May 2012 – Snail Trek Blog

Snap Judgments

It’s a pitiful scene–an obviously homeless guy staring longingly in the store window at the goods that he cannot afford. He hopes for better days ahead. His bags contain all his worldly possessions.

At least that’s the way I see it; that’s my snap judgment.

Maybe that’s the danger–it’s the way I see it. I have no way of knowing what the truth really is.

On my way to work this morning, my own pack was flung over my back containing the necessities for my day: lunch, coffee thermos, a book, iPhone charger, train schedules, camera, dental floss.

One missing essential from my backpack is an extra pair of clean underpants (in case I “were ever in an accident,” so I’ve been advised). But I believe if I go down that road, I’m concerned that I might actually consider undergoing a refreshing underwear change prior to an accident. Then the unexpected accident event might occur, and my rescuers would discover inexplicable dirty underwear in my backpack; that’s why I leave the clean underwear out of my pack.

So I was on my way to work this morning, hiking to catch the train, a podcast speaking through my Klipsch earbuds. Just ahead of me, a shabbily-dressed middle-aged man with a healthy head of black hair crossed the sidewalk.

Then he stopped, and he spewed his observations in my direction.

“You people catching the train always look like third-graders, wearing your backpacks to school!”

I removed my earbuds to hear him more clearly.

“Oh, yeah,” he continued, “and you people always have your cool earphones on!” He pointed to his ears and made a grimace.

Maybe he was looking for a fight. If so, I disappointed him. I kept walking. Nonetheless, the diatribe of this obviously imbalanced individual flustered me.

Maybe he hated me for no reason. Maybe he hated the lunch in my backpack. Maybe he hated all train riders.

Maybe he hated all third-graders. I examined myself and concluded that I did, indeed resemble a schoolboy, light-blue plaid shirt, tidy black pants, and newly-cropped hair.

Then I realized it: I looked successful, and he didn’t. And I received his snap judgement, just as I had judged the homeless vagrant staring in the store window for the things he could not afford.

A prominently-placed doorbell is installed on the wall next to the door that opens from the parking lot into the building where I work. When pressed, the bell rings directly into my room, requiring that I extricate myself from my chair, terminate my other activities, and launch myself down the hallway to open the door. This occurs despite a sign above the doorbell that gives clear directions for who may use and who may not use the bell. Instead, the doorbell’s presence appears to be a sanction for all would-be building entrants to disturb my workday as many as thirty times a day.

By the time I arrive at the door, I have had time to create a full-dossier snap judgment of the demented person standing on the other side of the door.

Instead of peering through the peephole to see who is there so that I can frame my attitude, I fling the door wide open, eyes aflame and staring, mouth corners drawn downward.

And each time, after I regain my composure, I realize just how vast the judgmental swamp really is.

One Year of Life

One year ago, when our first grandchild was born, we entered the Grandparents’ Club.

The first chore was selecting a grandparenty-sounding name. So far, I’ve come up with nothing clever or memorable to compare with Boop-pa, Opa, or Papaw, so I’m stuck with the traditional grandfatherly names: Grandfather, Grandpa, Grampa, Grandpappy, Gramps, Granddad, Granddaddy, and Grandpop. Maybe it would be a grand time to just give myself that name I’ve always dreamed of having. How cool would it be to have my grandchild call me Elvis, Dean, Jerome, Connery, Nash, Bronson, or Samson?

By now, I’ve fully entered the slow-motion process of baby-discovering-the-world, in which the baby carefully hand-selects tiny morsels of food, which are gingerly hoisted mouthward. There, the tongue fishes them from the tiny fist, or the finger foods are relentlessly smashed into cheeks, shoved up nostrils or implanted into ear canals.

The baby explores all body parts–whether belonging to the baby or a neighboring adult–eagerly investigating with the fascination of an early explorer setting foot in the New World.

There’s much to admire in a baby. When it comes, giggling arrives genuine and fresh as unspoiled spring water from an aquifer. A baby is still unable to imagine contrivance or fabrication to produce a desired manipulative effect.

Why do we feel so good when we’re with a baby? In their presence, we have entered a welcome Small World, where we can understand and mitigate the consequences of their apparently modest choices. We can offer solutions in this miniaturized world, something we are less confident to achieve in our own larger, intimidating arena.

Perhaps most importantly, we can make happy and fun faces to the baby, and we will not be judged for it. We are free to sacrifice appearances to give them happiness.

And the doing of that–our creation of a joyous countenance–in turn, that generates the very same emotions within ourselves. The intentional, joyous emotion we present to them with our face reflects back to us from the child, penetrating our own heart and giving us joy.

No wonder we enter our night of sleep exhausted and weary, yet with the rewards marked by creases carved deeply by smiles and laughter, further identifying our furrowed faces as–grandparents.

Hawking Peace

It’s the same every week–go where the people are and infiltrate them with peace. Fortunately for him, his warfare-imposed disabilities do not impede this practice. And the months, now measured in many years, don’t diminish his efforts. He is a man transformed by his faith. He is a peace hawker, an oxymoron he likes to attach to himself, provocatively linking his passion for peace with an ardent commitment to activism.

He had weathered the Just Give Peace a Chance idealism of the ‘60s that greeted his stretcher as he was carried off the hospital ship. The chanting demonstrators that surrounded the gangplank were a curiosity to him more than a threat. This was all new. Three years previously, the din of the enthusiastic well-wishers for the brave young lads departing to Southeast Asia had cheered his heart. But all that had changed.The jeering was not the worst of it. The worst of it was two buddies cut nearly in half by machine gun fire. The worst of it was a girl who had decided she could not wait for his return. The worst of it was the sniper bullet that had ripped open a lung and opened his intestine.

He spent years looking for “the best of it,” the redemptive outcome of it all. It evaded him for a very long time. Peace had left him during the war, and he had never gotten it back.

His epiphany followed him late one night into Charley’s Bar, a dive identified by a dingy purple neon sign. Its flickering, burned-out script lettering resembled unintelligible Arabic scrawl.

Unlike the emptiness in his heart, he could spin his empty mug down to the bartender for a refill. This was familiar turf. He knew the pattern of the grain in the wood of the bar and the speed the mug needed to reach its destination.

But this time something in the emptiness of the mug and its spin on the bar grabbed his eye and his heart.

Yes, he had yearned for peace–longing for the absence of war had never left him.

But today, he realized it was different. He recognized, for the first time, what he had been hoping for–no war and no pain–was not enough. Peace, defined as the absence of warfare, still felt empty.

Peace, he recognized, is not only the absence of war. It is not simply a vacuum. It is not a neutral placeholder like a stalemated demilitarized zone.

Instead, it is the presence of something far more powerful. It is an active and penetrating force. Peace is a substance that steals domains and imposes goodness like a conquering army. It chases evil, conquers it and banishes it.

Today, in this crowd and for this crowd, a veteran of warfare again collaborates to give Real Peace a chance.

It is his opportunity to help rout wickedness and redraw the turf of good and of evil one more time.

A Dummy’s Guide to Walking on Water

The ability to walk on water doesn’t quite share the top echelon of human aspirations, such as being able to fly like a bird, travel through time, or (for a girl at least) fit into Cinderella’s glass slipper.

But it’s an ambition that might be up there pretty close to these other passions. After all, the Apostle Peter is reported to have done so—he walked on the water toward Jesus, until he looked down and panicked, losing his faith over what he realized he was actually doing—walking on water!

This video discloses that apparently the freak-out factor can be mitigated by inserted oneself into a plastic bubble and then bouncing out onto the surface of a small swimming pool, thereby approximating the water-walk minus the fear factor. If Peter had simply used an inflatable bubble, he could have spun his bubble all the way to Jesus without the need for faith.

Or, presumably, he just might have kept spinning and spinning like a hamster in an exercise wheel, going nowhere fast.

Remarkably, a short time ago historians unearthed a previously unknown writing by the Apostle Peter. This epistle didn’t make it into the New Testament canon because of its recent discovery. It consists of one chapter, which contains a scant three verses, and was evidently written soon after Peter’s own water-walk experience. Without a formal title given by the Apostle Peter, it is affectionataly referred to as A Dummy’s Guide to Walking on Water. Here, then, is the brief three-verse epistle in its entirety:

Find someone or something that is worth risking everything for.
Decide whether you want to risk everything for that person or thing.
Risk everything for that person or thing.