The Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost

Yesterday was our day to run errands, including mailing a birthday gift to my sister and shopping for a birthday gift for one of the grandchildren. Since the post office was closed on Saturday and since I had procrastinated in wrapping the gifts and packaging them, we had to resort to one of those UPS stores to get the thing shipped. I spent the morning wrapping each individual gift — small items that represent a variety of my sister’s interests — and then packing everything into a well-used cardboard box. I wrapped the box in plain brown paper and taped it thoroughly and added a hand-lettered shipping label. When we arrived at the UPS store, the friendly clerk advised me that she would have to strip the brown paper from the box, as new regulations prohibited brown paper-wrapped parcels from delivery. She explained (with some sadness, after I told her how laboriously I had wrapped the box) that at the distribution center, the packages travel on a conveyer belt seven miles in length, and that paper-wrapped boxes often have the paper covering shredded and stripped, leaving the box without labels or identification. So she stripped the box, cleaned it up a bit with some masking stickers, and printed out a new shipping label for me.  Then she made my heart seize up when she told me the cost for shipping the package. It was truly astounding. I picked the cheapest of the three options, and sorry about that, Sissy, if it reaches you late for your birthday, but I am not paying over a hundred damn dollars to mail a package the contents of which are only a fraction of that amount. The clerk was very pleasant and funny during the exchange, and chatted with Mrs. Orr about Christmas gifts and vacations and home renovation projects. We said goodbye and then proceeded to a store to pick up a birthday gift for a grandchild.

While at the cash register, we waited behind an elderly gent who had brought back a piece of clothing to exchange for a different size. The cashier had difficulty applying his exchange to his store discount card and called for assistance from one of the staff. This staff member, probably about nineteen years old, ambled over to help, never once even glancing at the octogenarian customer who was waiting for her help. She got the problem solved and stomped away without a word to the man whose purchases help pay her salary. And I watched her, this worthless Trigglypuff with her dirty hair and her nose ring (with which she kept fiddling with her grimy-nailed hand) and her tattoos and her extra hundred pounds wrapped in her wrinkled t-shirt and her bored, impatient demeanor, and I despised her. I despised her on behalf of the patient old man who served during the Korean War (he had a faded tattoo of his own on one bicep, which I could read through the thin fabric of the sleeve of his dress shirt), and I despised her on my own behalf, and the feeling was pleasurable, and it was correct and proper.

I came home and re-read an article that was written forty-three years ago by the formidable Jim Webb, an article published in The Washingtonian. Though I was a green, yet-unblooded Marine when the article came out, I was still aware of the shitstorm the article produced. And that was in Nineteen Seventy Nine. Imagine the reaction today if such an article were published in a magazine. In an age of “celebrating” mentally ill people who have themselves castrated and demand that people treat them just like they would their own family.  Such people are the rulers of this age, and they have always been with us. They burned Saint Joan of Arc at the stake, and she was a real warrior. They wanted to burn Jim Webb at the stake, and he was a real warrior.

All evening, I kept thinking of the clerk at the store, and wondering if someday she or someone like her will be in command of a combat unit.

Never let anyone tell you that you can’t simultaneously be terrified, enraged, and nauseous. I’m here to tell you that you can.

***

This morning, I sat out on the back porch with the spotted twins and watched it rain, great sheets of cool, washing rain from the heavens, and I allowed the sight and the sound to lull me into the near-hypnotized state of meditation or reverie or whatever it is that allows simplicity and clarity of thought to move in and out of one’s mind like helpful advisors. The hummingbirds were undeterred by the hard rain, and returned in regular rotations to the feeder near the porch, their delicate feathers soaked dark, their faces upturned in between sips, watching for interlopers and perhaps calculating how many hours or days they have remaining before they begin their big flight down south.

And I thought of a back-and-forth I’ve been having with a friend, a discussion of belief, and how beliefs change and evolve when they run up against reality and experience, and of how terrified many people are of finding that their believes are changing, have changed. My friend and I agree that this discovery is not frightening, but rather liberating. People like to say that reality is the thing that, when you stop believing in it, continues to exist. That’s how I feel about my inner beliefs. The ones that have been weighed and found wanting and cast aside are the ones that were never real in the first place. And yes, I know that it’s possible to apostatize from the capital T Truth, but then again, is that Truth what we say it is, or what we think it is? Am I really in eternal jeopardy if I think loving our enemies is a weird, if not downright stupid, doctrine? I know who my people are, and I know who my people are not, and when I look at what is being deliberately visited upon my people in this age, am I to truly believe that God is displeased with me if I refuse to open my arms to these destroyers? If I refuse to forgive them (even though they’ve never asked for my forgiveness or even considered doing so)?

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I am sinning. A chance I’ll have to take, I suppose. Because to despise and want the destruction of those who are destroying my people is right and natural. Like  being sincerely disgusted at the sight of a snot-crusted nose ring in the petulant face of a girl who doesn’t have the common decency to say hello to an old warrior who is standing right in front of her.

~ S. K. Orr