The Power of “Re”

I sometimes reuse disposable Starbucks cups. That is, I can’t be bothered to use a water bottle, because they are ten pound cylinders that I for preferential and arguably reasonable reasons do not find to be a worthy accessory for my backpack. Anyhow, I was making my coffee the other morning, and I reached for a cup I thought to be, with reasonable certainty, clean. I had cleaned it last night and left it in the drying rack, so I filled it with ice, placed it under my coffee machine, and waited for my Nespresso to obediently serve me my morning fix. I had sipped almost half of my americano only to see a small white thing. A thing that looked so much like a larva of who-knows-what. Absolutely appalled, absolutely certain that I rightly identified a bug, I tossed the cup and left insufficiently caffeinated and morbidly disgusted for my 8 a.m.  

As I was walking back, I was struck by the sunniness of the sun and the sky-blueness of the sky, and the cloudiness of the clouds that can’t quite be drawn by just anyone. And it occurred to me that Helga, my dearest roommate, had cooked rice yesterday. That was curious to me, so I did what any scientist would: I hypothesized and tested the following proposition: is it conceivable that the bug that ruined my morning was not what I thought it was?  

I upped my pace down Comm. Ave., rode the elevator up, and proceeded to stick my hand in our (fortunately fairly empty) garbage. I took out the disposable cup filled still with the wasted remains of my coffee and, tabling all my disgust and bracing all my fear, I grasped that white thing and was confounded. I was standing alone in the fluorescent light of my kitchen pinching a kernel of short-grain white rice—the kind of rice that constituted at least half of my sustenance all my life. That which I had, with absolute certainty, identified as other, hostile to my very being, the Enemy, was actually a wandering tourist from Helga’s dishes and of the genre of food-things that was so oddly familiar.

What I mean to share is not merely the narrow fumblings of an all too clumsy senior.  Rather, I mean to share the light of reviewing life. Professor Barrette always reminds us in Phenomenology of the value of rereading and rewriting. This is meaningful to me because I don’t get things right the first time; I barely get them at all the first time.  I think the value of “re” is not bound to reading or writing. These days I am convinced that it isn’t just my readings that I don’t grasp correctly. It seems within reason that the very structure of my morning which starts with a careful look at my email rather than a careful look at the yawning of the rising sun is my first oversight. The orange that doesn’t have to be so orange against the fluctuating blue and sometimes gray backdrop might just be prior to an email from CAB about events I never show up at. 

I think the normality of checking your email in the morning and beginning immediately to check things off the laundry-list dimension of your day is maybe at least a degree away from getting your day right (all too ironically the norm is not normal or right i.e. pi/2 rads).

  I have begun to write the 80 things that just work instead of the 8 things that go wrong, and I am surprised, because I have discovered that the ratio really is 10:1. That white thing could well have been a bug, but it wasn’t. The world could be hostile to you, it could be a list of demands from a “sky-dad” with sadistic tendencies who gets a kick out of penalizing you for your fumblings, but that’s not the God of Israel, let alone the God who became Man in Christianity.  

Because my morning brew was not tainted by a bug. Because the sky is bluer than most November skies.  Because my life is providentially authorized and ordered by a Loving Father with whom “darkness is as light” (Psalm 139:12). I’m allowed, or rather, it is fitting that I get it wrong the first time.  I am beginning to take this as a blessing—so long as I can re-visit the error. Maybe it befits my humanity that I have to revisit, reapproach, review life in eyes that begin to approximate the eyes with which He Loves us into Creation—those eyes which chose the Israelites, obstinate and weak to sin as they were, called them His people, sent for them His only Begotten Son as Love Incarnate to break the brokenness of the first oversight, and yet in their brokenness, love them into loving Him, love them into receiving His love and returning that love to Him. I can begin to see things right and thank Him for the blueness or the grayness that marks today as distinct from yesterday and the bug that happened to not be a bug and the chance of looking again tomorrow morning to try to see things for what they really are.