Morning Prayer

This morning I find myself spiritually blunt - as blunt as the big knife we got on our wedding day – it was once the sharpest knife. Now I avoid it in the drawer. Dulled, once perfectly honed - I am struggling to hear the Spirit. Somewhere between i-phones and emails, television and my car radio, I stopped listening and now it is becoming more difficult. Help me father to hear your voice. Psalms and Epistles they read alike, flat as if all phrases were equal, all sentences the same. My Spirit has ceased ascribing value to words. The Ketchup packet reads like Tolstoy. The info-mercial the same as the Sermon on the Mount. Lord - deliver me from this fog – this waking sleep where all is obscured and meaningless. Lord I confess, my sin has dulled my ears, my eyes and most of all my imagination. Spirit have mercy. Christ have mercy. Father have mercy on me a sinner without imagination. A sinner who forgets that in every hour, in every minute, in the time it takes to scramble an egg or start my car, there is the possibility of the infinite to speak into the finite and move in power. Father forgive me for following other Gods – lust and power, influence and impact, relevance and novelty. Oh Lord, correct me through the prayer you taught us to pray that I might begin to see the world correctly again, myself correctly again, my neighbor correctly again and that in doing so I might see you again. Because my world is too small, petty, fragmented and lonely. Help me get past me so that I might love and be loved, that I might have passion again. Help my days not be consumed with consuming. Help my thoughts dwell somewhere outside of a store, a product, a way of buying myself to betterment. Set my eyes aloft oh God and restore a right spirit within me that I might see you in the desert where all things are at my fingertips and where nothing grasps me. Open my heart to your Kingdom come and your will be done because my Kingdom and will are too feeble. Have mercy.

Why do bad things happen to good pickles?

Last year I quit my job so I could devote myself fully to being the Community Pastor at our church. It was a great decision but like any great decision, there are trade-offs. We've had to make a few lifestyle adjustments as our income has dropped. This has meant many things. The first of these ancillary comforts to go was my YMCA membership. Sometimes a person, moved by faith, has to lay their ripped abdominals at the foot of the cross and give up temporal buffedness for the hope of bigger biceps at the resurrection. I wish I could say that giving up the YMCA membership was difficult but in reality it meant that I had a couple extra hours for watching Man vs. Wild and The Deadliest Catch each week.

And then something far worse happened - my cable TV was dropped. I cried out to the Lord, "Why would a benevolent deity take away my Pawn Stars and Ace of Cakes?" But that wasn't the end of the fiscal responsibility measures. I was informed by my wife, "There will be no more going out to eat unless someone is born, someone dies or someone is willing to keep the thermostat at 55 for the next three weeks." And the slash and burn continued. We had to cut back on gift giving - I actually gave a guy a meatloaf for his birthday a few weeks ago. We stopped buying paper towels, going to first run movies and going on coffee dates. Along with these small "sacrifices," my lovely wife placed a moratorium on the purchase of all non-essential food items. There are a ton of things in everyone's fridge that are non-essentials that they take for granted on an everyday basis. Let me give you an example: hot sauce. For the last six months I have gone without my Louisiana Hot Sauce and it has been a bland existence. Olives, wax peppers, bacon, garlic, to name a few, are non-essential food items. But the one item that impacted me greatest was the pickles - those briny submersibles of cucumbery concupiscence. I love kosher dills like Charleton Heston loved firearms, if you want to take my pickles away, you'll have to pry them out of my cold dead hands. But not wanting to cross my better half, I gave up the green denisons of the salton sea in order to avoid a fate worse than death, an unhappy wife.

Last week, we went to a new grocery store where they sold pickles in a 2 gallon jar for the meager sum of 4 dollars and 19 cents. I looked at the jar with the smiling cartoon stork with the funny hat, then looked back at my wife with a pouty face and she nodded. And for the first time in the new year, pickles were placed into the cart. A half hour later, I was unloading the groceries from the back of my truck. The last to go - the pickles. Now, I'm not sure what 15 year old bagger decided to place a 2 gallon glass jar of pickles in a single plastic grocery bag, but when I picked up the bag, the entire jar of pickles jumped through the bottom and smashed onto the concrete slab behind my house. Glass and Pickles intermingled in an unholy puddle at my feet, the plastic bag still firmly in my right hand with nothing in it. Pickle juice was on my feet and on my pant legs. For about thirty seconds, I just stood there - the smell of salt and capers wafting up from the glassy mess. "Maybe I could wash them off," I reasoned in my madness. "Maybe I could eat just one." But they had all been impacted by the fall. And then a theological truth ran through my head. I couldn't know why this all occurred. Maybe sometimes bad things just happen to good pickles and there isn't any real explanation for it.

Really? My Snowshovel?

Our porch giveth and our porch taketh away. And last week my porch tooketh my snow shovel. Porches and snow shovels seem like peas in a pod. According to my observations they have what Biologists call a symbiotic relationship - like Rhinoceri and that little bird that picks food out of their teeth. They help each other out. But apparently this evening the porch and the snow shovel must have had some irreconcilable differences and in the morning the snow shovel had packed its things, and had left the porch forever. And of course, that very afternoon, it snowed. So I went to the garage and introduced the porch to my hole-digging shovel. She wasn't all that interested.

We live in the city and sometimes not everything that makes its way to the porch stays there. People steal strange stuff from our porch all the time. Last year my friend dropped off a pound of whole coffee beans and in the 2 hours it took for me to get home, someone had stolen it off the front porch. It made me wonder about the street value of a kilo of Ethiopian Yergicheffe and if I had been so naive that I was unaware of the yuppies driving through inner city neighborhoods trying to score some cheap beans. Maybe I could find my stolen coffee in an alley or the back of a full size van with no windows and then rebuy it at a fraction of its value. I imagined a tough looking dude smoking a cigarette opening a large trench coat and showing me a selection of fine coffees sewn into the lining. I then envisioned a group of wayward young men, coming together after a long day of thieving and showing each other their loot and then French pressing a little of the beans to check the purity and quality. Whoever got the coffee, I hope they enjoyed it.

Then there are the flowerpots. For some reason, the flowerpot fairy seems to be unusually active on my street. Apparently 30 pound second-hand gardening notions attract thieves like a black Labrador to a drooly tennis ball. Sometimes we assume mutual exclusivity in ethics and aesthetics but outdoor decor and banditry often allide. I guess it would behoove us to remember that Martha Stewart is the queen of the gardener thieves. Every one of my neighbors has had their flower pots jacked at one time or another. My neighbor Greg is always asking me questions when I do yard work in the spring, "You're not going to put those flowers in that pot for everyone to see are you??" and "Those solar powered path lights are nice. You're not going to put them on the path to your house are you? Somebody stole mine two years ago." It seems like a lot of risk for a small payoff I guess. Most of the flowerpots are worth 10 bucks or less new. But people seem comfortable taking big risks for small payoffs around here. It's almost admirable - like an extreme sport.

But it can be annoying too. I always have to give special instructions to company's when we mail order stuff. One time our kitchen mixer broke and they sent us another one in the mail. I asked them to try and deliver it when I was home. The lady was from Iowa and she told me, in that Mrs. Poole voice, "Oh you worry too much, No one's going to steal your mixer hun'" I didn't take comfort in her guarantee. And no one called me about the delivery.

There are some rules in the hood that everyone follows. And high on this list is the don't let the whole neighborhood know that you've got a brand new 300 dollar mixer on your front porch. A stainless steel Kitchen Aid mixer sat for 8 hours on my front porch and no one touched it. It was one of those fancy mixers with optional attachments that no one ever buys - the kind that people register for when they get married and proudly display on the single square foot of kitchen counter in their studio apartment while they are in graduate school. The packaging had a large full size glossy color image of the mixer on the front and the Fed Ex dude hadn't even hidden it behind the railing. It sat there in plain view, on a sunny weekday for all to see. For some reason, it didn't meet the criteria of the thieves in my neighborhood that day but I'd like to think the porch was looking out for me - this time.

In the absence of my blue, low-quality, Chinese snow shovel, I began to wonder, "Why would someone naturally averse to work, steal a snow shovel at all?" Snow shovels are almost a symbol of hard work in the Upper Midwest. Mystery upon Mystery. I guess it tells us something about people - Sometimes we miss the good stuff and take the junk instead. Time to buy another 8 dollar blue snowshovel.

Smack!

My wife slapped me awake this morning at 6:12am. It was the first time I've ever been slapped awake. She hit me, open handed square across my face. She didn't mean to do it. She was sleep slapping me. She apologized immediately but in a dazed coma, I cried out, "Why? Why? Why did you do it?" And that is how my day began. Slapped awake.

The Source

The late august blackberries grew heavy alongside the small creek making the trail impassible. He picked them into a canvas army rucksack as he waded upstream. Clear, cold curtains cascaded down small granite shelves into dark pools full of "natives." The forest service never stocked this far up. It was simply too inconvenient. These creatures were true natives - brook trout that cooked up pink like salmon. They never grew more than a foot in the small flowage and they tasted different, more wild because they had been eating mayflies and mosquitos all summer. He was climbing a thickly wooded box canyon. The sheer speckled grey walls grew immense as he climbed. A run of iron pipe held aloft by what looked like a minitature railroad track of ancient pine swayed precariously on the cliff above him every time a gust of warm summer wind pressed against the steep faces. Dry-rotted wooden slats hung broken from the track. He thought to himself, "The men that made this pipe are all dead." Water still flowed through the pipe. Thick droplets leaked from the seams of the pipe at regular intervals and landed on his baseball cap brim. Pit, Pat, pat. The pipe was once used for drinking water. Now people filled their radiators and wet their heads with it. The youth wondered if it was from the gold rush era. It was not. Some men from Sacramento had built it in the 1930s.

With the trees hemming in the course of the creek, there wasn't room to cast. In stead he floated a small grey, brown and black fly down into the pools. None was more that 20 feet across and despite the fact that he had just waded through them, the natives didn't hesitate to take the fly. The young man was far from the campsite. It was about three in the afternoon. He didn't load his creel because it was too hot and too far to take them back. He just slipped the natives gently back into their pools. All afternoon he climbed - occassionaly glancing at the pipe to make sure it was still there. He had stopped fishing and had broken down the rod and put the real in the canvas sack alongside the blackberries. The sunlight which passed through the canopy cast long shadows as he followed the watercourse. He would need to turn back soon. He hiked through the bouldery creek another half hour. The pipe was closer now but still stretched far up the side of the mountain. Orange-green light which usually brought a feeling of peace in him, incited a panic. And in this panic, he knew he had hiked too far seeking the source. He had lost himself. And it would be dark soon. He still hadn't found the end of the pipe. His canteen was as empty. He hurriedly stumbled down the cobbled creekbed - the rucksack bouncing on his back with each stride. He ran through the dark - because of the dark. Blackberry vines gashed his bare legs as he clumsily ran. He twisted his right ankle but just kept running on it because to stop would be worse. The wildness of the canyon became more wild as darkness ensued, pursued. At last, he made it to the outpost. He collapased into a patch of dry late summer grass next to the ancient gas pumps and the wooden carved indian. The smell of motor oil announced to his senses that he was safe. A few feet away, he heard a trickle. It was the end of the pipe. Bleeding and exhausted, his panic gave way to thirst. And he took a long drink from the pipe not knowing its source.

For Mike's Dad

I pumped gas into my little pick up truck this morning. I wore a black suit with a white shirt and a navy blue tie. It felt like I was in Pulp fiction or something. People look at you when you're pumping gas in a black suit. They wonder, "Why's that guy pumping gas? He's wearing a black suit...Curious." I guess it's the juxtaposition of the formal and the mundane. Black suits are for special occasions not for Citgo stations

A lot of stuff happens in my black suit. It's the suit I wear to weddings. I take my wife to parties in my black suit. I used to wear it to preach in when I worked in a traditional church. It has seen a lot of cologne and a lot of sweat - handshakes and hugs. I am wearing it as I write to you now. I wore it to Mike's dad's funeral this afternoon. It was cool and breezy so I didn't have to sling my jacket over my shoulder. I re-tied my tie in the bathroom and splashed some water on my face. I heard twenty one gun shots and watched an older woman receive a folded flag.

I guess ordinary life happens in between the black suit moments. And as I am growing older, it seems like there are less of these moments. I remember the day I got married. I didn't wear a tux. I couldn't afford one. I wore my black suit and my friends wore theirs too. I wore a baby blue tie I bought from a guy in downtown Los Angeles. We took a picture on my dilapidated front porch. Our young faces were smooth and firm and our eyes hadn't yet been dulled by time. The porch was scabbed with peeling paint chips. An old man with white hair and a thick mustache took our picture. He must have seen the juxtaposition. He was wearing a black suit.