Salvation in My Pocket. Benjamin Myers

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Salvation in My Pocket - Benjamin Myers

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our being and our work, it also marks the gap between being and enjoyment. At least in the affluent West today, most of us would accept that life cannot finally be boiled down to work. The more sinister threat today is the reduction of life to leisure. A consumer society generates boredom in order to alleviate it. We are always bored, and we are always being rescued from our boredom. As Huxley predicted in Brave New World, our society has become one in which there is “no leisure from pleasure.” Again, we have closed the gap between being and work, except that now enjoyment has become our true and proper “work.”

      To face both work and enjoyment with what Agamben calls a “creative semi-indifference” is, today, the gesture of the human being who stands before God and is recognized by God—the human being who is no longer under law (neither the law of work nor the law of enjoyment), but under grace. This human being, this person under grace, is the one whose work and play can never be taken too seriously. They are creative embellishments whose ultimate aim is celebration and praise. Like Marvell’s rowers, both work and play find their place only as they serve the modest role of keeping the time in our song:

      And all the way, to guide their chime,

      With falling oars they kept the time.

      Breakfast

      A prayer with my children

      Yours are the bright sun and the blue sky to which we turn our faces as we gather on the lawn. Yours is the smell of steaming pancakes and brewed coffee and fresh-mown grass. Yours is the choreography that sets the wasps in motion while the trees and shrubs applaud.

      Felicity has prepared a table for us, and You are the welcome that nearly blinds us as we squint together at the shining plates and glittering knives and forks. You are our fullness as we pile our plates with the pancakes we have made. You are our sweetness as we scoop handfuls of sliced strawberries from the bowl. You are our overflowing bounty, our More Than Enough, as we squeeze the syrup from the bottle, as it oozes and dribbles over everything. You are Anna’s generosity when she sees my plate and worries that I will not have enough, when she hands me her own dripping pancake and implores me to receive it. You are the swell of gratitude in James’s chest when, overwhelmed by all that breakfast means, he turns and smears my cheek with the kiss of maple-syrup peace.

      O grain of the earth and fruit of the strawberry bush! O pancake of joy and syrup of thanksgiving! To You we lift our hearts, and our mouths are full of Your goodness. To You we raise our shining forks and sticky faces, for today heaven and earth are dripping with Your glory. Light of our light, festivity of our feasting, joy of our breakfast picnic: the night’s long fast is over, and we give You thanks and praise.

      California

      The future

      “As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future” (Alison Lurie, The Nowhere City).

      The slide

      “In Los Angeles, all the loose objects in the country were collected as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California” (Saul Bellow, Seize the Day).

      Pasadena

      The night before the Rose Parade, the Oklahoma preacher makes his way down Colorado Boulevard, holding above the crowded sidewalk a big yellow sign about the Bible, the wages of sin, the dreaded afterlife. Ten paces ahead of him, his eleven-year-old daughter keeps the same funereal march, pointing the megaphone straight ahead like a pistol and proclaiming the King James gospel at 120 decibels. I thought: One day she will write a book about all this.

      The idea of home

      We stayed in a big house on the hill above the sea. Everything was new, clean, polished, straight off the pages of a magazine, migrainously bright. It was not so much a home as the idea of a home, just as Starbucks is the idea of coffee and The Smurfs 3D is the idea of a children’s movie.

      Disneyland

      I am a cynic, a hater, a vehement critic of the Disneyfication of childhood. Anyone who will listen, I tell them what’s wrong with Disney. I tell them: “You should not always follow your heart.” I tell them: “The Real You is, at times, an abomination.” I tell them: “Your little girl is not a princess.” I tell the little girls: “Your aim in life is not to marry a prince.” When we agreed to take our children to Disneyland I made ironic remarks from the corner of my mouth, I spoke of compromises and the sacrifices we make for our children, I prepared myself for the grueling spiritual trials of an entire day at Disneyland, though secretly I wondered whether we might persuade our children to leave a little early. Then the day came. We drove all morning. We walked through the gates and we were in Disneyland. The colored shops and houses were bathed in a soft nostalgic glow, the streets curled away lazily into the distance, a horse-drawn streetcar pulled up beside us, the music of half-forgotten childhood movies played from somewhere beyond the sky. Everything was Sunday and Pollyanna and homemade lemonade and America. I peered carefully at a drifting cloud to check if the sky was real. We stayed for fourteen hours, until my children had to beg me to take them home.

      Prison

      We were eating breakfast and I was telling him about the evils of the penitentiary system. “You know, the percentage of incarcerated citizens in the United States is seven times higher than in Australia. And a seventh of all those American prisoners—mostly African Americans—are right here in California. It’s because the prison systems here operate just like any other corporate enterprise. Did you know that the prison guards union is one of the wealthiest and most powerful political lobbies in California? The Three Strikes legislation, for example—one of the most unjust pieces of legislation in American history—was backed by the prison guards union. For them, it’s all about keeping the cells full, expanding the number of prisons, increasing the number of people who work in prisons. A few years back, over 10 percent of the entire state budget was spent on prisons. Just compare that to schools and universities. Compare that to rehabilitation programs. I mean, once you’ve been incarcerated in California you’ve got a 90 percent chance of returning to prison—90 percent! My God, do you know how much money is at stake in all this? Do you know how many new prisons have been built in California in the last twenty years? The real dream of these purveyors of human misery is to have half of California behind bars, and the other half gainfully employed as guards in correctional facilities.” He chewed his food thoughtfully and said, “Man, I hear you. It ain’t easy. Wherever I go, them police move me on. I try to sleep behind the dumpster, they move me on. I stand in front of the store with a cup, they tell me they’ll send me back to jail. Man, it hard keeping out of jail in California, you got that right.”

      Los Angeles

      He took me hiking in the mountains and in hushed tones told me the names of all the birds. When we had reached the edge of a steep ravine and all we could see were the mountains, the sky, the cool stream and the canyon, he stopped and said, “There it is. My favorite view of Los Angeles.”

      Whales

      The day I went whale watching at Newport, we found ourselves in the middle of a huge pod of killer whales. They swam alongside us and swam in front of us and glided under the boat, their white patches shimmering like immense green lights beneath the water. They were so close, so good and gleaming, so startlingly alive, that it took the greatest effort not to throw myself into the sea in a mad gesture of love and gratitude.

      Celebrities

      It was a deflating experience. I had gone into Target on the way home because I needed toothpaste, and I stood

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