The Most Important Meal - An Occasional Feature

"I try to read a poem every morning with my coffee. It’s the most important meal of the day." - Novelist Sue Monk Kidd

I recently happened on the comment above and thought it a good idea. I have, accordingly, placed several volumes of verse on my breakfast table and resolved to treat myself to a poem with my first mug of java. Today I took up Kelly Belmonte's chapbook, Three Ways of Searching and began with the untitled piece below:

Cross-legged too long
on damp wooden dock,
until your ship slips
over the horizon's curve.
I shiver, too tired to rail.

Three Ways consists of short poems, mostly haikus but some, like this one, push the form just slightly while retaining its spare discipline. Call them jai-kind-of's, if you will. The title piece of the collection identifies the trio of search-engines as hounds, eagles, and silence. This device then provides the three sections of the book. I may be wrong, but it fells to me as if the individual poems within each section loosely express the governing metaphor. 

Take middle section, "The way of hounds." The characters here "sniff" and "pounce," they "follow" and "run." The actors in the first two pieces are, in fact, dogs; the last one, a child. Belmonte's angular language sketches the coursing hunt for truth; her hounds are, indeed, bred out of the Spartan kind.

Similarly, "The way of eagles" views in panorama. Two of the six poems focus on birds - crows, in fact. A single perspective shows entire landscapes. Indeed, the final entry embraces all of sinful humanity including the self. 

So it is not surprising to recognize that "Cross-legged" (Belmonte does not give it a title but to rest the reader I will go with the Jane Austen-convention and use the opening words) takes in everything from a disappearing ship to the dock from which it sets sail. No, that's not correct: It takes in everything from shore-keeper and passenger. 

On one level, not too complex: A lover (spouse? parent? friend?) gazes until the beloved's boat (steamer? fishing vessel? cruise ship?) disappears from sight. The speaker expresses fatigue and sorrow. That's enough, but I believe there's more.

It begins with discomfort: "cross-legged too long/on damp wooden dock." Simple enough: squatting lotus-legged on unupholstered planks has put the narrator's feet to sleep; the hips protest the position and the buttocks provide the backbeat. But look again: two images - a "cross" and "wood." I'm more preacher than poet or professor so perhaps I see Christ-figures everywhere but this one seems sound to me. And what has dampened the boards? Water, one presumes; or blood? No, the narrator is not Christ and the jetty is not Calvary, except to the extent that every sufferer is Christ because the cross embraces all suffering, and every lonely outpost is the Place of the Skull because every loss is today's ration of death.

"Until your ship slips/over the horizon's curve." Note the sibilant subject-verb nexus: they hiss in the mouth and ear; there's something furtive in the act, and something angry in the sound. As the smokestacks sink below the horizon the poem's stereoscopic perspective suddenly turns singular: The boat has not just gone out of sight; it has abandoned the knowable world. Down here in South Texas we say the land is so flat you can watch a dog run away for three days, but the salt prairie swallows object whole. The abandonment of those lines hits hard. "En una noche oscura." "'Nay' is worse from God than from all others." 

Then the discomfort returns: "I shiver, too tired to rail." Cold and fatigue, but they bite below the skin's surface. Somehow a warm bath and a nap won't fix this. Look at the last word of the poem: "rail." Belmonte makes one word do the work of two, and one part of speech do double-duty as well. Rail has two meanings in English, etymologically unrelated: It means to revile or scold in harsh language, and it means a wooden bar extending between two posts as a guard or barrier. 

So the two inhabitants of the poem have parted on bad terms and the speaker has lost the emotional energy required to protest, but also the energy to defend some relational line in the sand. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" But the second sense, the raw physical image of splintery wood, reverts to the opening image of "cross-legged." I can liner on this gibbet no longer. The head slumps on the breast; the Crucified one gives up the ghost. God yanks the sun below the world's curve and darkness descends ahead of schedule. 

But because of that, the poem ends in hope. 

Quintessence of Dust: A Review of "Clay in the Potter's Hands" by Diana Pavlac Glyer

Hamlet, after hymning the glories of the human creature, scoffs, "And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" It's not a bad place to begin pondering Diana Glyer's "Clay in the Potter's Hands." Glyer, herself a skilled potter, combines her vast knowledge of the intricacies of that craft with the biblical image of human beings as being made from dust. In the end, she provides a rich answer to Hamlet's rhetorical question. "Clay in the Potter's Hands" has several virtues that are, in my experience, rare in a Christian devotional book: It exegetes but does not over-reach, it favors substance over pithiness or prettiness, and it comforts without cloying. More to the point, it thickens the soul.

Glyer exegetes but never over-reaches. The author is not a theologian and she's not a pastor. She teaches English at Azusa Pacific University. Now, the teaching of English is a noble calling and Azusa is a Christian institution, and Glyer is clearly a serious and studious believer, but that combination does not qualify one to speak authoritatively in the field of Christian doctrine or the interpretation of Scripture. Glyer recognizes this fact. From the opening sentence, the reader knows that he has encountered a book of devotion - the thoughts of a devout Christian regarding her own rich spiritual experience. At the same time, Glyer does not offer a froth of uninformed emotion devoid of biblical content. When she does deal with Scripture (and these occasions are not rare) she keeps it simple and keeps it sound. Her Hebrew word-study on the verb "formed" in Genesis 2.7 provides an excellent example. In the same vein, Glyer cites Jeremiah 18.1-2ff, the inevitable text for a book about pottery as a spiritual metaphor, but avoids the mistake of trying to impose the full craft of pottery on what is, in context, a laser-focused image. Instead, she mentions the multiplicity of God-as-potter-people-as-clay language throughout the Bible and works from there.

Glyer favors substance over pithiness or prettiness. She writes beautifully, in pellucid prose of short, familiar words in compact sentences. She avoids any sort of verbal gingerbread. As I read I thought of the critic whom Hamlet cites on the subject of his favorite tragedy, exulting that there are

no sallets in the lines to make the mattersavoury, nor no matter in the phrase that mightindict the author of affectation; but called it anhonest method, as wholesome as sweet, and by verymuch more handsome than fine.

"Very much more handsome than fine": exactly! In fact, one surprising virtue of the volume is the lack of "quotable quotes." I call this a virtue because it arises from the fact that Glyer goes beyond maxims and quips. Again and again I discovered that pulling out isolated passages to share with others would feel like a surgeon yanking the lungs from a living patient in order to show a class of interns the elegance of their function: Glyer writes so organically that any single phrase comes to life only in its intricate connection to the larger work. If I attempt to isolate individual lines, I "murder to dissect."

Finally, the book comforts but does not cloy. So many devotional books deliberately seek to spin out sweetness like devotional cotton candy and leave the reader feeling that the road that leadeth unto life, while perhaps strait and narrow, is at least well-upholstered. By contrast, Glyer dives straight into the rough-and-tumble of the Christian life and uses her governing metaphor artfully to do so. I don't suppose I ever thought of pot-making as a violent process but throughout the book the reader winces as the potter pounds and purifies, bakes, smashes, and - perhaps worst of all - ignores the clay in order to move it from mud to artifact. This is a writer who knows that sinners do not become saints without some suffering. She writes in the vein of John Donne, who prayed:

That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.

So where does the comfort come in? Again and again Glyer assures the reader that a master potter never inflicts suffering except to serve the ultimate purpose. Chapter 14, "Redeeming," is by itself worth the price of the book.

In an Evangelical culture where bad devotional books multiply like tribbles on Star Trek, Diana Pavlac Glyer offers us a simple yet substantive volume of meditations on the Christian life, presented in the form of a vivid controlling metaphor soundly anchored to Scripture. I cannot recommend the book highly enough.

Does Jesus Commend Drive-By Evangelism? Some Thoughts on the Great Commission

Matthew 28.18-20 is one of the most familiar passages in the Bible to cradle-Baptists like me. Along with John 3.16, we learned it as Primaries in Sunday School, where we emblazoned it on construction paper with macaroni scroll-work and memorized it during Vacation Bible School. And rightly so: This "Great Commission" contains Our Lord's succinct marching orders for the Church Universal and each believer.

But there is an interpretive issue that my long-suffering first-grade Sunday School teacher never went into, perhaps because that kind of thing doesn't translate well to flannel-graph. Some commentators, noticing that in Greek "make disciples" is the only imperative, while "go," "baptize," and "teach" are all, in fact, participles, have argued that Jesus does not mean to enjoin any specific evangelistic activity. Instead, the command is to "make disciples," and we are to do this "as we are going. Indeed, my own father used this as the basis for his idea of "traffic-pattern evangelism," the idea that we would all share the gospel with whomever we encountered "in the normal traffic-pattern of your life." Some folk go even farther and eschew the whole idea of "witnessing." They argue that instead Jesus tells  us to go, and that as we do so people, noticing our very different (and presumably exemplary) way of life, will approach us and ask us to explain what sets us apart. (Full disclosure: That has never even once happened to me so perhaps I am a little biased.)

But is this reading of the Greek text accurate? Is this kind of if-you-live-it-they-will-come evangelism what Jesus commands? To answer the question, we need to look a little deeper into the language involved.

First of all, it is important to understand that participles in Greek - as in English - can function in different ways. If I say, "The shooting happened yesterday," I turn the participle into a noun; if I say, "Walking down the road, I hummed a tune," I use the participle to show how one action relates to another in time: I hummed WHILE I walked. And, due to the marvelous subtly and flexibility of the Koine Greek language, the Greek participle does things that the English participle does not.

Second, one must understand that, in Greek, participles have tense. In English I say, "eating" and, without some context, there's no hint of when or how long that went on. But in Greek I can express ideas about the duration of the action.

With that in mind, then, consider the following: One shade of the Greek participle is the idea of means. Under certain conditions, we translate the participle with the phrase, "by means of." Among other things, this happens when the participle answers what seems like an implicit and necessary question. Also, if we remove the participle, we lose the point of the main verb. Finally, the participle defines the action of the main verb, makes its meaning clearer.

Now try that with our example: The command is "make disciples." This implies a very necessary question: How are we to do this? "going" would be a part of the answer. Moreover, it seems to answer a necessary question: If someone tells you to do something you've never done before, you are liable to ask, "How?" Third, the idea of "going" sharpens the focus of "make disciples." Greek grammarian Daniel Wallace adopts this reading, which would give a translation like, "By means of going (into the world), make disciples."

If we accept this rendering, "going" ceases to be a while-you're-at-it idea and becomes a how-to-do-it idea. The one problem this raises is that we would need to explain why this participle is in a different tense (aorist) from "baptizing" and "teaching" (present tense).

But there is another possibility. Sometimes Greek uses what is called the participle of attendant circumstance. When this happens, the participle conveys an action that is coordinate with the main verb and is thus translated as a verb. In such a case, the participle takes on the mood of the main verb. There are, according to Daniel Wallace, about five characteristics that occur to signal a participle of attendant circumstance:

1. The participle is usually in the aorist tense.
2. The main verb is usually in the aorist tense.
3. The main verb is usually in the indicative or imperative mood.
4. The participle comes before the main verb both in word-order and in time.
5. This occurs most often in narrative passages.

What about Matthew 28.19? The participle and main verb are, in fact, both in the aorist tense - though the two following participles are not. The main verb is in the imperative mood - a command, in other words: "Make disciples!" The participle "go" comes before the main verb, "make disciples" both in word-order and in time (you go first, then you make disciples) - though, again, the other two participles do not. The passage is not, however, narrative, but a plain directive.

Still, that's four out of five and the most decisive four at that. Wallace lists this reading as "disputed" but it makes good sense: Jesus gives us two commands. The central one is "make disciples" and the sentence signals its primacy by placing it in the imperative. The accompanying command is to "go," to undertake deliberate action to spread the gospel. Though a command, this is an order that makes no sense by itself, since going is useless unless one knows why one goes. The other two participles (which fulfill none of the markers for a participle of attendant circumstance) state the means by which one can fulfill the main purpose: by baptizing and teaching. Toss in the fact that every other use of this particular verb for "go" in this particular form in Matthew is attendant circumstance and the thing looks pretty sound.

And what about the idea that "go" is merely adverbial, meaning "as you are going"? "To turn (the word 'go') into an adverbial participle," writes Wallace, "is to turn the Great Commission into the Great Suggestion!"

To conclude, I would say three things: 1) I believe the best reading of the Greek text here leads us to translate the verb "go" as a command to intentional evangelistic action. 2) Failing that, I would say it at least conveys means: "by going," which has only a slightly weaker emphasis on intention. 3) Reading it as an adverbial participle runs into any number of difficulties. Oh, and I'll throw in one more: The adverbial reading is the most comforting and least demanding - which almost certainly means that it is wrong.

Self-Sacrifice on My Morning Commute

A stranger sacrificed his life for me this morning.

All right, not his whole life; a few seconds of it, actually but that's merely a quibble.

What happened was this. As I drove to work in the sullen rain,  a motorist bore down on me from the other direction. We were on a narrow residential street. Parked cars lounged against both curbs on and sagged into the road. The oncoming vehicle was a pickup (well, I do live in Texas), one of those mug-macho-muchacho outfits with a dual rear axel that spraddled the rear fenders across the right-of-way like a Victorian matron in one of those hooped skirts. Clearly the two cars could not skin past one another in that strait and narrow way. Paint and rear-view mirrors would be flesh wounds; steel and glass would sustain the major injury.

Then, the truck pulled over.

Just at the point before the lane of cars lined the road, in a gap created by a driveway, the pilot steered that behemoth to the side so that I could pass. I waved, but in the dark and with the rain the gesture probably went unregistered. As I motored along, I saw the retreating taillights of the pickup as it lumbered back into the fairway.

I was on my way to work, wanted to get there quickly, had things to do. I assume the same was true of the other motorist. Yet that individual, whom I will probably never meet, and wouldn't recognize if I did and thus will never thank in person, put his agenda on hold, stopped the progress of his life, in deference to a total stranger. It wasn't a matter of strength: That quasi-semi could've crushed my SUV like a bug on its windshield. It wasn't a matter of law: If some city reg. covers this situation I missed it in my driver's ed. class. It was courtesy; it was sacrifice.

Too dramatic? Not according to the English novelist, poet, and theologian Charles Williams. Williams developed the companion ideas of co-inherence and substitution. Co-inherence refers to the fact that all lives intertwine in more ways than we recognize, so that each self owes herself a duty to other selves. (C. S. Lewis quotes Williams as once saying, "Love you? I AM you!") Substitution describes the inescapable fact that all lives thrive by the sacrifice of other lives: Grain dies to make my pancakes; a random citizen's schedule died (a tiny bit) to allow me a better chance at doing my job well today, thus continuing to make a living.

And Jesus died for us all.

That's different? Yes - but it is a difference more in degree than in kind. That other driver (and I don't, of course, know the person's religious beliefs) fulfilled Colossians 1.24, "filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions." I needed Jesus behind that wheel; I found him.

Closing note: Halfway through this post a co-worker came into my office. Her on-campus apartment had sprung a leak in the persistent rain. It was taking on water and listing to port and she just underwent knee surgery and does not need to be stooping and moving and mopping. Could I come help muck out the mess? Alexander Solzhenitsyn frequently quotes the cynical motto of the Russian Mafia in the Stalinist prison camps: Agreeing that we all must die eventually, they sneer, "You today, me tomorrow." This phrase holds true in a far more redemptive form, as I have learned this morning: At 7:30 it was someone else's turn. At eight o'clock it was mine.