Monday, July 18, 2005
Emergent Longings
We’ve given up. But still want to hope in the ugly and beautiful at once. Emerging from spiritual hollowness. Searching for God, but not for religion. Just for something. Maybe even a backdrop. Some place where the scars and pocks are no big deal.
But I’m not sure where to locate the exact spot where theology describes God completely. So narrative becomes the door that opens upon a journey with no definition—a journey to blemished faith.
A discovery of faith while scraping along the underbelly of religion, gleaning the parts that remain hidden from the mainstream. Because who wants to float on the surface where everything is so perfect and fake?
Maybe it’s a journey we all take once we put religion down to pick up the pockmarked soul that carries its own cross through this world of perfections and imperfections alike. But something smells like dead religion. I agree. It has a unique smell, you know.
Like the stench of urine soaked clothing. That will take your breath. It’ll leave you wondering if anything lives. Not lives as in changing you or making you like the rest. But lives in spite of what is blemished. Maybe even beyond what is dead.
Sense of smell gets to me first. Smell can discern real quick. Hearing can be hard to decipher. I’m 60% deaf in one ear. My ears chirp like a room full of cicadas.
Plus, people know how to talk to make it sound good. Things can look good and taste good too. But covering stink is difficult. I got a nose on me. A nice size nose like a Cherokee, and it can smell, especially in the fourth grade.
Kenny sprang a leak everyday in the fourth grade. He could not control himself. Almost daily, his father knocked on the door of the classroom to pick him up. We usually smelled him before something was done.
He played on my little league baseball team. Had a great arm, but hard to befriend. Who wants a leaky friend? The front of his white uniform attracted the red dirt of the infield. The rest of us stained our knees and socks from sliding into second or home plate, not Kenny.
But who was I to laugh or scorn? I was still trying to overcome my own leaky valve in the first grade. I peed all over myself. Right down the front, so no room to judge Peewee Kenny. I was broken as he was. But the day came when he smarted off, and I hauled off and kicked him, unaware of the scab on his knee.
He evidently scraped it doing something. There was no evidence of sliding into home plate. And a swift kick knocked it off. He bled. It gushed. It dripped down his leg over his sock and onto the floor. He stood. He got the teacher’s attention. Everyone looked. It stunned the class. They didn’t witness the kick. They thought the boy had finally ruptured, in fact, was hemorrhaging.
The girls squealed. The teacher ran back to where Peewee was standing in a puddle of blood like the Carrie girl in the Stephen King movie. But no pig blood was present, only what everybody thought was red pee. It’s amazing how much blood a knee can produce.
The teacher realized it wasn’t pee and sent someone to the bathroom for paper towels. She looked around the room. She demanded an explanation. Now I was hoping he’d lie and say he knocked it on his desk. But, as I sat with bangs over my eyebrows—batting innocent eyes—he pointed me out in the lineup.
The teacher—usually disgusted by his body fluids—became sympathetic. The entire class disdained me. No one stuck up for me when she sent me to the office, along with Kenny, who had to tell the principle his side of the story. I knew the principle would paddle me for making someone bleed. Blood always changes things.
All the way to the office, I begged Peewee. “Please tell them it was an accident. I didn’t mean to knockoff your scab. I promise to stop calling you, Peewee. Heck, you can even call me Peewee. I wet myself in the first grade. My mom had to bring some new underwear and pants. The other pair was soaked in urine. Stunk, too.”
Kenny had none of it. He had me where he wanted me—feeling guilty enough to beg, guilty enough to want to be his friend at any cost. Because he may have had a leaky valve, but he was no fool. He had no friends.
I received my licks from the principle and the cold shoulder from the class. Because it is one thing to turn up your nose like he was Pepe Lepew, but once the sight of blood entered the picture, I became the monster who made Peewee bleed.
The broken image followed me to fifth grade. No matter how many times I got Kenny’s lunch for him, they never forgave. It didn’t matter that I opened the door for him—when his father picked him up—and ushered him into the hallway saying, “You have a nice day! We’ll see you tomorrow . . . By the way, I couldn’t smell you today.”
Take Kenny. Put him in your church. The smell of him in the Ark. Maybe even the blood of him dripping onto the floor. People won’t sit beside him. People don’t go to church to smell other people. They go to be heads above the rest.
Incense is okay. It’s edgy. Probably better than the smell of Kenny. But maybe Kenny is edgy. Loving Kenny. Identifying with Kenny. That’s religion in the Ark. We learn to be respectful.
Maybe narrative is not a direction. It’s not a concise definition of theology or a purpose-driven knowledge. It’s as Walker Percy says in his novel, The Moviegoer, “To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” To be onto the possibility that the larger Narrative of the Blood is the awakening of our narrative, is the storyline that is onto something authentic.
We made friends. Kenny and I. Not hanging out at my house kind of friends, but I’d sit beside him. I didn’t mind the smell. I’m not saying I was a good guy. I’m not saying that at all. I sat beside him in the dugout during little league games because I felt for him.
This is when I could still feel. This is when I could still see his father standing by the fence at first base. He never sat in the bleachers with the rest of the parents. I’m sure he felt ostracized.
“Now which one is your son?”—one of them may have asked. “Oh, yeah, the one with the red dirt on his crouch. I see him.”
His father stood by the fence and yelled every now and then. I wondered about his father. What would it be like to have a leaky kid? Would I stand at the fence?
“Come on, son. Let’s go home. You played well tonight.” They walked into the matching darkness beyond the stadium lights. I’d speak to Kenny at school. He’d just look at me, as if I were setting him up, waiting on the right moment to get revenge.
But he never caught on to my distant friendship. You can get ostracized for so long that you stop looking for your own narrative. You believe you don’t have one.
I leak. I stink. Here my father comes. That was Kenny’s narrative.
I’ve seen this narrative play out in various ways. I love. I’m rejected. Here no father comes. It’s different. Same storyline, though.
We never get a perfect narrative. We can fictionalize it. Make it fake. But being authentic is the last and holy thing.
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Something New. Read one of Robert's novels in progress. It's a sweet and tender love story that appeals to the romantic in all of us. Click the link: http://ablogofregrets.blogspot.com/
© 2007 by Robert Stofel