Hummus, the creamy pasty stuff that's good for dipping with vegetable sticks and falafel, is made with chickpeas. Lots of chickpeas. And chickpeas come with skins, little saggy sleeves of vegetable matter that the peas can't shrug off by themselves, even with a good and proper boiling. Now say (just say!) you're making your own hummus. And you dream of it light and creamy. Well, for the creation of that light and creamy hummus, the skins need to come off of the peas. And yet taking the skin off of each cooked chickpea is a bore. Each one has to be picked individually up and slipped out of the skin. This takes time, patience, and over the course of many minutes of labor, even a little finger strength.
Now I know that all sorts of methods have been proposed to make the job easier. It may be that some of these methods even work. But I'm not here today to recommend a chickpea-skinning efficiency hack. I'm here to recommend the opposite.
I'm bringing up the skinning of chickpeas as an illustration of a whole class of labor that we pretty much wholly reject these days. Arduous, we call it. Boring. Mind-numbing. Manual. These adjectives are like the bright dashed lines that utility workers paint onto the lawn-grass. They indicate there's something deeper underground: in this case a copious pipeline of disdain. Need to weed the lawn of dandelions? Don't root them out with a dandelion digging tool; just spray and kill with herbicide! Dishes need washing? Put them in the dishwasher with some soap powder, flick a switch. Want to copy a poem? Call it up on a website and print the darned thing out. Then, with the time you've just saved, go do something more meaningful.
But what if this is just flat out wrong? Or mostly wrong? Or even just partly wrong? What if food is better, precisely because our own hands were involved in its making? What if poems are more enjoyable precisely because we copy them out by hand with a pen or with the percussive strike of typewriter keys? What if the reason we equate physical labor with meaninglessness is that we keep stubbornly neglecting to add something essential to the labor itself? Such as singing? Such as children playing in background? Such as the swapping of stories? Such as listening to the birds? Such as the simple striving to feel a Zen affection for the present moment?
Especially conversation makes work go sweetly by. There is no human gift so beautiful and everyday as the gift of conversation. And yet we discount it. Avoid it. Replace it with machines. I think we should do more conversing. And I think that, to encourage us to do more of it, we ought to do boring chores, more of them, just in general more.
As you may have guessed, not long ago Sunnyside was witness to the skinning of a certain population of chickpeas. I do not remember all the particulars of that episode of labor: exactly how long it took, or even what time of day it was when I myself took part in the work of de-skinning. I think it was late morning. But I do remember this. I was with my wife. And we sat across the dining room table from one another, and, as we did the work with our hands, that is, as we picked up peas from one metal bowl, skinned them, and deposited them nude and glistening into a different bowl, bing
, we talked. And now the jar of tasty hummus that sits in our refrigerator, is also a sign of meaning exchanged, stories transferred. It is part of the cement of relationship, a gift to ourselves that she and I made together.
I really am saying we ought to do more chores, if we possibly can, and especially if we can do them together, and especially if the chores in question give us space to talk with one another: maybe in silence, because even certain kinds of silence can be forms of conversation, but probably more often with actual nouns and verbs strung together aloud to communicate love and to create a common story.
As Eve says to Adam in Paradise Lost:
With thee conversing I forget all time,/All seasons and their change, all please alike...
Time to talk. Time to weed the garden. Skin the peas. Try it. Really. Maybe instead of boredom you'll feel something more like the return of time itself, which is to say, the return of light and creamy nutritious life.
HB
So. True harm has been done to you. Real injury. Particular injustice. How to respond?
No need to multiply the sum of anger and sorrow in this life. No need.
No need to extend the hurt beyond the circle of what's done. No need.
No need to daily anatomize the wrongs done to you. No need.
No need to endlessly rehearse the anger. No need.
No need to tell and retell the outrage. No need.
Always keep the task of healing in view.
Bring friends into your service as forces of prayer and pondering.
Consider your own past as a tool for the understanding of truth. Precedent often has something to say.
Consider relevant scripture.
Seek reconciliation in person. Legal tools are blunt and brutal.
Do not fear failure, even if you know you cannot possibly win.
Believe that there is not a human being on this earth who is not made in the image of God. Whom you must honor in person. Every person. Including yourself.
HB
Once I was mugged at dog-point. I was twelve years old, biking through a park after school, when the huge animal was suddenly right alongside me, snapping at my ankles. I got off and put the bike between me and him, a barricade of Schwinn, while he barked and bristled and in general made me understand he did not much like my living looks, and would do his best to turn me inside out. I was at that time maybe five feet tall. The dog may have been as heavy as me. Of course when you're talking about a dog that size, he might as well have been an archangel. I shook. Every inch of me.
Then, at a command, the dog retreated. Two men came near. One of them demanded money.
I turned the pockets of my pants inside out and there was precisely nothing in my pockets except a few pieces of lint, so he told me to get going you little shit. I got back on the bike and pretended to be off.
Though actually I did my best to track the three. I doubled back and followed at a distance. In a parking lot bordered by trees, the three of them got into their two door sedan. The dog jumped in first. It still kind of breaks my heart to think of that moment: the creature jumping into the back seat, in that eager scrabbling way that dogs often have of getting into cars. Enthusiastic. Full of the desire to please. He was just like any dog that knew his way around his life, and his owner's life. He might as well have just come from an innocent hour at the beach, catching Frisbee tosses. Though in fact he had just been used to mug a twelve year old boy.
Nothing came of my trying to get close enough to read the license plate. When I got home, I told my mother what had happened. She called the police, and an officer arrived. He asked a lot of good questions, the ones you'd expect, among them:
"Did they take anything?”
“Five dollars,” I said. Which yes, was embellishment. Why did I lie like this? Why did I say that the men and the dog had taken money? There's only one reason, I think: I wanted to be taken seriously. And the only guarantee of that, I thought, lay in saying that money had been subtracted from my pockets. Otherwise no one would really care. So I thought.
Later that afternoon, I went to catechism class—getting there a little late on account of everything that had happened. All my classmates had been apprised of events by the pastor, who, when I came in through a door in the back of the room, was sitting in front, at a lectern, on a tall metal stool. His eyes, filled with kindness and concern, found mine across the distance of the room.
“How are you?” he asked. Fine, I answered quietly, fine, though of course this was not precisely true. I took a seat, not far from a girl I liked, but not too close to her either, because there's a certain distance from what you love that helps you believe in its continual perfection. Class proceeded. Maybe we were talking about the creed: "We all believe in one true God."
(Who is not the god of Money.)
HB
For most of us, one is never enough, right? Cars, houses, adoring admirers, flowers, beaches in Costa Rica, sets of silver, Olympic gold medals...I mean, you could always accept another one, right? And not complain?
But opinions? No, not opinions! When it comes to opinions, we want only one, and that's the right one. Which is ours. The rest we go on the hunt for and destroy, like old one-legged Ahab and the white whale. Gotta get it. I'll take the whole ship down if necessary, drown every sailor of kind intention and cabin boy of sympathy, but that wrong opinion's got to go.
But why DON'T we want to be rich in opinions? Why should we NOT want to be of many minds? I myself say that certainty is boring. Insistence generally ugly. It's a mono-cropping of the intellectual life. A one-party totalitarianism of the heart. Away with it! Remind me of the earth, and its myriad geologic and animal forms, and make my mind a mirror of its multiplicity. Give me Shakespeare with his rebels and kings. Give me opinions galore. Stuff me with opinion. Not just to inform me, mind you, but to feed me. In order that I might digest it all, and turn it all to fuel for the natural impulses of my mind. Sure, there's going to be stuff that's bitter to me. Or over-sweet. Sure there will be material that does not nourish me. But even that gristle and fiber is necessary to the process. Right? Left?
I meet weekly with a friend, whose opinions are so far to the right, you might confuse him for a gutterball that missed Alabama. Or a really late release on a Frisbee throw. He believes that socialists hate children. That all rapists should be executed. That pedophile priests were, nearly without exception, communist infiltrators. And most interestingly, that William Shakespeare of Stratford was a superbly subversive Catholic saint of sorts, writing in a perpetual allegorical code to fellow underground believers, all aching for sermons on the stage. Shylock is not a Jew; he's Henry VIII. And Cassio in Othello is really blessed John Cassian. And Othello in general is a theatrical analysis of Aquinas's theology of the will. (I keep telling him to start a blog, because people might be interested.)
But the point is, when I meet with him, do I agree with him? Um no, not generally. Do I listen? I certainly do. These days, I jump at any chance to interact with another well-read human mind. Well-read minds are getting rare. Then too even his opinions, as opinions, interest me. Sure, sometimes they seem like curiosities of crankiness. More often though, if you dig, you find some genuinely stable metaphysical stance that underlies it, which gives it all consistency and sense, at least to him. Here is man who believes in the Holy Sefiroth. The sands of purgatory. Limbo for unbaptized infants. Why wouldn't he perceive Dante's Inferno in parts of Chicago?
Now. Should I avoid him, and instead have a long discussion with someone whose views I generally agree with? I suppose it depends. Solidarity has uses of its own. Still, I find that when I simply agree with those around me, I lose much of my own sense of the value of my argument. I forget why that view is meaningful to me. I am not moved even to speak articulately about it. I'm like a man between facing mirrors, getting littler and littler the more he repeats himself. When, however, I'm with someone intelligent whose cast of thought and habit of mind truly differs from my own, well then...
How about a metaphor to describe what happens?
I wash the laundry here at Sunnyside, using a plunger and a utility tub. All the clothes of all Sunnysiders go into the tub at once. One motley mix. One slapdash sartorial salad. This is like a healthy mix of opinions in a room. Now there are clothes in the tub that do not fit me and never will. Clothes that feel way too rough, or maybe ridiculously soft for me. They'll never be mine. Nevertheless I throw mine in with the clothes that are not mine and agitate the whole population together in the tub. Each piece rubs against the other, and voila they ALL come out cleaner for the rubbing.
Just so: I'm saying that the process of jostling opinions together in discussion and conversation provides us all with what might usefully be called the cleanliness of communal sanity. It's not that we'll all start wearing one another's clothes. It's just that the clothes are better for the agitation. The togetherness in spin.
The metaphor is not perfect. It makes sense only if, in the discussion we're comparing the washing to, everyone actively participates; and we have to remember that such participation always, always demands active, sympathetic listening. Good listening is hard to come by in this culture. I think we could all use more practice, listening with the heart. Almost stethoscopically.
Beat beat.
HB
