A Time to Laugh

While the difference between mortal and venial sin seems obvious, don’t be fooled. There is more to this than meets the eye. What is really bad and what isn’t? And who decides?

Here is a routine situation that every Catholic of my generation had to deal with: You are at a baseball game at Yankee Stadium on a Friday night in June 1950. Catholics are forbidden to eat meat under penalty of mortal sin. But you want a hot dog. Now, just considering eating meat on Friday is a venial sin; wanting to is another. You have not moved in your seat and you have already sinned twice. What if you actually ate one? Aside from the risk of choking on forbidden food and getting punished right on the spot, have you committed a mortal sin or a venial sin? Well, if you think it’s mortal, it may be mortal; and if you think it’s venial, it still may be mortal. After much thought, you decide it’s venial. You call the hot dog vendor, you take the money out of your pocket, and you buy a hot dog. This is clearly an act of free will. You figure you can go confess your sin to the priest on Saturday night. But wait! Does a venial sin become mortal when you commit it deliberately? That’s a chance you take. What if you’ve forgotten it’s Friday? In that case, eating the hot dog may not be a sin, but forgetting it’s Friday is. What if you remember it’s Friday halfway through the hot dog? Is it a venial sin to finish it? If you throw it away, is wasting food a sin? Within five minutes you have committed enough sins to land you in purgatory for a million years. The safest thing to do is not to take any chances–stay away from Yankee Stadium on Fridays.

The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning

It might be funny if it didn’t sound so familiar.

I’ve taken my own sort of vow of poverty. I’ve participated in endless cumin-dividing discussions about the fine arts (as if “fine” had more to do with its size than character). I’ve “done devotions” with every sort of program, cutesy name, and innovative strategy since early elementary school. I’ve been lured to strive for that “higher life” monastic upper-class known in my world as “full-time Christian service.” I’ve endured endless preaching where justification by faith is just a brusque bro-hug that gets you in the sanctification-by-works club. And we think we’re so different from the “Romish” church?

The crazy-making internal conversation cum tailspin that Manning describes is the life of a fundamentalist. That’s it.

What stuns me is how we do it together.

Just like the Shakers. Really. The Shakers’ individual (tail)spinning and twitching developed over time (due to outside criticism) into a full-fledged communal performance. I look at that picture and imagine how easy it is to get swooped away into the spin. The individual must persist with the dance because well . . . people are watching, and it’d be a bad testimony for . . . the group. You wouldn’t want to be “ungracious.”

I got shoved out of the spin. But I’m not sitting in the crowd watching on the left either. I don’t know yet where I am, but I’m kind of amazed at how many people keep calling me back to the dance. Or back to the prison, as Steve Brown would say.

“Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the LORD. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years.”

Malachi 3:1-4

I’m told I’m wrong about this. But no matter. I’m going to make my case anyway. Even if it is wrong because I can’t stop thinking about it.

I made a phone satchel this week for my new iPhone. I have trouble keeping the phone on me, so as usual I’d solve that problem with one of my two favorite coping methods: knitting.

Knitting as a process itself is pure bliss. But to be practical about it, my favorite construction method is really felting or, rather, fulling. Felting is what you do when you make a whole piece of cloth. Fulling is what you do when you make the garment and then shrink it to size. You knit something in wool about double in every dimension and through alternate hot and cold baths, friction, and soapy water the whole thing shrinks to a completely different looking item.

Felt is one of the oldest known ways to make cloth. They discovered it by some poor schlep sticking raw wool fibers into his shoes to keep his feet warm. By the end of the day, the heat, sweat, and friction had created something more sturdy and resilient than before.

Like with these Stetson hats.

I knit the thing with just a hunch about its future purpose. More instinctive art than exact science, I imagine the approximate proportions and the general design. And just run with it, changing as I go and incorporating mistakes as . . . well, challenges.

I wish I had taken a picture of the purse, post-knitting but pre-fulling. It was pretty ugly. It looked homemade. You could see each stitch and every tucked-in yarn tail. Every flaw was as plain as day. Yet you could see a vision of its final purpose too.

Then into the wash it goes. About 6 times. Friction, soapy water, and heat turns a floppy, gargantuan purse into a tidy little wallet. The stitches disappear. The curling that inevitably happens with a knitted garment is no longer a problem. It’s resilient now — strong and durable. And, in my not-so-humble opinion, it’s much prettier.

You need the soap. The oily soap makes the wool’s fibers slippery enough to “stand up” and the friction makes them connect. When cool and dry, the fibers lock and form the felt.

The NIV translates Malachi’s words as “launderer’s soap.” But the KJV and ESV choose “fullers’ soap.” The latter image is very different than the former. From my vantage point, that Soap is not just cleaning, but strengthening. It’s not only purifying, but also perfecting. The Knitter of our bones and sinews has a end purpose in mind for His creation. We start out floppy and misshapen — a kind of Burkean burlesque. But life’s friction and heat under the Fuller’s watchful eye and, of course, with His Soap make something entirely new.

It’s redemptive.

Isaac came home talking about Martin Luther King, Jr. this week. He learned about him in school, of course — the first one in our immediate tribe to hear about him as a fact and not a threat:

See this picture, Mommy? He’s waving hello. And he’s saying, “White people, you be nice to black people. And black people, you be nice to white people.”

That about covers it.

Being the public address nerd that I am, I said, “Let’s watch his speech, Isaac!” And more motivated by the snuggling than the learning, he settled into my lap for a viewing.

“He said Stone Mountain, Georgia! I know where that is. That’s where the presidents heads are carved — George Washington, George Bush, and Abraham Lincoln.”

Oh, so close. So, so close and so very, very far. “You’re thinking of Mount Rushmore. But we’ve been to Stone Mountain, remember? There are presidents carved into stone there, but presidents of the Confederacy.”

“What’s the Confederacy?”

Sigh. . . . Where to begin. I did my best. The differences between the North’s industry and South’s agriculture. The labor-intensity of cotton. And slavery. I hate talking about slavery.

I ended up at Abraham Lincoln’s conclusion that the South’s leaving the Union was no option at all. And the Blue Coats and the Grey Coats.

We listened some more and jumped ahead a hundred years to the Civil Rights Movement. I told him that right here in Greenville, people couldn’t eat lunch in a restaurant simply because they were black. Or drink from the same water fountain or use the same bathroom.

I finally sighed through saying, “And you know what, Isaac? Mommy has just discovered one of the most hateful sources of this racism. Right here in Greenville. That’s Mommy’s job right now — working with God as He makes that crooked path straight.”

While I was stuck in my little Public Speaking 121 lecture, I listened to this greatest speech of the 20th-century again. For the first time in a long time. King’s talking about the same thing I read during Advent. It sounds different now than it did in my previous life.

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together:

No wonder King was such a threat. Shalom is a threat. A threat to habits, isolation, pride, greed. And King was just preaching Shalom. No, I think he was singing it.