No Plan for Pains


Dear Eugene,

What is wrong with the way I am living?  Nothing major, most of us would answer--if we are conscious enough to even ask ourselves the question.

You were a pastor.  You talked to people, many people, all time, I presume.  Did this question ever come up?  I suppose it might have with major sinners, those in bad need of big time salvation.  But with ordinary, decent folks like us?  What are you getting at?  What kind of question is that, pastor?

You see, I don't believe the ending of "A Christmas Carol."

I don't believe Scrooge would change just because he's been shown his miserable end.  We know more than any generation before us the magnitude and extent of bad things we are doing to ourselves and to God's good creation, that we should realize beyond a shadow of a doubt we are asking for hellfire; does it make any difference to how we are living now?  Everything we read in the news is but a bad dream.  Scrooge would wake up and say, Thank God I am back to reality!  Let's waste no time and go right back to what I was working on before the little detour of careless nap!

Christmas is coming in no time and we'll let it leave the exact same way as we had before, repeatedly.  Peace on earth and goodwill to man, we sing, but we are not planning for any major life change to make our declaration even half honest.  Little gifts for the poor, huge gifts for ourselves, nothing wrong with that.  I don't stay up to grab the best online deals just to give them away!  Warm socks are always $1.25 a pair at Dollar Daze and that's my answer to the "goodwill-to-man" proposition.  I've shut my eyes just now and imagined Christmas leaving, casually sliding away: see, nothing changed!  I shall be the same me forever and ever.  Even Christmas can't do anything to me.

Standing in the rain, knocking on the window
Knocking on the window on a Christmas Day
There he is again, knocking on the window
Knocking on the window in the same old way

No we haven't got a manger
No we haven't got a stable
We are Christian men and women
Always willing, never able

Religion is supposed to make only non-believers feel bad; for those of us who are in, as long as our occasional porn habit is under control and obliquely acknowledged (ladies always get off easier, for some unfair reason), we must believe Santa Claus is God himself, at least a sacrament of God's endless grace, as a theologian would put it.

If the whole creation is groaning, crying out for renewal and restoration, we won't be able to tell when we are in a mall--the whole point of going to a mall, planning our Christmas getaways is to, well, get away from the pain and trouble of it all!

So I ask myself this question: if I am not a Christian and someone is to invite me to church this Christmas to set me right, would I do it?  The answer is: the last thing in my life.  Why?  Because no one cries in a church either.  No one would plan for such embarrassment, too big a change from forever-me.  The church is full of happy, decent folks.  So is the mall.

Then why complicate things?

Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. KateDecember 8, 2018 at 9:56 AM

    Dear Eugene,

    “Because no one cries in a church either. No one would plan for such embarrassment, too big a change from forever-me. The church is full of happy, decent folks. So is the mall. "

    Places - church, mall… work campus for me yesterday with no plan for pains. It was a work day bittersweetly bracketed within 12 hours by love bisected at polar ends of the spectrum in its varying intensities as if love indeed could be empirically measured.

    Places. People. At the spark of my shift an older colleague, whose charm would cause hyperventilation among many women, spoke in open space about his love in vow now broken beyond salvage on Christmas season. Half of a full sweep ‘round the clock later, another sort of love in its extreme was unveiled to me by a younger woman whom I barely knew. She called me towards the end of my shift. In flesh she needed to see & thank me after her 6-hour driving from home on I-5 South with her baby. I thought I misheard. She would need another 5 hours to commute in return. Why would a woman, a stranger until just 6 weeks ago when I first met her at work, do this for me? What have I possibly done in this place for this person to deserve her gratitude?

    Price for love. It comes with plan for pains - repeatedly.

    But I have not been prepared to give what I did not receive. I thought I was consciously decent in the magnitude & extent of bad things deleted from my little detour of careless napping, my occasional porn habit under control & obliquely acknowledged to embalm my eye-shut imagination of Christmas getaways at Dollar Daze. No church or mall could shame me or make me puke - until my friend told me about you, Pastor Pete, at a place in flesh & time unplanned. The truth repeated is I have taken too much: places, people at the price of pains - in poverty, privilege & pandemonium, in puny or pricey packets invisible, my past & present of morbid penitence, repeatedly.

    This past Summer I breathed in your words of Christmas living penned a decade ago in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: “It is only by taking our place seriously, studying its nature, familiarizing ourselves with its conditions, learning the texture and feel of this place where we work and play, eat and sleep, that we begin to acquire firsthand experience in the realities of freedom and necessity and learn that they are both gifts of God."

    "Standing in the rain, knocking on the window… always willing, never able.”

    Among pains people & places this Christmas, let the rain, embarrassment & questions overpower me. I need to stand in the rain, willing & able.

    Yours, Kate

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