Juxtapose

Being in my own place has its advantages - breakfast this morning was a small but satisfying teacup saucer of kalamata olives, feta (domestic, unfortunately), oregano, and olive oil, eaten with my fingers and some syrian bread. I can't help but feel a little indulgent. The salt is excessive, yes, but overall it's healthy and delicious and it brings me back to very warm memories of my Yiayia, of Mum and Dad and sitting around the dinner table talking after eating. I miss a lot of those things. In fact, eating olives and feta transposes me all the way to the Mediterranean, by the blue sea, whitewashed concrete housing, and old men playing bouzoukis. I've never been, but in my mind, I'm somehow connected all the way over here in dinkytown, USA, on the busiest street in the town, traffic whizzing by my head as I type at my kitchen table.

My problem is not so much that I imagine, but more that I'm, in a way, very sensual in the way that I experience the world. I love smells and sounds and tastes and touches and sights. Everything, to me, has a bizarre sense all of its own and the transmogrification effect that feta and olives produces is the same thing I feel when I watch people walk by me while chatting in their own world, or the reason that, of all the great stuff he does for me, the thing about Mark that makes me feel most loved of all is when he holds my hand when we're out and about walking. I love the senses. I turn my music up as loud as I can without making myself more deaf than I already am, so that everything throbs and swells around me - I never could get my head around what was so wrong, according to my church, about that darn "Beat" that was supposedly not of God, as it seems heavenly to me.

When Mrs. A talks about her memories of raising her four kids and laughs about some funny memory in the only way she ever allows herself to enjoy life, my eyes well up. She regulates everything, counting to the ounce her water intake and only eating raw foods and certain healthy things, and yet she is always searching for happiness, for joy, for fullness of existence. She has never found it, and she can't even enjoy a single little sweet taste of a fatty food, or a salty food, or a sweet food. The small indulgences of life. She has no joy because she has no Christ to take away the restraints she has put upon herself in order to live a temperate life. But to what gain? Dust to dust - a thousand years of temperance can never be Christ to her. So when she talks of her children and she reaches so far back into her memories and her face lights up with joy, I cry a little for her because that is the only joy she will let herself have, and it is not enough.

I deal in the warmth of the sun after a winter of darkness, the taste of saltiness on my tongue and a cool glass of water to chase it. I would travel the world, but not at the expense of listening to Teddy and Ray tease each other into fits of giggles. Good music, good food, good company, all so precious and so wonderful and so ethereal, so wholly of God and void of any state of chance that is pushed by the scientifically minded.

Once, in Bible school, there was a strange guy named Eric Baker who was in my Greek class for a few semesters. He has some wacky ideas, some wacky hairdos, and he was just not like the rest of the guys there. Sitting outside on break one day, he started talking about John Piper, who, at the time, I had read a great deal about. He started talking about Piper's writings on the so-called "Christian Hedonism" idea, which sounds very inappropriate but, if given more than one seconds' worth of skimming, is really just a way of saying, "Stop being fuddyduddies about the gospel and show some joy about the things the Christ has made possible through His blood." None of this went over very well with the Bible school set, however, and for months, poor Eric Baker with his permissive, too progressive, post-modernistic ideas was the topic of conversation and great debate. And for a while I wondered, exactly, what was so unBiblical about joy, or about experience. I don't know how many times I've been taught at church that worship is not an experience, that faith is not feelings, that joy is best expressed in a temperate manner.

But I don't know how to be temperate anymore. I don't know how to experience the Bible, the gospel, the songs and the prayers in this stilted manner. This temperance is taking away my joy, my love, my faith, in a subtle way that leaves me cynical about everything about the church.

I can't help but sense and feel and weep with those who weep and laugh with those who laugh, because I can't make myself any different. As we read through the book of John this past month and reached the crucifixion story, I find that the thing I can never get over is the nails. If I was there, so long ago, I think I would have wanted to touch the nail-holes in His hands. I would have been as foolish and as sinful as the worst of all the scorners and the sinners, but I am sure that if He stretched out His hand to let me touch that place where He was pinned to the cross, that would be the sight to my faith, if there ever was such a thing. I love those holes more than any hymn. I can't wait to touch them someday.

My breakfast, today, tastes like the Holy Land, a place where Jesus walked.