"THIRSTING FOR NEW LIFE"
Roger Dick
Sunday, March 13th 2005

Good morning. Our theme this Lent is “A Time of Thirsting,” so I’ve been thinking about thirst, deserts, water, and wondering about the slipperiness of language. Is this just official language, what we expect from churches this time of year, similar to what we expect from politicians on Veterans’ Day?

I’m fascinated by the power and the limitations of language. There are things which just cannot be said. They can be hinted at, suggested, implied, alluded to. Sometimes we can only speak indirectly, by analogy, comparison, contrast, overstatement, understatement, symbol, allegory, metaphor, synecdoche, metonomy.

“Thirsting for new life.” I wonder if we haven’t stumbled upon a powerful metaphor unawares: a metaphor too big for us. To say something is metaphorical often encourages us to dismiss it as a clever verbal device, not truth. We put our faith in bald-faced literalism.. I’d like to put forth a paradox this morning. It is the metaphor, though seemingly false, which is true, and the literal, though obviously true, which is false. Not because it’s not true, but because it’s so pitifully inadequate. It’s like mistaking the newspaper account for the game itself, or the score of an opera for the opera: “An evening in Venice. Lucretia sings in 4/4 time G, A, C#, B.” Well, yes, that’s all literally true, but that’s not the opera. I see that good old medicine has finally come stumbling in with the news that people can die of a broken heart

Beneath Roxane’s balcony Christian stammers, “I love you.” She says, “Tell me more.” He continues, “I love you . . . very much!” Literally true, embarrassingly inadequate. Cyrano takes the pretty boy’s place and says,

Your name hangs in my heart like a bell’s tongue.

The bell swings, and your name rings.

Real thirst is not tepid longing, dreamy desire. Real thirst is painful, even dangerous. The body screams, “I cannot live this way.” My own most powerful memory of thirst was in the army, temperature and humidity in the 90s, required to take salt tablets at meals, fatigues soaking wet, still wet in the morning, and rationed to one canteen of water a day. During smoke breaks we fantasized about water: “Man, when I get out of this joint I’ll never take water for granted again.”

Spiritual thirst can be even more real. We’ve often heard that many people come to St. Joan’s quite broken. Seven years ago I furtively entered that door back there, ready to scurry off at the slightest provocation. In three months I ventured no more than six feet from that exit. I don’t know what I was afraid of, but I was painfully conscious of being unworthy. Perhaps someone would recognize somehow that I didn’t belong. My first encounter with St. Joan’s hospitality was in the person of Echo Thoren, who brought communion back there to the benchwarmers. The speaker that morning was a woman who said that human beings weren’t meant to cross the desert alone, that’s why they invented caravans. So I imagined St. Joan’s as this rather weird caravanserai. But it is also an oasis of acceptance and hospitality. Both caravan and oasis for those parched with thirst. True thirst, even though metaphorical: “I’m not going to make it without you.”

And metaphorical deserts remind me this morning of how T.S. Eliot’s poetry once scared us to death.

We are the stuffed men

We are the hollow men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar.

This is the dead land

This is cactus land

It is the gospel, however, that I think is one of the strangest stories in scripture. I’m not a biblical scholar, but I do know something about literary criticism, so I’ll talk about the story as a story. To me it seems almost out of place, like reading a novel by Charles Dickens and running across a paragraph by Nathaniel Hawthorne. We are told that Lazarus is Jesus’ “friend.” No one else, as near as I know, is described as a friend of Jesus. Followers, disciples, apostles, sometimes dimwits, but not “friend.” Yet this friend appears nowhere else in scripture. Even in this story we don’t hear from him. Mary, Martha, the disciples speak of literal death, Jesus uses language on quite another level. Sometimes it seems like two stories woven together, or the same story by two different authors, one emphasizing the humanity of Jesus, the other his divinity. Outside of the passion, I’m not sure that there’s another picture of a more helpless, grieving, vulnerable, human Jesus. Yet at the end he speaks in a very commanding, even stentorian voice. And the story leaves us in midair, with a corpse walking toward us. Literally it is very macabre, almost ghoulish story, with a strong whiff of decay and the briefest glimpse of a zombie. Can you imagine what Mel Gibson might do with this story?

I used to tell my students that I believed in zombies, in the living dead, as in John Updike’s “Ex-Basketball Player”:

Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,

Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off

Before it has a chance to go two blocks,

At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage

Is on the corner facing west, and there,

Most days, you’ll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.

Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps –

Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,

Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.

One’s nostrils two S’s, and his eyes

An E. and O. And one is squat, without

A head at all – more of a football type.

Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.

He was good: in fact, the best. In ‘46

He bucketed three hundred ninety points,

A county record still. The ball loved Flick.

I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty

In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.

He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,

Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,

As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,

But most of us remember anyway.

His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.

It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.

Off work, he hangs around Mae’s luncheonette.

Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,

Sips lemon cokes and smokes thin cigars;

Flick seldom speaks to Mae, just sits and nods

Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers

Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

We all know zombies, perhaps we’ve been there ourselves, merely existing from one fix to the next, alcohol, drugs, sex, the latest consumer product, a needy lovebite. What a horrible price Dracula pays to cling to his life, if that can be called a life. Sometimes our public facades are stripped away and we stand naked: Michael Jackson, Martha Stewart, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton. Imagine the double lives of those priests guilty of sexual abuse? They walk, they talk, they smile, they grin. Like zombies they look alive. One sometimes wonders if anyone is what they appear to be. With the reports from Abu Graib and Guantanamo we hardly even recognize our own national character.

The newspaper account of what may be a literal historical event tells us Christ raised his friend from the dead. It is the metaphor that thunders. Christ cries in a loud voice to each of us, “Lazarus, come out!” And we need to be unbound from those burial shrouds keeping us from new life.

In stunning contrast to that world of putrefaction is the God of new life. Walter Brueggemann in The Prophetic Imagination introduces a concept I’d never considered. The phrase itself thrilled me: “the freedom of God.” Many of us fancy ourselves the writer of our own script, casting ourselves as the star of the show and assigning God the role of best supporting actor. We try to domesticate him, tame him, but he refuses to be harnessed or tethered, caged or boxed in. God is an outrageous revolutionary. Always doing the high-wire, death-defying act, the impossible, the unimaginable. He turns our expectations topsy-turvy. A baby will be born in the geriatric ward. I will give the patrimony to the lying little mamma’s boy. I will reject seven strapping, virile hunks and give the kingdom to Little Boy Blue. The Messiah will be a nobody born to a nobody in nowheresville.

Those old Hollywood romantic comedies got it only half-right. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl, they kiss, wedding bells, and the words “The End.” But even you and I know it could more accurately have been labeled “The Beginning.”

One personal example of unimaginable new life. Nine years ago she was a high school student of mine. She wore baggy sweatshirts so no one would notice her figure. She hugged the walls, fearful of the popular ones, the entitled ones. Of Irish-Lebanese descent she lived in dread that her father might make an arranged marriage for her and she would disappear into some harem as two of her thirteen-year-old cousins had done. She must be about 27 now. I received this letter about two weeks after Christmas.

Carlos has begun a new project in Caracas, Venezuela, but I have remained in Paris so I could finish my Arabic classes at the Sorbonne.

Studying classical Arabic has opened a whole new part of my brain. Sometimes it feels like another heartbeat, another life force. Hours will pass as I fill page after page with the beautiful script. I dream that as I speak English, the words pour out of my mouth like smoke, transliterated into Arabic. Working out the grammar creates a strange sensation, like the brain is doing flips inside the head, slowly rolling over.

I am terribly sad to leave Paris. As I packed, snow fell for the first time this year and from my window I watched the top of the Sorbonne turn from green to white. I am sad to leave the island, the river, the nuns from the Notre Dame across the bridge who sell me honey and soap and post cards of Medieval Virgins with babies that look strangely like little adults. They are such lovely pictures. The one I’m sending is of a 19th century Russian icon, the Virgin Kazanskaya, whose child does look like a diminutive old man.

If you had told me seven years ago that I would be standing up here speaking, I might have responded, “Of course. And what do you think of that new little Martian restaurant on the dark side of the moon?”

Not many have expressed their own spiritual thirst and emptiness better than the Victorian Jesuit priest-poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.

Why do sinners’ ways prosper? And why must

Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,

How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost

Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust

Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,

Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes

Now, leaved how thick! Laced they are again

With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes

Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,

Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.

Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.