Two-thirds of three

 Two-thirds of three 

Corner Coffee

Because something was happening somewhere in the world – a broken Brazilian butterfly wing, an Orthodox priest having trouble micturating in Minsk, a leak in the Michelin man – something had tweaked the schedule at work, and I had yesterday morning off, if I’d make it up, of course, somewhere along the line at a time uneasily unspecified. So I was having coffee* with Axel Sundstrøm, who wanted to talk more about centering prayer.** He’s disturbed about any attempt to lasso and corral God, to put him inside; he’s also concerned about what might be going on in peoples’ centers, their insides, especially given what is going on in his. I share the latter concern – sadly, I can’t imagine a soul disinterested in its own best interests. But every word about God is another strand of hemp in the rope and every book of theology is an attempt to fence him in.

     Still, I listened. I didn’t say to Axel what I just wrote to you, because it didn’t occur to me until later. Then, his phone went off; then he did. Then I moved from our table to the armchair in the corner of the window that looks onto Bye Street, deciding “I’ll just sit for a minute.” After which I needed to go home to dust. Roz had said the night before, “If you’re going to have the morning off, you might at least dust.” She didn’t care what else I did was the implication, but dusting was what pundits like to call – coughing the stern gravel they carry in their guts into their throats – “non-negotiable.”

Two young women were sitting at the table next to the big chair, sisters surely – maybe even twins: the same dark eyes, inky eyebrows, hard nose; the same high forehead and delicate chin. But the neatly-cropped hair of the one as opposed to the wild mop of the other threw everything off. They might be twins, but it was hard to tell; surely, though, they were sisters: you could have told that with eyes closed by the way they talked to one another – the complaining sister and the explaining sister.

Not these sisters.

     I didn’t follow the conversation as well as I would have liked. It was murmuring for one thing; words were lost as they chuckled at each other like doves. The angry dove and the shrugging-here-we-go-again dove. Whole sentences were lost as they went back and forth from English to Spanish according to no pattern I could discern. The plaining dove would say something in English, and her patient sister would answer in Spanish; then they’d be Spanishing for an exchange or two. Annoya raised her voice in English. She was mad at a mutual acquaintance, a victim of . . . I didn’t hear what. “She keeps saying, you know, ‘I’m different, so you have to listen to me, so shut up.’” Two paragraphs later, the listening sister responded to something in Spanish – about eating I’m pretty sure: “Mom says that’s not good for you.” “Yeah, well, Mom’s not good for me.”

     At settling that she got up and went toward the rest room. And I got up, bussed my coffee cup and started up the hill toward home, thinking suddenly and a bit sadly half-way there, I should have stayed a little longer. I needed another nugget from the sarcastic sister. I wanted to write about her, but I hated violating the “rule of three.”

     “You really shouldn’t do things by two-thirds,” I thought.

11.16.16

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* See here **and here.

Off-center

 Off-center 

I was sitting at my desk. The phone rang. It woke me up.

     I let it ring twice more. Humming. I was humming, because that’s supposed to clear your voice. I looked at the clock; it wasn’t even ten yet – the morning wasn’t half done. “Ted Riich,” I said.

     “Ted?” I waited. “Axel.” I waited. “I just quit,” he said. I waited some more. “Aren’t you going to ask what?”

     “What?” I said. “What did you quit?”

     “Prayer.” I waited. “Centering prayer.”

     “Hmmm.”

     “There’s something wrong with it – it isn’t just me.”

     “Of course not.” I tried to put an edge in my voice, but who knows? It still felt half-asleep, raspy, not at all clear.

The young Luther practicing de-centering prayer.

     “You know I’ve been going, right?” I did, to a “course” at the Episcopal Church a block from his own.* He’d been trying to get me to go with him.

     “Yes,” I said.

     “Not the course,” he went on. “I haven’t quit the course.” He paused. “Yet!” I waited. “I may do that, too. You don’t want to come to the next session with me, do you?”

     “I don’t think so.”

     “No. You wouldn’t. Not the course anyway, I didn’t quit the course; but I did quit this morning. The prayer.”

     “I gathered.”

Then, he told me what he’d been thinking. He was being pushed through the silence, this way and that and swimming back toward his center with his magic word. The word was vanitas, the first word in Ecclesiastes in the Vulgate. (Trust Axel to pick a magic word that way.) Then, he couldn’t get back – to the center - because it occurred to him:

     “It occurred to me – very strongly – that the practice throws away, like so much trash, the doctrine of irresistible grace.”**

     “Hmmm,” I said again.

     “You see, right? The practice suggests – very strongly – it holds that we normally resist God’s grace, so we have to make a place for it – light a candle, straighten our back, clear our mind. Or, it suggests – no, again, it holds – that we normally wouldn’t recognize God’s grace if it hit us over the head, we have to make our heads right. In the first place, it short-changes God – if we don’t answer the door when he knocks, he can’t get in? It doesn’t just short-change him, it demeans him. In the second case, it’s a form of Gnosticism.”

     “Explain that again.”

     “What? You don’t get it?”

     “No. Gnosticism. Explain that.”

     “It’s just what I just said. Our heads have to be right. We have to know certain things – especially how to do certain things, and do them the right way – or else God is beyond us.”

     “Isn’t God beyond us?”

     “No. Dammit, no.”

There was someone on the other line. I told Axel I had to answer it – in case it was “the Holy One in our midst,” I said.

     He said, “Very funny.”

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  * More about Axel Sundstrøm, my Lutheran pastor friend, here, all the links fit to print from the time he showed up at a wake and had to be driven home to the review of at least one sermon and mockeries of our various conversations.

** For the even less initiated than I, here is Van Harvey’s definition: “the grace that cannot be resisted by the will of man.” If I do get it, it goes something like this: If God is God and we are we, we can’t put him off. (Or her.) God comes to us when God comes to us. We can zip our Bibles shut, wrap them in swaddling clothes, lay them in a manger, seal the whole package, Bible, swaddling clothes, and manger, in a plastic bag, and throw the whole kit and kaboodle (like centering prayer does irresistible grace) down a well; the Holy Spirit is like Houdini and will show back up wherever and whenever it wishes.

11.11.16