when morality was legislated) have anything to do with the Christian life and the Church? More importantly, how do we use the Bible in a way that doesn’t devolve into meaningless squabble over hermeneutics, biases, interpretive lenses, and pragmatic results that in no way gets the Church anywhere other than hopelessly confused? Hoping that theologians would have an answer, I poured myself into the history of theology classes. Yet it wasn’t at Truett that I found my answers. It was Baylor’s Ph. D. classes that I stumbled upon, largely by accident, the writings of James McClendon, Willie Jennings, and Rowan Williams.
I do not care to go into depth about their theology; you, my dear reader, will have to read them for yourself. All I have to say is that McClendon’s claims about how Scripture and the disciplines are valuable inasmuch as they foster patterns of communal life that promote human wholeness and provide a claim of witness to the culture around it as well as the culture within it. The point of Christianity is the practice of virtues via the disciplines that allow the Church to hear Scripture- and by extension God- afresh and anew in every situation. Jennings adds to McClendon in that Jennings claims that it is insufficient to have multiple Christianities, versions of the faith that exist with little to no connection to the other. Multiple Christianities only serve to rob the community of its ability to watch over itself to ensure that its message is consistent with itself and with the faith of yesterday. Williams redeems the critical methodologies I spoke of earlier with such disdain, offering a way to use those criticisms to foster the kind of program that McClendon has in mind.
Morality is not deontological, utilitarian, or even finally virtue-based. It cannot be legislated, pleaded for, pushed for, or ultimately even fostered. Morality is intrinsically tied to Jesus Christ and the redemptive work that God fosters through the Church. In essence, morality is the acceptance of the No of God proclaimed in the cross of Christ against all of humanity’s attempts at being right, good, correct, just, and virtuous. That No comes out of the realization that we are ultimately incapable of knowing what is right, good, etc. and that we inevitably construct our personal identities out of the tension between what we think to be good and what we actually do. We must accept the judgment of God on our lives before we can begin to hear the “Yes” of God, the redefintiion, renarration, and refashioning of our lives as lives that walk with Jesus down the roads and byways of Judea and Galilee, attempting to learn how to be human. It is at the eschaton when Jesus’ words listed above finally make sense, for ultimately Jesus will judge us for what we have done with God’s No and Yes, who we have decided to be in light of what God has done.
I entered the church with minutes to spare. I sat and immediately noticed how the atmosphere differed from the traditional Sunday morning. There were two tables covered in black cloth adorned with two black trays containing black ashes. The entire church was poorly lit, shadows dominating the space between pews, the stage, and the baptismal pool. The sun had not yet risen, leaving the entirety of the outside world in a black fog pockmarked by the occasional glowing eyes of the mechanical monsters tracing the worn black paths seeking what they might devour. The Rolling Stones got their wish: the entire world was painted black.
And then I noticed it. Hanging around the most Christian symbol in the room was a black scarf. I remembered times when that scarf blossomed with colors as varied and as vibrant as an East Tennessee spring. I remembered the picture that we took last spring at Easter, all of us wearing colors surrounded by thirty kinds of flowers and that selfsame cross with its bright purple scarf. I remember feeling that morning as if Christ Himself were indeed risen that very day, feeling as if the wind and fire of Pentecost had fallen for the first time in our midst, feeling as if all would indeed be well, feeling as if the Kingdom of God had come, feeling awe and joy at being there when it all happened.
That day had come and gone. I sat in the church feeling as if my hopes, dreams, and expectations had burnt up and would soon be used to smear black spots onto peoples’ faces. The blackness was not simply exterior; it permeates into my soul though I couldn’t see it sitting there no more than 36 hours ago. I couldn’t see it because I couldn’t put words to the sorrow and despair I felt. Indeed, I wasn’t aware that anything was bothering me. Sitting, gawking awkwardly at the heart of darkness, I was as dark as everything around me.
The songs were sung. The prayers were prayed. I sat like a child who realizes that something important is going on yet has no way of grappling what that something is. Intimidated, slightly lost, more than a little confused, and entirely unable to appreciate what was going on around me, I left the service, entered my own private mechanical monster, and joined the procession of monsters moving into a world of grays as if nothing had happened.
But something had happened. My oblivious self met against a cry of frustration from a friend whose criticisms I needed more than anything at the time. But I was blind, and I assumed that he was simply being petty and unfair. Assumptions that I had made too many times before. Assumptions that fueled the fires of conflict between my father and I during my childhood. Assumptions that prompted a series of rapid, unconscious, and baneful responses: defensiveness, withdrawal, anger, aggression, dismissal, frustration, arrogance, and, chief of them all, contemptuous hubris. We parted ways. I, still fuming, entered the bathroom and saw the black cross on my forehead, a silent witness to my own lack of color.
This mute testimony was not lost on me. I realized just how selfish I am. I have taken my education, my gifts, my friendships, my time, my personal life, and my religion, twisted them, and formed them into a mutually reinforcing web of darkness. All for the sake of promoting my own agenda and capacity! Some people have a messiah complex; I have a superhero complex. I get to save the day, but everyone makes it out alive. But that isn’t the Gospel. What the black cross in my forehead told me is that the version of life that I was writing is not a Gospel but a horror story that makes me into the very kind of devil that I hate most: one that is willing to use, manipulate, and devour other people to get what I want. One that views people as little more than fodder, tools to be used and discarded when they are no longer in use.
In that moment, the black cross became the most colorful feature of my day, for out of the black ashes I saw the hope of a day filled with color in a Kingdom that doesn’t feature me as essential with people that I love dearly, people whose love and friendship I do not deserve. In that moment, the black cross told me that I was dust, that the lack of color was really inside of me, that the Gospel is that Christ is crucified to untangle my web of lies and attempts at self-justification.
Lent for me means that I give up attempting to justify my actions, opting to instead listen to other people critique or validate them. It means learning to live in communities in a way that challenges me and pushes me to change, to become a follower of Christ rather than trying to dominate the relationship and to lead Christ where I want to go. It means learning how to live in a way that abounds in color rather than paints in one shade.
Today I did something that I have not done in a long time. I read Scripture without looking for a sermon, a hermeneutical key, or a theological point. I read Scripture for the sake of Scripture. I read it for the story it tells. I wasn’t looking for information. I didn’t need to know what happened in the story. I wasn’t analyzing plot lines, character developments, tricky Greek constructions, seeming contradictions between varied accounts, or its reception by the early Church.
I read it to remember the story. I read it to remember who I am… or perhaps more accurately who I want to be.
You see I have come to realize that my lifestyle hinders the capacity for others to hear. I feel as if I have become propositional. I have wanted the Gospel to be a set of truths that I could be master of. I wanted to be the hero. I wanted to fix everyone’s problems. What I didn’t realize is that 1) Jesus Christ has already done that in very real ways that we have not even begun to explore and 2) the very idea that I should be the one to fix everything is a way of making myself out to be God. As if God does not know how to run the universe! As if I in my finitude could do better!
What is more, I think that modern Christianity has succumbed to this same impulse. The quest for propositional truth is a quest for mastery of God. The BF&M 2000 is a classic example; the ancient creeds, while containing propositions, also work narratively. They tell a story of how God the Father creates and sends the Son (insert a lot of technical theological language here) who ultimately returns to judge the quick and the dead. This is an admittedly brief narrative. The BF&M 2000 has no narrative. It (and by extension the Southern Baptist Convention) has ceased to acknowledge its storied roots, an attempt to be a people autonomous from the Gospel of Jesus Christ by taking that very Gospel and raising it to the level of divinity. Catholics at the time of the Reformation did the same with Aquinas’ writings. Luther rebelled against such yet was completely unable to rectify the error despite his attempts to release the Bible story from the linguistic and hierarchical chains that bound it. It was always the Bible read through Lutheran or Calvinistic or Armenian or Kantian or Schleiermachian or Kierkegaardian or Barthian or Tillichian et. al. theology, the Bible read through the lens of Aquinas’ sacramental theology, the Bible read through the lens of propositional truth. Propositional truth is the instrument of Satan to muffle and sap the Church of its ability to offer a radically different world. There has never been a time in the history of the Church and Israel when there has not been a tendency toward propositional truth (see Gen. 3; the first proposition is offered by the serpent).
I am tired of trying to distill the Bible down to a single principle or set of principles. I am tired of looking for the general idea that the Bible is trying to convey. I am tired of treating the Bible like a textbook that I can flip through and gain some proposition from and call it truth just because it comes from the Bible. I want to read the Bible for the Gospel that has the ability to set us free from our need to control God and the world. I want to watch as Christ challenges the notions of propositional truth by telling stories, knowing that Jesus’ stories challenge my ideas of what truth is. I want to understand prayer, worship, sacrament, fasts, silence, everyday life, and the community I am in terms of the story of God’s graceful redemption.
Don’t get me wrong; propositions in and of themselves are not bad. Propositions are how we communicate. It is when we elevate propositions to the status of reflection in place of the story of God’s redemption that we go awry. I don’t have all the answers as to what this means for me. I don’t understand how all the loose ends come together. I don’t know that it is appropriate for me to know. I do know that I am reading Mark’s Gospel, and I am beginning to see the world differently.
Life is like a fickle and capricious lady. One day everything is good, the next everything is falling apart, and the day after things are looking up again. Predictability isn’t the strong point of life; there are too many variables and not enough controls on the experiment. I guess we are along for the ride, rather unsure where we are or where we are going.
And I don’t think it matters. I am far more interested in knowing who I am with and the “we” that are going. What really stings is when the “we” reduces in number, either by transition or by death. The past two years have brought their fair share of reductions in that “we.” What they don’t tell you about graduating college or high school or anything else for that matter is that you also have to give up the relationships you gained along the way. Sure you can try and keep in touch, but things aren’t the same. I don’t pick Sarah up every Sunday and go with her to church anymore; it would be hard to drive to Charolette every week!
However, I don’t think that such losses are permanent. Nor do I think that these losses are indeed unmitigated. New people join the “we.” New places become important. New events shape the landscape of who we are. And we join with God in bringing order out of chaos, reshaping creation.
Thus may it be so as we deal with death and the experience of grief. Life has been a train wreck… but with some vision and imagination and the presence of Christ, we can make something beautiful out of it.
In spite of me having the best of intentions, I am not a very social person. I tend to keep to myself, usually puttering about in a desperate quest to do something “important.” It isn’t that I hate people (indeed quite the opposite I am quite intrigued and fascinated by other people in the same way that a neurosurgeon is intrigued and fascinated by Manet or Picasso); it is that I have a one-track mind. I have always been able to focus so intently on any one given thing to the exclusion of all else.
This habit has its perks, but it also has a monumental failure. People that I don’t particularly know are in my peripheral vision. They are there; I acknowledge their existence. However, I do not know them. There was a time when even people that I knew did not merit a deviation from my current task, but most of the time I will stop and say hello now. It is the other people, the possible friends and acquaintances… these are the people who are relegated to the shadowy existence at the fringes of my awareness.
Jake Gibbs was such a person. I was aware of him. I did not know him. Yet many of the people that are very much within my perception of people that I know well knew him. I see their pain… and remember my own. Though Jake’s death is more a shock that leaves me in stunned silence, my grandmother’s death was and continues to be though to a much lesser degree a world-breaking experience. I see in people’s faces the kind of silent despair that I have faced for a year and a half. I mourn because they mourn.
But part of me wonders what could have be were I more willing to sacrifice my “important” work to actually abide with people? There will always be books. People have expiration dates. My time with people has an expiration date. In a year and a half I may well be done in Waco. Why am I so focused on the future when God has given good gifts for today?
And now, friends and acquaintances, I wish to offer my handful of words from one who has walked the path you are on several times before. Craig Nash is certainly correct in his assessment of death: it has much in common with a female dog. Yet I forgot something very important in the days and months following my grandmother’s death, something that I urge you not to forget. Do not forget that God is in Christ reconciling the world to God’s self. Remembering this core conviction of our shared faith will not take the pain away. It won’t silence the questions of why or of God’s justice. But it will offer hope both for today and for the future. God is in Christ reconciling death to God’s self. God is in Christ reconciling our grief to God’s self. God is in Christ reconciling all the universe with its problems, its difficulties, its injustices, and its apparently hopeless situations.
I do not tell you to project your hope into God’s Eternal Kingdom. It did me no good during my mourning. It does me no good today. Put your hope in the fact that God is Emmanuel, with us as much on Golgotha as God is in the empty tomb. Today we walk through the valley of death’s shadow, but Emmanuel is with us. God is our hope.
