I Used to Be Smart.

They told me today that Mother Theresa wasn’t really sure that she ever believed at all.

That’s what they say. They she couldn’t hear the voice of God. They say her life was filled with some sort of great empty void.

So they think that Mother Theresa never believed at all. They think that she must have been a tragedy beyond words, this little lady.

They might be right. Maybe we should all be shaken. Maybe we should all be rattled to the core by this little lady who gave her whole live to destitute poverty and ended up so absorbed in silence that she could not hear the voice of God. Maybe we should think that we stand no chance. If the latter stages of her life were spent in a state of silence and void, what hope do we ever have? Should we despair completely? Should we abandon this whole project of believing? Should we be filled with pity? Lament a life spent wasted?

What do we do? Surely it is troubling. Do we relegate her to eternal torment because of symptoms that reveal a deeper disease of unbelief? Is that it? Has a sure saint, before our eyes, been transformed into a tragic figure? A pitiable clown whose life was wrecked by the inertia of things she did not really believe? Is that what we’re faced with?

Or have we gotten it all wrong? Have we missed the point? Do we not understand what the silence that Mother Theresa encountered really means? Could pity be a misplaced sentiment? Could our confusion be unfounded? Could despair be a naive sentiment?

When we hear the news of the profound silence that Mother Theresa encounters, should we instead break out in an uncontrollable smile? Even as she struggles with a silence whose meaning she has yet to learn, should we rejoice that she’s found such a void?

Could it be true that, rather than being found in a peculiar place of unbelief, that Mother Theresa had found herself in a unique state of belief that we could only hope to entertain? Could it be that Mother Theresa had encountered God in a way that few could start to comprehend?

Could she have entered the place that transcends belief? Could she have come to a place where her interactions with God became something that, “surpass all understanding?” Could she have come to a place where God was no set of cognitive proposition, no bracket of emotional responses? Could she be experience God on an irrational, incomprehensible level?

There is a long tradition that God is encountered most intensely in the silence, in the nothingness. Had she encountered there? Had she listened, and found God not in the whirlwind, but in the silence after? Had she searched and found God not in fickle endorphins moving through cells to produce fickle euphoria, but in a silence that was so indescribable it was troubling? Had she thought, and found God not in the fading electrical impulses that flicker across synapses, but in a place that mere words cannot possibly describe?

I cannot say. I can only listen.

(This parenthetical introduction has nothing to do with what I actually want to write. I’m sorry. Really, what I’m doing is, first of all, copying something that Dave Eggers would do. Sorry, Dave. Second, I’m entirely too self-aware, so instead of writing what I want to write, I’m writing this aside to tell you why I’m writing what I’m writing. That become, in itself, a task of writing. If you read anything that I write, you know that I haven’t written with any consistency for a while, so getting back into the habit of writing has been a little difficult. Everything feels a little rusty. To use a very silly metaphor, I’m the Tin Man and I need my oil can. So I’m trying. I’m trying to loosen all the stiff joints back up and rejoin some sort of already-happening creative process, but it is difficult. Creativity has been difficult, so I’ve mostly stuck to imitation. I’ve especially been imitating Bob Dylan, and his rambling “Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie”. Bob’s poetry is better than my inane ramblings, so should read that so you can see what’s been in my crazy head lately. So, I say all of that to say this: I think the joints are getting loose again, I want to start doing some things with a different sort of creativity, so I’ll be trying — and I probably won’t do very well. I do hope that there are some folks out there who are still reading this, and that those folks will care enough to join in a renewed creative process with me. So, please do. Join in. Help me help me.)

You can find the soul of a company not in what it says, but in what it does.

The truth of a company’s intention are not found in any cleverly worded press-release or any sanitized press release. The heart of a company cannot be distilled into well-worded advertising or summed up in a glib slogan.

No, the real soul of a company is to be found in the way that company does business every day. The real heart of a company lies in how it treats those who consume its product and the means by which that company will seek its ends.

What is this monster called money that we have created? What is this abstraction that rules every one of our waking seconds? Is the currency the evil, or are those bills and those account balances merely the objectification of an evil hidden deeply within the human soul?

I know what it is like to be the cog in a machine. I know what it is like to become the predator of the money of those weaker than me. I know the shame of preying on the weak. I know the sly ways in which the truth can be conveniently altered or “innocently” forgotten. I know what it means to stare into the face of a machine that will eat you alive and spit you out if you do not play your part.

I have seen the hard choices that money forces people to make. I have seen the way it gets under our skin. I have seen all of the ways we turn to it for comfort. I have seen the ways we make it our solace. I have witnessed as we look to it for our validation. I have seen the ways in which we wear our bank accounts on our sleeves — just praying that someone will take notice. It’s all the ways we say, “Look at me. Look at what I have. Look at what I made. Look at what I can afford. Look at what makes me better than him. Look! Look! This makes me a man. This makes me good enough and this makes me strong enough and this makes me hard enough.” It’s all of the ways we preen and strut. It makes us animals. We’re all locking horns because we know the women are watching. We all have our tail-feathers on display because we never know who might be near. We’re all screaming from the tops of tress in hopes that someone who matters may here us. And on my way up, I’m planting my foot in your face, and using you for leverage — because that’s all you are. You are good to me insofar as I can gain from you. After that you are disposable.

And I bet those are all just symptoms. I bet it’s all just part of some disease. We’ve always had it. Sometimes we’re aware of it. Sometimes, in startling moments of clarity we become our doctors, almost capable of self-diagnosis.

But we stand no chance.

We are bowled over by the inertia of the disease. We are powerless to stop it. Our roots are tangled so deeply now that removing them from this ground would be more painful than we could possibly imagine. We do not even know where to stop digging, and the more shovel back the dirt, the more tangled the whole affair becomes. We never stood a chance. We have been marked for death before we even had any idea we were alive. Stood up against a wall, blindfolded and dumb, struggling against the ropes that bind us. By the time we have freed ourselves enough to lift a blindfold from any eye we may have time to see a flash from a muzzle before our untimely termination.

So we flail. We flail about, hoping to grab something that sticks. Praying that we grab something that lasts, but each thing we latch on to eventually breaks free. So we careen, appendages whipping wildly about us, hoping that we can find the next solid thing, and we cling even more tightly to the next thing, because we have no idea how long that one will last. And if we’re lucky enough to find a solid enough spot to stand, we become like children at “King of the Hill,” or, worse yet, like surly animals defending a bit of territory — pissing in corners and thumping our chests. “This hill is mine. This ground is mine. This thing to which I cling is mine and mine alone and you will not share in what I have found because I need this thing. I need this thing to prove something to someone. I need this thing to show you that I belong. I need this hill to show that I am important. I need this hill to show you I am good enough.”

And it’s all bullshit. It is.

(This is poorly written. I make no apologies. I just needed to say a few things before they got lost in the muck of my brain.)

We’ve all seen the stock footage on the news. Waddling down the street in some unnamed large city, Fat America is here. The statistics are all ridiculous. Americans are fat. There’s not a bit of doubt about that. Being in Kentucky, I live in one of the fattest states in America.

Why? Why are we so fat?

Most people blame the obese. It must be their fault. It must be their poor choices. It must be their lack of discipline. It must be their ignorance. They must be willfully fat.

I disagree. Something else is going on. The food system in America is very, very broken.

The bottom line is this: food is profitable. Food is very profitable. And we all know what is true — Big Food (like any of the Big businesses) exists for the sake of profit. Their goal is not our health. Their goal is their profit.

That all leads to a sick chain of events. You see — Big Food will aggressively sell two things — what people like and what is cheap. High volume + high margins = high profit.

Americans, it seems, have a strong response to two particular types of food — sugar and fat. It’s undeniable. Think of all your favorite foods. List all of your indulgences. They’re all either sugar, fat, or some combination of the two.

Big Food is well aware of this. Big Food knows the things you respond to. Big Food is well aware what we crave. Big Food knows exactly what I will shove into my face at an alarming rate.

However, big food, for many years, has had a problem. It’s a problem humans have known about for years. Sugar and fat are expensive. It’s labor intensive and expensive to process sugar from cane. Fat is in the same boat. Most of the fat we consume is derived from animal products. Animals are expensive and labor intensive to keep and process.

From a profit standpoint — that is a disaster. The things that people want the most are the hardest to obtain.

So, if you’re big food — what do you do? You find a way to increase the profit margins on the things that people want the most. You figure out a way to make it cheaper and easier to produce sugar and fat.

These things have invaded our diets. High Fructose Corn Syrup. Hydrogenated Oils. Trans Fats. They’re all a product of Big Food’s desire to make sugar and fat available more cheaply and readily.

Our bodies were not designed to have sugars and fats in such high quantities. There is a reason that those things are so hard to obtain. Our bodies simply were not designed to have easy access to large quantities of fat and sugar. Big Food, however, does not care. Big Food will never choose ethics over profits.

That will doom us to our fatness. As long as the powerful forces with aggressive marketing continue to push the things that will make us fat, we stand no chance. To eat well will require us to be incredibly well-informed, incredibly self-disciplined, and it will require a large amount of money. Most Americans are not willing to those things.

So it’s tough. The battle against Big Food for Good Food is an uphill battle. It requires diligence and patience, and it’s never, ever easy.

But, as a reformed fatty — it’s worth it.

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I love all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation…”
– Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Early this afternoon, I walked into a Wal-Mart in a tiny town in Kentucky. I stepped passed the carts without acknowledging the retiree stationed there to make me feel welcome. The store opened up into a great flood of beeping, rattling, and jostling. The express lane, as usual, was backed up. The clerk in lane one was cute, I would have to remember to go through her line. Kids clamored for things they did not need, and parents kept rebuffing even the most skill of advances. Fat folks pushed carts filled with prescriptions and sugar.

In a single moment, I was overwhelmed by something I did not know I had the capacity to feel.

I was utterly reviled by all of these people. I could not stand to be near them. I could not stand the thought of them. I looked down on every one of them. I was utterly cut off.

And in all of that, in all of my anger, and in my rush to judgment, and even in the middle of the deplorable thing that was my revulsion, I remembered words that I had read so many times. Words that have been in my head since the second I read them, and I had to stop and wonder what I had become. Who was this man who had come to revile the people that he was called to love? What happened? Where did my heart get hard? I can’t possibly articulate the way that makes this sadness settle down over me, and press down on my shoulders. I can’t describe the way it makes a chill settle down in the deepest part of me, and gives me the strongest sense that something is utterly, desperately broken, and I am absolutely unable to fix it.

And in the middle of that great weight, I started to take in what I knew was true. I found it to be like a new drink. I have to take it in, explore it, and even after I swallow it, deal with what it leaves behind, and what it will do to me. I found the truth difficult to stomach. I still find the truth difficult stomach, and I wonder if I am brave enough to even attempt to set out on the path of living the truth.

The thing I must remember sounds easy enough. I have glossed over it a million times in my head. I have insisted that others know it is true — but I have never once understood it myself. I still don’t. I’m not sure that I’m willing to understand the truth.

It’s easy to love the truly destitute. It’s easy to love the obviously broken. It’s easy to love the definitely marginal. It is. We have convinced ourselves that it is hard, but it is not. It is easy to see that those people need something. It is easy to pour our hearts out to them. It is not problem for us to love them intensely. It is easy to see that they need much love. It takes little work to stir up our emotions in regard to overtly needy. If we look deeply enough, we know that to be true. The people who are least like us are the easiest people to love.

It is when we walk into a huge retail store, surrounded by people who look just like and our families that we have difficulty loving. Those people who are most like us are the people that we revile.

What is so hard is that Jesus did not care. Jesus made no distinctions. Jesus expected — no — Jesus demanded that each person that we encounter be give the same treatment. The most easily loved person is no different than the least easily loved person.

The fat lady at Wal-Mart with a basket full of brand-name drugs and high fructose corn syrup. The young mother who not only will not control her children, but seems as if she couldn’t make them be quiet if she wanted to. All of them. The ignorant ladies talking politics in the aisle by the dish towels. The wrinkled, white power-brokers who insist on making well-meaning people the cogs in their profit-churning machines. Jesus says to love every damned one of them like there is no difference between them and myself.

I can’t describe how hard that is. There are not words in the English language that can do that. I can’t even shock you with enough vulgarity to make it clear how hard that is. If you understand, it is clear. If you do not, I cannot make you understand.

So often, we do not want to love. So often, I do not want to love. I feel justified in hanging on to my revulsions and my hang-ups. There is no justification. Everyone around us will be sure that we have gone crazy, and they will not be wrong, for this is madness. It is madness to commit to loving the people that we refuse to love. It is madness to love the person that belittles us. It is madness to love those who seek to marginalize our lives. It is madness to love those what would oppress us. It is madness to love those with whom we disagree. And those are all abstractions, but it is so very real. It is madness to love the customer who yells at me and belittles for something that is absolutely not my fault. It is madness to love the boss who sees me as nothing more than a tool to fatten his paycheck. It is madness to love the co-worker who is incompetent and bungling to the point of absurdity. It’s all madness.

Red-faced, we cling to our revulsions and our hatreds. We think they are justified. We let them define us. We let others define us by who we hate. We think it is our right to be pissed off, but it is not. It never was. We gave that all up when we committed to this life. We committed ourselves to madness. There is no other way.

So I sit here. Shocked. Shocked at who I have become, and I can’t get it out of my head. I see like a scene from a movie. I see this little bald monk on a street corner in Louisville. And as the people walks by him, he stands there, astonished at what he has finally discovered. And the longer he stands there, the more people he sees. They all speed up and become a blur. He’s surrounded by this indistinguishable mass of people, and he stands there, smiling like a crazy man because he is utterly perplexed at this thing he has just discovered and that he cannot wait to try to put to words, and I have no idea how that must have felt. And I see that there is this journey ahead of me, and I know that I have choice. I know that I can set out on this journey. I know that I can start to become the man I have always wanted to be, or I know that I can shrink back in fear, afraid of many things.

It’s a hard, road I can see, and from where I’m standing, it’s all uphill.

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