Puros

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

- WB Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium, III

The Sting of Nature

It was a beautiful Monday afternoon, blessedly free of the dank Mid-Atlantic humidity that defines so many August days, and I was on my bicycle.  Fairfax County has some delightful bike trails, and I and my younger son were taking an hour or so to ride the Cross County trail, starting at a tiny little park and ending at the beach at Lake Accotink.

The ride itself was a pleasure, snaking through woodlands and along the utility right-of-way clearings, which had been left to become lush grasslands.  At the lake...which actually looked like a lake, given recent soaking rains...we stopped to hydrate and chat.

And then we returned. I marveled at all of the life around us as the trail pushed through an area of powerline-crossed wetland.  Small gulleys and streams snaked lazily through heavy growth of reeds and tall grasses, and throughout all of it, insects buzzed and hummed about their business.  So many pollinators, so many living creatures!  

It was all a wonder of natural beauty.

Which was precisely when a small black something crossed my plane of vision right in close and right to left, and I felt the impact of an insect right where my head and the front of my bike helmet intersected.  There was a moment of fierce chitinous scrabbling, followed by what was to be the first in a succession of sharp stabbing stings.  

The insect's efforts were immediately joined by my own, as I endeavored to 1) get it the rackafracking frack off of me and 2) not crash and 3) come to a stop and 4) also not crash.  A second sting was followed by a third and a fourth, before finally my frantic beating at my own forehead dislodged whatever it was, and I came to an abrupt halt.

For the next few days, the flesh over my os frontale was swollen, giving me a faintly Neanderthal aesthetic.  I don't doubt the wasp fared far worse.

Of all the foreheads on all the bike paths in all the world, you had to fly into mine?

Why, one might ask, did that happen?  Was there a reason for it?  Was it purely random, or was there a Lesson To Be Learned about the sharpness of the natural world, about how little it cares for our romantic musings and moonings?

This, I can't know.  In the scheme of things, and against the backdrop of how easily we mortals are broken, that momentary unpleasantness was a very little thing.  

It is a peculiarity of our times that shortly thereafter, I watched a viral video in which tiny little human forms...each, a soul, as fully human as I...fled an oncoming wall of water, rock, glacial ice, and mud in a Nepalese/Tibetan valley.  Along with millions of others, I watched them consumed.  I watched the moment of their deaths.  One moment, they were tourists and workers enjoying the beauty of a mountainous valley.  The next, they were gone.

My trivial discomfort, nothing to theirs, and infinitesimally tiny relative to the wrenching, heartbreaking loss of those who loved them.  Yet still, it is nature, showing how buses can be tossed like matchsticks, how seven story concrete edifices can be shattered like glass, how even the swiftness of flight and terror can end in a tossing, tumbling oblivion.

Why, one might ask again, shaken by the viewing, did that happen?  There are reasons, of course, underlying the mechanics of the event.  Glacial collapses...like wildfires and droughts and megastorms...are more common now that our world is warming.  But the "why" of those particular deaths is harder to parse out.  Do we suppose they died because they deserved it in some way?  They did not.

It is as beyond me as the reason for Job's suffering was beyond Job.

The Inverse of Trauma

 

What, I found myself wondering recently, is the inverse of trauma?  

Trauma...understood as a shattering, malign experience that burns its mark into the self...is a potent thing.  When we've experienced traumatic harm, our entire nervous system says: you survived this thing.  You're not going to go anywhere near anything like it ever ever ever again.  This makes sense as an instinct, but can make some of the rest of life much more difficult.

Like, you can't be around water.  Or cars.  Or dogs.  Or men.  Or people that remind you of a certain person.  Or people at all.

Trauma, by its nature, forcibly defines our engagement with the world.  Understanding this is an important part of reclaiming ourselves and our agency.  The challenge, of course, is that trauma-responses are themselves dysfunctional.  Trauma is a thing to acknowledge, but is the very last thing you want to center as a healthy integrating aspect of your psyche.  If trauma is the focus of a therapeutic approach, then in less-competent hands, all efforts can become to find the trauma...up to and including defining any suboptimal event or difficult relationship as "traumatic."  When the hammer is "trauma work," every nail starts looking traumatic.

This perhaps the greatest challenge of trauma-centered therapeutic approaches, because the task .of healing is to heal...and the trauma that warps our choices and stunts our lives is fundamentally and essentially dysfunction.  I mean, literally.  It's function shaped by shatteringly negative experience.  That's what the word "dysfunction" means.

To which I found myself contemplating what it would look like for a therapeutic approach to  emphasize the shatteringly positive.  Yes, "shatteringly positive."

Because there are such experiences.  There are moments in life when we are suddenly and irrevocably changed for the better, times that function in the inverse way to trauma.  Instead of having horror, fear, or anxiety seared into us, we are suddenly and unexpectedly made more whole, given courage, and given hope.

What do such experiences look like?

They are, first, epiphanic.  Having an epiphany means being caught up in the realization of something, as your consciousness suddenly grasps a vital and necessary truth that you've not had before.  Epiphanies are life transforming, shattering the present reality and the norms that have come before and replacing them with something new.

They are, second, ecstatic.  Ecstasy means, literally, standing outside of oneself, and describes a state of awareness in which you are at a remove from your normal consciousness.  They can be stirred by psychotropics or trance-inducing actions (think dance/song/prayer), but can also arise in moments of unusual experiential intensity.  

Third, they are sublime.  English is a weird language, in which "sublime" means "rising above a threshold" and "subliminal" means "existing below a threshold."  Why don't they refer to the same thing?  It's just the way English is.  Our language struggles in such places, but the unifying feature of these concepts is the encounter with and pressing through of a boundary.  A moment of breathtaking awe can be sublime, but...I would contend...so can the breaking through of a disintegrative part of yourself.  Those in recovery describe that moment of "hitting bottom" as being the place where real change begins, and it's a threshold encounter, in its own way sublime.

Finally, they are eucatastrophic.  Eucatastrophe is a term coined by J.R.R. Tolkien, who saw it as the core  defining feature of "faery" stories, by which he meant any supernaturally grounded narrative.  It's the good-shattering of a broken order by the indwelling of the transcendent holy, in which change is effectuated by something both good and greater than the existing and dominant power.

All of these point to an experience that is analogous to trauma, but that is radically and fundamentally positive.  And all are also essentially religious experiences.  

"Come to Jesus moments," if you will.

The Divine Nonconformist

I've doing some planning work for an adult education class this Fall, one in which I'm going to be exploring familial conflict and dysfunction through the lens of Scripture. Meaning, go into the Torah and the Writings and the Gospels, and surface pungent archetypal tales of Folks Not Getting Along.

The challenge, of course, isn't finding such stories. Lord have mercy, is that not a problem. The challenge is picking and choosing from the great groaning table of human mess woven into our Holy Book of Books, so's it ain't a one hundred and fifty seven week study. I mean, we get one opening chapter in which it's all good, and by the end of the second chapter, Adam's shaming and Eve's blaming and then it’s the healthy sibling dynamics of Cain and Abel and we're off to the races.

As part of that, I went searching for an old book on family systems that I'd read years ago, one called How Your Church Family Works, which somehow had made its way from the pastor's office into the parlor of the manse. 

Bowen/Friedman Family Systems work isn't cutting edge these days, as the therapeutic herd has moved on to trauma-centering approaches, but I still find some of the core concepts useful. The operating assumption of family systems therapy is this: we're part of organic systems and networks of relationship that shape our reactions and responses to others in ways that we frequently struggle to understand. That has always made sense to me, and it can be quite useful as a therapeutic process, but digging back into those concepts reminded me of a couple of things that never worked for me about that approach.

First, one of the core ideas behind Family Systems work is the concept of the triad. Meaning, it's not just your binary relationship with your mother, but your relationship with your mother and your father. It's not just your relationship with your mother, but your relationship between you, her and your younger brother. You talk about her to him, he talks about you to her, and you talk to him about her, and everything is emotional triangles and triangulation, as the trifold energies of interrelationship play out. There, the challenge I have isn't that this is too complex. It's that it's far too simple. Most of us are connected intimately to more than just two other people, I would hope, and that means our true relational connections aren't a two dimensional shape. They're more like energies playing across an ever evolving four-dimensional neural network than anything crudely Pythagorean.

Second...and this is a nontrivial problem I have with secular therapy-speak generally...it can get too centered on the dynamics of dysfunction. Everything is seen through the lens of dysfunction. As part of my family systems counseling coursework years ago, one central class assignment was to chart our emotional genealogy. We created actual charts of our family history going back as many generations as we could remember. Then, we had to use a set of labels to indicate the triangulated dysfunctions...the divorces, the addictions, the estrangements, the co-dependencies. That left us with a dark genealogy, a familial tapestry of wreck and ruin. And on that chart, there was no way to indicate the places of health. No mutual care, or faithfulness, or honor, or nurturing, or love.  It felt both jaundiced and a weensy bit counterproductive.

There’s a rule in motorcycling, and it’s a simple one: you go where you’re looking. If you anxiously target-fixate on a hazard in the road, you’re going to go right into it. Without a hopeful vision, a clear sense of the good, or anything to orient one’s faithful action towards, things stay broken.

The Apostle Paul describes a very different approach to life in his letter to the Church at Rome. In the twelfth chapter of Romans, Paul talks about how we live our lives. That represents a shift from the tone of Romans up to this point, which has been mostly diving deep into the theology of salvation by grace through faith.

As the letter ends, Paul takes a step back, and starts grounding all his theologizing in what it actually means to walk the Way of Christ. Here is what that actually looks like, Paul says.

In the first verses of Romans 12, Paul is once again talking about the body as a deep metaphor for the nature of how we participate in Christ, with each of us contributing our gifts towards the good of the church. Our purpose as Christians is to serve the good of one another, just as every part of the body serves the good of the whole. Some lead, some praise, some give, some show mercy and kindness. But all Christians have as their purpose the business of contributing to the joy of all, each part of the other, each serving in their own way as agents of God’s love. This is an important image for Paul, because he presents exactly the same image of the church as the body of Christ for two whole chapters of another letter, in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13.

Before we reach Romans 12:4-8, the Apostle makes another statement about the body. He suggests that we need to present ourselves as “living sacrifices,” giving ourselves over to the reason for which God created us. Our minds are to be transformed, and the purpose given to our lives is not one that comes from the pattern of this world, but from the pattern of the love that is the Holy Spirit of the living God.

This is a significant part of our reality right now, as our culture stumbles through thickets of violence, chaos and turmoil. The world is on fire, there are unprecedented storms and the spreading blight of war, and none of that is metaphorical. In all of that, we’re obsessed with dysfunction, focused on dysfunction, because that’s what our culture wants us to look at.  Obsessing over what is broken is the primary business model of commodified media, eh?  And where does that get us?  Just deeper into the mess.

What is our task, as disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, in such a time?

It is not to be conformed to that world. We are not to yield to the disorder that comes from the human hunger for control. We are not to hunger for power, spread fear, or expect others to serve us. We are not to succumb to slander and innuendo, eagerly passing along gossip and misinformation. That does not mean “the gossip and misinformation spread by the people we disagree with.” It means our gossip and misinformation. It means the lie we tell ourselves about others to reinforce our bias against them.

As the apostle Paul writes elsewhere, true followers of Jesus do not seek to tear down, but to build up. They do not deconstruct, but construct. We are children of the God who brings order from nothingness. If we wish to build or rebuild, that creative act rises from having developed a deep sense of the gifts and graces God has given you, and knowing what makes the world good. Know what is broken and why, sure. But it requires grace and wisdom to heal that broken thing.

For all of the wisdom in that family systems book about church as a family...and let it be said, there are very valuable sections in there...there was a third thing that I found challenging.  The last part of that "triad," so to speak.

There was a minor missing piece on the church front: God.

Oh, the concept of God was present.  Scripture was cited.  Here and there God would be included as one of the persons in a dysfunctional triangle, like some absent uncle or neglectful parent. 

But God at work among us, as the one that stands above our mess, and that can transform our mess? That was entirely missing. All we got is systems on systems on systems, and no sense of engagement with the higher power and startling grace that heals and transforms the wreck we make of things.

So, sure, we must accurately observe the things that don’t work, the shredded quiltwork of the pain we inflict on one another. There are good uses for family systems thinking, as there are for so many of the myriad other approaches to surfacing our brokenness. Being aware of how we sustain and maintain our pain is a vital step in that process.

But what heals?  What transforms?  That comes from knowing that God is above that dysfunction, and that Christ’s path leads us to something very, very blessedly different.

The Crumbs

Whenever summer arrives, I’m reminded of one of those entertaining facts about the complex, beautiful living world around us. We humans may seem to be the dominant species on the planet, but there are other creatures that do just as well. Like, say, the ants, who outnumber us two point five million to one, and are one of the most successful and adaptive creatures on our little world.

There are nearly fourteen thousand distinct species of ant. There’s the nearly two-inch long Amazonian Dinoponera Gigantea, meaning “Terrible Painful Giant” ant, which has a pretty potent sting and sharp mandibles. There’s the less threatening Carabara Atoma, the smallest known ant, which means “Heavy-Headed Speck” ant, which is as long from the tip of its antennae to the end of it’s abdomen as a credit card is thick.

Ants have a solid foothold on every continent but one, and that one is…kind of ironic, right?

Mostly, my encounters seem to be with the nearly ubiquitous Tetramorium Immigrans, the little black pavement ants that invariably find their way into mid-Atlantic homes when the weather gets warmer. They’ll come noodling into bathrooms, or booping across kitchen counters, and where one comes leaving a little pheromone trail, it means more will follow. “Dave, we’ve got ants again,” Rache will say, and I know it’ll be my sad duty to spray. Otherwise, I try not to kill them if I can avoid it, because they neither bite, sting, nor carry diseases.

So long as they stay in the yard, they’re welcome. There’s been a constant stream of Tetamorium Immigrans flowing across my carport this season, a relentless bustling rush of tiny chitinous bodies running right along the brick wall of the house, along a groove in the concrete, and then down and under the driveway. If it’s an average-sized nest, there are fifteen to thirty thousand of them down there, and so that flow doesn’t ever seem to stop, morning, noon and night, as relentless a bustle as any major human thoroughfare at the height of rush hour, with the only differences being 1) size and 2) the fact that the ants are actually moving. 

I got to wondering: Where are they going?  So I tracked them one day.  They’re going to my compost bucket, where they push past the charcoal filter to help themselves to countless little bits of rotted tomato, carrot peelings, and the cut-tops of okra.

Should I begrudge them this? I know, given the frequency with which I receive flyers from exterminators eager to kill every insect on my property, that there are some folks who struggle with the idea that there might be any unauthorized living creatures on their land. Kill the bugs!  Sure, spray kills mosquitoes and ticks, but it also kills nearly every other insect.  It kills the ants and spiders, kills the beetles and butterflies, kills all of them, all for our convenience.  We human beings can be weirdly territorial that way, mindlessly guarding even the crumbs that fall on the periphery of our lives.

The Gospel of Matthew delves into that a little bit, in a strange passage about a foreign woman who just wouldn’t back down, a woman who was not just subordinate because she was a woman, but also because she was a Canaanite, a Syrophoenician, to be exact. She was as other as other could be, and was treated as such by both the disciples and by Jesus himself.

First, she is ignored, as she cries out in faith for the healing of her daughter. She’s not a Judean. But she won’t stop, and the disciples finally get so sick of her persistence that they ask Jesus to send her packing. As the woman comes and kneels at Christ’s side, Jesus drops a surprisingly cutting metaphor. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” He’s the food, the children are Israel, and the dogs...well...she and her daughter are the subhuman creatures.

But her faith and her wit drives her to come back with an even better line, and Jesus...impressed by both her faith and her relentlessness...very publicly backs down. She is given what she has so persistently sought. Her daughter is healed.

It’s worth noting which Gospels have this story, and which Gospels do not. Mark has it, Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, Mark, clearly written for a community of Jewish Christians before everything in Judah fell apart. Matthew has it too, Matthew, whose primary goal is to show how Jesus meets and exceeds the demands of Torah and the Prophets, again for a primarily Jewish audience. Luke and John, which were written for Gentiles, all of whom were outside that first fold of Galileans and Judeans? They don’t have this story.

The difference seems obvious. There were ethnically insular Christian communities at the dawn of the church, who assumed that the Gospel belonged only to their particular race, nation, or ethnic group. The communities that first received Mark and Matthew tended that way. So Mark and Matthew made sure to remember to them that one time when Jesus allowed himself to be seen publicly changing his mind. Jesus himself, yielding to the insistence of a foreign woman who just wanted to experience God’s healing and grace, allowing his hardness to fall away.

We know, we do, that this selfishness of soul still lives in the heart of humankind, and that we are prone to treating certain others as if they are not human, as if their hopes and their sorrows aren’t as known to God as our own. It seems just part of our lingering soul-blindness, that inability to offer the grace we mistakenly assume is ours and ours alone.

Typically, I read this passage as speaking most directly to our ethnonationalist biases, to our tendency to look on those from other cultures as unworthy.  It's not primarily about how we treat our dogs, eh?  

But I do wonder, at times, if the measure of the grace we will receive might rest in our willingness to show compassion not just to our human neighbors, but also to those creatures that really and truly aren’t us, and that we consider less than us.

Just to be clear, I’m not considering converting to Jainism. Nor will I…and my wife will be relieved to hear this…be scattering crumbs for the ants in our kitchen. If there were some way to come to an agreement with ants, in which they’d only come into the kitchen to clean up debris between the hours of one and four am, we’d be good. But I don’t speak any of the many varieties of ant-language, as the pheromones I produce aren’t of much help.

That said, I’m aware, as I watch the ant highway to my compost bin, that they’re God’s creatures too, and I watch where I step. I’m aware, as I tend to my garden, that the dozens of species of native bees and little wasps and tiny shining flies that bustle from my flowering mint to my bolting basil to those great gorgeous okra blossoms are the very farthest things from pests.

Sure, they’re small and their lives are fleeting. But so are we, and so are ours. 

It’s a hard world for little things, but we don’t need to contribute to making it any harder.

----

Just because, here's a Portlandia sketch about ants that amuses me.  Note: Tetramorium Immigrans are also known as "sugar ants."  They do not eat wood.  I know this because I am a Dad.

Uncle Tom's Eisegesis

"Religion!" said St. Clare, in a tone that made both ladies look at him.  "Religion!  Is what you hear at church religion?  Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion?  Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for man, than even my own ungodly, worldly, blinded nature?  No!  When I look for a religion, I must look for something above me, and not something beneath."

"Then you don't believe that the Bible justifies slavery," said Miss Ophelia.

"The Bible was my mother's book," said St. Clare.  "By it she lived and died, and I would be very sorry to think it did.  I'd as soon desire to have it proved that my mother could drink brandy, chew tobacco, and swear, by way of satisfying me that I did right in doing the same.  It wouldn't make me at all more satisfied with these things in myself, and it would take from me the comfort of respecting her; and it really is a comfort, in this world, to have anything one can respect..."

Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 190-191

The Music of the Machine

I have, of late, been struggling to keep a certain type of music out of my playlists.

The auto-generated "favorites"  that YouTube Music pitches me can get a little stale, as one overfamiliar song after another is served up.  Sure, they're songs I like, but algorithmic recommendations start feeling a little bit like the musical equivalent of Bread and Jam for Frances.  "Sweet Lord Jesus, this again?" I'll mutter, skipping to the next one.

Usually, new additions are welcome.  Only now, I find myself having to be warier and warier around new music, particularly if it feels a certain way.  More and more new music isn't produced by human beings at all, but is instead the result of a short prompt dumped into Suno or some other AI.  I created a few songs myself, back when it was unusual and felt like a fun thing to try.  But I'd rather not listen to it.

As every ad for Suno reinforces, that creation process requires exactly zero talent, as people who haven't the skill or won't put in the work are encouraged to pretend they've made something.  So when I hear a song that exactly matches a particular vibe, I'm on alert.  Machine music takes advantage of our distraction, engaging parasitically with the musical styles we enjoy and crowding out human voices and talents.

Like, say, my listening preferences when driving on a cool summer evening.   I drive with the windows down and the sunroof open at such times, letting the wind play through my hair.  I want stuff that's utterly relaxing, both mellow and sophisticated.   Give me a tree-lined country road paired with a sultry chanteuse purring over a tightly constructed jazz standard, and I'm as happy as a clam.  

If clams liked driving briskly whilst listening to jazz, that is.  It may or may not be a mollusk preference.

So the other day while driving home from church, I heard a new tune that landed perfectly.  Bubbly and playful, with lyrics that danced between English and Japanese, it was just one hundred and ten percent chill vibe.  "Little Sunny Moments," it was called, and I enjoyed it as it hummed away in the background.  But as it progressed seamlessly from verse to chorus and came to a quick and easily digestible conclusion, I began to wonder.

Is this a real song?  

It felt too tight, the vocalizations too sharply defined and breathless around the edges.  Each "Doo Doo Doo" didn't quite have the shape and form of a human utterance.  I'd not really paid attention to it, so I listened to it a second time, tending to the lyrics, trying to come to a determination as to its provenance.

[garbled] is shining in the light. Everything just feels so right. Tiny waves go up and down. Nothing special, nothing big. Little sunny day.

Doo doo doo. Drifting far away.

Doo doo doo. Come and stay. Seagulls dancing in the blue. I just sit and think of you. Clouds are floating like a dream.

If I laugh a little more,

will this day just last forever? Doo doo doo. Little sunny day. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Drifting far away. Doo doo doo. Come and stay.

The lyrics sort of made sense, but were more a feeling than anything coherent, and the garbling of some words and hyperprecision of others felt less organic and more generated. Odds of it being AI? Now at 90%.

And then came the final verse, sung to precisely the same tune as the rest of the song:

Smooth relaxing jazz Bossa Nova.

Similar mood to Quiet Glow.
Soft breathy female.
Soft Doo Doo Doo

Soft Breath Doo Doo Doo
Soft breathy female.
Smooth.

It. Was. The. Prompt.  O Lord have mercy, how perfect.  From behind the wheel, I cackled with delight.   

Somehow, the prompt used by a human to tell an AI what kind of song to make had been accidentally folded into the lyrics, and...this being a low effort sort of thing...they'd just burped the thing out without even noticing.  

"This," I thought to myself, "should be mandatory."  Meaning, at the end of every AI song, the final lyric must be the prompt.

Just so we know.  So it's clear how much effort was involved, and how little humanity.

Each Season Different

This year's been an odd one in my garden.  Some of my old stalwarts have struggled, and promising new growth has been unexpectedly stunted.

The butternut squash which flourish with wild abandon most years haven't sprawled across my yard.  Their great glorious golden flowers and fattening fruit have been half of a typical summer's production.  

My okra, now in its third year, are yielding but dwarfish, standing thigh-high where last year they were now already towering over my head.  It might be the heat, and that we're still a bit behind on rain for the year is likely a factor, my regular watering aside.  Or it might be the soil, particularly for the butternut, where the hugelkulture beds that have always shown the greatest production probably needed a refresher of decaying wood prior to the start of the next season.

My trusty bush beans have also struggled, although that's more a factor of my taking an unexpected nine day vacation right as they were starting to produce.  That first wave of beans was missed entirely.  I don't mind that they went to seed, though, because last year's seed crop was devoured by marauding deer...again, when I was on vacation.

Even the sturdy sunflowers seemed slow to get going, although they're now once again feeding pollinators and beaming down beneficently at passers-by.

The majority of my efforts haven't been optimal.  But there are exceptions.

I cut my tomato planting by 60%, as I was convinced that the bed-density of earlier years had contributed to fungal blight.  Only four plants went in, and they've done wonderfully.  Pico de gallo and caprese and bruschetta have been present in abundance lately, and I'm enjoying regular vegetarian BLTs with sweet slices of those homegrown 'maters.  Also abundant: my basil, which started slow but has rebounded, contributing to multiple rounds of pesto and the aforementioned bruschetta, both of which also draw on my copious garlic harvest.

In all of this, I'm reminded that I am just a suburban gardener.  A weak year for me isn't a threat to my livelihood, and it doesn't carry with it the fear of famine.  It's simply a thing to observe and learn from, part of the wild and joyous variety of God's complex and unpredictable creation.  

Headwinds

I knew, when I headed to church one recent Sunday, that the ride home was going to be a little damp. The forecast was for rain, copious rain, blessed, welcome, drought-busting rain, and with the MidAtlantic humidifier turned up to eleven, there was no question we were going to get a drenching.

It drizzled a little bit on the way there, but when I stepped out to the scooter to head home, it was pouring. I no longer fit into the rainsuit I bought thirty years and thirty pounds ago, but that doesn’t matter. Riding home in the rain on a hot day is like getting free admission to a water park, and I was actually looking forward to it. I stowed my phone and my wallet in my waterproof courier bag, which I put in my scooter’s waterproof storage compartment, and with my torso protected by an excellent raincoat, I set out home.

In light, moderate, or passing rain, scooters are superior to motorcycles. Tuck your legs as demurely as Audrey Hepburn behind the scooter fairing, and you often don’t get wet at all. In light, moderate, or passing rain, that is. Last week was not that. But getting soaked isn’t the primary challenge when you’re on two wheels and the heavens are set to torrential-plus.

Challenge one is traction, as water courses across the road. When the ground is first dampened, things get slick. Then, the issue is flowing or standing water. Have you ever hydroplaned in a car? Let me assure you that hydroplaning on two wheels is a more…interesting.. sensation. You need to be careful of pace, particularly when changing directions, because the direction you go when you hydroplane in a sharp turn on two wheels is down.

Challenge two is visibility. When the rain picks up, you soon notice that the wiper settings on motorcycle helmets leave something to be desired. When you’re on the Beltway and the cars around you are slowing and pulling over, have hazards on, and their wipers are flailing as wildly as a panicked eight year old trying to escape a yellowjacket? When rain isn’t just torrential-plus but torrential plus coming at you at highway speeds? 

This is where doubt begins to enter one's mind.

Whenever we attempt something challenging, particularly if that challenging thing speaks to becoming the grace-filled soul that that God yearns for us to be, there is a moment of enthusiasm, a moment of delight. But then the storm has a tendency to pick up. You commit to a new life, a new path of action or a time of recovery, something that you know will bring you into alignment with a more gracious path.  But the wind howls in your ears that you’re sure you can’t do this, that it’s too much, that it’d be better to be back in the safe prison of your familiar brokenness.

The world around us is filled with powerful things we cannot control, after all, and our fear that our humble efforts will be sunk by those powers and principalities can crowd out our hope.

There’s a story of storm in the Gospel, as the disciples find themselves out on the sea of Galilee. They’ve just left a gathered throng, and between the demands of the crowd and the endless questions of his inner circle, Jesus was spent. He first needed that time away after the death of his cousin John, and after feeding the five thousand, he finally was able to be by himself, and he told his friends to go on ahead across the sea while he went to the mountaintop.

The Sea of Galilee is susceptible to sudden storms that blow up, winds that race across open waters and turn what is typically a flat and easy passage into something rather more significantly challenging. As fishermen, the disciples would have known this, and known how to cope with it. It wasn’t life threatening, or so we are told, and the sea was up, and the waves were high, and the wind was blowing hard against them.

They were handling that, although the going was hard.

What freaked them out just a little bit more was Jesus, as he walked towards them across the water. This is entirely understandable, because it’s unsettling when things step outside of their normal pattern, and a dude walking across the roiling surface of a lake in heavy seas is pretty far outside of the normal pattern.

They are justifiably a little upset by this, and Jesus hollers out to them to calm them down. Peter, hearing him, is still a little doubtful. Hey Jesus, he yells back, if it’s you, ask me to come join you! To which Jesus says, sure, c’mon over.

I’m not quite sure why this was enough for Peter to get out of the boat, but apparently it was. So the story tells us that Peter set out across the water towards Jesus. Now, it’s one thing to be in a boat on the water, and it’s another thing to be right there on the surface of the storm.

Peter panics. He’s suddenly aware of his vulnerability, of all the different reasons this just won’t work, and the water starts to consume him. Jesus comes over, lends a hand up, and the two get into the boat. The winds calm, and the disciples are in awe.

This story is a story of faithful striving when all around us is churn and storm and spray. In those times, faith in our purpose is tested, and doubt comes easy.

We all do that, but those first earnest efforts can be so easily undercut by doubt. We know you need to heal that relationship. We know we need to stop doing that one thing…you know what that is, for you…that has continually sabotaged our ability to show the grace of the Spirit. We know you’re called to something new and wonderful and hard. For a moment, it’s wonderful and euphoric. And then things get harder.

The salt of the spray fills our mouths and blinds our eyes, and we feel our hope bleed away to nothing, and it seems as if we’re going to sink beneath the waves. We falter, we hesitate, and any hope we had vanishes like Eurydice before the eyes of Orpheus.

That’s the point, as Jesus folk, where we need to set aside strangling anxieties and smothering doubts, reach our hands out, and trust in God’s strength and Christ’s grace and the love of the Holy Spirit.

If you are anxious and fearful on two wheels, you’ll freeze or panic, and that doesn’t end well.  There've been times in my life...times of stress and times of hardship...where I've stopped motorcycling, because I could feel my confidence in everything shaken.  But that wasn't what I felt on the road that day.  

I knew that I knew what I was doing.  When the wind drives the rain into you, and your water-coated visor makes visibility like opening your eyes in a swimming pool, there are two solutions.

First, pause, pull over under an overpass, and wait it out.  That works, but I prefer not to do that on the Beltway in low visibility situations if I can avoid it.  It's a dangerous road, filled with incompetent and distracted drivers who don't have a great sense of whether they're in a lane or on the shoulder.

There's a second approach, one that works if the road isn't flooded.   You want to clear your visor?  Go faster.  Don't speed.  Just be sure that the same wind that's blinding you is driving the rain off.  It works, time and time again.  So I forced my way into the storm.

The visor cleared, the beaded rain streaming away as rapidly as it landed. I could see again, as I pulled onto the high occupancy toll lanes, empty but for myself.

The Challenge of Permeability

 

It was a slow summer Wednesday, and I was in the midst of office hours at the church.  I'd worked on the sermon, chatted with some church folks, and done a bunch of prep work for the Adult Ed classes I'll soon be leading in the Fall.

At a certain point, I needed to move around again, so I circulated through the rooms of our nearly 200 year old utility building.  The "manse" currently houses my office, the copy-room, a nice little sitting parlor, two functioning bathrooms, and a number of rooms that are perhaps most generously described as "storage and utility."  In the hotter months, it does get a little warm, lacking AC as it does.  But the structure--state of the art 1827 construction--rests not on a concrete foundation, but on a bed of huge cedar logs, which just set there on the earth below.  That means that in the summer the building "breathes," as the rising hot air draws cool air from below, and I find it...with a ceiling fan...perfectly tolerable well into the upper 90s.

It's blessed with being a permeable space, sometimes a little more permeable than one might expect.

As I wandered into one room on the first floor, my eye was caught by a decoration I'd not seen before.  Did someone put up an artificial vine, one of those greenery decorations one might find in a restaurant of a certain type or a dorm room?  

Nope.

It was wild grape, alive and well and snaking across the ceiling from where it had shoved its way past one of the baseboards.  For a moment, I had a flashback to back when I was writing my first novel.  There'd be mornings where I'd go down into my basement, fire up my PS3, and listen to the music that Gustavo Santaolalla composed for The Last of Us.  The OG 2013 video game is one of the most remarkable and emotionally authentic gaming experiences I'd ever had, and the soundtrack is haunting and lovely.  I'd just leave the opening menu running, and the sorrowful strains of end times music would waft over me as I wrote.  

The menu looked like this:

This is what ruin looks like.  It's more than a little beautiful, in its own way.  But it's cold in the winter, and too hot in the summer, and zombies are everywhere.

My mind being what it is, that got me to thinking about permeability, and what we include and do not include in the life of the church.  Yes, we need to be open, and we need to be able to speak the language of our culture.  Yes, we need to show grace and hospitality, and to be amenable to the growth of the new.  Healthy churches aren't closed off to those things, or to the community around them.  They are places of grace and welcome.

But we also need to take care.

Because some things, let in, will tear our common spaces apart, will open holes through which other decay and rending growth will come, and then what had been a place of Christ's sanctuary and shelter will crumble and become consumed by the world.

It's a question of discernment, I suppose.

To Eat and Be Filled

I approached my recent vacation with a little bit of anxiety about food. The last few decades of my life have been marked by oscillating cycles of weight gain and loss, of being fit for a while, and then having the mass slowly return on a rising tide of IPAs and ice cream.

Going to the beach isn’t exactly the best place to go midway through an effort to constrain one’s once again increasing girth. One might think that being vegetarian would help, but let me assure you that it does not.

Sure, I’m eating a veggie burger, but it’s hard to feel that vegetarian virtue when I’m getting it with a fried egg, fried mushrooms, cheese, and a side of fries the size of the average rabbit.

I’m back to pushing myself to exercise more, which is good for me, and paying more attention to what I eat, mapping out my daily calorie counts against the medically determined expectation for what a man of my height and age needs. In kilocalories, or what we just call calories, that’s around 2,450 a day to maintain life.

The average Spaniard takes in around 2,600 calories a day. The average Japanese, 2,100. The average American? 3,700.  We eat thirty percent more than we need.  And it shows.

Seventy-four percent of the U.S. population is technically overweight. The diet and weight loss industry in this country is a $135 billion dollar enterprise, one that was recently upended by the arrival of GLP-1, which is on track to hit 65 billion in sales this year, with nearly 12% of the population of the United States currently using Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 agonists to constrain and suppress appetite. It’s clearly something that I’m not alone in struggling with. We consume too much, and exercise too little, and when you’re surrounded by an endless groaning table of synthetic deliciousness, it’s hard not to yield to that siren song.

Here in this country, we clearly have trouble with food, trouble coping with our fear of of absence and the presence of consumerist "abundance."   Rather than taking just what we need, we seem unable to constrain ourselves. Are we fearful we’ll not eat tomorrow? Are we soothing some broader anxiety about our place in the world, or our futures?

----

The story of the loaves and the fishes is a simple story about our fears and our food, one retold by all of the Gospels, but it’s got a couple of unusual and noteworthy elements. First, it’s really rather amazingly simple. Like so many of the tales that rise from our recountings of the life of Jesus, it’s visceral, a fundamentally graspable and elemental thing, the stuff of the everyday.

The context of the tale in Matthew is one of mourning. Jesus has received the news that John the Baptist, his cousin and a prophet of the coming of the Kingdom, was murdered by Herod. Jesus needed some time alone, and so sought out a place to be in private for a while, taking a boat to an unnamed location.

But Jesus being Jesus, and the word about him humming about in the world, a crowd gathered.

They wanted to hear this prophet, this teacher, this wonderworker, and perhaps to be healed. Again, Jesus being Jesus, he had compassion on them, and healed and tended to them. The day was growing late, and the disciples, seeing the throngs, were eager to wrap things up and send folks on their way. That, and they were worried, because out there in the wild, there was no way they could ensure everyone got fed. Let’s call it, they said, so’s that folks can find their way to nearby villages.

How can we know they’ve got food? We have a little food, sure, but they might not. They are anxious about the gathering, anxious that hungry crowds might lose sight of their message, anxious that there will not be enough.

Which, Jesus knew, there was.

In the face of their anxiety about what they had, Jesus told them: give it away. Break the bread. Cook the fish. Share it with a blessing.

The start of that miracle was the act of not worrying about it, and sharing graciously.

We who have so much poured out to us, and in whom so much potential lies, we need to trust that sort of miracle. This does not come easily for us, particularly as we’ve acclimatized ourselves to expecting more, more and always more, always hungry, never filled.

Some miracles are just right there, ready to happen, just waiting to be seen and acted upon. The joy of life, of growing and giving and sharing from whatever sweetness we have been given? That’ s the deepest of miracles. But first, we have to be able to see it through the thickets of our anxiety, and the depths of our grasping.

The New Seed

Yesterday, once I'd gotten my latest manuscript off to the publisher, I harvested green beans, most of them dried pods.  With a small metal bucket of pods before me, I spent a pleasant few minutes removing the fat finished beans from their crisp outer container.  It's a pleasant way to spend time, as the pods crackle in a satisfying way when you break them open.  I inspected each of the naturally dried beans for size, color, and structural integrity, and it didn't take long before I had twice the seed I'd need for a good-sized planting next year.

After finishing, I helped myself to a healthy snack, homemade pico de gallo and a small bowl of corn chips.  The pico was made the day before, from the good solid harvest of tomatoes in the front yard.  The 'maters have grown like gangbusters this year, and even though I put 60% fewer into the ground, I'm getting triple the yield.  Better airflow and less density (coupled with the dryness) have meant an absence of fungal blight, which I'll remember for future years.

I'd hoped, or so I recalled as I ate, to use some cilantro I'd planted in my herb garden to give that lovely floral flavor to the pico.  But it matured too early, as this summer got waaaay to hot.  After bolting, the plant was done.  Cilantro doesn't like being transplanted, so I figured I'd need to grow from seed if I tried it again.

That stirred something in my mind, so I wandered out to look at the remnants of the cilantro, which was...as expected...little more than dry twigs.  But that "little more" included scores of plump, round, striated seeds, grouped into sprays of a half dozen or so. 

"Oh, right," I muttered to myself.  "There it is.  Coriander."  I knew that cilantro and coriander are the same thing, leaf and seed of the same plant.  But for some reason, it hadn't occurred to me that I wasn't growing cilantro this year.  I was, instead,  growing both: 1) a functionally different herb, and; 2) ample seeds for multiple subsequent plantings of cilantro.

I harvested the plant and returned to the kitchen, where I laid out newspaper and spent another ten minutes teasing the coriander seeds off of their branches. It was, as process, quite different from gathering bean seedstock, but no less gratifying, as the coriander fell with a soft percussion against the newsprint.

One of the great delights of the garden is that it offers up new things, even when one isn't expecting them.

2026 Bethany Sandcastling

Day One:

I always start with something to remind me how to build.  With that in mind, I mucked about with a diamond-pattern as the core element, with interwoven layers and tiered walling with simple carved towers.  My wife told me it was a little bit on the Georgia O'Keefe side of things thematically, which I'd kind of noticed myself.  I mean, Georgia wasn't into angles and linearity so much for obvious reasons, but there were definitely anatomical resonances.  

Thankfully, that didn't seem to be noticed by most passers by.  Although that sixty-something German woman who took numerous pictures of it may have recognized that dynamic, as her husband gave me a knowing nod.  

Day Two:
 

I started the morning with a vision of a mass of ovoid beings, all staring out to sea with their hollow eyes.  But when I began to carve, I realized I just needed to make an octopus.  An octopus!  Keep it simple, stupid.

This seemed to delight the tiny people, which in and of itself is a reason to have taken that route.  A six year old girl with bright red hair was the first to approach with boldness, telling me that she and her four year old sister thought it was great.  Later, she brought her mom to see it, leading her by the hand and pointing it out with tiny person enthusiasm.   When Mom seemed a little distracted, the strong willed little redhead said:  "Mom!  Appreciate it!!"  Which I, myself, definitely appreciated.

As the Beatles song about an Octopus and his Garden kept humming through my head, I returned in the afternoon to construct a fence and a gate.  As I started, a nine year old girl who had been previously admiring the octopus accidentally fell into it.  Having taken out a few tentacles, she seemed utterly mortified.  Meaning, she was actually tearing up as she stammered an apology.  I told that sweet soul that sand was the easiest thing to sculpt with, and that it would be no trouble at all to fix things up.  It seemed to cheer her up.

My middle aged bones and tendons just weren't up for another consecutive day of squatting and shoveling, so I took Tuesday off.  

Day Three:

Wednesday, I returned refreshed, and began another classic castle.  The central tower was first, delta-shaped and with four "windows" all the way through:

I returned to the house to hydrate and slap on sunscreen, and then it was back to the beach for a few hours to build out the main stage.  The little gatherings of tiny people watching started up as the latticework walls took shape, which is always a pleasure.  The castle took shape, tiers upon tiers.

Then, a break, lunch, and a nap, at which point I returned again.  In the interim, family members who'd been down there reported requests from passers-by to take pictures with it.  That included a beach security patrol guy, who I chatted with for a bit.  He told me the castle was a "public service," which I suppose it is.

The beach in late afternoon empties out nicely, so a little more ornamental sprawl becomes possible.

As night fell and a full moon rose, I wandered down to the beach again to see the ruins.  The front side had washed away, but the main ramparts were still standing in stark silhouette against the moonlit sea.  

Day Four:

The following day, a delegation of small people gathered as I was setting up, and inquired as to my plans for the day.  Having put it off in favor of an octopus on day two, I wanted to experiment with a simple form I'd not mucked about with before, a schmoo-like ovoid.  That, and we had an outing planned, so I'd be at the beach for less time.  What I ended up with was a small assembly of the critters, in various sizes.  

When asked bv passers-by what they were, I'd suggest that they were the sort of sand-spirit that might come hopping up to you on a beach in a Studio Ghibli film.  This didn't seem to help folks much.  "Are those coconuts?" asked one earnest mom.  I told her they could be if she wanted them to be, which was true.

Towards the end of the day, several hovering kids peppered me with questions about them.  One boy thought they looked like guardians of some sort, and I agreed that they might well be just that.  A slightly older girl wanted to know if they'd survive the incoming waves, and I said they would not, after which I talked to her about the impact of the moon on tides.  She's not learned this yet, and she was excited to find out a new thing.  The first boy then suggested that they should all have names, which the kids all agreed was important.  One was Bob.  Another Christopher.  The largest, on the far right, was named King Gerald, on account of him being the largest.  

Day Five:

On the last day at the beach, I figured I'd pitch up my annual "Bethany Beach" lettering, which I've been doing for years.  It pairs nicely with a family picture, eh?

As I was about halfway through, a small voice rose from a passing group.  "Hey!  I remember that from last year!"  About five minutes later, I heard the same thing from an elderly gentleman.  Nice to know one's work is part of a stranger's remembrances.

This one tends to be a bit of a crowd-pleaser.  The new readers, perched on Dad's shoulders, sounding it out.  The genuinely gobsmacked ten-year olds.  The gaggle of teen girls.  A group of college bros passed by grinning, with one of them loudly declaring that it was the "xxxxing xxxx."   The young women who brought and retrieved our rental umbrellas.

The number of folks stopping to take pictures (either with family members or just of the sculpture) significantly increases.  The letters seem a marvel to folks, although they're not particularly challenging to construct.  

Pretty much every year I do this, someone will in jest suggest that perhaps I should set up a stand and charge admission.  Which is in line with the well-meaning souls (kids and adults alike) who'll ask if I'm a professional.  We've all seen what the professional sandcastle artists do, and it's in an entirely different league.  

I just do do it because I love to do it, which is the best of all possible reasons to do anything.