Doing Good

"Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you."

St Augustine of Hippo

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Dear Alex,

To those of closer ties with us, pay special attention. Do them good, give your better self.

As if we know better.

A hand coffee grinder - blades burrowing into beans, shaft whirling in aroma - is not part of the program for the sipper or maker on a typical week day at a frenzied cafe. Efficiency and gain have been pre-programmed in the crickety music of mechanics designed to purge beans “out of watery chaos into a strange world of order” to deliver the best, not good or better, (de)caffeinated blend of luxuriant legitimacy down gaping throats.

That coffee better be best for those in our immediate care.

As if I know best.

I thought I did when I first joined a new program. I had just met a senior couple at a community center this past Spring. And “by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances”, I was welcomed into a group of young and seasoned folks in genuine fellowship. Soon I started to lead one of their topical discussions, my tongue going round in circles, lungs going somewhere in smoke, life storming for legitimacy.

Not good enough so I did better to be best. I expended more energy, influence, “better taste, reasons good enough” for the program - no, I meant for the people. I hosted and boasted as mother to newborn in more interactive discussions. Bang! A re-birth of ideas, relationships, grinding goodness, nourishing souls, cocktails of everlasting punch for the thirsty: I became the rising coffee-maker for those in my sphere of craving for the better.

Then I stopped joining the group. Competing connections upon stale habits blunted my perspective. I paid more attention to better programs for me.

Last night after a few months of hiatus, I returned to the group for a pre-Thanksgiving potluck. One hugged me, then another and others. We sang and hung on words in breath and ink, hunched over rickety table and joints, stories on mad gallop, beans spilling, love streaming, pain steaming, bowels oiled and bellies rattling for something anew, not knowing better but better beckoning us to know her true. An elderly woman kissed my forehead after prayer.

Before I slept, my daughter showed me an image she had taken earlier that afternoon with a friend for their high school senior photo shoots. It was a place where I had never been with her before. The hills met and parted in brown and gold swaths, stubbly as coffee beans, rolling in a trance on mirror, my absence making it better, her life grinding and growing beyond my grasp, this program and life and creation too good to get better when the best we can do is to pay attention.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

Last night, dinner, teens around table, actually some too old to be excused as such, started to talk about serving customer.  "Stupid" customers they said, making idiocy of themselves and agonizing the world all over.  Though mostly re-traditioning stories funneled through other channels of bitterness and ungrace, the storytellers took vicarious pleasure in making the displeasure their very own.

"Carelessly call a brother ‘idiot!’ and you just might find yourself hauled into court. Thoughtlessly yell ‘stupid!’ at a sister and you are on the brink of hellfire. The simple moral fact is that words kill," Jesus claimed.

It's all clean fun, of course.  Bantering it's called, and Jesus was one hell of a party animal too frolicky to set the world on fire.  No one at the table intended any killing I am sure.

Still, I wonder, when "by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances" we arrive at a juncture to go for the jugular, what such repeated dinner rehearsals would do to our will and power to kill.  To pay no "special attention" to what churns in our heart and sputters out of our mouth is a habit to "do good" to no one at all.

Consider that.

We can't draw from what we didn't deposit.  We reap what we sow, one word at a time to yield rows of consistent and persistent pattern.  A complainer complains ever more bitterly as he grows older and weaker and takes ever better stock of his disappointments and others' wrongdoings.  "There's no end to this!" one day we shall wake up to our never waking up again.

"My concept of hell, I suppose, is being stuck with myself for ever and with no way out," Rowan Williams once said.

Yours, Alex