I’ve recently been writing some circumstantially connected, yet not related vignettes. Basically they’re glimpses into an apartment building on the coast of Sri Lanka 3 minutes, 3 hours, 3 days before the tsunami. Myy mind has needed something to do. Here’s Jeremiah.
“A man of the cloth,” they called him: a blanket term for anyone self-sacrificial or self-serving enough to clothe himself in the textiles of the church. He’d been doing this job since he was born-the son of generation after generation of Baptist ministers. He didn’t really buy into “the cloth”-the theoretical fabric of belief and tradition to which he was bound. Instead of leading, he followed his set of fears to Sri Lanka, to missions, hoping to portray a religion that reflected more of the God he thought he knew.
For the past 7 years he’d been attempting to peddle the truth. There were times he wasn’t sure he bought it. The people in the villages saw him as a rich hypocrite who was too western to give up the life of a tourist and function on their level. The tourists saw him as dirty and irrelevant. Any native fortunate enough to live in the city barely saw him at all. They were too focused on providing a lifestyle for themselves and a village less fortunate that they inevitably left to get there.
He struggled because he did believe, and he often wished he didn’t. It would be much easier as the tourist. He struggled to find a way to feel successful in a business of rejection. He spent most of his time struggling with his motives. Why was he there? Not in some metaphysical sense-really, practically, why? There were so many wrong reasons…all reasons that were true of him at some point in the last 7 years. Sri Lanka is beautiful- an idyllic place to which to be “called”. He liked the feeling of fulfillment that accompanies being sacrificial. Awaiting responsibility was held off for piety’s sake. While he had to answer to those who sent him money, his mission work was autonomous. He didn’t have to bow to the whim of a congregation full of opinions and the people who the opinions drug along behind them. He thought, he hoped, he prayed he had good motives as well. If he had to condense himself down into a thesis, he would say he was there (as would every missionary) to “seek and save the lost”.
At first he was gallant and adamant in his search. He confronted the villages and townspeople with the surety of a politician. He assured them that he could meet their needs, that God would take care of them, and that they could lay down their burdens. He learned soon enough that they had needs he didn’t even know existed. He’d seen cholera, AIDS, starvation, and parasites, but he wasn’t sure where he saw God in all of that. He certainly was not equipped to take care of them himself. Staring at the unkempt and unresolved pile of burdens at his feet, his surety gave way to the tenuous steps of a toddler. Strangely, he was recently coming to the conclusion that his God might be done more justice if his steps were handled with such caution and uncertainty. He couldn’t promise these people safety or health or food. He couldn’t promise them anything really. All he remained sure of, all he could offer, was unconditional love.
Throughout the Old Testament blood was used and regarded by the Jewish people. Through sacrifice it was their one and only means of being able to communicate with God. It was also sometimes considered so unclean that they could not come in contact with it or risk being shunned until cleansed. The Jews did not know much of unconditional love. They were too busy washing their hands and burying their excrement to infer it through a God who chased and wooed them, and they were too early to be privy to the New Testament denouement of their very own story. All of that blood would be washed away, overwritten, but they involuntarily put the book down too early to see their end.
Cross-legged on the generic beige carpet of his living room, he sliced his wrist perpendicular to his veins-in ceremony, not suicide. He’d seen enough cries for help to know the difference. Perpendicular would provide just enough blood to color his sacrifice. He poured himself onto the paper plate altar he’d set aside, waiting with a dollop of white paint. He gave of himself until he could feel his energy wane, but not leave. With pressure and gauze he saved himself to perform his task.
Mixing his blood with the paint, he saw all the misconceptions he so proudly fronted. As deepest red stretched into a sickening pink not quite passionate enough to convince anyone, he faced a perfectionist’s great disappointment: almost. That was the almost of every promise he’d failed to make, every realization that came too late. He weakly grasped his paintbrush-the kind used with watercolors in elementary school, for he was no artist-and wrote on the wall in foot-high Pepto Bismol pink letters the only word he felt he’d come to understand about a life lived between he and God: UNHOLY.
As he relinquished the guilt he’d piled up consistently for 15 years, a wave washed into his life- baptizing, renewing, and washing away his still wet unholiness. And so he died to his old self.
