Like a sad taco…

One week into the new year—are we still allowed to greet people with the cheery, “Happy New Year!”?? Maybe we might have better years if each morning we looked at that sunrise as a beginning of a happy new year.

I am back in Jordan, back for about six days now, and in the thick of Renaissance art in one class, the tensions of the 1920s in another class, curriculum design with the teaching fellows, planning a trip to Boston with students in 5 weeks, looking at our 9th and 10th grade courses and debating strengths and weaknesses, and…anything else? Surely, something else is on the cosmic to-do list for the month of January. Oh yes, my friend Dr. Christy Folsom is visiting Jordan for three weeks as the next “Visiting Scholar” in my line-up.

I had a lovely time in the United States—I had about 12 hours in New York (again, a cleverly concocted layover to allow for some Manhattan facetime) and then almost 12 days in Cincinnati eating and talking and merry-making. As I do from time to time, I tried to downsize some of the “treasures” in my old bedroom. The treasures are usually paper-products, like books and maps and tour guides and old magazines and old papers from courses and classes gone by. I know, I know, I should just wholesale dump it all (my heart is beating more rapidly, no, no!) but it is fun to go through and find old stuff, and…what? Well, if you are in my family, you don’t dump it, you re-read it!

I found an old 2002 issue of a magazine called The Lutheran, sent to me after I joined the Lutheran church at 93rd and Broadway in Manhattan. The cover story was called “Sticky Theology,” and I guess why I saved it was that it had an interesting take on how various authors unpack such popular (though sometimes banal) bumper-sticker sayings such as “Let go and let God,” and “God will never give you more than you can handle.” I reminded myself as to why I had saved it over these years (that and the fact that my family has a hard time letting go of things). The writer commented that life is “a plateful.” She elaborated: “I travel on my earthly journey carrying a flimsy paper plate. As I move along, I’m often caught by surprise. Life jumps out at unexpected times and places and dumps scoops of pain and loss on that paper plate. A final dollop of grief and my paper plate will fold in the middle like a sad taco.” As a lover of interesting writing and tacos, what an interesting image! I had never thought of life like a sad taco! This writer goes on to say, “Nasty, greasy juices will drip out of both ends, along with a goodly amount of sour grapes, bitter lemon and salty tears. I will be irreparably stained.”

So as I sat on my bedroom floor, contemplating the end of 2010, the death last week of a 49 year-old brother of a friend of mine, and the looming new year, I did what I guess any writer hopes someone will do—I took that image of the sad taco and pondered it awhile. We live in a time (has there ever not been a time?) of lost jobs, lost prestige, lost homes, lost hope. Our metaphorical plates are piled high with broken dreams and broken hearts. Sigh. Setbacks and disappointments. Our world always seems to be precariously juggling plates saturated with oil spills, starvation, war, earthquakes, flood and death. What we need, as individuals, as friends, as a world, is some way to put a hand under that paper plate of the sad taco and support it before it folds in on itself.

Such reassurances such as “God will never give you more than you can handle” can seem so glib and hollow and simplistic. The pains and indecisions and losses warrant more than a bumper-sticker rejoinder. But as I sat there thinking about the new year, and my own direction in life, the direction of the region where I spend 75% of my year, and my friends’ lives touched and marred by the heavy “taco” of life, it actually gave me such an invigorated feeling of the shiny year ahead. Instead of just watching the paper plate ooze sorrow from the sad taco of life, these pains and indecisions and losses can serve as a call to act as an earthly hand of God supporting the paper plates and the lives of others.

On New Years’ Day I spent virtually the whole day at my dear friend Sylvia’s house who hosts an open house every year. Sylvia puts out a great spread—no sad taco here!—and she has great cheeses and vegetables and Austrian Christmas cookies and pulled pork—and her friends roll in and out from around noon until the evening. One of her friends is a childhood acquaintance of mine who lost her mother this past year. Her mother had taught me Sunday School when I was in the 3rd grade, and we talked about how hard it is to lose a mother.

Naturally, I thought about Mary Martha, that extraordinary mother of mine, and how this was our fifth Christmas without her. As I missed her, I thought about how she would have responded to the “sad taco of life” analogy. She might have liked the gastronomic reference, maybe, but she would have likely reminded me of the pains that another Mary, the original Madonna, faced. My mother, always the dramatic one, would likely have reminded me of how Mary must have knelt at the foot of the cross, her son’s lifeless body draped awkwardly across her lap, recalling with yearning the boy she had known. But my mother, if ever there was one to deal with the “flimsy paper plate of life” would make sure that we remembered that Mary didn’t stay at the foot of the cross. Grief-stricken though she was, I imagine Mary leaned on Joseph’s arm, probably John’s arm, got up and got going and hoped for a better day. That hope was how she handled the inexpressible sorrow.

In my Bible is an underlined passage of Romans 5:3 that reads: “Endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”

A sad taco would surely disappoint us. But, instead, let’s look at 2011, in the 51 weeks left of it, as not so much the “flimsy paper plate of life,” or the funny image of the “sad taco,” but an alleluia of hope for the new year, for each day.