The beginning of the last year of my 30s has not been without its complexity and heaviness. Still, even in the midst of life, death, and existential constipation, Jesus offers lightness, truth, and pink sunrises to those who know that life is a long pilgrimage.
Stand-up comedians are the last of the circuit riding preachers. They travel from town to town speaking in front of huge crowds, telling hard truths that would never be acceptable if someone else said it. (See: Jim Gaffigan on McDonald’s or Dave Chappelle on almost anything.) Like the original circuit riding preachers, these comedians will sometimes get canceled because their sermons bite too much. And somewhere in the corner of a coffee shop, Jerry Seinfeld whispers to the ghost of Norm Macdonald, “What’s the deal with universities?!?!”
Despite the sermons, despite the cancelations, they keep getting invited to the largest stages our culture has to offer.
This is the case with Nate Bargatze. He’s got a special on Amazon Prime. And he recently hosted Saturday Night Live. He began his SNL opening monologue with a brief introduction: “I’m from Tennessee. I’m also from the Nineteen Hundreds.” A ripple of laughter. Then: “I just think you’ve gotta say it. The world is so future now. And I feel in the way of it.”
I don’t know if I’ve resonated with anything as strongly in the last half-year as that sentence. (It brought to mind William F. Buckley’s definition of conservatism as a force standing astride history yelling, “Stop!”) He then goes on to talk about his age—that he’s 44, that his daughter is 11, and that she’ll be his age in 2057. “I don’t even believe that’s a real year,” he says. “My movies didn’t go that high in fake years. How am I going to talk to someone from 2057? I have more in common with a Pilgrim.”
This is funny for lots of obvious reasons, including his deadpan delivery. But it hits home at very un-funny levels, too. There’s a subtle sobriety to it, a seriousness slipping in underneath the deadpan. To whit: Lindsey and I turned 39 in October. Paraphrasing Bob Dylan, I’m not old but I’m getting there. After our September trip to the Colorado mountains, I jotted these lines in my journal.
Life is a tree
and the leaves are the years
and nothing gold…
well, you know.
I’ve been meditating on James chapter 4. What is my life? It is a mist. Is it anything else? So much feels uncertain these days. And increasingly I feel like I’m just trying to keep the leaves on the trees as long as possible. Which is impossible.
My grandma, my dad’s mom, is 92. She was very near death on my birthday (after a month of significant health issues). Grandma is better now, somehow; recovering and still making her pained pilgrimage through this world. That in itself is a miracle. And yet about a week ago I got word that her best friend from her hometown of Roswell, New Mexico, died. They knew each other for decades. They used to walk together in those dry, desert mornings. And now she’s gone. I imagine that my grandma—born in the 1930s and who has outlived all her siblings—feels an ancient loneliness in this world, like some wandering figure, the last of a generation of pilgrims, still trying to walk the path in years that, to her younger self, probably wouldn’t have registered as real if she had stopped to think about them.
A BULLET-POINT PRAYER: THANK YOU FOR…
- The first frost of the year and seeing a fox—both on the morning of my birthday
- James’s first flag football season
- Rain and Lily making it into the Christmas dance production at their dance studio
- The Jesus Freak dance partiy in our living room
- Journaling on the hammock under the ash trees with a half-moon peeking over the fence
- Visiting grandma in the hospital with our kids—and that she called them by their names and recalled entire verses from her favorite hymns
DESIGN AND DEVOUR
That lingering uncertainty leaves me with an unshakable and immutable sense that I do not belong in this world. That, I, too, have more in common with Puritan separatists (said the Anglican) than people born in the last decade.
I cannot shake the sense that so much of modernity is contriving against my flourishing and well-being, and that I am partly at fault. I own a smartphone. I fall down YouTube rabbit holes more than I’d like to admit. I am on what used to be called Twitter. (That there’s nostalgia for Twitter says a great deal about how quickly the passage of time registers on us in this age.) And these things do something to me. The habits they cultivate, the voices they promote, the ways in which they inform the way I think of the world—well, they shape me in ways that (most of the time) I’d rather not be shaped. They demand so much of my time and energy and attention. They sap me of focus and desire and will. I am beholden to them; I crave them. This is the paradox of late, Western modernity: we design what seeks to devour us. We inject the dopamine drip-line, the supposed benefits undeniably alluring and irresistibly desirable. And I hate it. And I hate how they make me feel about myself.
I don’t need help in feeling lousy about myself. I waste so much of the time I have to do something—like waking up early to write and watch the sunrise—and then grasp at the last fleeting moments to hurriedly and regretfully try to enjoy what I’ve already missed.
INTERLUDE NO. 1: “SPIDER BITES”
It’s like this world was bitten by its own kinda venom
And it’s gone too deep to suck the poison out
I don’t know if it’s true, but it feels like it is now
HEAVY COMPLEXITY
I’m tired. I feel the deep drowsiness of acedia starting to have its way with me. I’ve failed to give much sustained energy and attention to writing that I don’t want to write. My writing—and a good chunk of my vocational clarity—feels rudderless and impossible. I want to get organized and make a plan but I’d rather sleep in or do just about anything else besides the things that would move my heart and body forward in obedience and faithfulness.
On many days I feel lost, un-grooved, without flow and consistency in the things I want to be consistent with. There are too many things demanding my energy. Most of these things are related to challenges in parenting and family life. Some of them I may write about in more depth later. But these issues demand significant amounts of my non-working time and energy. They inevitably encroach upon the time I set aside for reflection, rest, and writing.
What I’m saying is that life is not simple. It is heavy in its complexity. Real wars and culture wars and ailing grandparents and heartache and questions about what I’m supposed to do with my hands and parenting. Parenting, especially, is heavy in its complexity. I came across this tweet and nodded listlessly in agreement:
These are all good things. Necessary things. I am or try to be all of these things. But I feel so fragile. I’m inconsistent with most of them. And all I can do is cry, “Lord, help me. Have mercy on me and all the out-sized expectations I have of myself.”
A BULLET-POINT PRAYER: HELP ME WITH…
- Writing and my vocation and habits and all the things I say I want to do but never do
- Staying up tomorrow morning when the alarm goes off
- … and the morning after that
IN THE WAY OF MYSELF
A couple weeks ago a friend texted me a quote from Eugene Peterson’s book Run with the Horses. I have not read the book. I have not read much Peterson but whenever I encounter his thoughts and writings, I am usually better for it. (That includes The Message, his paraphrased translation of the Bible. Don’t @ me.) His books have the best titles (e.g., A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, Run with Horses, Eat This Book). Anyway, here’s the quote:
Honestly written and courageously presented words reveal reality and expose our selfish attempts to violate beauty, manipulate, goodness and dominate people, all while defying God. . . . Honest writing shows us how badly we are living and how good life is.
I have not had the energy or the courage to write honestly for most of the last two months. (I think there is a connection between courage and energy, or how courage expands to fill one’s capacity. Might have to noodle on that more.) When I don’t write, I feel existentially constipated. Bleh. That’s a gross image. But I think it is true. And lately I have been all out of laxatives. All out of spare courage to tell about the things of life.
Maybe it’s weird for me to write so much about my doubts and questions about writing in a forum that’s ostensibly devoted to honest and courageous writing about my experiences and observations at the confluence of adoption, poetry, and pop culture. Which most of the time means I’m writing about my family. About my life. About my emotions. It’s vulnerable and taxing, at times, but I think I am called to this. And ignoring a calling for weeks on end is not a healthy way to go about living.
Yet when the living takes so much out of me, I don’t know what to do. I feel in the way of myself. I, too, am from the Nineteen Hundreds and feel ill-equipped to live in the world as it is.
INTERLUDE NO. 2: “AUTUMN”
There’s too much traffic in my head, babe
I wish that I was on a freeway, just flying along
But all my feelings, they kinda seemed so out to get me
I always felt like it’s a strange thing just being alive
LIVING IN THE TRUTH
So I suppose that all of this reinforces the objective fact that I am a pilgrim, per Nate’s sermon. Pilgrim, stranger, sojourner. Walking. Pilgrim-ing. This, then, means that my calling is not dependent on me. And God’s purposes are not thwarted when I am spent of energy and feel defeated by the unrelenting nature of life and time. This is comforting. Immensely. Even though I do not always live as if it were true.
But it is true. It was true in the Nineteen Hundreds and it will be true in 2057, the terror of such a date notwithstanding.
I often think that if I can conquer my morning routine, if I can wake up early and consistently, then I have a fighting shot. For in the morning so many gifts are waiting to be enjoyed. So much vision waiting to be imparted for the pilgrim way: Jesus and his Word, pen and ink and paper, the pink November sunrises that offer one last reprieve before the darkness of winter.
When I think of mornings I’m thinking of the line from Herbert: “Rise, heart, thy Lord is risen.” I also think of the way Willa Cather captured the essence and spiritual richness of mornings near the end of her masterpiece Death Comes For the Archbishop. I finished the book and read these passages when my grandma was in the hospital and her recovery was still very much in question. And reading them gave me hope and clarity as death and time seemed so near and certain.
In New Mexico [the bishop] always awoke a young man . . . with the fragrance of the hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one’s body feel light and one’s heart cry, “Today, today,” like a child’s . . .
. . . Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the blot, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!
Consistency and faithfulness will not come easy. And life will not slow down. But he who promised is faithful. I can greet mornings with hope, even if I fail to stay up with the alarm clock.
POSTLUDE: “CHRIST IS MINE FOREVERMORE”
Mine are days here as a stranger
Pilgrim on a narrow way
One with Christ I will encounter
Harm and hatred for His nameBut mine is armour for this battle
Strong enough to last the war
And He has said He will deliver
Safely to the golden shore
