Having Coffee with God

Saturday morning, like every other morning, I was lined up with the other dull-eyed suburbanites for my caffeine communion at Caribou Coffee. Two earnest, clean-cut guys were standing just off to the left of the line handing out little blue cards and urging everyone to step to the second register, where drinks were free for the next hour. I took the card that was handed to me and eyed it suspiciously. "YES, it really is FREE!" the card said. "We hope this small gift brings some joy into your day. It's our small way of saying God loves you, no strings attached. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance." Beneath that was a beautifully scripted quote from Mother Teresa: "Do small things with great love." On the back, very low-key, were the web, street, and e-mail addresses for a local church, a map to its location, and the phone number. The givers of the gift were not taking names or handing out literature or asking if they could visit anyone's home with some uplifting literature. They were basically buying a round of drinks, and I accepted their kindness and the joy that coffee always brings to my day. Free coffee with a shot of God's love, especially.

I have to admit, I have several reactions to this event tumbling around in my head, even now, over 48 hours later. My first thought, once the mocha + espresso started working its magic on my crusty synapses, was "Wonder if they would have given me that little blue card if they knew I was an unbaptized gay Democrat?" Of course they would have. These are things that, in the past, have drawn religious zealots to me like flies to honey, hoping for a conversion or a cinematic driving out of my demons. The next thing I thought was what a savvy marketing drive this was for their church--kind of hip, definitely memorable, and very non-threatening. I might even go to a church like that. I have absolutely no objection to kindness in any form. At that point I realized they had me by my gratitude, just like the folks who send you return address stickers, and suddenly it didn't seem so clever.

Running errands that day, my decaffeinated partner and I passed a number of churches in our overwhelmingly churched community. One had a banner out front: "God Speaks the Truth About Marriage." No secret what "god" was saying there! Already word had gone out that religious rescue was the center of the sermon. An ex-gay man was speaking Sunday night about the need to save people from their gayness. Another church had a different banner: "Civil Marriage is a Civil Right." The marquee outside said All Are Welcome and had a little rainbow streamer underneath it. All week, Dick and Lynne Cheney had been feigning outrage about Senator Kerry using the word "lesbian" to describe their very out lesbian daughter in order to focus attention away from the fact that the radical right was on the march in states all across the nation. Just this morning, I read a disturbing article about Issue 1 in Ohio, a hate-based law that is whipping up the evangelical vote. All of this made me ponder the many faces of God.

The Bible says, "In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God he made him; Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created" (Gen. 5: 1-2). I have always read this as a statement of essential equality and self-determination, much like the Declaration of Independence. As candidate Kerry affirmed, "We are all God's children." Yet half of America is embracing a Republican agenda that is founded in no small part on a fear and hatred of gay people, foreigners, and anyone who walks a path different from their own, a call to war that is being amplified or refuted by Christian churches of various stripe. The fundamentalists see God as bitter and full of wrath. Others see God as loving and forgiving. It is probably true that we create God in our own image.

Since childhood, my relationship to God has felt very personal and direct and private. I was not forced into any congregation, but I went to a number of churches with various friends over the years and observed the stubborn literal-mindedness of "witnesses" at our door. The only thing I liked about church--Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, or Unitarian--was the singing. The sermons varied in tone and message, but none could ever convince me that I was unloved or dirty or in need of some self-appointed guy in a costume to mediate my knowledge of heaven. I had played outside enough to have felt God on my skin in the form of sunlight or wind or rain: I had daydreamed enough to know that prayer was more like a quiet receptivity than a verbal beseeching. No one had to tell me that angels were powerful and real beings. They were all around. Trying to fit the depth and breadth of my experience with God into the churches' dry ministrations and cold rituals felt wrong and dishonest. Yes, the Bible is full of spiritual instruction, especially the New Testament, which seems to be largely ignored by many Christians, but it is also an historical document that has been revised and retranslated and shaped by a long stream of political and sociological forces. What I like about the Bible most is its humanity. Our fears, our wars, our petty differences, our longings, our abiding hope, and our great sense of mystery are all evident in its pages, as they are in the Upanishads, the Quran, and the epic of Gilgamesh. The language of the Bible is sometimes breathtaking in its sensuality: "I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved" (Song of Solomon 5: 1-2).

Sometimes I think God is a howling fit of laughter hoisting our tiny ideas by their collective petard. Other times I think God is a flood of despair at what we're doing to Creation. Certainly God's face shines through the good Christian who buys his neighbor coffee as much as it does the tired, hung-over barista who serves it and the grateful heathen who drinks it.