Remembering How to Blush

They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,

saying, “Peace, peace,”

when there is no peace.

They acted shamefully,

they committed abomination;

yet they were not at all ashamed,

they did not know how to blush.

Therefore they shall fall among those who fall;

at the time when I punish them, they shall be overthrown,

says the Lord.

 

When I wanted to gather them, says the Lord,

there are no grapes on the vine,

nor figs on the fig tree;

even the leaves are withered,

and what I gave them has passed away from them.

~Jeremiah 8:11-13 (NRSV)

 

“They have no shame.

They don’t even know how to blush.”

~Jeremiah 8:12 – MSG

 

I’m not sure why I recently chose Jeremiah for a devotional partner each morning.  He’s hardly the jovial sort; certainly among the Eeyores of the biblical Pooh saga, always rescuing gloom out of the jaws of joy.  Maybe it had something to do with the malaise that has encircled me too often of late, and I knowingly gave myself over to the old presumption that medicine has to taste bad to be good.  Or maybe it was simple academic curiosity.  Who knows? But not having sat with him for quite some time, and wondering perhaps what he might have to say to our present time, I invited him to join me, to observe, to speak, and if need be, to indict.

 

So it was that this morning I pushed into the eighth chapter where my first real dose of chastisement interrupted my progress.  “They have no shame,” the prophet speaks on God’s behalf, “They don’t even know how to blush.”

 

Indeed.  Not that many years ago, when a President defaced the Oval Office and defamed himself by his sexual indiscretions, we collectively recoiled.  Not everyone, perhaps, but most.  We were disgusted.  We…blushed.  More recently, however, when another President spoke bawdily of…shall we say, “disrespecting” and “objectifying” the intimacies of women’s bodies for his own sexual and ego gratifications, we scarcely batted an eye and continued on uninterrupted.  

 

Without shame; without blush.

 

I hear people say, by way of righteous self-defense, that we are not to judge.  Jesus, after all, said so.  But that, of course, is at best a misunderstanding of Jesus’ words, and at worst a self-shielding bastardization of his intent.  Our life, after all, is a perpetual series of separations of “this” from “that” – chocolate versus strawberry; bone-in or filleted, hip-hop versus classical; digital or vinyl; spicy or mild.  And if these all strike us as trivial, they are nonetheless discriminations – judgments of preferences; of what we find “good” or “bad”, “comfortable” or “offensive.”  We judge between political parties and economic systems, between values-driven imperatives about how we use resources and the relative weight of means and ends.  We draw moral conclusions because, whether Jesus actually said the words or not, we somehow know that not everything is the same; that some words, some behaviors, some choices are better than others.  And some are even more despicable – heinous, even – than that.

 

We judge.

 

Or, at least, we ought to.  No, we don’t get to draw up the census list of heaven, or punch the tickets to hell, but if the prophets like Jeremiah are to be believed – or Paul, or Jesus or any of the other voices of scripture – we are called to know and name the difference between good and bad, the lovely and the lascivious, the vile and the virtuous, the sacred and the desecrated.  It is the holy labor of spiritual growth.  We are stewards not just of our money, but of our morals as well - the very integrity of what it means to live into the image of God that we were animated to be.  And if we can no longer recognize or name the breach of it – the soiling of it; if we treat carelessly and superficially with a band-aid the deep wound, and announce, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace; if we have lost the capacity to blush…

 

…then our leaves are, indeed, withered and our lives – along with our life together – are fruitless.

 

Seeking, then, the sweet meat and the juice of the vine, we judge.  

 

“But aren’t we suppose to be loving?” the benignly kindly will ask?  

 

Of course we are, which reaches to the root of our aspiration:  to seek the best for ourselves and each other.  To demand it, really.  To hold each other accountable.  And every time we remain silent in the absence of it; every time we turn aside from the presence of it; every time we choose to make excuses or accommodations or simply prefer not to notice we propagate the "least" instead of pruning and cultivating the "best".

 

Jeremiah, of course, is not all storm cloud and chastisement.  There is that comfortingly evocative assurance toward which we gravitate in the 29^th chapter, “’I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”  We certainly lean into that reassurance, while necessarily leaning away from alternative indulgences and self-constructions.  But in the meantime, there is yet this cautionary, disciplining word:

 

Remember how to blush.

The Silent But Louder Love

“At dinner we light the candles and sit in the dining room, often quietly, kything, rather than talking.” (Madeleine L’Engle Two Part Invention:  The Story of a Marriage, p. 157)

“We have not talked a great deal about it verbally, Hugh and I. But we have talked enough. Better, we have kythed, that silent communion which deepens between two people as they live together for many years. When our fingers are touching, we are communing as well as communicating.”  (Ibid, p.  162)

 

I’ve been reading this memoir about a marriage – a subject that deeply interests me, at least in part because I am anything but expert at it.  I pour myself into the mystery and craft of marriage, devotedly but all too often fecklessly.  And so I search about for wisdom in, and example of, the art of it; wanting and needing to grow in the practice of it.

 

It was, then, in the course of her telling that twice L’Engle used the word to describe the comfortable communication into which she and her beloved had settled over time:  “kything.”  The first time I thought it a typographical error and skipped past it.  The second occurrence caused me to reach for a dictionary.  It is an old verb of Scottish derivation that means, “to make known by action; show; demonstrate; prove."  

And so it is that the couple talk with their touch; their communion a deep and voluble communication.

 

I love the tender warmth of the idea; the quiet, companionable intimacy.  But it is a difficult proposition for a guy like me who hungrily nurtures an infatuation with words.  Words are the stuff of poetry – the nuts and bolts and sheetrock and paint of my days.  Words are powerful enough to create new worlds if the book of Genesis is to be believed, and capacious enough to hold the very manifestation of God according to the Gospel of John.  Words, I want to insist, matter.  

But it was, of course, the word itself that drew me to it and invited me to linger with it.  So there is that.  There is this word:  Kything. It feels good on my tongue and lands well in my ears.  It is a lovely, provocative word.  But I cannot dodge the definitional reality that even in the speaking and the hearing it is already nudging me beyond the confinement of the vocalization.  Eliza Doolittle’s cockneyed protestation in My Fair Lady musically haunts my practice:

Words! 

Words! Words! I'm so sick of words! 

Don't talk of stars 

Burning above; 

If you're in love, 

Show me! 

Tell me no dreams 

Filled with desire. 

If you're on fire, 

Show me! 

Sing me no song! 

Read me no rhyme!

Don't waste my time, 

Show me! 

 

And the admonition dubiously attributed to Francis of Assisi: “Preach the gospel at all times.  If necessary, use words.” 

 

Perhaps, in the spirit of kything and in the present context, we might render it, “Love each other at all times.  If necessary, use words.”

 

It is the essence, now that I recall it, of the winsome country song by Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz, “You say it best when you say nothing at all.”

 

And I linger longer, brooding over the notion.  The vocabulary of enactment.  “To make known by action; demonstration.”

 

It’s not, I suspect, that I shouldn’t speak.  A muted love, after all, would starve me and, I suspect, malnourish my beloved as well.  But I am at once chastened and inspired by the symphonic capacities of the vocabulary of tenderness and touch; pronouncing by proving.  Not so much talking without words, but beyond them.

 

Perhaps that is the Valentines gift to bring:  flowers, yes, and chocolate, of course; but then “I love you,” spoken with lips, and hands, and, grounding and amplifying it all, a kything kind of life.

This day, and all the days beyond it.