What if that’s at Walmart?
This is an unlikely collision of a 14th century poem written by Hafiz and a commencement address given by David Foster Wallace. My dear friend, Alana introduced me to Hafiz’s exquisite poetry and my niece, Molly sent me an excerpt of the aforementioned speech delivered to Kenyon College’s graduating class of 2005. I have since listened to the latter in its entirety. They somehow knew I would love and appreciate their vastly different “offerings.” Oh, how I did.
Wallace talks about the real value of a liberal arts education with the typical “banal platitudes” and “rhetorical niceties” conspicuously absent. Yes, it’s about learning how to think, he argues, but it’s also about choosing how and WHAT to think as well as what to pay attention to and how to construct meaning from experience. And, ultimately, choosing to readjust our “default setting” that we are at the center of universe. In this way he suggests, we can keep from going through our “comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life” in an unconscious state and can experience life before death. What I loved was his Frederick Buechner-like supposition that all moments can be not only meaningful, but “sacred- on fire with the force that lit the stars.”
I had one such moment, not in Walmart, but in someplace equally as undesirable (to me), The Mall.
My youngest daughter “needed” a dress for the winter formal, and I consented to take her shopping after first urging her to borrow a dress from her older sister. The prospect of merely asking, however, struck terror in her. To my three daughters I must not be “like the other mothers” (to draw from one of my favorite films, Chocolat) who actually enjoy shopping.
I like buying – what we need, that is – which I realize can be defined quite differently depending on the perspective. Fortunately, we struck gold. A dress I, in fact, picked out not only fit perfectly but looked fabulous and was under budget! I took off my blinders that cold, rainy evening and began to look around at the other consumers, not with impatient apathy but with an intentional perspective that they were “all God’s children,” at the tender encouragement from a friend.
Then the oddest thing happened. I smiled at someone and she smiled back, and when my daughter and I bellied-up to check out – despite the store being “hideously flourescently lit and infused with soul-killing…pop music” – I started to dance. Just a little bit, like in the unemployment-line scene from The Full Monty. Much to the mortification and chagrin of my youngest, of course. Yet it was a moment that would not have ever been meaningful previously, much less sacred. It just took simple awareness- “awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over.” And to me that is…
God is with us. Immanuel. This Christmas and always.
Friends, these moments are indeed on the map and holiness happens if we let it- whether listening to an achingly beautiful piece of music; offering a tearful prayer in an empty room while grasping the hands of friends with whom you have never before prayed; quietly singing to a home-bound woman on the threshold of the great hereafter
Or even, perhaps especially, shopping at Walmart.
– Caroline Watkins
