Ironic Advent 2016 MediCATION #4: An Old Friendship, a Paradox, and Sexual Quarantine

The Patron Saint of Friendship, Saint John

Today is the last day of November, 2016, and yesterday, the 29th, was my friend Daniel’s 30th birthday. I’ve known Daniel since 7th grade, which means we’ve known each other for 15 years - half our lives. He was homeschooled as a child and raised by conservative Christian parents. Consequently, he was a complete nerd when he walked into Community Christian School, a place I had transferred to only half a semester earlier. His only exposure to pop culture was Ernest P. Worrel and Weird Al Yankovic. He wasn’t allowed to watch PG-13 movies well past his 13th and 14th birthdays. Zit-faced, oily blonde hair, skinny. Good thing for him he was funny. He was also smart, which maybe wasn’t a good thing, since he shoved it in everyone’s face as much as he could and love love LOVED to compare grades - because he usually had the higher one - usually. His arch-nemesis, whose name was also Daniel, was kind, intelligent, polite, athletic, handsome, and popular, and challenged Daniel (my friend) for the title of Smartest Kid in the Class, which Daniel's (friend) self-esteem depended on (though, the other Daniel was so pure and above this sort of thing that he never even knew such a title existed). Daniel’s jealousy (my friend’s jealousy, obviously) was palpable, but endearing, and he never let it interrupt the chemistry of our small class of 19.

Daniel and I ought to pray to Neil deGrasse Tyson and ask for forgiveness for our 8th grade science fair project. This thing was an abomination, a wretched, barely functioning tin-can motor. If our project was a dog, it’d be a wet, mangy, starving, worm-infested stray. If this project was a plant, it’d be a weed. If it was a weed, it’d be the limp, stringy, ugly kind that gives even weeds a bad name, a weed that doesn’t even have the dignity to grow thorns, the kind you don’t even bother pulling because when you see it you shrug and figure it’ll be dead soon enough so it’s not even worth the bending over. This tin can motor actually lowered the value of the tin can we used to make it. The tri-fold poster board was just as pathetic, some white computer paper filled with 12pt font text glued to the surface. This whole project had a sorrowful look that painfully whispered “kill me” to any judge that had the misfortune of seeing it. I remember working on this damned thing in the kitchen of his childhood home. We knew we were guilty of crimes against science, but we did it anyway. The science fair judge failed us, but our science teacher, St. Teresa Spangler, showed us mercy and gave us a D minus. Teachers take note, sometimes that what mercy looks like: a D minus.

Daniel transferred to the local public high school in 10th grade, by that point no longer the dweeby homeschool kid in the yellow techvest who only listened to Weird Al. We reunited when I transferred in 12th grade. Fast forward to my senior year of college, when Daniel and his wife Rachel (whom he met at the Christian school, the only girl he’s ever dated) packed up and moved to Texas. The college years were difficult for both of us and we all bonded through a lot of failure and through a lot of drinking to forget that failure. I cried.

Rewind.

In 8th or 9th grade (I don’t remember exactly, we were in our middle teens), Daniel got involved in some Really Big Drama with his then girlfriend, now wife, Rachel. Oh, this was Big. Back then, it must have been the cool emo thing to keep a DeadJournal (a kind of online diary), which was a sort of goth alternative to LiveJournal (which I guess is what preppy-cheerleader-establishment types used), and Rachel (outcast band nerd) did just that. Well, after some time, word got around that Rachel had more or less been writing 50 Shades of Daniel and shit. hit. the. Fan. Daniel’s parents found out and they were apoplectic. Daniel was put on sexual quarantine. Nothing in. Nothing out. AOL communications were severed, internet usage was put under surveillance, and Daniel was forced to break things off with Rachel. I won’t get much further into the details, since some of it might still be raw. But I’ll say this: it’s hard to stop loving someone. And Daniel’s parents couldn’t put in place enough rules to keep him away from her. They’re married now and they have a daughter who loves food as much as her dad.

The Really Big Drama left a mystery, though. Someone told Daniel’s parents about the DeadJournal, but who? We speculated, we made accusations, we talked about it through college and after but we never got any closer to solving the case...until 2 years ago. Daniel’s mom, who had refused to spill the beans, finally gave up her informant. It was my mom. I had been reading the DeadJournal on our family computer and my giggly friends and I (not including Daniel, of course) had either left the window up, or my curious mother checked the browser history, and that’s how she got all the spicy deets on my pal. Most parents do the best they know how for their kids with the information and options available to them. I believe that. I also believe it was poetic and tragic and ironic and earthly and spiritual and something I can’t put my finger on that this mystery, from years ago, involving a family that had long since moved out of town and a friend that had established a life in Texas, finally broke at the precise moment in time and space when many of my mother’s demons were tormenting her and being let loose and into the lives of the people around her. I don’t know if you call it karma, or coincidence, or if our lives and our choices somehow vibrate out into the open universe and somewhere along the way those waves bounce back (I guess that’s karma, but it feels like something else). All I know is that when I got the phone call from Daniel putting an end to this mystery, my reaction was a paradoxical mixture of “NO WAY!” and “of course….” Chesterton said (I’m paraphrasing), “Paradox is truth standing on her head to attract attention.” There’ve been more than a handful of times with my mother where I’ve done everything but stand on my head. Maybe paradox is a friend. Maybe it was helping out. Maybe it was telling me something. Maybe it was Memphis. Maybe it was southern summer nights. Maybe it was paradox teaching me a hard truth, keeping it secret, keeping it safe, until the time was right. Friends always have the best timing.

If paradox is a friend like Daniel, I’ll sleep a little easier tonight. We’ve kept in touch all these years, even after he moved to Texas (and now Virginia). We’ve got a scrappy friendship and managed to meet in person twice in 2016 after a four year hiatus; once in Dallas in early April (sorry, Jen), where I stayed in his guest bedroom during a trip to WrestleMania; and once at Cedar Point in late August, where he drove 7 hours (from Virginia) to meet me and another old Christian school friend of ours, Jordan. Daniel and I talk on the phone when we can, but we use voice memos regularly to communicate in 10-20 minute monologues which we send via text. It started back in 2011 with voice mails, then videos, and now the memos, which allow for the longest recordings. We’ve sent hundreds upon hundreds of memos. Our poor iPhone mics have heard more than any single piece of technology really deserves. There’s been so much to overcome for both of us these past few years. There still is. We’re still searching for a way through. We’re still waiting (there’s that word again) for a savior (or maybe just I am, since he’s agnostic). There’s an old gospel hymn that goes like this,

There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus
No, not one
No, not one
None else can heal all our soul’s diseases
No, not one
No, not one
Jesus knows all about our struggles
He will guide till the day is done
There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus
No, not one
No, not one

"Jesus knows all about our struggles, he will guide till the day is done." That’s one hell of a friend. That’s the kinda friend you leave voice memos with. That’s a slooowww friend. Daniel is a slooowww friend. It’s taken a lot of years and a lot of grit. It’s so damned easy to just not call someone, to just not put in the effort, to just...not. But the wait, and the work, and the years are worth it, because the alternative is just...nothing. Without friendship, we’re just a bunch of meat and bones floating around on a big dirt ball. Friendship makes us human, and friendship takes time, and taking time means waiting. Hello, Advent, my old friend.

Okay, I’ve probably overstated some things, but you get the idea. We need people and people take time and hope and that’s what Advent is about. It’s about a God who, for some reason, decided to become like us, and now we’ve gotta wait. And we’ve gotta hope. And if we can learn a little bit about friendship in the waiting and in the hoping, so much the better.

Thanks for the years, Dan. Here’s to many more.

Ironic Advent 2016 MediCATION #3: Shut 'er down, Ethel, she's a-suckin' mud

Cherries in the Sun by Doris Lee. Take a minute to appreciate the happy details in this painting.

"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry." - Henry David Thoreau

***

I’ve got my safety pin on, my hashtags ready, an all-female Ghostbusters t-shirt, an AR-15 strapped to my back, my Merry-Christmas-Not-Happy-Holidays latte, and a bucket O Chick-Fil-A! And if nature calls, you better believe I’m ONLY using a LGBTTQQIAAP friendly bathroom and you know I’m not using any microaggressions, baby! Wait. Is baby a microaggression? Okay! We’re ready for Ironic Advent MediCATION #3!

Alright, I’ve got some splainin’ to do. Yesterday I wrote this gem:

If waiting isn’t your strong suit, let me lay a quote on you from a co-founder of Anarchy Hospital, Leo Tolstoy, “All really great things are happening in slow and inconspicuous ways.” That’s how healing works. Come to think of it, that’s also how growth works. In fact, probably the only thing that doesn’t work that way is destruction. Bulldozers and bombs make quick work of homes. Ice cream melts in the sun in minutes or seconds. But healing, that takes time. And the greatest healing takes a loooooong time. Ironic, huh?

Well, no. It’s not ironic. Great things take a long time. There’s nothing unexpected about that. What I meant was this: great power is made manifest in small, still, slow, and steady things and ways (the 4 Ss), contrary to what we might expect (there’s the irony!) In this culture, where “demanding justice” applies as much to an innocent man being freed from prison as it does to a Taco Bell employee buying a new TV and a pair of Jordans every Advent, we’ve become accustomed to power as something that solves problems quickly, like protests/demonstrations, legislation, and technology. Small, still, slow and steady things, things that grow, things that take root, things that leach out into the soil and into our lives, they don’t get much press in a technocracy. We celebrate Christmas because LIGHTS and PRESENTS, but Advent? This is the first time I’ve ever properly observed this season and I get why we don’t. It’s about waiting and fasting and preparing. That stuff don’t sell and it don’t keep the kids entertained.

I preached a sermon at my little Mennonite church a few weeks ago. It was about politics and, like a good, un-ironic Mennonite, I might have mentioned the Kingdom of God. It’s a Mustard Seed kingdom (or a Mushroom kingdom, if you prefer). Christian politics don’t have no business in high places and, despite what Rachel Held Evans might say, the end all be all of Christian politics ain’t leftist identity politics or “standing in solidarity” with the groups we white folks find it fashionable to look down upon. “Solidarity.” Bosh! This isn’t the USSR and you ain’t fighting the communists. Dial it back, girl. (Is girl a microaggression?) The Mustard Seed kingdom is slow. It’s close to home. There’s a place for activism, but it doesn’t roll with the latest Twitter hashtag and or throw itself into Facebook’s weekly anger porn orgie (unless it’s Harambe, which, by the way, is one of the great ironic movements of 2016 and I’ll definitely be writing about that soon).

The earth is slow. The seasons are slow. Advent is slow. People are slow. We change slowly. We get better slowly. Sometimes we get worse slowly. I like people. I like weird people, especially. I like watching people change and get better, slowly. People care about people. People want to help and they need to be needed. I want to help and be needed and I like to feel as though I belong someplace. But technocracy doesn’t like people. Technocracy likes technology and the things which make technology good are not the things which make people good. People need rhythm, people need slowness, people need stillness. I took an afternoon nap today. In this culture, that’s damn near forming a coup and maybe something of a sacrament. Sacraments, anarchism, and naps. That’s what Advent is all about.

A Thoreau quote for you:

I am again struck by the perfect correspondence of a day - say, an August day, and the year. I think a perfect parallel may be drawn between the seasons of the day and of the year. Perhaps after middle age man ceases to be interested in the morning and in the spring. Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourselves to the influences of each. In August live on berries, not dried meats and pemmican, as if you were on shipboard making your way through a waste ocean, or in a northern desert. Be blown by all the winds. Open your pores and bathe in all the tides of Nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons. Why, "nature" is but another name for health, and the seasons are but different states of health.

(And I didn’t just pull that off the web, though you might recognize the ‘live each season as it passses’ line because some yoga studio you went to once and liked on Facebook threw it up against a picture of some trees, ran it through a filter, and posted it. No, dear reader. I own Thoreau’s journals and I copied that out of a book made with paper and glue because HU taught me better.)

My brother’s got a line, “Shut ‘er down, Ethel, she’s a-suckin’ mud!” That’s a little Advent mediCATION for you. RX: shut ‘er, down. The air has a new chill, the trees lack the strength to hold their leaves, the grass alongside roads and old barns is golden, wavy, and wheat-like, the sun, after shining bright and hot in mid-summer and in August, now retires early, and the blue sky is hidden by gray clouds, which wrap around the countryside like a mother hen's wing around her baby chick. The earth is shutting down, and maybe we should, too.

***

A brief epilogue. Isn't it something that God, in his/her way, is small, still, slow, and steady; and the earth, in its way, is small, still, slow, and steady; but people, we aren't so good at keeping to this, though we are, in truth, the slowest and smallest of them all, we scurry about, hustling, bustling, "running" errands. For my part, tomorrow, and during the rest of Advent, I'm going to walk my errands. Maybe even saunter my errands. Advent stretches time waaaaayyyy ooouuuuuttt and folds time over upon itself. We're waiting for a God who is coming, already came, and will come again, to save a world that's already been saved, is being saved, and will be saved. If God can play fast and loose with time, you can too.

Be well. 

Ironic Advent 2016 MediCATION #2: RX 1 Healer Pilgrim, 2 Unmercenary Saints, as Needed

Saints Cosmas and Damian

The cold rain is coming down on small town Bluffton, Indiana, but I’m inside sitting on my papasan chair, wondering where my cat, Pancake, has gone off to, listening to Handel’s Messiah, staring out the window at the wet and waving English ivy which is illuminated by a small outdoor lamp, feeling slightly hungry but not enough to eat, on this 2nd day of Advent anno Domini 2016 (that exhausts the extent of my Latin). And since it’s day 2, that means this is Ironic Advent MediCATION #2. That’s right, we’re still on schedule.

With regard to this mediCATION thing: I earned my degree from the Dr. Mario School of Medicine, which means that in Ironic Advent MediCATION #1, I broke the law when I said that Advent might have something to teach us about waiting. I can’t very well go around prescribing drugs for people with impatient-itis or performing an I-want-it-now-ectomy. Well, not legally, anyhow - that’s right - welcome to Anarchy Hospital. We’re a Kingdom of God kinda people and we don’t care much for them voting types. We accept cash, gold, and bitcoin, but we really love trade-ins. You give us a little time, and we’ll give you a little wisdom, the best we can muster. All our meds are supplied by the best healer pilgrim this planet’s ever seen, and let me tell you something about him: he’s in no rush to fix anyone’s problems.

If waiting isn’t your strong suit, let me lay a quote on you from a co-founder of Anarchy Hospital, Leo Tolstoy, “All really great things are happening in slow and inconspicuous ways.” That’s how healing works. Come to think of it, that’s also how growth works. In fact, probably the only thing that doesn’t work that way is destruction. Bulldozers and bombs make quick work of homes. Ice cream melts in the sun in minutes or seconds. But healing, that takes time. And the greatest healing takes a loooooong time. Ironic, huh?

Then there’s Saints Cosmas and Damian, twin brothers and skilled physicians who freely treated anyone in need, man or animal. There are men like Steven Seagal and Danny Trejo who are paid to kill. They are called mercenaries. Cosmas and Damian healed for no charge at all, and they are remembered as the Unmercenaries (Unmercenaries! What a name! A couple of ironic healer pilgrims, no doubt).

***

While writing this Ironic Advent MediCATION, I received word that a former classmate and younger brother of an old friend died this morning of an accidental overdose on a prescription medication. You could call that ironic, you could call it tragic. I was going to share a Robert Frost poem with you and talk a little bit about our culture’s obsession with novelty, but it will have to wait for later. I did not know Tate Willey well, but his brother and I spent a lot of time together as teenagers, guitar jam sessions and whatnot. I was fortunate enough to see Tate recently, about a year or two ago and he was very sweet and kind. It is haunting to think that this young man, in his mid 20s, at the time of our brief reunion, had not even 24 months left to his life.

1 Corinthians 15:26 tells us that death is the last enemy to be destroyed. I don't know if that means it's already happened, if it's happening now, or if it's going to happen. Whenever, the fact is, we are waiting. We are waiting, O Healer Pilgrim. On this 2nd day of Advent, we are waiting. Generation after generation, we are waiting. Each day that I see my mother, fearful, dying from anorexia, and thin as those Jewish families in the old Holocaust pictures, I am reminded that this is a bleak and demonic world, that those “Love Trumps Hate” protesters have no idea what they’re talking about. Love doesn’t trump hate, and life doesn’t trump death. ...Maybe one day it will, maybe even now in tiny ways, like a flower growing up through a highway or a healer pilgrim coming back from the dead, but that doesn’t make the bypass any less real or the death and sickness of the people we love any lighter for anyone to bear. No matter what you believe about life after death, death is real and sometimes slow and it always has consequences. Could be that the best we can do is stare it in the face and live like Unmercenary Saints. 

***

I've been holding on to a short, bitter reflection about anorexia. I might clean it up a bit and try and breathe a little Ironic Advent redemption into it and post it as a MediCATION. Or I might not. You'll have to wait and see.

Ironic Advent 2016 MediCATION #1: Waiting for Christmas with Joe and Thoreau

“Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” - Matthew 2:2

Today is the first day of Advent. I think. I’m looking at a 2013 liturgical calendar because I’m too cheap to fork out $15 for a new one, so I might be wrong, but being wrong about the start of Advent is as good a way as any of putting words into this new blog, which I’ve called Pilgrim Dude, because 1) I’m a pilgrim (and so you are, even if you don’t know it yet), and 2) I’m a dude, like literally a man, but also a DUDE - I’m sitting in a papasan chair, in a bathrobe, with my long matted hair falling down over my tired morning eyes and all I’ve eaten in the past day and a half in an apple. (I also blog at Patheos, so if you’d like to hear my thoughts on economics and other such things, visit the Pickled Pencil. Truth be told, I don’t find it so easy to write about that stuff on a regular basis. But I do need to write, and that’s why this exists.)

Alright, we’re talking about Advent, which Google confirms does, indeed, begin today. Seems early. [The author took a writing break at this point to go to church, because if he’s going to write about Advent and other things he’d damned well better get himself to service on day one]. I got the inspiration for this blog (and possibly the name, I’m not sure) after spending a few years talking with my friend Joe Martyn Ricke, going to musicals and concerts, finding vegetarian food at late night diners, meeting creepy defense industry women in Indy, sharing our mutual disdain for Facebook, and generally finding ourselves exasperated at everything which our friends and neighbors have come to view as normal or even virtuous. He has a blog called Ben Camino Soul where he publishes his Ironic Advent Meditations, which I routinely misspell as Ironic Advent MediCATIONS. These things are a sweet relief from the anxiety and strain of northeast Indiana, where everyone’s work work workin to save a buck on a AR-15 and a chainsaw, and social media, where a single Tweet or post or comment could save the world (or at least your self-esteem).

Here’s an appropriate Thoreau quote (I’m full of these). “We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! Or, what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties.”

Joe has Ironic Advent Meditations copyrighted, or so he claims (he stole them from our friend Jennifer and they both stole them from their old pastor). He does not, however, have Ironic Advent MediCATIONS copyrighted. How’dya like that dose of irony, Joe? Eat it. (Though, he’d probably still have a case, something about “consumer confusion,” but what with his writing being so much better by comparison, I think I could wiggle out of that one, too).

But here’s the ironic part: “Medications” kinda works. That’s what Advent can be, a medication for what ails us, like Chicken Soup for the Soul (vomit vomit vomit). Thoreau wasn’t sure if it could be fixed, the hustling and the angst, the consumerism and the workaholism, the discontentment met by the mindless accumulation of dross. “A well-nigh incurable form of disease,” he called it. Seems to me we could stand to learn a little something about waiting, or at least slowing the hell down. Maybe instead of following Twitter social justice warriors and Christmas advertisements from Honda we should start following stars like the Magi. Your Advent pilgrimage won’t happen staring into a screen [The author is well aware that he is currently staring at a screen, it’s called irony]. "I don’t know what I’m hopin’ to see but it ain’t Facebook and it ain’t on TV.” A pilgrim dude I know wrote that.

*** 

Thanks for reading. We’ve got a long ways to go, and as my Sith Master, Darth Joe, tells me: it’s gonna get dark and it’s gonna get difficult. “Everything we say has to be resisted as well as said.” That’s another Joe quote. Go read his MediTATION. But ignore the insults and threats about me. That’s just a part of his charm.