Mark's Letters

When I was nine I memorized the Beatitudes so Walla Walla First Church of the Nazarene would pay some of my cost of going to summer camp. So I have known the first one, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” for a long time.” Most of that time I haven’t really known what it meant—still don’t probably. But I think I have run across a couple Southern expressions that might help unpack some of what being poor of spirit is and isn’t.

I think being poor in spirit isn’t what folks in the South call poor-mouthing (po-mouthin). This, at least as I understand it, isn’t the same thing as bad-mouthing someone. Poor-mouthing is always talking about how poor you are and how you just can’t afford this or that. A po-mouther might look at someone’s new car and say, “Wow, that’s a mighty fine car. It must be nice to be able to afford a car like that.” Or, “My goodness, this old dress, it ain’t new. I haven’t had a new dress for years.” Some do this about their health and make everyone afraid to ask, “How you doin?”

Another kind of po-mouthing is done by those “humble” church folk who are always telling others what they aren’t able to do. We can also spiritualize this by explaining that certain kinds of work or service aren’t our calling or gifting. Sometimes we can po-mouth ourselves right out of obeying God. Moses tried this and sorely tried God’s patience. And if you think about it, the guy in the parable with one talent did some po-mouthin when he explained why he had hidden that talent in ground instead of investing it. Po-mouthin is an enemy of faith.

The motives for poor-mouthing probably vary, but the result is usually the same: everything becomes about the person, how little they have, how little they can do, how poorly they feel. Po-mouthers can fool themselves into thinking this is being poor in spirit—when it is just being poor in the mouth.

Another expression that may point the way, one that may just be old-fashioned, is “much obliged”. Like many pleasantries, this can be said without much thought, but if you think about it, “much obliged” says more than “Thank you.” It is both an expression of gratitude and recognition of an obligation.

Gratitude and a sense of obligation are key characteristics of those who are poor in spirit. The poor in spirit recognize that all they have is a gracious gift from God—each breath is a blessing. The blood of Christ has purchased us and we are God’s possession: we are much obliged to him. We are only one member of the whole Body of Christ; we are much obliged to all the other members. And to those who founded this country, who pioneered it and fought for its freedoms, we are much obliged.

Perhaps the breakdown in community parallels the loss of the saying, “Much obliged.” The web of obligation between neighbor and neighbor and individuals and the community are what keep us “doing for” one another. Some observers have said we now live in an age of entitlement where most think about their rights and what they deserve. The myriad lawsuits certainly indicate this. And the greater the affluence, the more we can live the myth of self-sufficiency and being self-made men. During the great depression, “much obliged” was heard the day long.

There is probably more to being poor in spirit, but part of it, I think, is having a heart “Much obliged.”

I have a son that went skydiving, but fortunately as I get older I don’t have to do much to feel heroic.

Teckla and I went camping! I suppose that exclamation point is silly, but it points out how even trivial things now seem heroic. We were the only gray heads in our tents-only part of the campground. In our section you have to use wheel barrows to get all your gear to the campsites, but the campsites are beautiful. Our neighbors were young families with loads of noisy kids, and one night a drunk couple that fought all night even though their car had a co-exist bumper sticker.

When we went to the other sections to take a shower, we found people our age sitting under the canopies of their huge RV’s. It may be that most people our age can afford RV’s, but I choose to believe Teckla and I are more heroic. Every night, twice some nights, I wallowed on the air mattress, climbed out of the sleeping bag, found a flashlight, put on my sandals, and trekked through the darkness to a restroom full of moths and spiders. It was my nightly odyssey.

We went tent camping, and at our age, that is heroic. This summer I tore out the rotting floor of the garage—a task worthy of Hercules. Yesterday, I took a chain saw and trimmed the rotten ends off of all the huge beams under the floor of the garage—a task Paul Bunyan would envy. The years ahead will be full of adventure and epicness!

In the last few years I have watched some friends face the death of their spouse. In some cases it was quite unexpected. I watched their brokenness and their slow healing. And of course, I have wondered if I could ever continue on if Teckla died suddenly. I have wondered in what sense those that mourn are blessed, and what is the nature of their comfort. To me the comfort seems small in comparison to the hurt. Honestly, I don’t get it. It may be, I suppose, comfort we receive only after we also die. But I found some help in understanding mourning in a short story by Wendell Berry.

Berry begins his collection of short stories That Distant Land with a one entitled “The Hurt Man.” In it he presents a mother, Nancy Feltner, whose first two children died. She now wears mourners’ black all the time. Berry makes clear, however, that her mourning is full of life and love—not bitterness or darkness. Her young son, Mat, now their only child, saw that “she maintained her sorrows with a certain loyalty, wearing black, she was a woman of practical good sense and strong cheerfulness.”

Berry’s story moves along to Mat’s memory of a time when a man hurt in a drunken brawl took refuge in their home. Mat watches closely as his Mom tends to the hurt man:

What he saw in her face would remain with him forever. It was pity, but it was more than that. It was a hurt love that seemed to include entirely the hurt man. It included him and disregarded everything else. It disregarded the aura of whiskey that ordinarily she would have resented; it disregarded the blood puddled on the porch floor and the trail of blood through the hall. . . .To him, then, it was as though she leaned in the black of her mourning over the whole hurt world itself, touching its wounds with her tenderness, in her sorrow.

Berry gives us a beautiful picture of redemptive mourning—the kind of mourning that dredges the depths of our compassion. Nancy Feltner’s grief had enlarged her heart toward the hurting.

Her love may be most powerfully expressed by what she disregards. Mourning, feeling fully what we have lost, can make us see more clearly what is important. We can look past our opinions, aggravations, and inconveniences—we see the worth of the hurt people around us.

In a recent Sprint commercial the narrator declares, “I have need—no, I have a right to be unlimited.” Now, I know that the commercial is about having an I-phone with unlimited minutes, but if you listen to the whole commercial, consider the music, and look at the images, the religious overtones are hard to miss. It begins with “The miraculous is everywhere.” It concludes with the words, “I am unlimited.” Although this commercial is selling technology, it is not inviting us to worship technology or simple materialism. It is appealing to our worship of ourselves—our desire to transcend all limitations. It is a kind of Satanism: not the kind with people in black hoods chanting prayers backward in a graveyard; the kind that smiles and says we are all gods. I is very much in the spirit of Satan in Paradise Lost who declares, “I am self-created.”

I doubt that old fashioned idolatry will ever disappear, but in the post-Christian West idolatry is being replaced with Satanism lite. What little hints the Bible gives us about Satan’s fall tell us nothing about Satan calling upon the angels to worship some false god. Satan, especially as interpreted by John Milton, is simply wrapped up in worshiping himself. It is this spiritually, the worship of self, which is so popular today.

Many new age movements and books speak openly of realizing one’s own divinity. Some new age books even use Christian terms as they invite people to actuate their own “Christ consciousness” and realize that like Christ, they too are God. Pantheism can easily become a kind of self-worship if one follows the logic: god is in all things and I am a thing, therefore I am god.

Even our approach to traditional religion can be Satanic if it is centered on us. Many today choose a religion, not because they think it is true but because it suits their personal taste or style. Religion has become an expression of one’s lifestyle, not one’s convictions about reality. Increasingly the marketing of Christianity has emphasized a cool and hip Christian lifestyle and “what God can do for you”. Evidence of this self-worshiping approach to Christianity is seen in how few Christians actually forsake sin, deny themselves, and pay the cost of discipleship.

Pop psychology has offered us lessons on self-actualization, self-realization, but not much on self-denial. We have even had a magazine called Self. So much of American spirituality is infused with pragmatism that we ask not whether spirituality is true, but whether it is “working” for the person. When cutting themselves and crying out on top of Mount Carmel, the priests of Baal seemed, at least, to believe Baal actually existed. But today our beliefs are so often about what we would like to be true—not about what is.

In both Paradise Lost and Marlowe’s Faustus, Satan’s only expression of being unlimited is when he declares that wherever he goes, he is still in hell. He has downloaded all of hell into his heart. While uploading ourselves into “the cloud,” we should be careful not to download the seductive worship of ourselves. We should beware of “Satanism lite”.