Extraordinary and Quotidian

by Margaret Krumm

Dolphins swim in these waters of Fort Myers, Florida. To Northern eyes, they are quite a sight, so Dad and Grandma and I marveled at them before our two-bit pontoon boat cruise left the dock yesterday evening.

The co-captain/emcee made jokes into a microphone as we puttered a little deeper into the Caloosahatchee, and my dad—as an apparent result of his recommitment to the Lord—made his usual remarks about how incredible everything was.

I say "usual" like that because he is always saying the most quotidian of things—my finding a satisfactory parking spot, for instance—are "very cool", "awesome", or "just amazing", and I wonder sometimes which words he uses for things that really are.

At eight o'clock, we watched as the sun sank into the water.

"This is our second sunset in a row! Isn't this amazing..."

My grandma chimed in. "Beautiful." She says it like "beauty-full."

Of course it was gorgeous, but "Come on," I half-wanted to say. "The sun sets everywhere almost every day."

Additionally:
the sun also rises (zing!) everywhere almost every day
the moon is full every 29 days
and stars and their constellations are always there (though Pittsburgh clouds only occasionally reveal them).

Why such awe for objects so constantly present?

May my awe for their Creator surpass it.

[untitled]

by Margaret Krumm

Seeing footprints between rows,
I knew I had been wrong
to roll on over late last night
and keep weeds from being sown.
And at harvest time, don't trust me
to rightly hold a rake.
These weeds are looking fine for food,
but oh! for God's sake. . .

They Pruned But Did Not Rake in Eden

by Mark Kazmier

At the commencement of this spring I had a very nasty flu. It was mostly the fever that was so unbearable. For about 24 hours, my fever was 103 degrees Fahrenheit. That night I was delirious; the ceiling seemed to be spinning for about 10 hours. It reminded me of the time when I was seven years old and my Mom let me watch the Disney film Dumbo when I had a fever. That night I was deliriously tormented by pink elephants. Dancing Pink Elephants are scary enough without delirium.

Have you noticed that it always seems to be the most glorious weather when you are bed-ridden? Well, this time I rebelled against my bed and forced myself to lie on the wooden porch of the Monastery (our community living house in which the abbot, myself, happens to have a wife) in the sun. After my fever was reduced to 99 I decided to do a bit of gardening. A logical decision, of course. See, I had been staring at our little patch of flower and herb garden from the deck that has not been touched for two years and was naturally (or perhaps un-naturally) overrun with dead leaves, dead grass, and weeds. It was kind of depressing to stare at actually. So I grabbed the only rake we have in our shed, a rake with sharp metal ends spaced rather wide, not your average leave-rake. I moved very slowly because of bodily fatigue, but after two afternoons I cleared the bed with my metal rake of most all of the dead debris. It was actually quite odd now that I think of it, how passionate I was about clearing the bed of dead stuff so that the living daffodils and rose plants and herbs could be free from it. I had not communicated with the outside world for about six days because of my illness, and yet the only thing I could think to do was to clear that little patch of ground of death and make it neat and orderly.

God put Man and Woman (she was not actually named Eve until after that whole fruit-eating thing) in a Garden. Not a palace. A garden. And they were commanded to tend to it. And that command was pure joy to them. Making things beautiful is the real job of every man and woman. That’s why gardens are so attractive to us: the atrraction is merely a remembrance of our original occupation. Even in perfect Eden, the trees and bushes and plants would get unruly if not attended. There is even a sense in which nature was wild before death entered the world. If it was not wild, then why would have God given us dominion over it?

But there were no rakes in Eden because nothing died. Principally, rakes are needed only to remove death.

Oh that the Master Gardener would now take up His rake and remove the death that is suffocating the new growth in my heart. After all, when Time worked itself backwards and the Second Man rose from the earth, Mary mistook him for a Gardener.

Rake

The Details

by Chris Pipkin












(Picture: A groundskeeper's house in Sighisoara, Romania)


Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee;
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

--Alfred, L. Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.

It’s all artificial, of course. The order in my room. “A place for everything, and everything in its place,” my mother said once, quoting someone who was quoting someone else. But nothing really works that way. There are always more things than there are categories, or, if not, more categories than there is space. Even a good rake allows the occasional rogue leaf through.

At some point, there has to be compromise. I will have to place the sketchbook in with the other books, and store the drawing pencils with the pens, thus dividing “art supplies.” I will have to decide if The Great Divorce goes with the fictional, theological, or devotional books. This annoys me, but I remember that the ordering principle is only good insofar as it brings you closer to the objective of having a clean room. That’s hard, because I’m a fundamentalist at heart. Either the room is disregarded, like the ozone, or it must be faultless, like the Bible. You can only care about so many things when you care about them this way. But to follow the Way of Organization as simply a means--to not become obsessive-compulsive--actually feels like hypocrisy to me. In reality (I’m told) it is healthy.

I’ve noticed that certain of my English students are practically fluent. After painstakingly memorizing every rule and studying for years, they’ve arrived at an excellent working knowledge of English grammar--better than most native speakers, in fact, and frequently better than me. But they won’t sound like native speakers until they forget all the rules they’ve learned and just speak English. Rules were certainly not made to be broken. But they were also not made for their own sakes (especially not English rules).

I’ve toyed around with writing a (possibly heretical) story about Moses. He’s up on the mountain, and God is dictating the Law to him. As God dictates, Moses’s arm gets really tired. He starts missing words out, here and there, and God refuses to slow down. By the end of the day, he’s leaving out whole paragraphs, and his arm is completely numb. Night falls, and Moses, exhausted and depressed, hears the voice of God again, telling him to get up. Moses obeys, and God brings him to the stone where he’s been scratching out the commandments. God tells him to begin sanding down the words, and as Moses does, he feels the presence of God in the pitch darkness, terrifyingly intimate. The next day dawns, Moses is reinvigorated, and he tries taking God’s dictation over again, fails, and rubs it out that night in the midst of God’s presence. The process repeats itself thirty-nine times until Moses gets every last word etched into (what is now) a tablet. He feels thrilled that he has at last gotten it right, and goes to sleep. But lo and behold, he is woken up by God and instructed to sand the tablet down, as usual. Moses protests that he has written it all perfectly this time, every word, but God insists, and Moses again rubs the Law out. The next morning, he wakes to see the words on the tablet again, but in God’s handwriting this time. Moses is annoyed and asks what the point was of all the writing and erasing. God says “I Am,” or something equally Zen (and hopefully more satisfying in terms of story). I don’t know for sure, as it’s barely started. It takes so long for me to write anything. I get too hung up on the details.

On the other hand, if all are sinners, as Paul says--if none of us can yet speak the Language of God fluently--then grammar lessons we must have...

Rake

by Jason Pipkin

i couldn't find a rake in beijing.
Even if lawns existed
you'd be hard pressed to find a tree that's not
gray.
Where is Johnny Appleseed when you need him?
Or at least a tree-hugging liberal...
Never thought I'd miss the liberals.
I think they've all sworn allegiance to
the Dalai Lama-
he whose name must not be spoken in these parts.
A peaceful man
who probably likes trees,
but is not welcome here.
If he were,
maybe he'd join the foreign environmentalist group-
Green Drinks. They meet on the
Second Tuesday of every month
at the Stone Boat Cafe.
Or is it Wednesday?
I've never been, but my friend Paul used to go.
He's into that sort of thing.
One time he met a nice girl there who really dug him
but I think he was oblivious or uninterested.
He's not gay, just really, really cool.
He's Lebanese.
What a guy.
But I don't think the Dalai Lama would have dug her either.
Too much karma.
And what they don't tell you,
the big gnosis,
like aliens in Scientology,
is that true nirvana is the cessation of all karma,
good and bad alike.
It's true.
Maybe you can become a bodhisattva by doing good deeds
but never a buddha.
Take that, Richard Gere (who,
incidentally,
is also banned from entering this nation).
I wonder if he rakes his own leaves.
I'd guess "no", but celebrities
are full of surprises.

Diving In

I only saw Forrest Gump once. I liked it well enough but wouldn't call it especially formative, save for Jenny's prayer which lodged itself in my memory with her winsome Southern innocence:

"Dear God, make me a bird, so I can fly far. Far far away from here."

When I am weary and desperate, sometimes Jenny's prayer reflexively becomes my own, and I feel ashamed. At first I thought it was just because using a movie quote as a prayer seemed lame. But it turns out to be much bigger than that; it is actually the antithesis to the prayer that my more Reformed theology asks that I pray. Before I tell you what that is though, I want to show you a little bit of scripture and what I recently learned about it.

It's at the end of Luke 14, and Jesus lays down quite the non sequitur: "Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; it is thrown out."

Questions swim in my head after reading this. Can salt really lose its saltiness? Doesn't salt kill grass? Why would you ever put it in soil? And manure? Huh?

A few weeks ago, I heard a theologian named Anthony Bradley speak on this passage, and it was really helpful. He asked if we had previously heard that being the salt of the earth meant we were to act as a preservative in the world. Nods all around, and the absurdity of that finally hit me. Preserving the world when we are called to participate in the redemption of it? Really?

Bradley went on to explain that this salt probably wasn't sodium chloride--regular table salt. It was one of many other salts--magnesium fluoride, for example--and it didn't kill grass. In fact, it was used as a fertilizer. As for manure, the salt was thrown on it in order to break it down quicker, so that it could be used to--again--fertilize.

"You are the salt of the earth."
You are to bring life to barren places.
Even when it gets really, really messy.

So my new prayer in response:

May my eyes be opened to see barren soil and piles of shit, and may I be willing to dive straight into those piles and with God's help, make growth possible. And so that I do not fly away (because I will surely want to), may my wings be clipped.

-- Margaret

120 mph, straight down.

At a little over two and half miles up, the air is cold, the wind is deafening, and my heart is pounding. The safety glasses pinch my nose and I shift uncomfortably on the aluminum bench. The small plane rattles and bumps and suddenly a door is opened. And men are willfully jumping out. This all seems dreadfully wrong. I am tightly strapped to a care-free instructor (my back to his chest) who chuckles at my obviously and genuinely terrified comments. “Oh shit.” I nervously recite to myself what I was told in the preparatory class. "Wait... um... when do I do the... um... what's the altitude when... er..." My friends have disappeared out of the door which is just ahead of me. "Don't worry about it!" he haphazardly hollers. Suddenly we're scooting forward. Now on the lip of the open doorway, looking down at the distant ground and a few strangely-near wisps of cloud, my mind is blank. My body has gone limp as my animal survival-instincts are suddenly overcome with a numbing I've-gone-too-far-to-go-back realization and the whipping of a cold wind that my body knows was meant to support birds, not men in flimsy straps and buckles. Yet from somewhere deep inside begins to erupt a whoop of exultation.


Skydiving in Orange County, Virginia. August 20, 2005.


Cheers,


Noah

Wings

“'We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!”--Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit

During the summer, that hot, confusing summer, that summer that wound like an uncertain snake through the dust of Jibou, Oradea, Sarajevo, Krk, Zagreb, Budapest, Sibiu and Iasi--only a mouthful of the world my heart wanted to swallow--during that summer, I sometimes imagined that my overloaded, back-moistening traveler’s pack was, in reality, a pair of wings. This absurd image would flit through my consciousness as I shifted the enormous thing and complained while walking down a highway with my girlfriend, two removes from nowhere, thumbing for a hitch with a paper sign.

The bag was stupidly heavy. That had been my fault. I’d thought it necessary, besides clothes, to pack several books, a sketchpad (unused to this day), a computer, light-up fake ice cubes, and other nonessentials. Socks. My name is Christopher and I’m a pack-rat; for me, annoyance at having left something behind is always a sharper pain than whatever tome is wedging itself into my back as we trudge up an impressive concrete hill just outside of Zalau, arguing all the while.

It’s true; the idea of traveling, beforehand, is a lot more like flying than the reality. When you get there, there are beautiful, cool days, magic and strange languages. But there is also heat sickness, cranky self-hatred, difficult relationships (or loneliness), and, more than anything else, there is the pack on your back that you’ve been silly enough to fill with books you won’t feel like reading even when you have time. Instead, you’ll be staring out a stranger’s window pretending to be Romanian so they won’t ask for more money, while your girlfriend does all the talking.

Yet afterwards, it’s strange how we really do enjoy the inconveniences. Like the grandfather who is forever telling his materialistic grandchildren about playing with tin and dirt during the Depression, we bask in them after the fact--those nasty, uncomfortable things. When they find out about my previous travels, Czechs often ask me what country I like better--the Czech Republic, Romania or Croatia. It’s honestly difficult to say. There is no question that I’d rather live in Prague, where I can (for the most part) get what I want, where I have friends, where the architectural marvels glimpsed during an ordinary tram ride really can take one’s breath away.

Yet the further East you go, the more texture there is. There’s something to crunch there; something to write home about, not just send a pretty postcard. It’s no expatriate paradise. The bones of that old ancient and exotic dragon, Communism, obviously protrude from the ground, among gypsies in covered wagons and land mines from a not-too-distant and all-too-brutal war. You have to go around these things. Even in terms of career. How many people have I told about the first English class in I taught in Osijek, when a Macedonian man about ten years older than me started screaming at me for daring to suggest that they speak English in English class? By contrast, can I even remember my first day of teaching here in Prague?

Perhaps, in the end, all the things I see weighing me down, even now, are raw material for wings. I speak naively, I realize--as though the difficulties of others, or even of myself later in life (Disease? Debt? Bereavement? Homelessness? Divorce? Apostasy? God protect us from them, but even if he does, we must all face Death, at least.). And yet, I know a man who carried a beam on his back, up a hill, then carried the grave up, up, to the place where Grief itself is overwhelmed by Glory.