Can I clean up first?
Short answer: no, you can't
I know she can hear me.
She’s upstairs, getting ready for her workday. I’m down here, working on a post for my blog, Late in the Day.
I’m coming across typos out the wazoo, and it’s making me mad. I’m responding like I always do, by getting on the express train to the bad-word zone.
I don’t mutter my vulgarities and blasphemies under my breath. I roar them, as if I were being subjected to the most egregious affront the universe could present me with.
She’s up there, and I’m down here, and we’re both focused on the tasks before us, but it feels like we’re having a conversation by telepathy.
Her: Just one morning, I’d like our household not to be bad-vibed by your screaming and cussing.
Me: It’s a good thing you’re not here all day. This is my default setting when I write. I really don’t even notice it anymore. It’s no biggie to me, and I’m generally satisfied when I get a piece done and hit “publish.”
I’m such an ugly person.
I have “improved” somewhat over the years. It’s been a long time since I did anything regrettable in public. I have cast off the least savory of my nervous habits. I make a point of being an attentive husband who’s fun to be around and guarantees that he’ll always be on his wife’s side. I’m a fairly good “adulter” - that is, I handle household chores and situations, financial obligations and the mundane aspects of my work in a pretty timely fashion.
But I get impatient, angry, cynical, and discouraged within a micro-inch of throwing in the towel with dismaying regularity. I let my neurotic little systems for everything drain the joy out of my daily life.
Several times a day I conclude that this is a hopeless, hard and filthy world based on
seeing litter
being treated rudely in traffic
being misunderstood in conversations
I’m not a bigot, but I harbor presumptions about various demographic groups that arise when a representative of one does something to which I react negatively. (“Should have figured he/she was a _________.”)
And I doubt:
Put bluntly, most people are not attracted to the question, “Where is God in all this?”
Their answer is “I don’t care. It’s not relevant.”
It wears on a guy.
What’s my own answer? Is it enough to maneuver through my daily life prayerfully and in a manner that is going to keep controversy rubbing off on me to a minimum?
I have faith, but I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t admit that I sometimes wonder if I’m jiving myself.
Leonard Cohen faces this subject with discomforting precision in such songs as “You Want It Darker” and “I’ve Counted What I Have.” His articulation of where he stands in relation to God really resonates with me. (“I’m sick with greed, with unrequited greed / and everyman becomes my enemy / I need his woman / his career I need / for what he has / he’s taken it from me / and what is mine / he uses clumsily / the pagan there pretending he can dance / the Christian peddling his humility”). ( “If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game / If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame / You want it darker / We kill the flame”).
I’m always impressed by people who, while sincerely seeking after a closer walk with the Great I Am, don’t sugarcoat or gloss over the grime with which they’re covered.
In Liturgy of the Ordinary by Tish Warren Harrison, Harrison makes the point that the peace of Christ is anything but cheap. And it requires strength, the strength of hoisting our crosses onto our backs:
[It] is instantiated . . . [when I’m] respond[ing] to [my husband] when I feel slighted, or genuinely celebrate a friend’s upcoming vacation even though I’d never be able to afford it myself . . . It is not a peace that plays nice-nice, denies hurt, or avoids conflict.”
But we never achieve it impeccably. So how does anybody attain grace and mercy? A look at relevant Scripture indicates that God meets us where we are.
The apostle Paul knew this, which prompted him to say, in his first letter to the church in Corinth, “To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.”
But something in me feels like I ought to be at least somewhat presentable.
Alas, as our Lord, who could craft a parable like nobody else, says there’s no time for that, or at least we can’t know whether there’s time or not:
“At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. 2 Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. The wise ones, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps. The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep.
“At midnight the cry rang out: ‘Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’
“Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil; our lamps are going out.’
“‘No,’ they replied, ‘there may not be enough for both us and you. Instead, go to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves.’
“But while they were on their way to buy the oil, the bridegroom arrived. The virgins who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet. And the door was shut.
“Later the others also came. ‘Lord, Lord,’ they said, ‘open the door for us!’
“But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I don’t know you.’
“Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.
You never know, he might just want to come to your house:
Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.
When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.
All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”
But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”
Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
C.S. Lewis says the end of the material universe will be this scenario writ large:
The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph. This seems to some people intolerably frustrating. So many things would be interrupted. Perhaps you were going to get married next month. Perhaps you were going to get a rise next week. You may be on the verge of a great scientific discovery. You may be maturing great social and political reforms. Surely no good and wise God would be so very unwise and unreasonable as to cut all this short? Not now, of all moments!
So no, there is no time to run home, get a shower and put on your Sunday best.
The train is pulling into the station.