The Mystifying Present: Another Look at Tinker Creek

Everyone knows what the present is until you ask them.

When I learned of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, I was intrigued, not least because she did so well so young (29) and because she had studied at a nearby (then) women’s college, Hollins (now University). When I learned she had written about the very creek that bordered our house I just had to read it. Except it was ten years before I began.

This year marks that year and happens also to be the 50th anniversary of its publishing. So I set the helpful, if rather pedestrian, goal of reading it through the year and writing on it month by month. I have yet to know if the book’s depth — or mine — is up to that task, but the creek is wonderful thus far.

The book is comprised of fifteen chapters, a journal of sorts, most of which were previously published in various magazines. No particular method of approach presents itself so in this round I am going to look at one chapter. Chapter 6: The Present.

Everyone knows what the present is until you ask them, just like we know what to do with it until we realize whatever we are doing we already did. Time is such a mystery – who can know it? The Psalmist says to number your days and so we try to have a sense of how many we have left and how we should use the ones we have.

But how do we use the present?

The beginning scene of the chapter is exactly right and earthy, a simple stopover at a gas station- a reprieve from the weary highway miles on her way home. I love it for the implicit mix of space and time. When you travel by modern means, present takes on a whole new feel as it flies past at artificial speed.

Drive 400 miles in 7 hours and you feel hurled into your destination as if it were a backstop on a ball field. You don’t feel alive for a day or two as your body chides you for attempting to play god with time and space. The same kind of thing happens, says Annie, when you leave a theater mid-movie. Stepping from the imitation to the real, from time-suspended to time-absorbed – it shocks the soul.

This gas station is no ordinary stop. In her quiet waiting at the station Annie feels the surrounding Virginia panorama. “Shadows lope along the mountain’s rumpled flanks,” she says. Of course mountains have flanks, at least that’s what I’ve always said. And shadows lope. Yes they do, we just never stop to see, to know, to feel. Later on she says mountains are “hunched.” My thought exactly! Except not, because I was never sufficiently present.

Present. This chapter could theoretically be the whole book for Tinker is about being in time rather than marking it. When we are truly ‘present in the present’ artificial (clock) time is forgotten. Instead such moments know life by the moving sun, or as darkness creeps in beneath the clouds.

Clock time is construct, thief, imposter: claiming – tyrant-like — allegiance, devotion, and surrender. But it loses power when you learn to be with those around you; when you listen, hear, and see the very earth in all its expressions; when you dare to engage ‘the present circumstances’ as the simple and real stuff of life.

Annie says living in the present lets us “catch grace as a man fills his cup at a waterfall.”

And she lays waste, again, to self-consciousness as the enemy of the present: of life itself, one might say. It made me wonder if self-consciousness gets in the way like two mirrors facing one another. Self-reflection repeats itself until there is nothing left. Innocence is better than self-consciousness, she says: a wide-eyed openness and settled intent to receive the real rather than imagine we will re-make it.

Innocence for Annie? “At once a receptiveness and total concentration.”

But why, I wonder, serve and revere the present? Is this the dictum of one Ben Franklin that calls us to treasure time? Surely it is more. The present is life and let’s not reduce life to a clock. How much time do I have left in this world? I don’t know and I’m not going to trouble over what I can’t know. In fact, knowing is oversold: living is better.

Living- that is – in the present.

Platitudes like this are worn but no less true for that. Some cultures, wiser, tell us not to look forward but backward, for only there can we see the countless points of presence that make us who we are today. Look forward and there is nothing to see. It is too much for me, but before I die I want to learn to love life by loving the present.

Tolstoy has a famous short story about how much land a man needs. A man is told to circumvent as much acreage as he can, and it will belong to him if only he arrives at the starting point by sundown. He runs hard and fast to encompass as much as possible but his ill-prepared body succumbs to the exertion and he dies upon reaching the starting point as the sun is setting. There he is buried and we are told he had all the land a man ever needs: enough for his own grave.

How much time do I need? The present is all. The past is no more and the next moment does not exist. To say I need the present is simply to affirm life, for there is no life outside of the present. The present is the only place we live.

Even if I live to be one hundred years my whole life will be described (inadequately) as a compilation of moments. And whenever I missed the moment, I wasn’t really living. The present is enough because it is all I can hope to manage, and learning to manage it is a lifetime endeavor.

Presence is a kind of anchor that transcends time. It is presence that rightly demands “allegiance, devotion, surrender.” Presence is the central gift of life: existence, wonder, scintillating joy and discovery. Whatever life is, it is the present. I think this is true but it is too much for me.

Though this is a second reading, I’ll not finish the chapter. Annie holds forth beautifully on trees, and it is enough to know those trees, the trees along that bank where I once mowed, are all but certainly long gone. At one moment they were no more and so shall be with all things in this life. We know, we are aware, we are present. And then, in some moment as real as all the others, we are not.

I wonder if that is what some theologians call “the eternal now.” And I dare to believe that must be a right conception, and that in that day, a moment never ending, we will finally know that for which the wonder of presence is a clue.

Puzzling, heart-breaking, stupefying: but a clue nonetheless.

That’s reason enough to learn to live in the present. Figure that out. Rather, let it figure you out, for the reality is vastly more than you and I. But if we go there, game on! We become more than we ever imagined.

For we only learn to “hold” the present when we let it hold us.

Praise [10'TH]

Praise ye the Lord. Praise the Lord, O my soul. 

While I live will I praise the Lord: 

I will sing praises unto my God while I have any being. 

(Psalm 146:1-2)

These last five Psalms are all about praise. I have been puzzled by praise all of my life. I think we conflate praising God with exhortation to praise God, but I don't know what this does to us. Perhaps it does not matter.

What do I mean? I remember a particular evangelist speaking of going throughout the house saying over and over, "Praise the Lord!" But is that actually praising God? No. It is admonishing one's self or others to do so. So the question is, "What would we do if we did that which we are admonished to do?" That is, "What exactly is praise?"

Another preacher once preached so well I sent him a note of thanks, expressing my appreciation for the excellent sermon. He responded saying, in part, "I think some of your praise is over the top." Praise, of course, means simply to tell someone how good they are.

When we praise the Lord, as the Psalmist urges us to do over and over again, we are reveling and recounting how great He is, how good, how amazing, how awesome. In my experience this is something that is hindered, not helped, by simply saying "praise the Lord" as if that expression, in and of itself, is praising God.

I do not think this is over-thinking, but since my 10 minutes are up I will lay this on the shelf and resume in another week. 

Now is time to pray.

Distress? [100WW]

David cries out in typical fashion in Psalm 141:

"Lord, I cry unto thee: make haste unto me; give ear unto my voice, when I cry unto thee." 

Urgency and pleading: the man feels his need and cries out to the only One who can help. On full reading it seems clear David's life was in peril. He seeks relief from distress.

What distress do you feel today? Pain of heart or body, broken family, deep sadness of soul, lost time and opportunity, fear of peril?

Cry out to God. He hears, He cares, He is able for your need.

Little League Lessons for Life

Baseball in western Kansas was better than anyone knew. The Little League had eight teams and each team had plenty of players – it seemed there were four or five friends on the bench at any time. Our little field had real dugouts in 1973. You would actually step down a step or two and watch the game like you were in the big leagues. A year or two later they got rid of them and put in easy-maintenance chain link at ground level with a roof over for shade.

I missed the real dugouts. New isn’t always better.

There was always the wooden fence in outfield though, and some years we had infield grass. Someone worked really hard to make that happen. We were in Ulysses after all, a place on the prairie where very little grew unless you put water right on it, and lots of that. I loved that field. Sometimes after my afternoon pre-game ritual my Mom would drop me off early and it would be just me in the stands and the grounds guy working with the chalk marker. He would bring that batters’-box-shaped metal frame out from the maintenance shed, drop it by home plate, adjust it a bit, and then run the chalk thingy over it. Then he’d do the other side, and then the foul lines. Nothing better.

There are a thousand things and more to say about those days, and someday I hope to write a book about it. It went deep in my soul and the sights and sounds are ever with me. If I were to write a book, one chapter would be about my coach, Bob Heath. What a guy. A person never knows how he or she may be a hero to young’uns. And the young ones seldom are aware how much the coaches mean. The good ones – and Coach Heath was certainly that – become a point of reference, the one who knows everything and can be trusted. He tells you what to do and you do it just because. He’s Coach.

It must have been hard – of course it was. I vaguely remember a parent complaining because her son was not pitching. And there was the constant pressure of who gets to play, how much, and when. Coach Heath had to take it in stride, try to please everyone if possible, and teach these young men about life and baseball. Of course we’re always quick to say “in that order” – life before baseball. But I think you can’t teach baseball without teaching life. Whatever the case, we all knew baseball was great fun and we should play with all our heart. And we knew if we played it right, with a good attitude, we’d have a win no matter what the score was. That was Coach Heath.

A chapter on Coach would be easy, but I also wonder about a chapter on Joe. Joe Garcia. We had a lot of Mexican-American friends in the League – which was another happy chapter. One of them, however – a young friend named Oscar who struggled in life and baseball – died tragically when a car hit his go-cart on a country road. I was a pall-bearer at his funeral at the tender age of eleven. Another teammate was named Johnny Sosa. When I heard about the Big League star with that last name I wondered, because Johnny was really good.

But I was thinking about Joe Garcia. In my memory he was kind of like Bo Jackson. Big and strong for his age, intimidating on the field, a very good athlete. I was pitching one evening well into the game. I would guess I was almost 11 years old and Joe was all of 12. Joe came to bat, probably about the 4th inning. There may have been a few on base, I don’t remember. But I remember Coach Heath coming out to talk to me.

“What do you think, Randy? Should we walk him?” Joe was a far stronger hitter than any who might follow him.

“No, let’s don’t walk him, Coach. I can pitch to him. I’m sure I can. I think I can get him!” I heard myself say it, oblivious to the youthful zeal that carried my certainty. I just knew, somehow, I could do it.

Coach looked at me and put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you sure?” I nodded my head.

“OK,” he replied. “Give it your very best!”

He went back to the dugout and I watched Joe come to the plate. He was strong and seemed to have no fear. It has been over 40 years and I’ve never forgotten what happened next. I wound into my typical Little League pitching form and let loose the hardest fastball I could muster. Right down the middle, right over the plate, about stomach high. Joe swung and the ball came straight back toward me as a slow grounder.

Joe was fast mind you, as you’ll know in a moment. I had to charge the ball and when I swung around and threw to first he was almost there. My throw was straight and hard and I watched as Joe sped through first and hopped the sideline fence in one quick bound as the umpire yelled, “Out!” I had done it!! Somehow I faced my fear, barely knowing or caring about the odds, and gave it everything I had. My Coach knew what mattered most and gave me the opportunity to face possible failure. And I won!

I’ve had many a mishap in the years since, plenty of times I should have pitched but folded instead. And there were times I insisted on pitching and was hopelessly over-matched, outwitted, or simply defeated by unforeseen circumstances. But the life lesson is still in my soul: the mix of risk in winning, the fear of knowing you may lose, the joy of giving your best and finding it is enough to win the day and get the job done.

I doubt if Coach knew all that meant. He was just trying to help a kid do the right thing and help a team win a game. But his guiding word and giving heart meant he was in a place of influence that has made a difference all my life. So to Coach Heath and all the coaches across the country in Little League fields in unknown places, baseball is better than you know. When you teach baseball well, you teach life. And I think the two go together just right.

Empty Boots

Those who gave their all made our life possible and showed us how best to live it.

This is a day to remember those who died, to honor their memory, to consider that for which they gave all, to ask ourselves if we are living worthy of such a gift.

While few things are more certain in this broken world than than the awful scourge of war, it is vital that you and I remember the cost. We must remember the boots, leaving cherished homes and villages; marching away from family and friends to serve the fatherland and preserve freedom. In the last century those boots in trains and ships, half-tracks, trucks, airplanes and submarines, in tents in Iraq or colossal buildings like the Pentagon – those boots numbered 10's of millions of our friends and fellow citizens.

• WWI saw 9 million register to join the cause, a stunning 9 percent of our population.

• WWII engaged over ten million souls in the global struggle on behalf of our great nation.

• The Korean conflict enlisted well over 3 million soldiers, airmen, marines and sailors.

• The Vietnam struggle pulled 9 million of our best into the conflict.

• And the wars since Vietnam, especially in the Middle East have sent millions of our men and women around the world to serve in circumstances stifling in every way, while others dutifully leave family and other life loves to serve at home and other posts.

The toll of this commitment is unspeakably hard, a steady faithfulness that requires diligence and perseverance beyond knowing. Most of us know little of it – it defies experience and comprehension.

But today it is for our good to remember those boots. And we are especially here today to remember the empty boots – the ones that left full of life and vitality, carrying courageous, devoted souls and returned empty or not at all to loved ones heart-broken.

We remember them today to let their loved ones and all of us dare to believe that the loss was worth it, that their loss gains for us a continuing heritage of freedom, that we rightly honor those who gave, in Lincoln's words, “the last full measure of devotion. It is fitting and proper that we do this.”

Let us remember today with gratitude, with honor, with devotion: receiving the gift they gave and pledging anew to earn it by living a life worthy of their loss.

Let us remember the empty boots.

• The 117,000 that never returned from the ghastly two years we fought in WWI.

• The 417,000 dead in WWII – nearly 300 soldiers a day for the duration of the war.

• The 54,000 who never returned from Korea

• The 58,000 lost to the Vietnam conflict, 61% of whom were not yet 21.

• And let us remember the nearly 8,000 who have died in conflicts since 1990.

It is good to see again the transforming power gained when we are willing to give all. This willingness means some will indeed fall, they will in actuality make that ultimate sacrifice. And the countless crosses on so many hillsides are testament to the greatness of those who laid down their lives so we could live, and live free.

Today I want to remember, and pray for grace to live in such a way that brings life-changing strength for all I know and love, and for our great nation in the hard days ahead. 

Those who gave their all made our life possible and showed us how best to live it.

Overthinkers Not-So-Anonymous

There's a social media group called "Table of Misfits" and I suppose something like "Overthinkers Not-So-Anonymous" would be in the same broad category of human proclivities. The very name carries the intrinsic acknowledgement of irony, a constant shadowy presence for all over-thinkers. Countless things are said to allow for too many shades of nuance until the over-thinker would be exhausted if sufficiently self-aware, and the listeners are faking it like pros, which skill, if the listener is well known to said over-thinker, they have perfected to a pure art of friendliness. Whole books could be written while listening to various adjustments, explanations, considerations, rabbit holes to consider intent of various ideas, basis for the ideas behind the ideas behind the ideas and so on. I exaggerate a bit.

One could argue this is a sheer matter of analytical bent and not learning how to draw boundaries. One would be right, it seems. Analysis is important but so easily eats itself, or tries. As Muggeridge says so well somewhere, "Accuracy can be the enemy of meaning." The overthinker pounces of course, missing the point: "We can have both, can't we? Do you wish for IN-accuracy?! What good is meaning if founded on a lie?!!" And on and on. Whether spoken or not it reverberates in the head. 

Perhaps an example will help for those who are peaceable and yet have the remarkable ability to care and engage with an overthinking person. I read Psalm 116:1 this morning: 

I love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications.

Allow me to give you an overthinker's version:

• Do I really love the Lord? (I do try.)
• You mean it is ok to have a cause for loving God? What is this, a quid pro quo; God does something for me and then-and-only-then will I love Him? That violates all norms of free will and loving relationship. What is David thinking? This IS Scripture isn't it? I guess it is OK to love for reasons, as a response to the amazing love of God. [Grace sneaks in the back door.]

And grace, always grace, delivers. Of course over-thinking comes along and steps in, and grace redeems it. What is grace you ask? [Overthinking is already there.] Grace is the goodness of God expressed in redeeming the life of all who look to Him for help and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace is a gift of enabling, helping us see a better path, revealing the very reality of God to us in what is very often the direct ministry of the Holy Spirit to our heart and mind. 

Overthinking is normal mental faculties over done. Overthinkers need all that is involved when Paul says to "take all thoughts captive." Submit all of life -- this includes the mind -- to Christ. He is good, He knows what we need and if we let go the reins, "lean NOT on our own understanding," we will find a miracle is at play everyday. The grace of Christ helps us learn to keep the monster of overthinking at bay and to learn the joy beyond knowing of this lyric: "Like a river glorious is God's perfect peace; over all victorious in its bright increase."

I love the Lord and am able to do so because He first loved me, showed me the way in, and walks with me daily. This brings gladness to my heart and puts overthinking in its place.

Alleluia!

Wait becomes Weight

Waiting is weighting if we let it. Chafe, complain, look for end runs and quick fixes and you'll find no weight in the wait. Oh, there will be weight alright, but not the kind you want, not the gravitas that makes rich and strong and whole, but the millstone that drags down. If you abandon the pain of waiting you will compound the problem and prolong the pain, trading what might have been for far lesser than.

Waiting develops weight when we learn to be still, to trust that God is at work, to give way to the vision of faith which always says the work is now and it is also not yet. It is ongoing. This is the crux. This is the cross.

The work Christ would do in us takes time and “when that which is perfect is come,” when “patience has done its perfect work,” we will see the trials of this life worked in us “an eternal weight of glory” and we will know the wait has given way to weight, to reality, to glory. When we are forever joined to Christ we will share in His glory, full of grace and truth. We will finally see that which is eternal, we will be “perfect and entire lacking nothing,” and “that which is in part” will be forever done away. And we will know without a doubt that it was worth the wait.