A Taste of Fire and Water

It had been an unseasonably warm day in Garrett County, where my in-laws have had a vacation home since the mid-1980s.  Late December and upper 40s to lower fifties, barely even jacket weather, which is the new normal now.  But the forecast was for a storm front, followed by temperatures plunging.  

As the wind howled and the first waves of sleet fell, we were comfortable and unaffected.  On the agenda for the day was going out to a nearby brewpub, where we were to meet up with another family for pizza and hoppy beverages.

The trees roared and thrummed, and the roads were strewn with branches, but it wasn't a big deal.  We gathered at the brewery, chatting and reconnecting, ordering appetizers and meals and insulated from the storm, as bitter winds drove the temperature to below freezing.

Then the pub lights flickered, flickered again, and went out.  The restaurant was without power, which meant no heat and no light.   The pizza ovens were still going, though, and overhead skylights meant we could see, so we continued with our pleasant lunch.  Things did cool down a bit, and new patrons were turned away, but it was still enjoyable.  Paying was a bit more of a challenge, but the battery powered card readers had an emergency offline mode, so that proved surmountable.

We returned to the houses, the one we own and the one we were renting nearby, and discovered some challenges.  The wind had blown open a door in our house, the one where the family dogs were awaiting our return.  None had scarpered it, because they prefer warm and cozy to cold driving winds, rain, and sleet.  But the house was colder.  The rental house had an electronic door lock, which wasn't working.

One dark cold house, one dark inaccessible house.    

The colder house has a woodburning fireplace, and I set about getting a fire going.  It's got a terrible draw, and is a bit finicky to get roaring, but once it's going, it'll heat the entire house up.  Folks gathered around the hearth, and I tended the fire until it had enough ember and fuel to be left for a little while.  I set myself to the next task: water.

Not for drinking, but for flushing.  Being off of municipal water, the house has a well, and that well relies on a pump to pressurize the system.  No power means no pressure, and that means each toilet has one flush only.  Which, given the meal, the libations, and the eleven souls in one house, was not going to be enough.  I mean, one could squat in the woods, I suppose, but that seemed a bit unpleasant with sleet and sixty mile and hour gusts.

So water had to be secured, and I knew where to get it.  Up the street from the house is a fire pond.  Down I went with two buckets, which I filled with pondwater.  Back to the house I went, a bucket in each hand.  I filled the tank in one of the bathrooms, and then refilled it as folks did their business.  That proved enough for three flushes.  On the third fill in the darkened bathroom, I considered the possibility this could yet take several more hours, and began the ten minute process of water gathering again.

Trudging back, I noticed lights in other homes flickering for a moment, then powering off, then flickering again and remaining on.

By the time I returned to the house, I was greeted with cheery affirmations that yes, the power was back.  My buckets, unnecessary.  Lights and Wifi and all the comforts had returned.

As I dumped the buckets, I thought: how many millions live like this, all of the time?  Find water.  Make fire.  Find water.  Tend fire.   Walks down to rivers and streams or a common well.  Collecting fuel for the fire, whatever can be found.  All day, every day, that's the task, if life is to be sustained.

There is so much that we take for granted.

Pick Up Sticks

With the winter now almost upon us, the days are short and the nights are cold, and that means fires in our hearth many nights.  We've got an old-school woodburning fireplace, which...now that it's been supplemented by a hefty cast iron fireback...really does keep the heart of the house nice and toasty.

Not being a gas fireplace, it requires a fair amount of effort to get going and manage, and that includes not just acquiring wood and keeping a stock of matches, but kindling.  Kindling is absolutely key, as the building of a proper fire cannot happen without it.

As a tiny and pyrophilic pup, I'd pay close attention as my father set the fire, and he'd happily describe the necessary process for getting a good roaring blaze going.  Three stages were necessary, as I came to understand it.  First, ignition kindling, something one had in quantity that would catch quickly and burn fast.  Newspaper, crumpled and pressed into a bed?  That was ideal.  But if you only used newspaper and split logs, the paper would burn off before the wood caught.  So you needed an intermediate stage, which was a big mess of twigs and sticks and small branches.  They all needed to be dry, inside and out, the sort of sticks that break with a snap rather than bending.

Gathering those sticks was a child's job.  Go, O my Son, and gather kindling, that we might have a fire! Yes, O my venerable Father, I shall do so!  Or so that conversation never went, as I was sent scampering out into the yard to find appropriately sized bits of tree-fall.  That pattern continued with my own sons when they were little.

It's a perfectly kid-sized task, one with clear benefits and purpose.  The goal is achievable.  It engages mind and body, and the results are warmth and coziness.  On a particularly good night, when one is making S'mores, the acquisition of a good marshmellow roasting stick can be added to the mission.

Yesterday, I was thinking all of these things as I wandered through our wooded back yard.  The day was warm, almost unseasonably so, but the forecast was for rain, followed by a stark drop in temperature.  So if there was to be a fire, I'd need a good stock of wood bits to get it going.

In between housework, writing, and church work, I took a few minutes to putter about in the yard, gathering sticks.  Our kids are grown, and so the labor of gathering kindling falls to me.  It doesn't take long, less than ten minutes of bending and picking up.  My eyes flit across the ground, assessing every option, choosing a blend of sizes and thicknesses that fill a small bucket.  Occasionally, I'll test a questionable stick, keeping it if it snaps, tossing it into the ivy if it does not.

As I gather, I also consider this: I am a grown man, doing a child's work.  It's ten fifteen on a Thursday morning, and I'm not in a meeting or working on a memo or analyzing data or reviewing the work of my AI assistant.  I'm picking up sticks.  Am I bothered by this?

I am not.  Nor should I be.  It's true that it's a rudimentary task, blissfully simple.  It's not something one gets paid to do, so basic that it runs beneath the valuations of the marketplace.  But it also has a radiantly clear purpose, and a definitive outcome.  Your labor is necessary for the hearth, and the hearth warms the house.  It's the sort of task that gives us a sense that work has meaning, and that it has intrinsic value.

How much of how we fill our days is as obviously useful, and has such a pleasant result?

The One Who Writes with Fire

It came in a moment of reflection.  It was a brief meditation over a concept, or rather, a meditation over the interplay between two ways of conceptualizing the divine.

On the one hand, the concept--often troubling--of God as a consuming fire.  Generally, we do not want to be burned.  Burning is bad.  Burning hurts, a bunch if it's you encountering a hot pan, rather more so if you're Servetus after a particularly contentious Presbytery meeting.   Despite all the emo-Jesus Christian Contemporary Music that tries to make it seem romantic, fire-language still feels more than a little bit too reminiscent of Tomas de Toquemada.

Plus, there's a strong negative theology of burning.  Burning is what happens to bad people.  Lakes of fire!  Hot coals!  Sinners get the weeping and gnashing, plus, did we mention you'll be on fire?

Mysticism, of course, has always embraced the divine fire.  It is that light that is kindled in us.  It is the light that awaits, and that we will embrace as it consumes us.

This is the mystic vision, in both Christianity and every other human religion.  It's what Jesus brought and lived out, and what Paul affirmed and spread.

But America is not a very mystic place, and the idea that we will be subsumed into anything annoys us.  That'll destroy our individuality, we grump.  America has always been fiercely self-oriented, but now, it's reached a fever pitch.  Our consumer culture needs us to be distinct and separate and conveniently trackable, more than any culture in human history.

Consumed by the Numinous?  Really?  How will Netflix know our preferences in heaven if it can't pigeonhole our demographic profile?  Think what being indistinctly suffused into the nature of the Holy would do to Amazon Divines business model!  And the Google AfterLifeAds?  They'd be completely random!

The horror.

To my reflections on this idea came another image of the divine, that of God as Author.  I like this image, for reasons that are very slightly transparent.  Yeah, I like to write.  So sure, I see God as an author.  And yes, there's a wee bit of projection involved.  I get that.  But I'm aware of the limits, and aware that it's metaphor.

It just happens to be an excellent metaphor.  The very best.  Ahem.

God is the storyteller, the one who spins out the narratives of our existence and of time and space.  He tells not just our story, but ourselves, writing us into being.  He has authorship over us, and authority, and yet allows us to participate in the telling of the tale, like a master DM spinning out an elegantly complex D&D campaign for a circle of dear friends.

Two different images.  There's the One who Writes.  And the One who Burns.

When I was a little child, those would have been very different metaphors.

But what struck me, in my reflection, was that "burning" and "writing" are now interchangeable words.  They have become synonyms, in this digital age.  Burning is how we write, how we set data into a physical medium.

The two wove up in a reflection, of a God who writes us out with fire, burning the truth of our life into creation.

All this before my second cup of coffee.  What a productive morning.

The Gift of Tongues

As a part-time pastor, I'm the member of the family with daytime flexibility.  That means laundry and kid-shuttling and gardening and cleaning.  It also means study and writing.   But it also means I can take time to work with the local Meals on Wheels, which provides nutrition to the homebound elderly.  Pastor though I may be, I'm not "in leadership" here.  This is just a dirt-under-your-fingernails opportunity to simply be a servant.

I take my marching orders from a dear old saint who has coordinated the program for years, first from a warehouse near a hospital, and now from the basement of the nearby Baptist church.

My job, as I've chosen to accept it? I'm the delivery guy.  My route fluxes and varies from month to month, as folks seek the service or move...or pass on.

This week marked my second delivery to an elderly Korean woman, who spends her days sitting alone in the walk-out basement of a townhouse.  She's frail, semi-mobile, and knows very little English.  When I arrived, she was perched in a chair by an open sliding glass door.

As I approached, she was still and expressionless, her long-view gaze taking me in as another passer by.

I came nearer, and she looked up, still solemn.

"Ahn-yang-hasaeyo," I chirruped in greeting, smiling broadly, using the words for greeting given me by a Korean-American friend.  I stretched out that last "OH" as I'd heard it spoken hundreds of times in the hallways at my old church, and as I hear it spoken into cellphones in Annandale's sprawling Korea Mall.

Her expressionless face lit up with a huge bright smile, and giving her a curt respectful bow while still smiling, I presented her with her meals.

"Thankyouthankyou," she said, beaming.

"Have a great day," I said, having pretty much exhausted my vocubulary.  Well, I suppose I could have counted to three, but I'm not sure it would have worked in context.

"Nehnehnehneh," she said, still smiling, clutching her meal.

That's "yesyesyesyes," I think.

Burning the Bible

Over the last two weeks, in the midst of absorbing about 50 hours of nonstop doctoral coursework in seminary, I popped into the bookstore.  Using a gift card given to me by some of the saints of my former congregation, I bought myself a spanky new bible.  It was a Harper Collins Study Bible, functionally identical to the bible I've been using since 1996, when I first went to seminary.

This is far and away my preferred text for study purposes.  Yeah, the NRSV is a bit relentless on the gender-neutral language thing, to the point of not really accurately reflecting the meaning of the original text on occasion.  But the translation is otherwise sound, and better yet, it has exceptionally good footnotes.  Seriously.  The footnotes alone are worth the price of admission.

In many "study" bibles, the footnotes tell you what you are supposed to believe about the text.  They do the interpreting for you.  Given that the whole point of the Reformation was that we were to be set free to explore the texts on our own, this is a nontrivial thing.  Rule of thumb about scriptural study tools:  You should wield them, not the other way around.   In the Harper Collins, they give you historical context, details about variances in translation, and provide clear linkages to other relevant passages.

This left me in a bit of a conundrum.  My old Bible was dead in the water.  Repeated applications of clear packing tape, made necessary through daily use over a decade and a half, had finally failed.  The inner binding had come apart, to the point at which I could no longer use it in worship or study.   Books would just fall out of it, which isn't great in a class and even worse when you're up leading a service.  It was spent, a ruin of a book.

So it was time to...what?  Just leave it lying around?  No.  I despise clutter, perhaps because I'm so prone to it.  If a thing is broken and past its use, I'm not going to cling to it like a hoarder.  That kind of grasping thing-orientation is one of the more persistent demons of our culture.  

Throw it in the trash?  I couldn't see doing that.  Here was a book that had been by my side through seminary.  It had rested in my hands during literally hundreds of important conversations and sacred moments.    Dumping it in with the coffee grounds just didn't feel right.   

Neither, quite frankly, could I bring myself to recycle it.  Stuffing it into the pile of old newspapers and stacks of Best Buy and K-Mart advertising just didn't feel right either.   

So, in a moment of willful ritual carbon positivity, I decided to burn it.   

I made a little stack of wood in our fireplace, nestled the bible on top of it, open to Isaiah, and lit the pyre.   It took a bit to catch, but when it did, those thousands of pages burned long, hot and bright.   For about forty minutes, I sat by the flames, intermittently turning the pages with a poker, opening the book so that fire could dance in and devour the text.

Words would appear, here and there.  I saw Micah consumed, and a chapter on Hezekiah the king.   My face and chest burned, as the room grew hot with the heat of it.  

As the burning tongues licked text after text to ashen nothing, I remembered the feel of the book in my hand, the many times I'd sat with it preparing a sermon, or trying to open the gracious traditions of our faith to those who knew only enough about it to get themselves into trouble.

I reflected on the importance of those words, as bearers of concepts that have the power to change the direction of a human life.  I reflected on how far the Bible is from being a book of magic, as much as we want it to be.  

It's just ink and paper, text on media, no more infused with sacred power than the air we breathe or the light that plays across a room.   The message it conveys draws truth from a place beyond the pages and the language we print upon them.  Burning it does not destroy anything of what matters about it.  It's good to have a sacred text like that, I think.

And then the flames faded, and all that remained was ash and a faint sense of reverence.

Jesus Fail

As one of the few Americans who still reads a print newspaper, I tend to pore through my Washington Post over a cup or three of coffee.  Much strikes me, but I'm particularly drawn to interesting faith-related niblets. 

Today, the moment of Jesus in the Post came in a conversation between two women.  They were both from Tennessee, members of the community where a man's house was allowed to burn to the ground because he'd forgotten to pony up his seventy-five bucks in fire-department service fees.  Their conversation went thusly:

Neighbors are torn over the incident.  Retired teacher Laura Davis rushed to see whether the Cranicks needed help but wants a world in which "people suffer the consequences" of their actions.  A friend challenged Davis to think about what Jesus would do.  "I don't know that he'd put it out," Davis said.  "I don't know what he'd do."

One could always assume that Ms. Davis isn't Christian, but then again, it is Tennessee.  It's deep Bible Belt, and pretty much ain't nobody not Christian in them parts.  Or nominally Christian, anyway. 

Here, we have evidence that Christian ignorance of the core teachings of Jesus goes rather deeper than flailing on the recent Pew survey.  Not knowing about key figures in the Reformation or the philosophical underpinnings of Catholicism is one thing.  But honeychild, if you can't figure this one out, you've failed as a Christian.

Why?

Because when Jesus was asked where the rubber meets the road when it comes to following him, he pitched out this little story.   Perhaps you've heard of it.  It's about this guy who chooses to care for an Israelite who foolishly walked a road alone and got himself in a mess of hurt.  It's terribly obscure, of course.  But it is, nonetheless, something that speaks to the heart of what Jesus taught.  If you see someone suffering, you help 'em.  It's a fundamental duty of every human being, one that Jesus couldn't possibly have made any clearer.

But it's probably not what she's been taught.  Many churches in Tea Party country, I'm sure they don't really preach about it at all.    Not very "pull yerself up by yer bootstraps."  It's so off message.

Staring Into The Fire

One of the more paradoxical things that one encounters in the reading of mystics like George MacDonald is the juxtaposition of their earthy, grace-filled and open-minded faith with a rather ferocious and intimidating view of the mysterium tremens of the Creator. Though mystics glory and delight in the created order, the One from whom all things spring isn't presented in terms of butterflies and bunnies and huggy bear Jesus, all viewed through a warm fuzzy filter of wuv, sweet wuv.

God, as MacDonald says again and again, is a consuming fire:

He is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God.

In this, MacDonald resonates with Merton and all those who have perceived the nature of God's love, including those few, brief flickers of presence that have formed my own faith. As I meditated on this yesterday, I found myself musing over how the Fire articulated by MacDonald relates to the teaching of the Dark Philosopher Heraclitus.

Heraclitus is the dude who came up with the idea that everything is change. "You can't step in the same river twice?" Heraclitus said that twenty-three hundred years before Disney Pocahontas sang it. He argued that nothing is constant, that everything is dynamic and ever changing, and that it is impossible to make any meaningful statements about being, other than that it changes. He's the father of postmodernity.

In his philosopical poetics, Heraclitus declared that underlying all being was an all consuming, all devouring fire, which he called the logos. Yeah, that logos, the same Greek term that English versions of John's Gospel translate as "Word."

I puzzled over this juxtaposition. There is nothing in mysticism that points to God as the engine of impermanence and meaninglessness. Nothing at all. Quite the opposite. Yet the imagery is so similar...so close...and the influence of Heraclitus on Western Philosophy so huge...that it felt like a non-random connection.

Perhaps it's a question of perspective.

We are creatures of change. As we view and perceive ourselves, we are ever changing. The organic processes of our bodies. The fleeting impermanent moment in which the light of self dwells. We are not the same being from one instant to the next...and yet, paradox of paradoxes, we are, and we cohere.

In our encounter with the One who formed us and in whose love we dwell, we are entering into relationship with that which does not change. As beings who are ever changing, we look at our Maker, and see that glory from the perspective of our own changing. Observing that endless, timeless presence in which lies all potentiality, we see terrible fire and change because we are changing. The Word is not flux and change. We are.

Perhaps, perhaps, we encounter God as we might view the tarmac beneath us as we book along on our motorcycle at 200 klicks per hour. "Wow, the road is moving fast," we might think. But it is not the road that's moving.

Though we perceive God as fire, that may just be...relative.