Daily Archives: September 14, 2010

When I was eight years old, I kicked a rock down a road and anguished that I was going fast and straight to hell. I realize now that in that precise moment of time, I felt that before God, I was like a muscle car on a straight road with the gas pedal stomped –  tires burning and screaming, hood rising up, trunk hunkering down, speedometer rising steadily, speed raging, the road blurring on either side, the focus narrowing  down to a small, tiny bit of hard asphalt ahead that was going to rip the car apart when it flipped at about 130 miles per hour. And I feared that my life would end in a gruesome crash of punishment someday, because someone was pressing foolishly on an evil gas pedal — me. Fear was among my earliest and most emotional thoughts when I thought of a greater force in the world than myself.  It was a decidedly ancient-Greek response. The gods were big and powerful, and I expected them to cast large fire bolts at me someday for my failings.

It’s odd, my fear of the divine wrath,  because in actuality my early life was focused on the small and safe. When my brothers and I were little, we liked to play outside at night in the summer in the large field in front of the house.  On warm night, in the field, I remember the fire flies blinked on and off. I remember their tiny yellow lights flashing all over the place, like Christmas lights moving in the air. In between one soft blink and another there was their flight, but we only saw the pulse and in that was the beauty of the thing. There was something there, alive, magically small, a light house that could fly. It was astonishing, safe fire. 

There were also other things that I remember from the field that were small and fun. There were the daytime flies that buzzed around the cow paddies. In the summer the cow were allowed into the field to graze on the grass.  And on their soft, steamy piles, the flies landed, which provided great sport for us. Out we came with our B-B guns, and the fun began. Each shot made a splash and left a gashing crater. If the shiny copper B-B’s were on the mark, then the fly disappeared into the goop, with perhaps a wing left flopping on the surface to signal the kill. “Hit” said the softly waving wing.  There was no tragedy in this, only the hunt and the hit and the yell of victory over the small combatants. I remember one fly who was  hit and seemingly sunk in the muck who rose and flew again, and in that moment I celebrated  his escape and told his story to my brothers. “He was down, in the B-B tunnel, and he crawled out, and he flew off!”  I loved the bold, triumphal comeback of the other side.

Small boys love to wage war on small things, and live happily in the diminutive world of small victories and small defeats and they do so without any fear.

Take for instance wild strawberries. I loved them. They hid from us in low leaves and grass, but we found them everywhere. I remember the spots where they grew, the field were we played baseball out behind the grade school and the ditch along Highway 7, right in front of the shop where we painted my first car. They were different than store-bought strawberries in that they were so small, about the size of a finger nail. They were the same in that they were bright red with little brown seed dots and green leaf hats and tasty. The fun was in the hunt, and in the find, and the reward was immediate because we ate them unwashed, on the spot. The ripe ones were ambrosia, juicy and sweet, those that weren’t ripe were tart and tangy in the mouth. We learned quickly what to pick and what to not. Sometimes we piled the bright red ones high in cans or cups and carried them home with us, our attempts to save the manna for another day.  But there was always more manna.

And when we went to school, there too, life was experienced small, and safe and approachable. One page in the encyclopedia housed a tree full of birds and a field full off flowers and their names. The terrible tyrannosaurus  took up only a part of a page and was so small and smooth that I never remember being afraid of it. The saber toothed tiger with long teeth and sharp claws was glossy and flat. The vast ocean that looked so wet and wild was dry and calm, and the fearsome war heroes and their horrific battles were silent.  School made life small, fly-like, quiet, safe and one dimensional. It was done this way for our safety and for the preservation of our teachers, because as Jonathan Swift pointed out while on another errand, we were delicious children. And our teachers, were by law unarmed. We never took a field trip to Jurassic Park, but we knew it was there or that it had been somewhere at some time. Just because we only saw it in a book, that didn’t make us doubt its fundamentally dangerous reality in any way, but the danger hadn’t come close to us.

In school, the hunt and the find and the shot and the hit were all confined to the quiet of the page and they ended not in a blood bath but in a tiny back dot at the end of a paragraph. It was there on the page and at the desk that under the press of the pen that the huge and dangerous universals became the small and safe particulars. The small became the safe-large by virtue of repetition and the large became the small again by the example at hand. In short, we discovered the knowledge of the largest things in the knowledge of the smallest things.  We found math in 2 plus 2. We found books in “See Spot run.” We found art in Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” And we found war in George Washington crossing the Delaware at night. This is the way of life, as I have found it, and so I have gradually come to change my metaphysics.

Today I ate at piece of toast with my strong coffee. I put milk in the coffee to bring it to just the right light brown and smooth flavor that I like. I smeared homemade strawberry jam on my bread, covering my toast, my small field of wheat in bright fruit, my childhood on a plate. The strawberries were tamed a bit by all the added sugar, but they came through for me as they always have. The rosy sweetness kissed the buds on my tongue awake.  In just moments, I could feel the sugar and caffeine hit my brain, that familiar ready-for-more, bring-on-whatever-is-next feeling. It is so fine. Small things have such powerful effects, suggesting the larger things of life to us with nod and hint and semiotic gesture.

The bread of life has no harm in it. It is iconic of the love and patience and safety that surrounds me.  For me, every bite has become communion, and everyday I partake of it.  I’m bludgeoned with soft bread. I crunched Special K for breakfast.  I had some frosted mini-wheats later for a snack.  In the evening, I tore small pieces of French bread off a loaf and dipped them in a creamy spinach dip. The evidence surrounds me.

Before lunch today I went to Costco. I shopped, then before leaving, picked up a Hebrew National hot dog and diet Coke. I covered the inside of the bun with relish, mustard, catsup and fresh onions. Then I found a seat on the red and white picnic tables and looked out over the store. Costco, like the bread I eat everyday represents the absence of scarcity. It is a fragile shell around a substantial pile of food. If a tornado hit a Costco, the big, thin box of wall and roof and ducts and pipes might fly away but the food would remain, on its medal shelves, stacked four pallets high. It is the food that makes this store. It is head-high everywhere, and in most places it towers twenty feet above you. It comes in such large quantities that the issue in choosing some things comes down to, “Can we eat that much before we die?” I considered the lemon juice recently, but the deal was two huge bottles linked together by a plastic strip. I passed it up. It was an excellent price, but only for a younger person with more time. I don’t want my children to go through my stuff after I die and say things like, “Wow, Dad was weirder that we thought. Look at all this lemon juice. What was he thinking?”

Not everyone can shop at Costco. I know that. It’s painful for me. Not everyone has enough. More than 800 million people don’t have enough to eat today. But there is enough food in the world to feed them.  And there is enough land to produce more food than we do, the needed food, the amount of food, an abundance of food. And there is enough muscle and money to produce the food. What we do with this is our business and our responsibility, and what we have not done about that is to our shame, but the truth is that the world has been well-stocked. We have done each other wrong, but the truth is that we are provided for. The truth is that the gods are not simply angry. The truth is that the smallest bits and pieces that we receive each day point eloquently to the profound compassion of someone.

 The good just keeps piling on and my metaphysics lean hard in a different direction now than when I was eight.

It comes to a basic bit of logic, really. There is so much that is good and beautiful in life – the kinds of bread, the fire flies, the strawberries, the caffeine and the logic. And if there is an original source that all these fine and excellent things come from, a divine and amazingly creative source, and I have come to believe that this is true, then all these good things come to my hands and my mouth and my mind from that source and as a result, I just can‘t stop feeling like I am being loved not punished and that I will not be punished in the future.  And I just can’t stop noticing that I am safe today, for the moment, and that I all around me things signal good.

 It’s massive really, the evidence.

This evening my wife and I lay on the bed in our room as the sun set, debriefing the day. I noticed a warm block of yellow light on the northwest facing wall. Odd, how did the sun get on this surface considering it was setting almost directly behind it? We looked around. I got up and walked over to the southwest facing window and put my hand in front of the glass to see where the sun was entering. My hand shadowed the block on the wall, and then I noticed the mirror on the southeast wall. The sun was passing through the window, hitting the mirror and reflecting onto the northwest wall.  Evidence was  present, cleverly cast in front of us in the form of light. Something in me wants to clap and not stop.

Fireflies, glitter paths, candles, light bulbs, lightening, computer screens, headlights, stop lights glittering on the pavement in the rain, luminescent fish and every other small patch or spot or gleam of light in the universe shouts, “Life, illuminated, good, safe, more!” Small lights gesture toward the presence of the large lights. Radiance is a gift and it reminds us that we are loved and that in the end there will be more light of the same kind, not lightening bolts frying us but light warming us and charming us and seducing us to more light still.

And I won’t stop making this point by writing hyper attentive narration about eating crumbs and seeing odd patches of luminescence. This matters! Do you think I am dabbling? Do you think this is some boring form of intellectual dilettantism? It is not. Is the divine universal only spoken of in the trivial positive? No, everything speaks to this. The whole of life makes this point, the horror too.

Take war. Boyhood battles with flies turn into shouting in the living room and hitting in the school’s halls and ego thrashing in the meeting rooms of offices and smart bombs rushing to do collateral damage like brain damage that ends with unending weeping because it can’t be fixed, by us. I know; now I’ve experienced some of this. It turns into flat history on a page for young school children but it begins three-dimensional, scary and bloody ugly. We contend, and we will contend forever. Nothing is more certain than the changes that will come from the battles we will wage against nature and against each other and against the source. There will be more B-B guns fired at flies and there will be more concussive explosions on the human battle fields and more arms will fly off and more heads will spin across the dirt and family will rise up against family and nation against nation and more hearts will be broken and minds twisted into fear and unending hate. And more children will starve to death. And some of us will be drowned in the excrement of others, and it couldn’t be uglier than it will be. We will flop a wing in the excreta of hate and revenge, and we will grimace with mouths full of filth and pain and we will again be so broken and fouled that we won’t want bread, and we will put our heads in our arms and close our eyes so that we won’t see the yellow patch of fading light on the wall of the bedroom.

Do you understand this? You must. Everything communicates something. In the small dose of violence that it has been your lot to witness comes to you the larger, more universal issues of systemic violence and racial hate and recurring wars. It is the same as the good. The small speaks of the large, both in the good and the evil. But the evil is from us, not from above, and this I have come to be sure of. This much is true. And this is where we too have some measure of comfort and hope. I believe that what is above is working to turn evil to good.

Have you ever seen something bad turn out for some good? I have. Have you ever felt like pain wouldn’t end but it did? And this is something I knew so much less at eight years old than now. In what is worst we have a chance to see some of what is best. Just because we are stupidly violent doesn’t mean that the source of all that is good and right is so? That source is not. Instead the source is steeped in the politics of redemption and the passion for renewal.

I have come to believe that evil things can be recovered from, and to believe that the small good can defeat the large bad. Good has a way of leaking back in when one is open to it and the end doesn’t have to be dark. I have come to believe in the personal acts of redemption. Once one who was strong kneeled close to one who was weak, and lifted up what was broken and carried it to a place where it became strong again.

This happened to me, and has happened to me again and again. I remember my junior year in college so well. All the loneliness of growing up and living apart from my family and studying nihilistic philosophies and fuzzy-edged literatures and not having safe friends and family that I could disclose myself too and looking for refuge in stupid-brain experiences with immature friends, it caught up with me, and I was so hungry for soft bread and warm light and something tender and good and loving to believe in and to believe in me.  I wrote in my journal too much that year. It was eloquent of missing relationships full of transparency and truth. 

And it culminated in me standing in a park in the city at cool night on a hill looking at the sky and shouting, “If you are there, do something!”

“Do something,” which means something like, “Don’t hate me, don’t condemn me, don’t make war on me, don’t not understand me, don’t leave me alone like this, don’t not pursue me, don’t not make right what I have made wrong, don’t be a distant and judgmental father, and don’t above all things, don’t leave me unchanged.”

I remember reading something in that time that tasted like good bread and shone like yellow light winging through the dark and felt like holy war on untruth. It was from the prophet Isaiah. “In returning and rest shall you be saved and in quietness and confidence will be your strength.”

These words weren’t frozen in print as I read them, but instead they were as alive and real as they came off the flat, thin page and they formulated into something three-dimensional and sharp that entered me square between the eyes and proceeded into my frontal lobe at high speed. They pierced my cerebellum like an arrow fired from a bow pulled all the way back at close range and knocked back something that I hated and wanted to be rid of – noise. The words struck me quiet, and they created a space inside for silent confidence to begin again. 

The specialists of the heart call this redemption. It means that something lost is retrieved, something sold is bought back and something ruined is restored. And this is that way that redemption happens, like it happened to me, in a shout into the night and bit of scripture on a page. It came to me as one bite of soft bread, one small light flashing in a field, one turn of the page and one small line of truth struck deep.

What is it? It is God.

The religious sing, “Great is our God.” I have no quarrel with that. But I found him first and I find him most in what is small.

 I found him that way yesterday as my wife and I lay on the bed together and talked over our day, as we always do. And as I held my wife’s hand I knew that her small hand in mine was from him, from his Costco-style plenty for me and that it was such a perfect picture of his larger safe grip on me.

I found him today as my daughter Rosalind and I drove away from the house and talked about how many times we had ridden together in the morning, her off to school, me off to work, buddies shoving off in the same boat together, from kindergarten to college, and then going our own ways for the day,  knowing we will see each other again at night. It speaks volumes to me of the God that I have come to hold on to.

I have found the largest thing in the smallest things. And these things have been made small for me out of compassion for me. And the maker is present, suggested, hinted at, gestured to in the short ride and the small bite and the rectangular glow on the wall and the page turn and the tender hand in my hand on each one of the very particular days of my life.  

It isn’t all okay, but I am not so much afraid of fire from heaven anymore, and I know that whatever comes, I will be loved in precisely the small and personal ways that will eventually make everything right.