junkmail for blankets

rough draft, 04/29, 8:25-8:45 PM

on thursday evenings in my nonfiction form/theory class, we're usually given a writing exercise based on the readings for that week. my professor, natalie kusz, gives us specific direction and about 20 minutes to write. i go outside, find an uncomfortable chair, light a cigarette, and scribble like mad. when we re-adjourn, we're asked to read (without apology). i love this stuff; this is the reason i came to the program. and i figured since most of what i post on here is product, i should occasionally include process, and if any of these have potential, i'll probably revise them this summer and post them side by side. so tonight, we were told (1) to write about a "place" with which we have particular insight or knowledge and (2) to unpack that, the basic idea being that we can write with skill in describing a place, person, or object, but that skill doesn't translate into literature until we push that skill into meaning. something like that. so . . .

::

Always, a cigarette butt—bloated, blooming—trembles in the water. I don’t find this to be the case in the airports, say, or at ballparks, but always, always in church bathrooms. In the basements of these churches, usually. The tile is checkered, hiding cracks, faults, general brokenness, and it serves as contrast to the sepia-stained walls, rust streaks, peeling mirrors—a man could be canonized into terror here, to apocalyptic imaginings. The church bathroom is no place for small talk. It’s about duty, about setting your eyes on the task that lies before you.

I’m optimistic about the reality of salvation, the possibility of present tense renewal, the already despite the not yet. I have room in my soteriology for material healing, but I hesitate when I enter these bathrooms, wonder if maybe some things are beyond redemption.

The Apostles’ Creed says Jesus descended into Hell as part of his suffering, death, and resurrection, so surely the bowels of a church building are included, may potentially be born again. But it turns on potential. Jesus’ atonement was no universalism—He does his thing and all is made well. No, on the cosmic stage, to some He will say enter with gladness, to some he will say I never knew you.

One floor above the basement bathroom, the church members sing, pray, listen, eat. We are a collection of broken souls, cracked, faulted. We hide this in black and white, in rules, in legality and duty and assume that Jesus will be pleased with our attention to order. We find no use in small talk. We would rather not use the downstairs bathroom, face ourselves in the peeling mirror, the rust and stains blurring into our reflection—Jesus might walk in.

He might stand at the urinal next to me and talk about the weather, ask about my garden or how my wife is doing. I might get stage fright—what would He think about my being in a place like this? A place like this isn’t me—I am beyond this kind of thing. I would have to fix my eyes straight ahead and deny Him, or tell Him that it wasn’t I who put that cigarette butt in the urinal. He might pull it out, breathe on it, dry enough to light it up again.

02/04

I don’t blame you—

I shouldn’t
have asked for so much
that the only way to answer
was to be gone
when I woke up to go to school
where Robby Reid with the cold sores
and Playboys saved dirt clods
to throw at dragonflies. who would
follow me home
on his Firestone skateboard
and force our Oatmeal Cream Pies
through the faultlines in his lips
through his twisted teeth
down his tall throat
as he said it’s time
to get under the sheets for special inside baseball—

but where were you?

behold

please go visit my friend john hendrix, who illustrated for ghetto monk long long ago. he's beautiful.

49 down, 1 to go?

i've just finished filling out my application to process fish in alaska this summer. not because i like working 128 hours a week, or even gutting fish, but because i am drawn to maniacally deflating summer employment. after managing a fireworks tent in horn lake, mississippi, a few years ago (more on this in a future post), and following that by driving an ice cream truck, i thought i had paid my dues. but that was just the beginning, soon to be followed by installing toilets and taking inventory of abandoned diesel lots in memphis. i began to think i should write a book about summer jobs, but i felt that i were one job short. enter this summer. and as a bonus, i could cross alaska off my list, leaving only north dakota, where, one day, i hope to land a summer job herding dust.

insert the flat metal tip

as the airplane was taxiing to take-off, the intercom clicked on: "Hi, I'm Bobby, one of your flight attendants for today's entertainment. My Anchorage-based team includes Cindy, Sherry, and your pilot, Captain Ron."

Bobby, Cindy, Sherry, and Ron? Did I fly back into the 70's?

bobby's voice was so endearing, i couldn't help but obey her orders to take the aircraft safety information brochure in the seat pocket seriously. as i looked it over, this is what i heard her saying:

"If we are in the process of plunging toward the earth, while your dad tries to shield your baby sister from the impact, remain calm and sit back in your seat with a smug smile . . . "

" . . . if the plane manages to land safely and the inflatable slide unfolds, make sure to get a running jump and catch some air--it's more fun that way . . ."

" . . . meanwhile, though you'll be tempted to look back and compare others' air-catching to your own, DO NOT look back. run hard. run out of the figurative frame. and if you're wearing brown pants, please resist the urge to grope your fellow passengers--this is not the time . . . "

" . . . and if you get out on the other side of the plane and have to slide down the wing, we realize you'll be disappointed to have missed the slide, but please resist the urge to run away. stay and offer encouragement to those who may be afraid of sliding down the wing, something like 'we know you can do it. we'll catch you, we promise' . . . "

" . . . thank you, and have a nice flight."

sexy, tar-based analogies

been out of town, will be back soon. until then, chew on this beautiful analogy that i just oversaw in the library computer lab:

"I just met a guy who's hotter than georgia asphalt."

sick.

catapult

a website i write for occasionally asked for an article on writing as they prepare to "advertise" at the calvin festival of faith and writing. very cool, and they graciously gave me the "featured article," which was lovely of them. please go visit them. they're good people (regardless of their publishing of my stuff).

catapult magazine

my clothes smell like butts

i read an essay by walter wangerin, jr., in which he recalls going to the bathroom in the basement of a church. in the urinal, quivering above the rubber strainer mat thing, was a cigarette butt, bloated and foul. it was an essay about selfishness, about service, about convicting me. it's easy to think of the many small things i do that can ruin a day for a person. so i'm trying to go beyond that to think of the small things i could do to make a day for a person. cigarette butts, for instance.

i was in the laundromat today listening to a homeless guy talk about his son in california working on his 5th ph.d. while growing pot to prescribe for people, a job which "dubya" has made barely profitable. whatever. the most interesting, and disturbing, part of the monologue was the smoke quivering around his fingers and over our heads. i'm all for smoking in public, but laundromats? i considered asking him to quit, but for what? so my clothes wouldn't smell a little like smoke? this is the same guy i see walk past my coffeeshop almost daily and check the butt cans for cigarettes that weren't smoked all the way down and went out before burning down on their own. i've seen him at the ashtray outside the grocery store, too.

so i've begun smoking my cigarettes only 2/3 of the way down, then making sure to put them out and prop them on the rim of the ashtray, to save the sliver of indignity from having to wipe ashes off the filter, for the laundromat smoker. or whoever else needs a small thing to make his day.

let's get trivial, pt. 2

so i lose my trivia host virginity in about 30 minutes. i've been waiting for this day for a long time, and i'm glad i saved myself for now. it feels right.

so without looking, do you know, for example:

:: the name of Principal Skinner's mother on The Simpsons?
:: what the world's 3rd most widely spoken language is?
:: what color an airplane's blackbox recorder is?
:: the name of the mascot from the 1996 Olympic Games?
:: what holiday originated in Spokane?
:: within 10, how many grooves are on the edge of a quarter?
:: the only US state with a diamond mine?

get your buzzers ready . . . .

last goodbye, bird

This is our last goodbye
I hate to feel the love between us die
But it's over
Just hear this and then I'll go :
you gave me more to live for,
more than you'll ever know.

Well, the bells out in the church tower chime
Burning clues into this heart of mine
Thinking so hard on her soft eyes and the memory
Of her sighs that, "it's over... it's over..."

jeff buckley, last goodbye

some poetry is not meant to be out loud, bird. we have stopped reading, but i know you will hear me. it is for now, but not forever, like you knew: i will see you Then.


so sleep tight, bird::
rest your hands
and feel wings of flight.

so sleep tight, bird::
rest your eyes,
God will be your light.

so sleep tight, bird::
rest your mind,
the moon tastes so bright.

so sleep tight, bird::
rest your heart,
this is Jesus' night.

stall inhalants

i'm still not sure what happened yesterday.

sarah vowell was on-campus last night as part of our reading festival. if you've heard her read, you realize that it matters not what she's reading; she has the kind of voice that makes everything funny. if you haven't heard her read, go here and fast forward to 22:00 in the clip and listen to her talk about band camp.

i went for a quick bathroom stop before she read, as i have a bladder the size of a kidney bean, and i wanted to make sure i was able to concentrate on that voice. the bathroom was crowded, so i had to use a stall (which made me think of the pub i was in earlier that afternoon, which has a bathroom with two urinals and a stall and no walls around the stall, and i thought how awkward it would be to walk in on someone not using the urinals). on the back side of the door of the stall, someone had drawn a blunt-looking tubeish object in sharpie. above it, the words "smoke atomic nugz."

i'm sure sarah was hysterical--everyone around me was laughing--but i couldn't pay attention because i kept thinking about atomic nugz. trying to figure out what an atomic nug is, and whether the "z" on the end were the true plural form of a word like "nug." i wanted to ask sarah, during the q&a, if she knew, but she only wanted to make jokes about the 2000 presidential election and come up with witty answers to people's questions that didn't necessarily answer them (not that i blame her, as most of them were pretty bad questions. no one even asked her what she thought about polygamy, or anything normal like that). so i still don't know.

on the drive home, i pulled out green day's dookie and listened to it for the first time in, oh, 9 years. it was nice. it made me forget about the nugz. for a while.

for some reason, i stopped at the video store near my house and decided that it would be a good idea to rent the running man and watch it for the first time in, oh, 15 years. this was not a good idea.

i woke at 1:00 today, and i'm now at the coffee shop drinking an americano and eating some beef jerky. i have three papers to write, it's raining, my nose is running, the soup next door smells good, and all i can think about is atomic nugz. everything has been a bit off since i saw that graffiti. please, someone, fill me in before atomic nugz destroy me.

sometimes hissy fits

i feel bad for ever calling it background "noise." it's a sound. just as important a sound as the high-lows of the e-strings, as the warble and croon of the voices.

the sun ducked out for a vacation yesterday, taking with it 30 degrees and rolled-down windows. i wasn't happy about this, especially since my cold-weather clothes are ten-times worn and fuming. my car wasn't particularly excited, either--cold weather eats her purr.

over-hot coffee and over-hard scone in hands (steering wheel in knees), i drove the 17 miles to school this morning. set the scone on the dashboard and grabbed the cd case, picked a disc without looking, and listened. it was a 4-song demo by my handsome friend adam weaver. demo, as in verbalized mental notes and apologies before the songs; cold-house sounds in the background. and the hiss: unmixed, unprofessional, unfinished.

and yet the hiss was perfect. the hiss was what i needed. the hiss softened the cold and unfixed the dreary of driving. the hiss made me glad. why? who knows. maybe it's nostalgia for early 90's mix tapes. the hiss makes them human; the hiss implies dubbing and fingers on stiff tape deck buttons and stiff backs from bending over floor-based stereo equipment and meaningless labels like "metal c." the hiss is what sacrifice sounds like.

to my beautiful friends who have loved and continue to love me with your hiss, know that it fits, that it sounds just right, that it doesn't need finishing, that i am grateful on days like this. for you, adam and jonathan and duff and trent, especially, thank you.

another conversation i'm waiting to hear (in honor of vernon, florida)

person 1: "boy, that's a lot of water out there."

person 2: "yeah, and that's just the top of it."

a conversation i'm waiting to hear

person 1: "So tell me, why do you love her?"
person 2: "Because I chose to."

for mom

I have decided to slip into my parents’ lives by degrees. There are songs, films, cultural references that have attached themselves to the why-are-you-here part of my brain for upwards of 25 years now. Maybe these allusions are/were significant cultural artifacts for my folks. Probably not. But they’ve stayed with me for a reason; they say more about me than them. Slowly, I’ve begun giving them some attention, maybe as a way of giving my parents attention, as I’ve been bad about this.

Maybe it’s because I’m 29 now and a lot of the things I remember were part of my parents’ lives when they were the same age. By my age they had three kids, one of whom was a nine-year-old me. And the thing I remember the most from that time, about my mom, at least, is her listening to the St. Elmo’s Fire soundtrack. I vaguely remember her watching the movie. Whatever the case, St. Elmo’s Fire has stuck with me.

So I rented it last night. When the theme music came on, I felt the blur of nine again:

Growing up, you don't see the writing on the wall
Passing by, moving straight ahead, you knew it all
But maybe sometime if you feel the pain
You'll find you're all alone, everything has changed

Play the game, you know you can't quit until it's won
Soldier on, only you can do what must be done
You know in some way you're a lot like me
You're just a prisoner and you're tryin' to break free

I hadn’t heard that song in years, yet I knew the words, or at least knew them in the way I knew them when I was a kid. I had the “writing on the wall” part down, and the rest I could intonate correctly, at least.

I won’t summarize the film here, but will say that seeing it caused me to think about my parents, especially my mom, in a new way. She started being a mom when she was 17. I think of the things I’ve done since I was 17, and I wonder how many of those things my mom would have liked to have done. She would read this and say that she wouldn’t have traded me for the world, and I believe her, but I also know that there’s more to her than her kids. And, being one of her kids, I also realize that there’s more to her than I’ve known or will ever know.

This is all to say, mom and dad, thank you. For loving me, for taking care of me in a way that required taking away so many of your own goals, your own needs, your own hopes. For setting yourself aside in a way that I’ve never known. For allowing everything to change. For fighting the urges to break free. For holding everything together for so long, and for my sake. Growing up, I didn’t see the writing on the wall, but I’m learning to read, and the words rival the saints’, the martyrs’, the poets’. Next time we're together, I want to hear you read them out loud, to know what you dreamed of at 16, at 20, at 24, at 29.

And though I shudder at the thought, in the spirit of learning to read those childhood artifacts, I’ll be watching Yentl soon. Oi.

let's get trivial

in a couple weeks, i'm hosting a trivia night at the local coffeeshop. 8 rounds of 3 questions each. music between rounds with name-that-band trivia. i'll walk around with a janet-jackson-control-era headset and ask questions. which is where you come in. i'd love your help coming up with good questions. all subjects and time periods are worthy. so hit me with your best trivia. some of you, i know, are prodigiously trivial.

closed captioning

my friend trent's first solo cd is on its way. it will be sexy. check it.

:: ::

chesterfield King

nothing new for most of you, but i've not posted this on the main section, and i got me a massive chunk of papers to comment on, and posting this will make me feel productive, so if you haven't read it (and don't look at sidebars) and are interested in the church's response to her smokers, here you go:

Did Jesus Smoke?

I remember three things about the church I attended from 1976-1979. The first involves scary pastor-portraits in the hallway. The second, roller skating to impress a girl named Tina. And the third, the one I can’t get out of my head, involves lepers. Every Sunday after church, shuffling behind my family through the parking lot, I saw Them. Always the same ones, huddled in a close circle, their circumference dictated by temperature: the colder the air, the tighter the circle. Always, a pillar of steam rising from their center, regardless of temperature. No one talked to them, and no one went close enough to touch them, taking long-cuts to their station wagons to avoid them. Parents gathered their children in close, slowly folding them into their coats, shutting their eyes to the show. My parents never caught me looking, and, though I waited, terrified and delighted, nothing bad happened to me. I became infatuated with the mystery, and I began looking forward to Sunday. I daydreamed about Them, and, in terms of firing my curiosity, they ranked right up there with reproduction and how could there be so many ramps in Hazzard County.

One morning in Sunday school, Mr. Goode gave us a lesson on lepers; he apologized for not having any feltboard characters for us to see. So he sketched a leper colony on the blackboard, and when he moved out of the way, my breath caught, and my lungs began to burn. We had a leper colony outside our church, and my delight in Them was snuffed out. I was afraid.

A few years later, after I read Where Did I Come From? and discovered the workings of television car chases, I also realized that those weren’t really lepers outside my church–they were smokers. Here was my first lesson in mystery, fear, stigma. I’ve learned since that the church labels its vices well, and, rather than stepping into sordid circles, we tend to colonize our offenders and rope them off with Bible verses and voices of concern.

The church was/is/will be full of smokers. Some of them are regarded as kings (C.S. Lewis, Charles Spurgeon, R.C. Sproul), some of them are considered “normal” (the regular number outside my church in St. Louis), and some of them are filtered out, quietly vanishing from the church like wisps of smoke. They have these things in common: they love Jesus, they like to smoke, and they leave themselves open to criticism. All Christians, truly, are open to criticism; when we become children of God, we also become his representatives—his hands, eyes, ears, mouth. What we do with those hands and mouths must faithfully represent their creator. We are responsible for representing him faithfully, which means we must be open to criticism and be willing to criticize unfaithfulness. We are called to community for this reason. Our criticism must be warm, gentle, winsome, thoughtful; otherwise, unfaithfulness adds to unfaithfulness. Though some criticize smokers warmly and gently, few of us do so winsomely, fewer still thoughtfully.

We see a Christian hold a three-inch cylinder packed with dead leaves, set it on fire and suck on it, and we pronounce “sin.” The Christian blows smoke from his mouth, and we back up and say, a bit louder, “Sin.” We watch this happen again and again, twenty times per pack, and, without thinking, we cry “SIN,” effectively cutting smokers off from meaningful dialogue, from biblical criticism.

I’ve spent the last few years huddling with Christians who smoke, sitting in circles of Christians’ smoke. Many of these people have left the church, refugees from rebuke and subtle disregard. Some of them are addicts, some of them are just smokish, but all of them have been treated poorly. And they still smoke, tightening their circles, cut off from the corporate worship of the living, breathing God.

The church is called to be God’s hands and mouth: warm, thoughtful, compassionate. We are called to evaluate our behavior with discernment (prudence rather than prudishness) rather than mere reaction. When we find our knees jerking in reaction, we must question ourselves—the Kingdom does not operate on the basis of jerks.

During my praying, thinking, questioning, interacting, I have yet to find a way to support from Scripture that smoking itself is sinful. Addiction, yes. Under-age smoking, yes. Causing a brother to stumble, yes. Smoking itself, no. This is no black-and-white matter, where we’re either Pro-Lung or Pro-Choice. To our lessons in mystery, fear, stigma, let us add discernment.

Last Sunday morning, as the offering plate drew near, my pew-mate confessed that he had spent the few dollars he had set aside for the offering—he ran out of cigarettes Saturday night. The gas station is on the way to church. Cigarettes add up; they can be costly financially and physically. Cigarette smoke offends most people. Secondhand smoke hurts babies. So, is it a sin to spend money on the things we like? To expose our bodies to physical harm? To smell bad? Put another way: smoking is the leading cause of cancer, and the Fall is the leading cause of sin. So, are cigarettes a result of the fall? Is smoking a cigarette a sin?

To at least approach an answer, we must examine our hermeneutics: our understanding of Scripture and our application of compassion.

Last month, my roommate asked me to promptly return some videos for him. I told him I would. I did, but not last month. My roommate now has a nasty late fee. Have I sinned? Fundamentally, sin is a transgression of the law of God, a prohibition committed or a command omitted. I searched Scripture, thinking surely that the apostles didn’t have time to rent movies. I was right—no specific command to return movies on time, and no specific prohibition against keeping movies too long. While I was at it, I searched and found a similar absence of references to smoking cigarettes. So, are the smoker and movie procrastinator free from sin? (Reader: my intent is not to insult, but carefully to punctuate our agreement.) By this hermeneutic, they have not sinned. But this is a strictly literalistic hermeneutic, and were we to adhere to such, I would be forced to forego my hatred for neo-Nazi hate crimes, as the Bible doesn’t address them (and, thus, condemn them) specifically. If smoking isn’t denounced on these grounds, then which?

I told my roommate I’d return the videos on time. I had the opportunity, and I didn’t. I did not fulfill my commitment, and I acted unfaithfully, both principles that Scripture clearly enunciates. Deprived of specifics, we look for principles. Rightly so. Lacking specifics, then, what principle do most people raise against smoking? This is the part, frankly, where my ashy skin tightens and I strap on my anti-mantra helmet, hoping to avoid the near-inevitable Scripture-grenade: “The body is the temple of the Lord.” Plucked from I Corinthians 6, this passage tends to be the champion of those who label smoking sinful. And the principle infusing the passage? That exposing the body to physical harm is a sin. Here is the point of contention.

And here is the point. First, this passage certainly refers to believers and their bodies, but Paul isn’t addressing physical harm to the body. I Cor. 6:15-20 describes the believer’s body as a figurative temple, the union-house of Christ (6:15) and the vessel of the Holy Spirit (6:19). In this passage, Paul speaks exclusively of sexual immorality. Because of the believer’s union with Christ and, thus, his union with other believers, sexual sin, the only sin against the body (6:18), and thus, against this union, affects, mysteriously and differently than other sins, everyone who is united to Christ: the Church. This, the unique peril of sexual immorality, is Paul’s contention with Corinth. Certainly, from this passage, we can infer that our bodies are important, possibly moreso than we realize, and we must treat them well, but we cannot, from this passage, conclude that exposing the body to physical (non-sexual) harm is a sin.

Second, supposing that the other 1,188 chapters of Scripture might have something to say, let us grant, for the sake of discernment, the proposed principle that exposing the body to physical harm is a sin. I returned my roommate’s movies at 5:15 on a Monday afternoon. St. Louis had just received a carton of snow, and, on the way to the car, I slipped on the ice and bumped my bum. I scraped my knuckles on the door handle trying to de-ice the lock. I almost lost control on Delmar Avenue. On the way home, to soothe my nerves, I picked up some MSG-laden General Tso’s Chicken. Once home, I washed the General down with Coca-Cola. Two states away, a dear friend of mine, who labels smoking a sin on the “physical harm” principle, was having his fourth cup of coffee for the day. Two countries away, a missionary was dealing with dysentery. My friend in Los Angeles was breathing smog, and a cab-driving Christian in New York was doing his everyday cab driving in New York. Across town, a Christian was delivering a baby. Even the recluse hypochondriac, who decided to avoid the perils of the world, was experiencing muscular degeneration from sitting on the couch all day. We live in a fallen world, and the only guarantee we have, save the second coming, is that we will die in a fallen world, certainly a physical harm. Truly, some exposure to physical harm is necessary, some of it voluntary, some of it part of calling; in all of these examples, though, physical harm, either actual or potential, is unavoidable, exposing our bodies to harm is inevitable, and it measures itself in degrees. And who of us has the right to legislate degrees? We cannot say, absolutey, generally, or consistently, that exposing the body to physical harm is a sin.

We do not have the right, from scripture, to see a Christian smoking and, on the basis of the cigarette alone, call his behavior sinful: sin resides in the heart, not in the tobacco. We do have the right to require prudence, and we are obliged to evaluate each other’s behavior with discernment.

Smoking can be expensive, offensive, and addictive, and it is mostly not a good idea. But if we make judgments beyond that, we must ask ourselves why. What is the origin of our judgments? Is it scripture, society, tradition, a mixture of them all?

Of all the things I hoped I would never hear a Christian say, “Kirk Cameron was soooo hot in Left Behind, The Movie” tops the list. A close second: “Don’t smoke, don’t chew, don’t go with girls who do.” For all of us who had grandmothers who turned snuff into a beautiful art form, let us be grateful that this dictum didn’t sway our grandfathers. For my part, I’m not necessarily looking for a girl with a dip-can ring worn into the back pocket of her Wranglers, but I can’t, on biblical grounds, rule her out. On cultural grounds, it’s worth discussion, but on biblical grounds, no. When we seek to evaluate our behaviors, we must not allow culture to inform our decisions more than Scripture. In India, a smoker is considered a non-Christian; in Holland, an elder; in Mississippi, a backslider; in California, a Republican. How much of our views on smoking is dictated by culture rather than Scripture?

As we must be critical and discerning of culture (and our own views regarding it), we must be the same with smoking. But we cannot equate critique with prohibition. Much of what we critique (music, film, politics) we also enjoy, and are at liberty to enjoy. We may not be able to parcel out the particulars, to draw the line between degrees, but that is the difficulty, the responsibility, and the privilege of being a discerning people. You may not think it prudent to be a Democrat, or to watch Magnolia repeatedly, but can you call it sinful?

I doubt if Jesus smoked or watched Magnolia, but I know that he engaged in much that was considered culturally sinful. Were he to stand outside one of our churches today, I have no doubt he would gladly engage with the smokers, the modern-day leper colonies. In his own day, lepers were considered culturally unclean, sinful. The Pharisees refused to touch lepers, lest that touch make them unclean in the process. Jesus was born to touch lepers. And in his touching, Jesus’ point was that sin resided not in the leprosy itself, but in the heart. Those who stigmatized lepers, especially the Pharisees, were criticizing the form rather than the substance; they were condeming people based on culture rather than Scripture. We cannot make strict parallels between leprosy and smoking, but we become Pharisees when we condemn a smoker on the basis of cultural grounds rather than biblical standards. We must be careful, lest we strain the gnat and swallow the Camel Light.

Jesus, while touching lepers with compassion, extended little to Pharisees. We, too, like the Pharisees, are in danger of becoming selective with our compassion if we allow culture to direct our judgments. Ask yourself: were you on a panel to select a youth worker, the applicants being equally qualified in all other areas, would you be more inclined to hire the smoker or the coffee addict? The shop-aholic? More willing to invite over for dinner the smoker or the Christian struggling with alcoholism? From my experience, the smoker, whether addict or occasional inhaler, receives less patience, compassion, and sympathy than others who “struggle” with a traditional vice. My fear is that the church has become selective with her compassion, and we select based on potential burden. The drug addict, the church member who struggles with pornography, and the alcoholic don’t make our clothes stink, don’t pollute our air, and our differing treatments reveal that we are often concerned for ourselves more than others: “As long as your smoke, your ‘sin,’ doesn’t get into my fibers, welcome. We touch you in the name of Jesus.”

Recently, on my morning walk to the coffee shop, I noticed a button on the ground. I leaned over, picked it up, and wiped off a thin layer of dirt. Underneath, the slogan: Fight Homophobia. I decided to keep the button, proud of my compassion for “sinners,” and as I reached to put the button in my satchel, the pin on the back pricked me, and the thought flashed through my mind: “Those damn activists planted this thing to give me AIDS.” I became aware of two things at that moment: One, I should be careful with buttons. Two, until it became a burden to me, I was glad to practice compassion, but once pricked, I realized the true depth of my concern. If patience, compassion, and understanding aren’t coupled with sympathy, the willingness to enter another’s world, to get dirty, to smell bad, to hurt personally, then we might as well hang a letter on the necks of sinners and rope them off.

My friend Winston (yes, go ahead, laugh) is a deacon in his church, a gracious husband, and a playful father of three. Every once in a while, after a long week of church meetings and work and dirty diapers, he puts the last whining child to bed, pours two glasses of wine, sits on the deck, and enjoys a cigarette with his wife, the wine and the nicotine making his heart glad.

A friend of mine spends a lot of time sitting inside a coffeeshop, writing. After staring at a sentence for 45 minutes, he likes to take a break and sit outside and have a smoke. The coffeeshop is near the local university, and almost every time he sits outside and smokes, a student approaches him and asks to “bum a smoke.” He obliges, offers a light, and they talk, smoker to smoker, image of God to image of God. And the only reason for the discussion, the spark that ignites it, is that in his smoking, he has created a safehaven, instant hospitality, unabashed freedom from judgment that smokers crave. He is gifted and called to write and to befriend and respect unbelievers; smoking isn’t a necessary part of his calling, but it is a valuable one, and, according to Scripture, if he can pack smoking into his calling responsibly (without addiction, e.g.), then he is at liberty to do so.

Is the typical cigarette-smoking Christian addicted? Yes. Must the Christian smoker, addicted or not, be sensitive with his smoke? Yes. Must he be regarded or treated differently than others with behaviors that we don’t like? According to Scripture, no. Does this mean our churches are required to build smoking rooms inside our churches so the smokers don’t have to shiver outside while everyone else is shaking warm hands? Probably not, though it’s worth considering. What is required of the church is that she think through her criticism before stigmatizing people. That she be willing to offer the benefit of the doubt first, and to seek understanding accordingly, before she form conclusions. We have lost many gifted and beautiful saints because of our lack of discernment and biblical thinking on this issue. Regardless of whether fewer or more people are smoking now than last year, or ten years hence compared to now, the church will always have her smokers. Will we continue to make them feel that their “temples of the Lord” aren’t as valuable or healthy as the rest, or will we treat them respectfully, winsomely, warmly, thoughtfully? I hope for the latter. I can’t quit praying for the latter—I hope to become addicted.

:: originally published in Critique #1, 2003 ::

discover this

the folks at discover credit cards have decided to take the sting out of receiving credit-card-based notices (late payment! limit exceeded! for example) by embedding their urgency in nature. hallmark-inspired credit card notices.i may sign up for a card just to receive one, and hope they're something along the lines of this:

i came here this morning to worship you

rummaging through old documents, sending the dung to the recycling bin, i came across this letter i typed out to send to anne lamott (to her church instead of her publisher, thinking to outwit the other, weaker letter senders). while reading, i laughed, i cried, i thought, "geez, i'm a freak."

Dear Anne,

I have a crush on you. I thought you should know, and I’ve put it off for far too long. I intended to write in October, when the leaves were in riot and my heart was changing. But I decided to wait until rationality peeped its head into my life. So here I am, fucked up as ever, but glad to be writing anyway.

I’m sorry for sending this to the church, but I envisioned a two-story fan-mail eating machine, something that Greg and Peter might have invented in the backyard whereupon Alice would have eventually stumbled upon it and have to confront the Mr. and Mrs. and maybe even Sam the butcher, in the back of your publisher’s office, and I didn’t want my letter to be an accomplice to any sort of perverted fun on the job.

I am Jeremy. I’m 26 years old, so I imagine my crush will have to remain just that. By God’s grace, I ended up at a place called L’Abri last summer, in Greatham, England. It was the first time in my life that I was given the freedom to fall apart, to be completely honest with another human, and in the process, honest with God, who dragged me, all bleary-eyed and childish, into the wrestling ring. He’s winning. But I like the limp – it means that I’m alive, that He has blessed me, that my gait may finally direct me off the comfortable path so neatly set out for me by family and church. God is finally big to me, mysterious to me, comfortable enough with Himself to handle all my big hairy doubts and questionings. And in the process of such cosmic rumblings, Traveling Mercies was a refreshing, terrible delight to me. Rather than let my words insult my heart’s gratitude, I only ask that you trust me for your words’ influence and refreshment. So thank you. I pant for such honesty in the church.

I teach English part-time, and my students love the excerpts I read them from your books. We have to hide this little secret of ours, though, because if their parents found out, they would discuss my sins at the next Home-Schooling Parents’ Conference; quite possibly it would slip onto the docket right between “George Bush: Savior of Suburbia” and “Rapture: The Day Dancing Dies.” So on Anne Lamott Reading Day, I bring candy and make them swear not to tell their parents about it – it’s a way to memorialize it, make it sacramental. Like the way I plan to teach my children that Sunday is special. We’ll light sparklers on Sunday nights, and only on Sunday. I like it, at least.

I was out in Moraga in October visiting the first girl I ever loved. We had Anne Lamott day, and the first thing we did was find St. Andrews. And you were there. We sat in the back, and Abigail was embarrassed for me to stand and introduce us, so we clapped enthusiastically for the newcomers, hoping to look like regulars that everybody had just forgotten to meet for so long. Her same embarrassment spilled over into the after-church fellowship, so I didn’t get a chance to come and step on your foot or somehow insult your family during the process of trying to innocently introduce myself to you. I said goodbye to Abigail that week. So here I am, back in St. Louis, four months later, writing you this love note. Besides, what would I have said? “Hi, there, my name is Jeremy, and I came here this morning to worship, well, you, I guess.” Not that you don’t seem like a pretty decent person, but Yahweh, the Covenant God, the Ancient of Days, may have resented the implication.

So thank you for writing. It helps me worship.

I realize that you are a mother, a writer, and, I trust, someone who doesn’t really have time to deal with stalkerish letters like this, but I’m glad just for the writing of it. Maybe one day I’ll work up the gumption to ask your advice on this embarrassing thing of mine; I was going to call up Rikki Lake and maybe have her studio audience help me out, but that doesn’t seem to be the right thing for now. I leave seminary in three semesters, and I have no idea what I’m going to do when I grow out of this place. Maybe you can tell me what to do with my life. And if that doesn’t work out, maybe you can spare some advice on how to pursue writing. I’m no writer, but I like to do it, and I want to see more honesty in the church.

So it helps just to have written this all out, even if you do end up getting a papercut opening it and decide to tie a rope and a bell around it and send it into the Holy of Holies to be consumed.

Thank you, Anne – I can taste my crush on you. I think it’s your words. They taste like sunshine on the walls of my mouth.

(to everyone's astonishment, she didn't write back)

like i stole your bike

some are fabricated, some aren’t really confessions proper, and some are just heart-breaking. www.notproud.com ::

At a club/bar, I bought a girl a beer even though she was already piss-drunk. I wanted to see if she'd puke. She did

My diary looks like a giant suicide note.

I hope you found what I wanted you to find.

i haven't bought shampoo for months. i simply use whatever's in there. i'm not sure if it's my roomate's or one of my suitemates'. one of them is a generic head-and-shoulders thing. i don't have dandruff but i use it anyway because it's shampoo and conditioner all in one. saves time.i do buy my own soap, though.

Everything thinks i am fucking Martha Stewart or Betty Crocker and perfect perfect wife, perfect mom. I am a total lunatic. They have no freaking idea!

I was watching a video on the twin tower's tragedy in school and as we were seeing numerous people jump out of the window I started signing 'it's raining men...' in my head and it made me laugh. Luckily it didn't show because I was repressing my laugh as hard as I could. When I couldn't contain it anymore I ran out of the classroom to the farthest toilets of the school where no one could hear me and laughed for a good 5 minutes. I laughed so much that tears had welled on my eyes and when I got back in class, the video was finished and the teacher thought I had been crying. She hugged me and told me that she understood me and stuff like that. I gained a lot of attention from the students because they thought I was more affected. I never told anyone that I haven't cried but actually laughed my guts out. Even though I know this is a terrible thing, everytime I see that footage, I can't help but smile.

I got so angry at someone for taking two bites out of my english muffin that I spit onto their plate full of food.

this sounds really bad. but i want to end a life (not of a good person, someone who deserves it) and feel their life slowly leave their body and feel them slowly grow cold.

I confess that I actually get angry when the confessions aren't updated every few seconds. I get an odd kick out of seeing new ones (especially if they're mine). I realise you guys that run this site have a life outside of it, but I admit to wishing that you didn't. Is it wrong to love this site so much?

I broke a kids nose for throwing a snowball at my dog.

Every time my boss asks me to go get her lunch I pee in her drink.

I just told my boyfriend I love him and he said it back. too bad I am still talking to my old boyfriend and telling him the same

i want an expensive car to hit me when i am walking on the side of the road so that i can sue them and get a shit load of money.

I stole your girl like I stole your bike.....

I stole a hacky-sac from Wal-Mart

last night I ate a whole pizza

I finished a bag of 200 blowpops in one day.

today i went into the freezer at work and ate all of my co-workers girlscout thinmints. god damn they were good.

My fat cow of a girlfriend doesn't deserve me. I'm way too good for her.

I love myself

an unscripted prayer for mercy

God forbid a teen heart-throb catch me reading the Bible.

Mozart and the Whale, an indie film, has taken over Spokane, the place where I live. Well, maybe not taken over: it's in its last two weeks of filming. I found out today when I turned right on Monroe Street and saw a crane in my parking spot outside my coffeeshop. And someone with a headset and clipboard sitting at my seat in the coffeeshop, like these movie people owned the place, or were the boss of me (my favorite childhood rebuttal).

Girls that I’ve never seen so much as play with fire were outside lighting up, justifying their presence outside the coffeeshop, which happened to be in direct eye-shot of the filming, in direct view, they hoped, of Josh Hartnett. I don’t know what this guy looks like, but I remember seeing his name on a fold-out-poster edition of a teen magazine.

Even some of the macho, drip-coffee regulars were talking about Josh, scrambling to the available computers to get some vital stats off the internet (“25 years old, loves his mom’s pizza, 6’1”, likes eskimo kisses and eskimo cream pies, ha!” I imagined).

Producers and important movie-looking people were rigging around outside, and, admittedly, I considered going outside myself, taking my usual, EVERY DAY seat and lighting my own cigarette, showing them what REAL COFFEESHOP SMOKERS look like, sure that a talent scout would see me and, in epiphany, realize that I would make a great addition to the scene being filmed, script be damned.

But then I realized that the coolest thing to do would be to act unaffected by the glitz and glamour and boyish good looks of Josh. He was right there, 50 feet away, in the actors’ food tent, sitting on an Igloo cooler with his low-cut jeans and slightly undercut jawline. I considered walking up to him and asking him to fix me a ham sandwich. Or walk by and, like, just not even look at him. Whatever it would take to let him know that I wasn’t interested, that my life was glamorous enough before he came along, that I didn’t need his teen-beat approval.

I decided to stay inside the coffeeshop and grade some papers. After the filming wrapped and the equipment trucks and cranes folded down for the night, I walked out to my car to drive home. I looked in my back seat and saw my straw cowboy hat and thought how cool that could have made me look. Then I saw my Bible. And realized it had been there for a while. For a long time, really. I haven’t sat down and read that thing for months and months. The truth is, I don’t like reading the Bible much; haven’t since college, and even then, I’m not sure if I liked reading it as much as I wanted people to think I liked reading it.

I’ve been a youth pastor, an urban missionary, a homiletics award winner, an evangelist. I have staked, on the Bible, my life, at least. My soul, at most. And I don’t even like reading the thing.

Did academic study of the Bible kill my enjoyment of it? I don’t think so; I may never have liked doing it. Theologically, I know why it’s important. I know that it’s a means of grace, possibly the means of grace. That’s why. But the how gets me—I don’t understand how it’s a means of grace, how just sitting there and reading it works. Memorization, dwelling, meditation, up-in-my-heart storing—I know those things. Which is why I feel like shit when I preach, when I write, when I talk to people. No, take that back—I don’t really feel like shit, because I have the Bible’s words at my disposal, because I have the main ideas down, because people do like it when I talk about it. And I don’t have to wake up in the morning and have quiet time to get that. It’s much cooler that way.

At my coffeeshop in St. Louis, I would get mad when other seminary students would come in and bang their Bibles down on the tabletop—right there in plain view for everyone to see! NOT COOL. If the non-Christians there, the ones I was spending my time with trying to convince of my coolness (in the name of evangelism), were to see that Bible, it would all be over.

I’ve seen enough kitschy Christian Bible covers and the Bible In One Minute study Bibles and heard enough guilt-driven sermons and Bible study plans to drive me to Los Angeles. And I think to myself, "God’s gotta be up there gagging, thinking how disgusting all that is, how completely, god-awfully uncool those things are.” I want him to know that I’m not affected by all that, that I’m no starry-eyed Bible fan digging up information and acting all excited about it.

Here’s what it comes down to. I know I need my Bible. But I don’t know exactly why. And deep in my heart’s script, I catch myself thinking that I was doing alright before he came along, showing him with my non-Bible-reading that I don’t need his approval. I’ll just sit outside and play with fire. Sure, God says I need the Bible, but I don’t see it—what, do you think you own this place, that you’re the Boss of me? God forbid. Please. God forbid me.