Right now my life and the inch of frost on my windows seems to be stuck trying to survive our frigid cold that is colder than cold, slap my possum Grandaddy Slappy cold.
Ovens, it appears, are part of a homeowners’ trial by fire that, like our souls, constantly require sanctification. Perhaps ovens are a great metaphor for that inner work we tend to do in the winter months when the sound of the traffic in our heads is finally muffled by stocking caps, puff jackets and gloves. We become more patient and let the casserole do its thing, melting the layers together until the buzzer goes off and the recipe we have been hoping for is ready for consumption. Then, our souls are ready for the dish that God has been baking for us behind closed doors. He is our comfort food in winters that sometimes seem barren, and oppressive.
I watched a bit of news about the Iowa caucus this week, but the polar vortex in my head couldn’t help but swirl around the story I once heard about a confused man who was told that temperatures were rapidly dropping to two degrees but he went outside and couldn’t find either one of them. In exasperation, he went off into the forest searching, turning over rocks and climbing trees to find those two degrees. Finally, he returned home, disappointed, and remarked that he would just have to wait until more degrees arrived.
Well, we are all looking for something, right? In our searching we often work so hard to find that magic medicine, we might be better off with what is right in front of us, even if it is a couple of degrees off!
Frozen days notwithstanding, I’ve been taking in some new thoughts this last week from one of my very favorite authors, Garrison Keillor. His book Serenity at Seventy, Gaiety at Eighty, sounds like a book on aging, but it is much, much more. So, when tickets of Prairie Home Companion came available, we took a road trip down to Nashville to hear Mr. Keillor speak at the Ryman Auditorium about his beloved imaginary hometown in Minnesota, Lake Wobegon, a community he invented and built single-handedly and has been telling us about for forty years on NPR. As Garrison began in his typical, it’s-been-a-quiet-week-in-Lake-Wobegon kind of way, we were transported to his rural town where the stop lights meant stop and green lights meant go. Mr. Keillor’s buttery voice and peaceful rhythm made me long for that kind of town too, and as he spoke, I noticed fewer and fewer folks texting or checking for a notification about an overdue library book. We listeners settled down into the town ourselves because we knew that in Garrison’s Lake Wobegon, there is never a need to keep up with anything, that words like relevancy or authentic or intentional aren’t applicable there, and after a forty-year narrative, still runs on a strong cup of coffee with no cream or sugar or relevancy or any of that stuff. Just black, thank you.
Yes, there are some occasional sleepers that slip through Garrison’s monologue. After all, relevance seems to be the catch word for anything worth giving your time to these days. Nothing passes the litmus test anymore without RELEVANCE! A story has to be connected, sound real, BE AUTHENTIC! Oh, and don’t forget intentional! Those all-important words still tried to slip in through the back door of Keillor’s town, but they didn’t get very far. Down at the town’s local tavern, The Sidetrack Tap, a modern remote-controlled digital juke box was dollied in but was carted out the same day because it partially covered the faded picture of Lake Wobegon’s first Mayor, a man who stopped being Mayor one Spring to put in a soybean crop for his friend Mr. Lundquist who had fallen and broken his leg and couldn’t drive his combine.
Rather than leave the stories of Lake Wobegon at intermission, Garrison asked all 1200 people in attendance, many of whom looked a lot like Winston Churchill, to stand and sing with him, so we did, and he directed us to sing hymn after hymn like one massive “Lutheran” choir. Religion, Lines-In-the-Sand, and Bitterness, those great menaces to mankind, found wars to fight elsewhere and feeling out of place, got up and walked out of the building. Goodwill and Charity and Felicity came in to take their seats, politely squeezed past standing, singing people, who reached out to them with a steady hand to help them keep their balance and usher them to their seats.
I’ve mentioned before in previous podcasts that our family, in all its history, has never been able to sing one single solitary note in tune, but here, singing songs shoulder to shoulder that I had learned in Sunday School, I sang out with a kind of reckless abandon, as if I had been handpicked to be in this choir, and had as much right to sing as anyone else. Notes came out of my mouth that I had never heard before, low Mesopotamia harmonies from ancestors I never knew I had, whose ancient resonating voices were suddenly sincere and honest and true. They came through me and my wife, who cannot sing either, and we held hands and looked at each other as if it was our wedding day, and we were going to be able to make it through another day, perhaps even a year without wishing the other person would hang up the wet dishrag lying in the sink.
We sang and sang, one hymn after another and wished all our friends knew each other and that they were standing there with us, singing and being still, and perhaps holding each other’s hands. I have never been to a church service like that before, except at a funeral, where it was too late to be standing next to the one that passed away. Yes, it felt like everyone knew each other, that we’d just been sitting together around a table, all of us, only hours before, eating burgoo soup with saltines, using cloth napkins and spreading real butter on the white bread, maybe putting a little sugar on top because out last cholesterol test was passable.
So, at intermission I did not leave as I normally would have, because things were working so well from where I stood. I stood singing for the thirty minutes break at the risk of having a bladder spasm, to join with others in unison songs like I’ve Been Working on the Railroad, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and Nearer My God to Thee, and even the Beatles, I Saw her Standing There. At one point Keillor encouraged more bass voices and then more tenors to fill in, and a man behind us, who had been quiet all night, chimed in with a voice so deep and powerful I thought for a moment I was listening to a recording of a blue whale that had lost its way and had taken a left turn at the Cumberland River, and had swam upstream to join us in Nashville at the Ryman. The rich bellowing notes he added to the auditorium atmosphere so resonated off the hard wooden pews that people nearby reached for their hankies and made eye contact with their partners as if they really did love them. I felt the love myself, or maybe it was the vibrations from his notes that went through my skeletal system and right up my spine, and for a moment I thought I was getting an MRI, then realized I hadn’t had a physical for over a decade and made a mental note to myself to check my health insurance when I got home and see if it covered spinal irregularities.
No, I thought, that would not be authentic, not a true picture of who I am, and then began to worry that insurance might read my inquiry as irrelevant and would begin to send me intentional messages about co-pays and reminders about a donut hole that reappears every couple of months like a bad penny. All of this was going through my head, until about that time, when I hit the most melodic middle C right on cue and held it out there until it faded in beautifully with the choir, and held there a long, long time with all the women at the Ryman who were strong and the men who were all good looking, who brought the last verse of It Is Well With My Soul to a close in quiet, perfect pitch. Intermission was over. None of us had not gone anywhere, and nobody was looking around anymore for those two very cold, missing degrees.