IVP - Strangely Dim - October 2005 Archives

Cafe of the World

I’m about to go on vacation, and my flight is scheduled to land in Florida at about the same moment that Hurricane Wilma is scheduled to land in Florida. I find myself tempted to exploit this coincidence as a metaphor , but hurricane metaphors seem particularly inappropriate this year. The whole country is still standing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, scratching our heads, trying to make sense of it.

I’ve always loved New Orleans—for all its weirdness, it wears its soul on its sleeve while other cities hide behind masks. One of my favorite places is Café du Monde, a large outdoor café lined by chess tables. Every time I’ve gone to that city I’ve gone to that place. New Orleans without Café du Monde will not be New Orleans for me, but then again, why should I have a say in defining a city I only rarely visit? At my most sympathetic I remain a tourist; the residents of New Orleans can’t afford to indulge my sentimentalities as they come back to themselves.

There’s widespread resolve to rebuild New Orleans, and I find myself imagining what life in that city might be like on the far end of that recovery. I picture an old man lingering around the café on a Sunday afternoon . . .

***

Wanna know something funny? Back in the seventeenth century they called coffee houses “penny universities.” You paid a little money and you got to argue for hours about whatever you want.

Here at the Café du Monde, nobody wants to argue, they just want to play chess over café au lait and beignets. Play the wrong person and you get schooled, though. I’ve seen some folks play two, three games at a time, and they wipe the floor with the tourists.

You can beat a tourist at chess in four moves—four moves! Maybe people just don’t learn chess right up north, but I like to think that some people come to New Orleans to get a little schooling.

Me and Charlie were regulars. Had our own table right here. We’d spend hours on Sunday working the board, talking over this and that. I beat him most times, but he made me work for it.

We met in the service. I taught him chess ‘cause I needed a rival. He grew up out west where chess never got played much, but he took a liking to it. We’d pass time by playing chess, and he’d tell me about his girl back home, and I’d tell him about New Orleans. The more he heard, the more he liked it, so when we got discharged, I hooked him up with a job in the city.

New Orleans is a beautiful town—you hear about wild nights and gators and voodoo, but that’s all just cream and sugar. New Orleans is hot music and spicy food, heart and soul, coffee and chess. Nothing like it anywhere else in the world.

Charlie took up the clarinet for kicks and played with a combo Thursday nights at a little bar down the road from Tulane. Me and Sharon would meet Rachel there every once in a while and just listen to him. After Rachel died, though, Charlie quit playing. His boys would come home over Christmas and beg him to play some Dixieland for the grandkids, but he wouldn’t do it; once you stop playing, you lose your chops.

He never quit playing chess, though. There’s no game like chess: at first it seems you’ve got an infinite number of moves you can make from one turn to the next—you can do anything. But the further you get into the game, the more you realize there’s a method to it. So you try to think five or six moves down the road, and you try to think of all the tricks ole Charlie might pull on you. With a little luck, you pull a few tricks of your own and Charlie buys the next round of café au lait.

You never quite master chess; you just enjoy it. You’re there hovering over the table, watching it unfold like the whole universe is coming into being and then coming to its end. And it just makes sense as you watch it, even if you’re bewildered by it. No matter how hard the game gets, you know each piece has its spot and every ending, even when you lose, is a happy one.

Once I got “retired,” me and Charlie added a Wednesday game. Sharon didn’t seem to mind, and Charlie was kind enough to buy the beignets. Then, of course, the hurricane hit. Wasn’t the first, probably won’t be the last, but Katrina did a number on us in 05. Beat us in one move, like a bunch of tourists! Me and Sharon were able to salvage the house, but once Charlie’s castle came down he just gave up. We all left town, but Charlie never came back.

He’s up in Chicago with his oldest now. We talk every once in a while, and once a month I send him a can of coffee and chickory—best coffee in the world. One cup keeps your mind sharp; helps you plan your next move. And with all the changes that hit you when you least expect it, you need all the help you can get.

Me, I’m here for life. This is my home—no place like it in the world. Life’s gotten me into check once or twice before, but I just keep on playing. I come down here Sundays and sit here at me and Charlie’s table, sipping my café au lait, waiting for a rival. Four moves or four hundred—doesn’t matter; I’m just looking for a happy ending.

***

I'm busily preparing to give four talks at a high school retreat in Alaska next month. I'm really looking forward to it, although I think November in Alaska qualifies as "off-season." My theme is "We Could Be Heroes," which has been a recurring theme for me for the past two years because of the book. But I think it's a good theme for kids--who wouldn't want to be a hero? Who knows what a hero really is?

Attention All Spammers

I found out today what type of subject heading works on me:

Expel Disgusting Fats rlPR

I must have deleted fifty e-mails when I got to this one, and in some kind of Ouija board moment my mouse moved from the "Delete" tab to the "Open" tab. Here's what I proceeded to read:

Revolutionary "Hoodia" which works effectively burning fats without hunger, chemicals intake or heavy exercise. Suppress your appetite and enjoying your very nice V-Shape body in just a week. You won't regret.

I'm trying to decide what letter my body resembles currently. For some reason I'm torn between "U," "W" and "B." If we could all figure that question out, we could line up together and send messages to space.

That seems like a good plan, but most of us will have to do without "Hoodia"; otherwise the message we send to space will be "VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV." I'm pretty sure that's offensive to Klingons.

Chez Lounge

The other night I was driving home and saw a neighbor doing something that I absolutely hate doing, and yet I was jealous of him. He was sitting comfortably on a chair on his sidewalk spraying his lawn. He had achieved serenity, shalom, nirvana, whatever you want to call it. Even his labor was leisure.

Let me clarify: I don't hate sitting comfortably, I hate spraying my lawn. It smacks of waste and futility--waste because I'm doing what God meant for rain to do, futility because grass withers in my presence. Right now I'm watering twice a day everyday because our wildflower garden, which supplanted our above-ground pool, has been supplanted by what we hope will one day soon be grass. It's a faint hope, though, since I killed the pool and wrecked the wildflower garden.

As a result, most of my thoughts while watering are occupied not with hope but with grumblings of how I might otherwise spend my time. I could be writing or serving the poor, although more likely I'd be quoting the Lemonheads: "What if something's on TV and it's never on again?" On the surface of things, to be condemned to sit in a chair watering my lawn for the rest of eternity would be, for me, like an eternity of wailing and grinding teeth. I looked at that guy in his khaki shorts and his long black socks and his fishing cap and Hawaiian shirt, and I thought, That dude is lazy. But then I thought, That dude is lucky.

I'm reminded of Frederick Buechner, whose definition of sloth is hanging on the wall of my office, just high enough that I don't have to see it every day:

Sloth is not to be confused with laziness. A lazy man, a man who sits around and watches the grass grow, may be a man of peace. His sun-drenched, bumblebee dreaming may be the prelude to action or itself an act well worth the acting. A slothful man, on the other hand, may be a very busy man. He is a man who goes through the motions, who flies on automatic pilot. Like a man with a bad head cold, he has mostly lost his sense of taste and smell. He knows something's wrong with him, but not wrong enough to do anything about. Other people come and go, but through glazed eyes he hardly notices them. He is letting things run their course. He is getting through his life.

So if that guy's lazy, then I'm a ten-toed sloth.

Drawn Out Conversation

A few weeks ago I sat down with Andy Rau of ThinkChristian.net, and we had a delightful conversation about comic books, with a big fat digital recording device capturing the whole thing. He's posted that recording as ThinkChristian's first podcast, which is also, come to think of it, my first podcast. Check it out, and if you're so inclined and have an unusually high number of fingers, feel free to count the "umms" and "uhhs."

Loud Time

By David A. Zimmerman

I hear all kinds of noise about the "quiet time." It's something of a boundary marker—we prove our Christian faith by how regularly we steal away for private prayer and Bible study; the longer our "quiet time" is, the more spiritual we are. I hear stories about people like Mother Teresa being "too busy not to spend at least four hours a day in prayer." I see a lot of people spell it with capital letters—"Quiet Time," like "Holy Communion"—just to give it some extra gravitas.

Advocates of the "quiet time" appeal to the times when Jesus went off by himself to a quiet place to pray and think. Jesus made major decisions in moments such as these, it's true. But what's most notable to me about Jesus' quiet times is how little ink they get in the Bible. Much more attention in the Gospels goes to Jesus' "loud time."

Now, loud time doesn't share the mystique of a quiet time. Where would you more likely expect to find God anyway—in a cave or at a circus? But we have to ask ourselves what classification most of life falls under—quiet or loud—and the answer is quite simply loud. We are active, communal people, and solitude cannot by itself fulfill our needs.

Of course, I have nothing against the quiet time. Some of my most meaningful moments have been alone with God. But then, I have to say that, don't I? A more mind-blowing statement would be that some of my most meaningful moments have been with others and God. God, after all, is not Snuffleupagus—some imaginary friend who goes into hiding when other people come into the room. In fact, Jesus tells us that "where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them." God wants to be found by us—as many of us as are willing.

God speaks to us through others, and he speaks to others through us. A greater awareness of God's presence and guidance comes through a devotional engagement in conversation, listening for God's voice in the voices we're met with. But it's not only the sound of voices that characterizes loud time. As much as Jesus' major decisions were made in quiet, God's major interventions in history were noisy. Witness the parties that commenced after the Jews crossed the Red Sea, the annual feast of Purim and the mayhem surrounding Pentecost. There are many, many more such occasions of celebration, and each occurrence is thick with spiritual meaning and loud as they come.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that gentle Jesus is meek and mild while God the Father is raucous and unruly. Jesus could be as noisy as the next guy: he raised a ruckus in the temple area and shouted down the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. Much of Jesus' ministry was conducted out loud, following in the great tradition of prophets from Amos to Zephaniah.

To be frank, quiet time without loud time would be meaningless. What kind of life would it be if nobody said nothing all the time? Of course loud time without quiet time would be likewise untenable: I would lose my mind if I lived, moved and had my being in an arcade or a casino. But whether we are quiet and alone or loud and in the thick of it, we have this promise: we are always accompanied by the one who will never leave or forsake us. And that is cause for all kinds of noise.

Dirty Thoughts

Yesterday I bought dirt. Again. The only redeeming value of buying dirt is that it gives me the opportunity to revisit one of my favorite SD posts of all time: Dirt Cheap. Hope you like it.

If you don't like it, try this link to a very clever revisioning of the movie The Shining. Proof that perspective does count for something.