Ironic Advent 2017 Meditation #8: Shaggy Dudes, Cutting to the Chase

Ironic Advent 2017 Meditation #8:

Shaggy Dudes, Cutting to the Chase

This year the Second Sunday of Advent gets right to the point, cuts to the chase as my dad used to say (never knew exactly what he meant), cuts out the cute stuff, cuts to the bone, cuts to the heart, cuts through the fog, cuts the crap.

I mean, it cuts nothing at all but starts at the most barebone of the gospels, the lovely, spare, yes m'am that's all I've got to say opening lines of The Gospel of Saint Mark. That's enough for me. For today anyway.

This is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God: 

A rather shaggy wild guy eating bugs showed up in the desert saying rather wild things. First, though, an angel appeared to . . . . Oops, that's not here. But then Joseph thought . . . . Not here either. No Herod. No genealogical register. No neo-platonic Logos riff. No nothing.

Shaggy dude. Eating bugs. Sayin' a change has gotta' come. And the message, though really stripped down in Mark, is pretty specific (if weird). Here's what EVERYBODY has to do. Get in the water, confess that you are doing wrong. And start doing right. And that, my friends, is how we decorate for Christmas. In the wilderness. Y'all got it?

Sounds like Advent, if you've been paying attention.

Does John Baptist really look like Johnny Cash? I don't know. I just like to think of them both as no-nonsense, cut to the chase (still not sure what that means) guys. Pretty sure Johnny Cash only knew three chords, and he only played one of them well. His vocal range hit everything between A and B. With some difficulty.

John Baptist had one song. And he beat it like a drum (stop me if you've heard this, because it's a song I wrote a couple of years ago for Advent). "Turn around" was the verse one, verse two, chorus, chorus (as Johnny Cash used to say). 

Really I think of John the Baptist as a cross between Johnny Cash and my friend Richard, a sage from Arkansas. IF only his name were John, I could claim it was a miracle and nominate someone for canonization (either Richard or Johnny Cash or maybe Luther Perkins because he was JC's guitar player who gave the Tennessee Two that distinctive cut to the chase sound on Sun Records).

Richard is appropriately grizzled, but I think a lot of that has to do with being on sabbatical. Not sure if John B had a sabbatical. Johnny Cash was in rehab for awhile, so maybe that's kind of like a sabbatical. Maybe he got pretty grizzled those days.

Richard also plays guitar, but I'm not sure how many chords he knows. What I know is that he likes to cut to the chase, cut out the crap, get down to brass tacks or brass knuckles or whatever brass thing it is that people get down to. Sometimes I don't know what he's talking about, but it's still kind of cool to see his guys get all prophetic and fiery and then, unlike Ben Camino, he just says a few words.

Today we were talking about deer hunting. And he said, yeah, you never realize that you can see 300 yards. I kind of acted like I knew what the hey he was talking about. And then he stared off into the distance and said, yeah, that's the great thing about deer hunting. You sit there all day and don't see any deer. But after awhile you realize you can see 300 yards. Past the trees and everything. So I didn't say anything for a minute, and then I said, yeah, I just remember sitting with my dad in a tree freezing to death. And Richard said, yeah, that's what I mean, you can see 300 yards.

I really CAN, because I've been at this a few years now, draw a really beautiful connection between Richard's focused vision on . . . nothing (at least not what he's supposed to be seeing, namely deer) and John the Baptist's focus on the essentials and Johnny Cash's one chord and one key and Mark's spare Gospel and the cold Second Sunday of Advent. I CAN, I said. And yet, and yet. I don't think I need to. I don't think I'm going to. If I don't get going soon, I'm going to miss the Our Lady of Guadalupe vigil. 

Just this. Tomorrow I'm going to go out and sit in the cold for awhile. And I'm going to look. Maybe I'll see a deer, but I'm pretty sure I won't (hell, there's a better chance I'll hit one driving to work). But I hope to heck I learn to see for 300 yards. Because that is a skill that my friend Richard thinks important. And, as I said, he is a sage. From Arkansas. That's almost Texas. 

While I'm out there, I'm gonna' be humming "Folsom Prison Blues," probably the song in which Johnny Cash most clearly sings one note over and over again. And (ironically or not) meditating on John the Baptist's stripped-down gospel intro. Fix up your broken road. God is coming. Look over there.