beyond the need for a miracle. I, however, have my doubts. Starbucks, I think, is science and math. Starbucks has taken the miracle of golden espresso streaming into a warm, porcelain demitasse and made it into an equation, the outcome being a predictably hot, milky beverage with caffeine and a measured squirt of some artificial, seasonally appropriate flavored sweetener—pumpkin pie or cinnamon, maybe—to mask any possible bitterness. Ordering your drink at Starbucks is easy, and you can expect your drink to be served quickly. The goal is to inspire warm, sentimental feelings, repeat customers, and brand loyalty, but only in the most unusual and exceptionally rare case could it ever inspire something like genuine love.
But great coffee—capital-c Coffee—requires sensual people, bodies that are attentive to taste, touch, and smell, fleshy human beings doing the kind of work that no machine will ever do: love. All of this strikes me as fundamentally miraculous, not just because coffee tastes so good, but because it is there at all. That good espresso exists—that anything exists—brings us into the direct glare of the fundamental miracle of being, the very thing that inspired even the curmudgeonly atheist Edward Abbey to write: “To me the most mysterious thing about the universe is not its comprehensibility but the fact that it exists. And the same mystery attaches to everything within it. The world is permeated through and through with mystery.”[4] The world is here when there might just as well have been nothing at all—no coffee plants, nobody to run the roasters, no espresso machines, no you, no me, nothing—but here it is anyways, a perfect double-shot, and here I am, enjoying the smell of it, and there you are, reading about it. Big Bang or big-c Creation, take your pick, but here we are, billions of years after the fact, and I’m sitting here with a glass of cold water and a demitasse of double-shot house espresso that my friend just served me, and judging by the smell and look of it, it’s going to be good. I call that miraculous.
Little things, of course, but then almost all of life is made up of precisely those sorts of little things, and if we spend all of our time waiting around for the big things, we’ll end up missing nearly everything. So Thank God, I say! Thank God for coffee beans, for the farmers who grow them, and the fires that roast them. Thank God for the engineers who design the grinders, and the friction that turns roasted beans into freshly ground coffee. Thank God for boiling water, gravity, taste buds, and for the ongoing miracle of long-chain carbon molecules that make that double ristretto taste so damn good.
[1]. Lynch, “Fish Stories,” 153–54.
[2]. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 13.
[3]. Ibid., 16.
[4]. Abbey, “Watching, the Birds: The Windhover,” 51.
10
The Insufficient Self
For as long as I can remember, I have always been falling in love.
When I was four I fell in love with Carolyn, the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Her parents were good friends of my parents, so it felt like destiny that we should be together. I remember visiting them once with my mom, while Carolyn was at school (thus marking the beginning of my lifelong pursuit of older women), but I could tell by looking at her straight brown hair, dark brown eyes and inviting smile in the school photo above her parents’ stereo that she was my kind of girl. In my head I called her my girlfriend—until I got to grade one and fell in love with Kim, who was seventeen.
In grade three, Becky came to spend a week with my older sister after summer camp ended, and she fell in love with me. She told my sister she thought I was a “totally gorgeous hunk of a babe,” and that she’d go out with me whenever I was ready. I didn’t know what “going out” or “hunk of a babe” meant. The only hunks I knew were hunks of dirt we lobbed around the garden, pretending they were grenades. It was the first time a girl had ever liked me, but I don’t think I ever talked to her, and after she left I couldn’t remember what she looked like. So I pictured me and a made-up version of her going for quiet walks together around our farm, strolling in the summer sun, jumping on the trampoline, and laughing like we were part of a Disney movie. She lived three hours away, and I never saw her or heard from her again, but that didn’t stop me from calling her my girlfriend for more than a year.
My cousin Dan and his family moved to our farm when I was in grade five, and we went to school together for the year that they stayed. He started writing love notes to Marion, and because Dan was pretty much my best friend, I decided that I really liked her too. But his handwriting was neat and mine was small and scribbly and hard to read. She chose Dan, and I tried not to be jealous.
By junior high the hormones hit like a flood, and I started falling in love every day. I had crushes on every single one of my sister’s friends, sometimes all at once. They were a year older and therefore more mysterious and beautiful than the girls in my grade, but not one of them showed me any attention. I aimed higher. I had crushes on the girls all the way up to grade twelve. No luck. I was tall for my age, but I was pimply, gangly, and awkward, my cracking voice stuck ambiguously between boy and man, and despite my best preventative efforts I always had a foot odor problem. On top of that, I was only twelve.
But then I met Lana at the week-long co-ed summer camp my church sponsored. She was tall, thin, and had puppy dog eyes hidden behind a curtain of hairspray-crusted bangs. She was shy and very quiet, and I was nervous around her, but during meals and at chapel I always tried to sit close enough that I could smell her perfume. When our paths crossed I tried to catch her eye by making a strange face or doing a ridiculous dance. I thought if I could make her laugh she would like me. At the end of the week, I got her address. We wrote letters for nearly a year, one or two a week, and we saw each other when our youth groups got together for special events. When she turned fifteen, I asked her out in a letter, and she wrote me back and said yes, so I bought her a ticket to see Michael W. Smith in concert. My mom drove us to the city and Lana and I sat in the back seat holding hands. I got my very first kiss on the drive home, but two weeks later she dumped me and never told me why.
In high school I went to weekend youth retreats and fell in love every time. At one of them, the guest speaker talked about eternal relationships and earthly relationships, describing how important it was for us to make sure that above all else, we ought to have a right relationship with God. “He wants your whole life, not just the Sundays,” he said. He told us about his life when he was our age, how he had dated tons of girls, but he had never found the satisfaction he was looking for. “I thought I was looking for love,” he said, “but what I was really looking for was Jesus. You’ve got to get things right with God before you go falling in love with someone, or you’ll end up no further ahead than when you started. You’ve got to be satisfied with your relationship with God, just you and him, just the two of you, before you’re ready to be dating someone. If you aren’t satisfied on your own, you’re not ready to date.”
It made me feel guilty about how much I liked girls, but it fit with my understanding of what God wanted and what I owed him. I couldn’t expect to find any sort of satisfying love in someone else because God was the only one who could give me what I needed most. Just me and Jesus, that would be enough, and until I could figure out how to be satisfied on my own, trying to find a girlfriend would be a distraction. By the time I got to college, I still felt the burning hunger for soul-filling love, but I never forgot that I was not yet whole, that I was not in a relationship with God where he satisfied my every longing. I thought that if I did fall in love with someone, God would take her away from me so I would learn to depend completely on him first. The message lingered: get everything right between God and yourself, and only then will you be spiritually ready for the kind of romantic relationship God wants you to have.
The encouragement to be content on one’s own is probably a necessary antidote to the kind of illusions that fill romantic comedies, where love really does make everything turn out nicely, so sweet, perfect and whole. But the fact is, we will never be whole. We are all restless, hungry, broken, unfinished, incomplete souls.
