Revelation in a Cup of Coffee

One day my doorbell rang.  There were two things I knew for certain about answering doorbells.  The first was that the day would surely come when I'd be thankful I wasn't wearing that t-shirt I bought at the bookstore at Ball State University, the one with BALL U emblazoned in red letters across the chest.  The second was that drinking coffee is not a sin.

I had just poured my second cup and was returning to my desk, where the same long string of gray sentences waited for me like sagging fence posts. Mostly I’d been staring out my window, watching storm clouds through the breaks in the trees. Whoever it was at the door could be peddling sex toys for all I cared.  I welcomed the interruption.

I was greeted by two black women with friendly, handsome faces and silver hair. Both appeared to be in their 60s. They were conservatively dressed in dark suits and wore light coats against a cold, windy rain that had been falling since early morning. Perfume hung heavily in the air. My own tattered appearance stood in embarrassing contrast: unshaven and unshowered, cargo shorts with a rip in one thigh, a black, oil-stained Pittsburgh Steelers sweatshirt I wore inside-out, old sneakers impervious to the neutralizing effects of baking soda. It was a Saturday morning, and I was writing, not another soul in the house. Who prepares for visitors?

One of them—she wore glasses with silver frames--sang out, “Hello, sir!” Her voice carried like a bell. “Would you mind if we took a few moments of your time to talk about your salvation?” I don’t often get this question.  I felt like saying, Well, that will take some doing. But I don’t do brush offs very well, and I didn’t want to leave them standing in the cold, and I sensed, I admit it, an interesting story. I invited them in and they followed me into the living room. The one who had spoken to me walked with a slight limp, so I cleared some newspapers from the sofa and steadied her by the elbow as she sat down. She placed a canvas book bag at her feet. It was filled with glossy, printed religious material. Her partner, who hadn’t said a word, glided to the loveseat, where she sat prim and silent.

I asked them if they would like some coffee. The pot was still fresh. The silent one—I learned her name was Mrs. Forrester--smiled demurely and shook her head, a movement I almost didn’t notice. The other woman, Mrs. Helms, held up her hand as if warding off an attack by wolves, but she said politely, “No, thank you. We don’t drink coffee. It’s against God’s commandment.” I looked at my own cup, steam still rising, a faint whiff of peppermint, decadence in my favorite pottery mug. I set it down on the end table and tried to pretend it wasn’t there.

Mrs. Helms got down to business. “Jesus is coming. Armageddon is here.” Reflexively, I mentally parsed her sentences. Jesus is descending from the heavens now?  This would fulfill a yearning that has been a fixture of Christian belief for two thousand years. But what the sentence really speaks to is his immanence, his eternal presence, more spiritual than material, and it’s a belief that has shown remarkable resilience down through the ages, even though it’s mostly treated as a metaphor. But the second sentence was a bald assertion of fact: the imminence, the right-nowness, of the end times. I stole a glance out the front window; I couldn’t help it. A stiff wind buffeted the dogwoods along the driveway. They seemed to be whispering: any minute now.

She cited the evidence. Earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan. Hurricanes from Texas to Virginia. The tornado that ripped through my own neighborhood in Auburn, Alabama, the previous November. More twisters in Tuscaloosa and Joplin, last April and May, where dozens of lives were lost. Meteorology and plate tectonics have been staples of end-of-the-world prophecies for as long as anyone can remember. But by now, I thought, we’d be taking them for what they are. “The prophecies of the Bible are coming true,” she went on. “The signs are everywhere.” She said this in a matter-of-fact way, like a Yankees fan citing A-Rod and Jeter as proof of a forthcoming World Series title. Her smile was gentle, not the self-righteous smirk so common among the true believers. But she didn’t cut corners. “Are you prepared?” It wasn’t a plea. Mrs. Forrester nodded in vigorous agreement.

I confessed that, no, I wasn’t, and that I doubted strongly that most people were. Earthquakes are common, I said. Lisbon in 1775. San Francisco in 1906. The last serious hurricane to hit the United States was in 2005. Sometimes signs are nothing more than the chaotic, occasionally destructive noise of a dynamic system. We want them to mean something because we can’t tolerate randomness and uncertainty. We want trajectory and closure, connections and patterns, and, more than these, we want our narrative to be the only true one.

 “Ah,” she said, as if her mission had taken on a new urgency. When I told her I’d been raised a Catholic, she said “Ah” again, but in a tone that suggested the difficulty of the task God had put before her. Not only must she save me from the runaway secularism of the age (I also told her I was an English professor), but from the benighted ignorance of theological error.

Where to begin?

None of us was a trained theologian, so while my coffee grew cold we told stories. Mrs. Helms told me she had a son who’d lost his legs to an IED in Iraq, and now, unable to find work, he was under treatment for alcoholism and depression. Mrs. Forrester, who looked intently at both of us as we talked, remained silent. It was through Mrs. Helms that I learned that Mrs. Forrester had lost her husband to cancer three years ago. About the same time she had been a high school social studies teacher in Enterprise, Alabama, and had watched a tornado kill ten students and a colleague. I was silent. Here were two women who had already seen the world come to an end.

“Please don’t mistake our intentions,” Mrs. Helms said. “We don’t wish these things on anyone, but God has a way of getting people’s attention.” Mrs. Forrester’s eyes glistened.

“Is the world really about to come to an end?” I asked. I apologized for sounding skeptical; I didn’t want to offend them. Personal tragedy does get our attention, but what does it tell us? I told them that in Catholic school I had been taught that imminence, the belief that the end of the world is on the verge of happening, came dangerously close to the sin of presumption, wherein one claims to possess knowledge of things known only to God. Surely at the top of the list of things only God knows is the precise hour of Armageddon. Mrs. Helms agreed. To claim to know that would be presumptuous. “Pride,” she put it, “before God.”

The conversation turned to the mad cleric from California, whose fee-for-service business model included scaring his flock with predictions of the Rapture. Suitably frightened, they gave away all they had, most of it to him. It so happens that on the day a tornado destroyed much of Joplin—May 22, 2011—the Great Sucking Up was twenty-four hours past due. Calling the apocalyptic shots has been a cottage industry for two thousand years, and the broken shards of past failures are littered everywhere down through the ages. He missed again when he rescheduled it for October 21. Like free throws, he only got two. A few months later he had a stroke. Mrs. Helms thought it wiser to avoid calling the dates. “You’ll notice I said Armageddon is here. That’s a place. I didn’t say when.”

I told a story of my own, though not as tragic as theirs. When I was in the fifth grade, a boy in our school was crushed to death beneath a five-ton dump truck. No counselors were brought in to comfort us—they didn’t do those things in 1960--but our teacher, a nun we firmly believed had gone the whole three minutes in the ring with an orangutan at the county fair, had a lesson for us. Personal Armageddon can happen anytime. You just never know. In place of presumption there is hope, some distant time, not measured by the calendar, of promise and light, and for this you must always be ready. She didn’t say it in these words. She put it in terms an eleven-year old could understand. Say our prayers before bedtime, but we still better have our homework done for the next day.

The Church does, however, profess the doctrine of immanence, which comes in two parts. In the absolute formulation, all of creation is by necessity a manifestation of God’s infinite plenitude; the unmoved mover is all over the place all of the time. In the relative formulation, human beings are independent agents who act freely within the created order. This is hard enough for an adult to understand, but to a fifth-grader it’s a mind-bender. During the funeral Mass, I expected Jesus to jump down from the cross hanging above the altar, stride like Charlton Heston to the casket, tap the lid with his staff, and raise the dead boy back to life. But he’s still buried in the cemetery next to the church across the street. I can’t say I was disappointed in Jesus’s stoic indifference, though. I was eleven and starting to question things. I knew Jesus didn’t drive dump trucks.

Here is something I wanted to know, I told Mrs. Helms. Whom do you listen to? Whose narrative can be safely ignored? I had another story. One warm, muggy afternoon in spring an itinerant preacher suddenly appeared on the campus of Auburn University, where I teach. Students were stripped down to the necessary minimum of gym shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops. In this sea of bare legs and arms, he took his stand in one of the university’s open spaces, under the white disc of a punishing sun. He wore cotton khakis, a bit tight at the waist, a white shirt that clung to him like a sticky film, and a print tie pulled tightly against his neck. His hair was neatly trimmed and he was clean-shaven, not so much as a pencil-thin mustache or pale stubble on the chin to rough up his smooth exterior. And then, in a voice loud enough to be heard across half the campus, he declaimed the word of God with a fervor that was almost demonic.

Ostensibly, the word was literal: six twenty-four hour days from start to finish for creation; two, male and female, of each kind of animal—giraffe, garden slug, grizzly bear; Lazarus, dead as old Marley, moldering like John Brown, called back to life. Mostly, though, he dwelt on the sex lives of college women, about whom he seemed to know an unseemly amount. They were, by his account, far more experienced than anyone thought possible for being so young, and they engaged in “activities”—he used this word with alarming frequency—that would send a sailor back to sea for fear of his virtue.  To hear him talk, you would think Jesus had never met a blind man or a beggar, never offered his suggestions for treating the poor and the sick.

What kind of sorcery was this? How did he know so much about these kids’ private lives? How did he find out about these…"activities"? And where did he park his car? All of a sudden he was just there. Encountering him was like coming around the bend in a trail and finding a rattlesnake sunning itself on a rock you’re about to step over. I listened to him for a few minutes before going to my classroom.  A few minutes later a women taking the class stomped angrily into the room, her flip-flops slapping the floor as she crossed to her seat. I could tell she’d been crying by the redness around her eyes. “He called me a slut! He said I should put some clothes on! He said I was going to hell! What a bastard!” On her t-shirt was printed the name of the university. The print was small, so it had taken him a second or two of hard staring to make out the word in the glaring sunlight, but once he did he told her that the Bible commanded her to quit college and get married. “So he’s looking at my boobs, too! Jeez!” A few weeks before this confrontation she had written about a mission trip she’d taken with her Methodist Church group to Cuidad Juarez, Mexico.  It was during the hot, dry summer after she’d graduated from high school. Drug gangs were killing innocent people every day.  But she built houses and cared for sick children anyway. And she had now been told that there was no place in heaven for the educated and near-naked with a giving heart.

A look of disapproval crossed Mrs. Forrester’s face, but it was Mrs. Helms, suddenly stiffening and looking agitated, who had something to say. “Sometimes we wish they spent more time forgiving and less time condemning.” She was shaking. Then she reached into her bag and brought out two magazines and handed them to me. “Perhaps these will explain what we mean.”

I know. The zealots and crazies are out in full force, and I’m just encouraging them by taking their literature. But I’m a sucker for the written word, and the ladies were nice, and the cover of The Watchtower (“Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom,” which it’s been doing continuously since 1931) showed an exploding atomic bomb.  It was all yellows, reds, and oranges, and the word ARMAGEDDON was stretched across the mushroom cap in solid black letters. This is the lurid iconography of the overactive apocalyptic imagination that trips most people’s fringe lunatic detector, and I tried not to let my reaction—a mixture of disdain and “Oh, come on!”—show. Beneath ARMAGEDDON, but in smaller type, was printed:

                             WHAT IS IT?

and

                      WHEN WILL IT COME?

The message was unmistakable, and wrong. Whatever it is, Armageddon, according to the Watchtower, will not usher in the eternal peace and light to come after the end of history, but the eternal lake of fire that awaits all of us. What, I wondered, had past editors used for visual reinforcement before the atomic age? As to the question, WHEN WILL IT COME?, aside from pointing to the obvious need for a better copy editor, the text was reassuring in one sense. No one knows, but it will happen. For the millenarian restorationist, the right-now is everywhere and always.

I was drawn more to the second magazine, called Awake!, which has been around under one title or another since 1919 and claims a circulation of nearly 42 million per month. This is Wikipedia, always a chancy source, and it’s pretty clear whose interests are being served by the self-congratulatory tone of the entry. (The magazine’s mission statement is repeated verbatim on its Wikipedia entry.) So when I saw the cover, I got excited. It showed a teenage girl punching a text message into a cell phone. In the background was an enlarged shadowy image of the very phone she’s holding (a Samsung Galaxy S2, by the looks of it), and what she was doing was visible for all to see: looking at photographs on a Pinterest-like website. The dominant color was a restful light blue, right down to her eyes and earrings. The headline read, “What Should You Know About Social Networking?” Given Awake!’s self-assigned mission of building confidence in a new world “about to replace the present wicked, lawless system of things,” I expected an answer that would reveal the wicked and lawless reality behind the seemingly innocent appeal of technology. (I once heard a Baptist pastor declare bar codes to be the sign of the beast.) Instead, what I found were the standard-issue warnings for anyone who uses social media: watch out for predators, friend only people you know in real life, don’t cyberbully, and don’t post photos of you in your underwear. For the most part, the story took a neutral position on social networking, neither endorsing nor condemning “any particular social networking site.” True, there was a smattering of Biblical grounding here and there—we learn in Proverbs 10:19 that “In the abundance of words there does not fail to be transgression, but the one keeping his lips in check is acting discreetly”--but this is just another way of saying that loose lips can sink a reputation as easily on Facebook as they could years ago in a whisper campaign. It’s wisdom literature at its most banal.

But I did notice one thing that made me think the millenarian’s editorial eye had blinked, and that was the author’s implicit belief that the future still awaits us. That neutral, nonjudgmental approach to any particular social networking site actually disguised a pretty optimistic vision of what the world will look like—wicked and lawless, no doubt, but interesting and full of promise, too—a few exits down the information highway. It’s easy to imagine the girl on the cover marrying a start-up entrepreneur and someday having teenagers of her own, and implanted in their brains will be nano devices, invented by her husband, that can convert a mere thought into a status update on the heads-up display of some as yet undreamed-up Facebook. Nowhere in the story did I detect any thought that the end is about to slam down on us like the display screen of a laptop. Instead, we seem to be inching our way toward acquiring the omniscience of the gods.

Mrs. Helms and Mrs. Forrester got up to leave, and I helped them on with their coats. And then, for the first and only time, Mrs. Forrester spoke. She placed her hand on my arm. “You didn’t have to let your coffee grow cold, you know. We wouldn’t have minded. Why, Lord, I remember when I was teaching school, I just had to have my coffee before I faced all those kids. I couldn’t have made it through the day without it.”

It was still raining when I escorted them, one on each arm, up the driveway past the quivering dogwoods. The women were bundled against the wind, which is a near constant presence around here. We usually don’t notice it, except when a storm comes through. We came to the street and they turned to face uphill.  "We can take it from here," Mrs. Forrester said.  They shook my hand and started up the hill.  I wondered: Where had they parked their car?