you can believe the truth and still be asleep

What happened was, I fell asleep.

There are five long rows of tables, those old wooden fold up ones, and the carpet feels like moths. The smell is ornate brass door knobs and sweating wood. An overhead projector brights about authorial intent, or verbal aspect theory, or second temple interpretations of something-or-other.

It’s funny how an open palm is a perfect place for a cheek. Elbow on the table, left palm pillowing my left cheek.

The professor is saying something about contextual analysis, or a Pauline use of the aorist, or historical-grammatical exegesis.

Who knows.

It sounded like numbered sheep jumping a fence.

It’s late semester. The room is hot. My button up shirt is half undone, a “wife beater” damp and clinging to my chest.

The inside of my knees are slick with sweat. Trapped in dress pants, pressed against a melting plastic chair.

The room pulses with hot breath and tired brains and glances up at the big hand counting down to break.

And when the clock strikes free, without a stretch, without a chat, I walked down the dark halls of the big baptist church, into a room with no one else, and pulled one of those 2oz liquor bottles out of my pocket. The kind you buy in bulk.

I sit down on the ground. And I let it burn my throat and set fire to my empty stomach.

Measured doses. Like my masters classes. Just enough to take the edge off.

Class ends and it’s chairs and people shuffling, pages and truths being tucked into binders.

And later that night, when I should have been groggy and exhausted, well, I’m alive.

My apartment was on the east side of the city and it was a two-story place above a restaurant. From our back door you could climb onto the roof, and you could sit there, where the red shingles met at some easy angle, and you could watch the city fall asleep.

The blues of late day giving into fire. Reds and purples. The streets begin to glow. People become little shadow silhouettes of who they once were. The opposite, of me, I think.

The air cools, and instead of my cheek, my left hand is holding my beer and my cigarette. My forearms are resting on my knees.

And for the first time all day, I felt awake.

Smoke dances up from my fingers. And the only thing on my mind is this burning question of why.

Everything I heard that afternoon was true; but I had to see something beautiful to wake me up. To show me myself. Not the shadowed silhouette.

And up there, so far from it all, you feel like you can see everything.

All the nooks and crannies of your life and all the ways you feel broken. Incomplete. They cast these shadows, there in the setting sun.

You wonder what makes you sleep, what makes you cope, what makes you come alive.

You wonder what carries you through all the sandpaper times. The times when they say you’re being refined.

The Good Book says life burns off the dross. But some days, the heat just puts me to sleep.

Evening spirals up in your nose and down into your lungs with all its untamed vitality and it compels you. Asks you to move.

There’s four cigarette butts crumpled at the bottom of a bottle each. Sitting damp in flat High Life. My arms still on my knees. My skin tight in the dark breath of night.

All those things I’ve learned, they’re this rooftop. A vantage point.

A meta-level analysis.

You can see it all.

But does it move you?

Does it turn you from a silhouette into a real person?

Who knows.

And now, when the big hand strikes I haven’t eaten in hours, you say goodnight to the horizon and you slide down the back end of that easy angled roof, and you throw your empties out into your neighbours bin.

You breathe your last bit of night, and walk into the kitchen. Since the apartment is as old as the restaurant, the stovetop is those spiralled elements, and the floor tiles are chipping away.

The green digits blink out 11:23 and your stomach, your soul, is growling.

Your stomach wants those leftovers.

Your soul?

It wants to eat the sunset.

The stainless steel pan starts to smoke, just a bit, so you add in your olive oil, and you turn the pan around in your hand a bit, and it coats in ripples. When you drop in the glass Tupperware of beef casserole it sizzles and spits.

And under the heat, the cold brick changes into a warm aroma of life. The growl in your stomach turns into a song.

It shapes hunger — makes waiting easier and also harder.

Easier because there’s something good coming.

Harder because, you can’t imagine doing anything else.

Steam rises from the pan, and it is incense. A kind of prayer.

Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub. Amen.

That pops into your head. And it’s from the Simpsons.

Above the sink are some white bowls, and beside the sink is the cutlery drawer with my favourite fork tucked inside. And once the steaming hot casserole is bowled, and once there’s some hot sauce on it, it’s time to go upstairs.

Find a chair and a book. And eat.

I’m sitting in a chair, reading, about 6 feet under where I was sitting fifteen minutes ago. And something inside of me understands the difference.

Morning spills in through horizontal slats.

And it noises in with horns and chimes and yelling.

City living.

Mornings are consequences.

The same tank-top clings to my chest, and so do my decisions from yesterday. Easy fixes for discomfort always ruin the morning.

It’s downstairs. It’s boiling water. It’s grinding beans. It’s the french press.

And then it’s waiting.

6 minutes.

The easy and hard waiting. The new aromas.

Invitations.

It’s the desire, again. And it’s my need.

One of my roommates is in the shower and it sounds like the other one is leaving to work. The open window behind the stove lets a breeze fall down to my feet. Hot air rises.

Cold air? It has slow mornings.

This hunger is an invitation.

That’s what your headache tells you. That’s what the nausea sets your attention on.

You reap what you sow, kind of thing.

That green blinking stovetop clock, well, it has counted down from six minutes to a beeping zero. And with a short press and a white diner mug, I’m back up in that chair. Six feet under.

The shadows are soft at the edges on the wall beside my bed.

The frontier of light.

And the coffee steaming and burning down my throat and into stomach, well, it’s doing the same. Softening the edges.

Inviting me awake.

Except awake happens slowly. The body takes time. So do consequnces.

And you think of everything again. Except you’re not way up there, looking down. All meta. You’re in it.

All the messy lines in the light of dawn.

Reaping what you sowed.

Formation always happens.

Shaped every day by what we reach for when we’re tired, how we cope with the hunger, by how we numb the invitations.

By how we explain away any need for change. For movement.

Your life isn’t mine. But at the same time, it is.

We’re the same, you and I.

And my guess is that you need the same interruption as me.

The same twilight call, the same light to soften all the dark edges.

The same slow time to digest food for the soul.

You need Beauty to wake you up long enough to see your need. And then you need Beauty to teach you the easy and hard path to waiting.

And then, you wait.

You say yes over and over.

Until every morning is a New Dawn.

This topic, Formation Through Beauty, is a central theme in my new book, Heaven Meets Earth.

But not a theological theme. A pragmatic one.

One I do my best to invite you into.

Hope you enjoy it.

Every Day Saints is a torchlight searching for the quiet miracles, the beautifully human stories and ideas that exist all around us. And it is a place to dialogue, not Holy Ground, but still a place of gathering.