urban trappist scriptorium

We Are All Ways Ticklish

Nate: Stirring Dull Roots With Spring

Michigan is a gradient, rising from the smog and slums of Detroit to the pristine lake towns in the North to the unpassable swamps and unimproved roads of the untamed Upper Peninsula. Between the northern lakes of our vacations and rusted-out Motor City lies Grand Rapids. It has traffic jams, but a thirty minute drive in any direction leads to one of Michigan's forests. They are not astonishing like sequoias or sitkas, but will enchant anyone slow enough to love their unpretentious nature. In March they were humbly beautiful, and, without ruse, force, or mesmerism, enveloped me away from the logistics of directing the youth.

I was visiting Grand Rapids for a conference on spirituality and music, featuring a concert of two eclectically instrumented bands: trombones and flugelhorns, banjos and zithers, xylophones and glockenspiels. They were, I assume, paired because of this mutual affinity for orchestration, but they were not alike.

The first band took the stage and they danced. Every musician who did not have a behemoth of an instrument danced, and those who did still shuffled around. Most of us in the audience did not know their music, but we could hear and see in the horns and bells and arms and ribbons that these songs were deeply theirs. They danced and played it out to us so their music became ours, and everyone suddenly burst out singing, everyone danced, everyone there. The band was called Anathallo; in Greek that means renewal. It means re-creation. For us there, they had made a new place.

We all knew the second band, so we could not be enthralled by mere fun. But then we were. They played a song that invoked the "Man of Steel," and suddenly - it's a bird! it's a plane! it's a legion of inflated Supermen, soaring down from the rafters to save us all. The music was playing; we were playing volleyball with air-filled superheroes; everyone was singing and laughing.

For an encore, the lead singer came out alone and, plucking the banjo, sang quietly:

I can see a lot of life in you.
I can see a lot of bright in you.

After this, I sat alone at a brewery, considering how plotting mission trip itineraries and arranging drivers and organizing fundraising were all clouds in front of the bright life that I wanted to see. I ordered their boldest, rarest beer. The bartender said, "You know what you're doing," then poured me samples of everything on tap as a tribute to my supposed libational wisdom. A young Grand Rapidian came in and sat between me and the Grand Rapidienne two stools down. He started talking to her while the barman refilled only the innovative samples I said were best - a stout aged in bourbon barrels, a Belgian-style blonde ale fermented with raspberries. The Grand Rapidian was wearing a t-shirt of a band whose name had some or another literary reference, so I asked him about them.

"Hard-core metal. Great stuff. We listen to it at the factory."

I explained why I had asked.

"I don't know anything about that, but they sure rock."

I believed him; the shirt was unequivocally black.

"I'm Nate," he turned toward me.

It was nice to meet him, but I really wanted to do some writing.

"What about?"

I explained the conference but said nothing about myself, my life, about how I felt I was missing some interior connection needed for dancing and twirling and playing like Anathallo's tambourine dervishes.

"Oh, you're a God sort of man?"

The phrase applies best to Jesus, but I still said yes.

"Well let me ask you something. Me and my family, we don't really go to church on Sundays. That's the day of rest, right? I don't want someone telling me where to be and what to sing and what to do when I'm trying to rest, right? Isn't that okay? I mean, what do you do to rest?"

Beer. Running. Fishing. (I told him these; I did not say road escapes. Jubilant concerts. Solitude. Re-creation. Own creation. Humble beauty. The rain in the evening. The small scent of bourbon in the snifters that sat out overnight after a friend left town - so many things that tickle; too many to hold, too many to release.)

"Fishing! So you understand that me and my family, we don't go to church, we go outside. We go to the forest. We just go and walk. That's rest," Nate said. "What do you do on Sundays?"

As Director of Youth Ministries, I usually was preparing lesson plans, printing materials, ordering pizza, maintaining minimal order, evaluating the event...

"Well shit, you are officially a God sort of man. Oh, sorry for that."

I didn't give a damn.

"So tell me, is it okay for us to sleep in, eat some bacon, and go walk to a lake on Sunday? Is that okay?"

While he was pleading, I noticed the Grand Rapidienne silently getting up. I started to discuss Howard Gardner and multiple intelligences, praising Nate's self-knowledge, but ultimately I couldn't stop from professing, "Your Sabbath - be it Saturday or Sunday or even Thursday - is not just a day of rest. It's the Lord's day. You need to spend it with God."

"We do, we do. Me and my family, we worship Mother Nature. Mother Nature is our God. Isn't that okay?"

I couldn't say yes. I couldn't say no. I asked a question I couldn't answer: "What does God mean to you?"

"God brings me back to life."

I considered a barstool sermon built upon "the Lord is One" and "no other gods before Me" and "no one comes to the Father but through me" and so on, but he had pre-emptively outpreached me. He skipped the commandments and the prophecies and the parables to find his resurrection.

"Okay," I told him.

It was Saturday night. Nate said he needed to get some rest.

The next morning while driving back to Cleveland, my mind wandered back to Michigan, thinking about Nate: his boys finding branches, slashing them against old trees. They romp through the offtrail forest floor, then yell for their mom to come see their find before it hops away. When she crouches to look for the knobby brown toad that probably wasn't ever there, they dump worms and crickets on her head. Shaking her now-colonized hair, she looks over at Nate, smiling.

At the windy shore, the boys skip stones among the waves. No strategy, they just wing it boldly toward a coming swell: surely too hard, surely it will just plunge into the advancing, frigid surge. But, from the young, low arm, it slaps the slope of the swell and launches a hundred feet up and away. Nate looks at the soaring stone, looks at the leaves returning to fill out the forest, looks at his boys, his wife, his life. Here it is.

I thought, I've been there. I kept driving through Detroit toward Cleveland. I meant to work on the night's plan for youth group but got distracted into the music that had played the night before: I can see a lot of life in you / I can see a lot of bright in you. I could see there was another place for me - a literal lot of life, a literal lot of bright - but I couldn't see it any more precisely than I can see the sun; it's right there, but I can't look right into it and say what it is that is there.