Dirty Shame

Because of God's tender mercy,
the morning light from heaven is about to break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
and to guide us to the path of peace.
- Luke 1.78-79 (NLT)

My dad raised me on the Bible and western movies.  That tends to explain a lot.

~~~
I see Old Doc Luke sitting in the corner of the saloon, slow-nursing a drink, turning a pocket watch over and over in his left hand. Piano music is circus-like but soft to the side.  The place is full, people are talking, drinking, carrying on.  A coupla young cowboys are getting loud; unfortunately they're boys and just getting started.  A center-piece table holds the card game for the evening.

The years of practice have passed for the old physician.  He's taken to writing as there are some things he feels compelled to record. He's seen a great deal.

She descends the stairs with unspoken authority.  Everyone knows her word is the last word.  She pauses for a moment beside Doc's table, standing close enough he can feel her presence.  She raises her hands to adjust her hair as she speaks.

Looks bright tonight, doesn't it Doc?  


Looks are deceiving, May.

Yes, plenty of shadows to go 'round in here.  Sometimes I think the merciful thing would be for the earth to open up and choke us all down.


Me too.  But the mercy is tender, May.  Tender.


Tender.  Its a word she hears Doc use often these days, a word rare in this hardscrabble town so it stands out.  She's gonna have to rein in those cowboys a little, get her bluff in early.  But before walking away, she places a hand on Doc's shoulder with a gentle squeeze.  For a split second she sees the dream she has on occasion, the one about a different life, one of tending a home and baking bread in the mornings as dawn spills over the hills and greeting Doc every evening on his return.  She chokes down the vision and steps into the light-filled shadows of a busy night.

Doc sees young Tim Sanders through the window, motioning for him to come outside.  It must be his little sister, Ann; her fever's been high two days now.  Doc pockets the watch and rises to his life's call.  A tender mercy's work is never done.           


  

Lagniappe (lan-yap) - an unexpected benefit, something given gratuitously.

I like this word.  It is normally used in the context of a merchant giving a customer something extra, a little gift, at the time of purchase.  Merchants don't do much of that these days.  Oh they'll offer you 10% off your next purchase of Old Spice or the opportunity to buy the dancing Santa for $5 or something like that...but rarely do you see the pure lagniappe.

But I like this word.  I believe its a Christmas word.

We're putting up the tree at the Dirty Shame today, no doubt stringing some colored lights around the windows, and our traditional wreath will find its way to the front door.  And on the sandwich board which usually describes the soup de jour, I'm writing that word I like, that Christmas word, lagniappe.

I hope you'll put some change in the red buckets which swing to the rhythm of the Salvation Army bells.  If you don't have any in your pocket, I hope you'll run back to the car and search the cushions like some breathless widow sweeping the house for her lost coin.  I hope you'll consider sponsoring a child from Compassion - www.compassion.com or supporting the work among orphans through organizations like Children's HopeChest - www.hopechest.org .  I hope you'll take the time to read/ponder the subversive beauty of the Advent Conspiracy - www.adventconspiracy.org and Christmas Change - www.ChristmasChange.com.

I also hope you'll remember, from time to time, the soup de jour or de month at the Dirty Shame - lagniappe.  And as you move in and out of the lives of flesh and blood, be it family or strangers or friends or enemies or co-workers or bosses or folks beside you in traffic or children, especially children, I hope you'll give a small gift, an unexpected benefit to these darkened days.  What are these small gifts, John?


Drumroll please?  Courtesies.  There you have it friends.  Common courtesies which are not so common anymore, so when you see them or hear them or feel them, you pause to catch your breath or wonder why?  In the words of Father Robert Capon - "We come at each other as casually as we approach watermelons.  We hold each other in careless, calloused hands."  I know courting is usually associated with romantic love, but there is a courting dance we do with one another, courtly gestures that have the ability to raise someone's spirit or brighten their day or encourage them to keep going a little further or remind them of their worth in the eyes of the God who is big but made himself small so as to dwell among us. Have you ever thought about God being courteous toward mankind?

The lagniappe of courtesy.  That phase won't make for a very hip website, but it might make the difference in someone's day or life...  
    

Alright, the 12 Weeks of Christmas Book-And is coming to a close. I realize we only made it to week 6, but after some book publicity travel and Thanksgiving, I'm turning around and wham! it's December and I so want to be intentional about these days leading up to Christmas.  Writing a book about savoring the slow-born-wonder of Christmas and then not practicing what you preach...well, I'd just hate to do that...most days I'm a card-carrying hypocrite; there's no need to dig a deeper hole.

Besides, the Dirty Shame has been feeling like some show almost...book giveaways and promotional verbiage and razamataz. Maybe it hasn't felt that way to you, but it sure has to me.  The Dirty Shame is a place where folks can come and warm themselves by the fire of words and phrases stoked just so.  I want to try and get back to that...I'm sorry if things got off track.  Please don't hear that as some pious claptrap; the world has more than enough of that...more than enough.

~~~

We spent Thanksgiving in St. Louis.  My wife's cousin was married on Saturday afternoon in a gorgeous little Episcopal church in Webster Groves.  Later that evening, we all converged on a banquet hall for a dinner/reception.  The atmosphere was celebratory, people were laughing and carrying on...but then it happened...someone got up to "give thanks" before we ate.  Now I don't know who this person was, probably some friend of the bride's family that is considered religious.  I'm sure her heart was in the right place, but her words were not.  She constantly invoked the great God and used the word community at least twice.  I seriously thought I might start crying.

I pray with my eyes open; it's just how I do things these days.  As I looked around the room whilst the great God was being intoned, it looked like that room in the White Witch's castle in Narnia, the one where everybody is frozen and blue and almost dead.  Not a minute before people were full of mirth, but in two shakes of a "let us pray" the life of the party ran and hid.  Fortunately, after the pray-er said amen, one of my wife's aunts (a rabid Razorback fan) said Go Hogs!  And with that the spell was broken, the winter was past, and the green of spring returned as we ate and drank and were merry and abandoned all thoughts of community.

My lord.  Why do we do that?  I use the collective we because I've been there before many times and on more than one occasion I've been the one asked to "give thanks" and about all I did was chill things for a few seconds.  Now some of you might say but John, there needs to be a distinction between the sacred and the profane, the earthly and the heavenly...a margin between the common and the divine.

"...there are no unsacred places/there are only sacred places/and desecrated places..." - Wendell Berry

Once upon a time, there was a wedding in the town of Cana.  Jesus was there.  The atmosphere was celebratory.  A need arose in the margins of that party.  Jesus stepped in, bridged it with a miracle, and the only pause that occurred was the one where the host said hey, this is even better than before, this is like, well, springtime...like warmth..like home.


Something to ponder.
Amen.
Go Hogs!

      

Halle, halleluja...

The tail-end of Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show involved two television interviews.  I'm thankful for the exposure those shows brought to my book, I really am.  I could tell you a lot about those experiences, about the makeup and the lights and sets.  But I'd rather tell you about Mary.

On Wednesday morning a hotel shuttle took me to the Harvest Show station, picked me up and brought me back to the hotel, and an hour later took me to the airport.  I had the same shuttle driver each time...her name was Mary.  I was the only passenger each time, so, well, Mary and I talked.

She grew up in Mexico.  Marriage, nineteen years ago, brought her to South Bend, Indiana.  She asked early on if I had kids.  I said oh yeah.  I volleyed the question back to the driver's seat.  She said oh my.  You see, Mary has a sixteen year old son who is also a sixteen year old father.  He was the best boy, good grades, but he found a girlfriend and things changed.  I sent him to Mexico for the summer to try and get her out of his system.  I didn't know that before he left, he got into her system. (I laughed)  When he came back home, she told him she was pregnant.  I tell you, that was the hardest thing of my life, I tell you...the very hardest thing...


The deal is I was on my way to talk to this perky tv host about Mary the mother of God, among others, and all of a sudden I was slack-jawed with thoughts about another mother, a lady scripturally silent, who dealt with an unplanned pregnancy.  Now sure, in the fullness of time Christ was born, but let's stay tethered to the good earth uno momento, por favor.  From down here, for one mother's heart, that first Christmas may just have been the very hardest thing.

As Mary the shuttle driver told me her story, the shame was thick.  There were small nervous laughs, but shame is hard to hide...remember Eden?

What of the shame in that first Christmas?  We often talk, and rightly so, of Mary's difficulty...but what of her mother?  A mother who no doubt had hopes and dreams for her little girl?  A madre who probably walked with her daughter hand-in-hand while little Mary would sing the Jewish equivalent of Que Sera, Sera and her mother peered into her innocent eyes and replied with the Jewish equivalent of whatever will be/will be/the future's not ours to see but neither mother nor daughter nor any created thing had the foggiest idea just how pregnant that lyric can become in the hands of a God whose ways are not as ours.

The title of my book is Touching Wonder.  If I hawked that title in those television interviews once, I said it twenty times.  Yes, there was a rousing, thrilling, hope-filled wonder to those days filled with angels jamming the airwaves with Glory to God in the highest.  Yet there was also dark wonder afoot...it still classifies as wonder, but it is not as we would choose, not as we had hoped.  It is the wonder that descends upon the young and old wombs of our lives and plants a seed we did not anticipate.  And it often grows in those early days thickly watered with shame...

Mary the shuttle driver dropped me off at the airport.  Little did she know that moments later I would basically have to undress for the security boys because it was a slow day in the South Bend airport and the uniformed nincompoops saw a guy with a ponytail coming while visions of dueling banjos danced in their heads and...well, that's a story for another day.  But before she drove away, Mary shot me a grin - not a full-blown smile, but a gentle curve of lips, a sliver of hope.  Again, I am beyond grateful for the tv interviews, makeup and all, but I am also thankful to the point of tears for having spent more than a few moments with another mother named Mary, one who has been through the very hardest time, but who made it through, and now occasionally drives to tell about it.

Halle, halleluja...    

Halle, halleluja...

Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show hit the LifeWay store in Texarkana, TX on Sat. afternoon and the First Baptist Church of Nashville, AR on Sunday afternoon.  Yes, I knew the people in both places and yes, they were smaller venues, but I signed/sold around seventy-five books.  Those aren't Palin or Huckabee numbers, but you've got to start somewhere, right?

Speaking of numbers, I attended church Sunday morning with my parents.  This Baptist church prayed over 3000 Operation Christmas Child boxes.  A friend of mine once visited a family in Rwanda.  As he looked around, the walls in the home were bare save for one item held to the wall by some tape.  It was a My Little Pony doll, still in the plastic packaging, never opened.  The story goes that the little girl received that in an Operation Christmas Child box and it was the thing she cherished most.  Stories like that birthed from shoeboxes packed by the hands and fingers of unsung saints make book signing/selling/promoting feel like the kinda stuff Jesus turned the tables on outside the temple that day.

Monday held a drive to Dallas, TX for a television interview.  But before that came to pass, we stopped at a retirement center to visit my dad's uncle Sam Patterson.  He is known as S.C. - he and my dad's mom, Nora, are the last of their siblings still living.  S.C. drove a bus in downtown Dallas for thirty years; a treasure vault of stories.  He lost his wife, Vaughn, in September.  She was his best friend.  He now spends his days sitting in a wheelchair listening to country music and being a crank to the nursing staff.  The hair on his head has all gone white while the bruises on his arm were fresh blue; a fall days earlier left him "bunged up."  Patsy Cline had a hit song - The Last Word in Lonesome is Me...as I looked around that cafeteria, that's what I saw...a whole lotta lonesome.  It wasn't lost on me that one day you're young and alive and signing books and the next you're a widower wearing diapers wishing she was still around.

Halle, halleluja...  

    

Halle, halleluja...

Day 2 of the Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show took me to Arkadelphia, AR in general, and the Covenant Bookstore in particular.  I was to sign books from 10-noon.  It's helpful to know that Arkadelphia is the town where my wife and I went to college, and then years later, we moved back there and I assumed the duties of pastor for Second Baptist Church.  So, as you might guess, lotta memories in that town, a smattering of ghosts, and a skeleton or two.

But when the clock struck ten, the people came.  I'm guessing most days in the Covenant Bookstore aren't that busy.  Arkadelphia's a slow moving town, no need to rush much; that's one of the reasons I like it.  But that morning, things were hopping.  Even with the opening of deer season, thus taking out most of the men, and a Razorback football game that afternoon, business was brisk for the Covenant.

I got to see old friends: young couples we knew who now have kids; college students we be-friended who now have spouses and soon will have babies; men who passed offering plates on Sundays while the organist played; ladies who faithfully prayed for me when pastoring grew heavy; and one family who attended our church only a few months before we moved to Colorado - they stood there and cried and said "we miss you."

There was one old lady who happened to be in town that weekend and she made a point to stop by.  I say "old lady" with the utmost respect.  Her name is Jo and she was a member of our church and I was her pastor.  Jo was married to Elmer...he died a few years ago at 90 years young.  As a pastor, you're never really sure who loves you and who doesn't.  That's fine.  Life's like that some days, I guess.  But I never doubted Jo's love for me and my family...never.

Jo came in the bookstore that morning and bee-lined for me.  We hugged and she placed a shaky palm on my cheek and said "boy, you're pretty."  I still don't doubt Jo's love for me.  She then proceeded to speak so that all in the small store could hear:  "You know what I remember most about you, brother John?  You visited me in the hospital, when I had that heart surgery, and before you left, you kissed me on the forehead.  I'll never forget that."

Now you need to know that I didn't make a habit of kissing women in the hospital; it's just not the way I roll.  But I'll gladly confess that I did kiss Jo that day years ago, that day when she was scared and Elmer was scared and I was scared.  It was one of those thin days, when the distance between this life and the next felt close.  The kiss probably wasn't something I thought out carefully; I just did it.  Some of the best pastoral work happens that way - spontaneous, unguarded expressions of love for those in your care.  Jesus said when you visit those in the hospital, you're visiting him.  I'm gonna roll the dice here and say that when I kissed Jo's forehead, I kissed the forehead of Christ.  I believe that.  If you don't, well, I still do.

The Covenant sold out of my books that morning.  I'm grateful.  But those moments were much more than transactions.  They were remembrances, stirred memories of a time that's now gone, but a time that was rich and wide and deep and fun and horrible and smooth and rough and sorrowful and beautiful all in the same breath...days of sheep and the Good Shepherd and a young fool named John who got to waltz into the lives of glorious people for a season and marry their kids and bury their husbands and dedicate their babies and at least on one occasion, kiss the forehead of a scared, little old lady named Jo...

Halle, halleluja...