April 13: Adam and Eve, Maundy Thursday, Ham Sandwiches

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals.  Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work.  The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas.  It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids.  And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed.  That wasn't in the movie.  Billy was extrapolating.  Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve.

I sometimes think of moving backward through time, like Billy's war movie.  Undoing all the mistakes that I've made.  Making better choices.  In Billy's movie, a war comes undone.  All the bombs are unexploded, returned to the airplanes.  The airplanes return to their bases.  Bombs return to the factories that made them.  And so on and so on.  Everything moving in reverse to Eden.  Adam and Eve.  A new beginning.

It's a wonderful vision.  A chance to correct the mistakes of humankind.  Unfortunately, the world is a very broken place, filled with broken people living broken lives.  Tomorrow is Good Friday, the beginning of Easter weekend.  A time of renewal and hope.  Beginnings.  I really love reading the Passion narrative on Friday, lighting the vigil fires on Saturday, and getting up in the dark on Sunday morning to see the sunrise.  It's sort of like Billy watching the war movie in reverse.  Easter is about moving from darkness to light, death to resurrection.

I'm not going to go all pentecostal here.  I'm just embracing the Jesus narrative, the idea of renewal and hope.  It has been a crappy week for me, full of broken car windows, uprooted trees, and corporate firings.  I'm ready to light a few candles, sing "Up from the Grave He Arose," crack a few green and red eggs, and eat ham sandwiches.

It starts tonight.  A Maundy Thursday service.  The Last Supper.  Friendship and betrayal on the road to redemption.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for renewal.

May 14: Scarred and Broken, Sewer Again, Tracy K. Smith, "The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack"

Is this what it's like, I thought then, and think now:  a little blood here, a chomp there, and still we live, trampling the grass?  Must everything whole be nibbled?  Here was a new light on the intricate texture of things in the world, the actual plot of the present moment in time after the fall; the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling--not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land.

Dillard is musing on the violent beauty of the world.  She has just witnessed a mosquito land on the back of a rattlesnake, drink its fill, and then fly off.  She marvels at this sight, the rattlesnake not even responding to the annoyance of the feeding insect.  It's all part of the broken and scarred nature of creation.  The world after the fall.

I am thinking quite a bit about the brokenness of the world this morning.  You may recall that a couple days ago I had a little problem with my sewer.  I paid $150 to have my sewer line cabled by a couple of plumbers.  This morning, as I was going about my morning ablutions, I flushed the toilet and heard gurgling in my bathtub drain.  My sewer is blocked again.

Being the son of a plumber, I have a good idea of the implications of this second blockage.  There's probably something a little more serious going on.  This isn't a minor annoyance.  I can't swat this mosquito away.  Of course, being the eternal optimist, I am thinking about how I scrounge up thousands of dollars to get a sewer line dug up and replaced.  (Yes, I know, I know--I don't even know what's wrong, but I like preparing for the absolute worst.  Then, if anything better than the worst occurs, I count it as a blessing.)

I have called the plumbers who came on Thursday, left a message.  I have not received an answer.  I called my brother, who is a licensed plumber and lives about an hour away from me.  No go on that possibility, either.  So, I am sitting in McDonald's in a kind of sewage limbo.  We can't use the bathroom in my house.  Can't shower,  Can't wash dishes.  I don't really want to crap in a bucket and use it as fertilizer for a garden.  (I don't think my neighbors would appreciate that, either.)  So, I'm stuck at the moment.  Not moving backward or forward.

The world is a broken place.  When Adam and Eve messed up in Eden, they kind of screwed the rest of us.  If it hadn't been for that apple, I would be lounging, naked, on the banks of a river, eating chocolate off a chocolate tree, enjoying another perfect day of warmth and peace.

Instead, it's snowing and cold; sewage is in the air; and Saint Marty is thinking of going off the grid.

Maybe a poem will help . . .

The Universe:  Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

by:  Tracy K. Smith

The first track still almost swings. High hat and snare, even

A few bars of sax the stratosphere will singe-out soon enough.

Synthesized strings. Then something like cellophane

Breaking in as if snagged to a shoe. Crinkle and drag. White noise,

Black noise. What must be voices bob up, then drop, like metal shavings

In molasses. So much for us. So much for the flags we bored

Into planets dry as chalk, for the tin cans we filled with fire

And rode like cowboys into all we tried to tame. Listen:

The dark we've only ever imagined now audible, thrumming,

Marbled with static like gristly meat. A chorus of engines churns.

Silence taunts: a dare. Everything that disappears

Disappears as if returning somewhere.

I know how i feel--shitty