In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Part 2
Keeping the feast
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Paul J. Pastor
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
— Psalm 23:5, KJV
V. Of that blessed table which is prepared for us.
THE TWENTY-THIRD Psalm is a song of trust. It is perhaps the most beautifully articulated statement of confidence in God other than Job’s (“Though he slay me, yet will I trust him”). The psalmist poetically paints God as a shepherd—a good shepherd—who, the careful reader will note, is not leading his sheep away from danger. He is leading the flock through it. Our path for grazing, for some reason we cannot fathom, leads “through the valley of the shadow of death.” When the table is laid for the psalmist, it is not among friends, but in the presence of enemies.
This is a way of saying that God leads us in the Real world. This is not an insulated Pretend. Yes, the pastures are green, and the waters are fresh and full of peace. Nonetheless, death and darkness surround. Through them, God leads us to the table he has prepared and to the feast laid upon it.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN to feast? More than just eating, a feast holds the dimensions of the sacred.
At the core of Christian tradition sits the table. Only the pool of baptism is as indispensable. The table becomes an altar. In the Anglican tradition, which has become my own, we speak St. Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians 5:8 at the culmination of the Eucharistic preparation when we celebrate the sacrifice of Jesus: Therefore, let us keep the feast.
But what is the feast? It is certainly our provision, our “daily bread.” And without question, it is the Eucharist, a sign and sacrament of Christ’s presence among his people. But the true dimensions of the feast prepared for us are even larger than they first appear. What is the table that God spreads for us in the presence of our enemies? It is as large as the world and limited only by our ability to receive it.
The Greek word from which we draw Eucharist is well translated as “Great Thanksgiving.” From the Presence of Jesus, Host at the Table of Life, the entire creation is being caught up and changed—becoming that endless and holy feast for which it is our joy and duty to give eternal thanks.
VI. The whole world, turned to table and to weapon.
TO FEAST MEANS to partake with joy, to celebrate abundance. Not every large meal is a feast. In fact, there are ways to feast without eating a thing. I have feasted richly in New York’s Met museum, have feasted to the point of sobs as the Oregon Symphony presented the music of Vaughn Williams. I feast upon the roses and lilacs in the spring. Each morning I am able, I feast as I rise at dawn and walk a mile to a nearby creek to plunge into a cold basalt pool, my “Pool of Wonders.” The trout rise, and the American Dipper birds dive around me, and I wash myself like Naaman of whatever leprosy has clung to me, and it is like eating.
As the whole world has been sanctified as an altar for Christ’s gift, so the whole world has become a table. And how it has been prepared! Witness the continents, spread like a cloth, draped with sand and snow, rising stark and blue to the boreal seas of ice, relaxing toward the luxury of the lush equator. Apples and pineapples, the brittle butterscotch scent of ponderosas, the shaggy mane of palms, the birds, the iridescent beetles, the bugling elk who tramp the chilly marshes. The voice of neon frogs who chorus in hot jungles, the clack of stone in the high Cascades as an aging marmot stumbles. Every fish. Every monstrous wonder of the deep, which science has not yet even discovered. The table holds the plasma breath of nebulae and of your own lungs with equal affection; the table is laid with all, every kind bearing fruit after its kind, each thing learning to speak its own name before God.
And to this table we come. This, through no virtue of our own. We come as children, receiving gifts so large we cannot see the end of them. And we eat, and play, and dance, and peck our runes in stone, and graffiti our secret names on freeway walls, and birth out laughing babies and play peekaboo, and tell one another why the tortoise has his shell, and what the wind is singing in the storm. We compose symphonies and crank tunes upon the hurdy-gurdy, and stomp in clogs, and fling ourselves off pommel horses in clouds of dusty chalk, and blast clay pigeons from the sky, and live.
AND BECAUSE IT is all done in the presence of our enemies, it is all fighting. In all of it, most powerful when it is most unconscious, we, as Children of Life, fight the Children of Wrong. Every joy a spear against the dark, every love a shield, every thank you holding in itself more of reality than the massed deaths of all of history. This is what it means for the Creator to spite his enemies.
Which is why I must convince you to believe me. You must take heart, must resist the Wrong that presses you, no matter the form it takes. Your life, your life is part of this. You are at the table before your one true Enemy. Delight is incendiary. Beauty is a weapon. Not a weapon as the world would fashion it, nor as our baser instincts of hatred or vengeance would determine, but the only kind of weapon that can touch the Wrong. Against the unmaker, making. Against chaos, order. Against decomposition, form. Against confusion, clarity. Against the cramped and shrunken, magnitude and right proportion. Against the cheap, the sublime. Against death, eternal life.
For as it is written,
We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (Eph. 6:12, KJV)
And as it says in another place,
Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger. (Ps. 8:2)
Understand this and tremble; no true joy in your entire life was small. No love that you have ever loved was wasted. The lost moments, the beauties you could barely grasp, were each a blade forged in heaven. You cannot see your dimensions in this war. You cannot see your importance. If you could, it would unhinge you.
The Christian writer and artist is participating in the work of beauty under conditions of spiritual war. This is not a war of a quick invasion or single drastic acts of heroism. Rather, it is a war of a similar kind to that which my beloved grandfather fought, though I blush to make the comparison. A long war. A war that makes one quiet. But in this war, it is the childlike who lead the way to battle; it is the poets who strike. This is not mere foolishness or religious fluff. It is, in the clean logic of heaven, the only way to fight our enemy.
VII. Pawns and bean patches.
ONCE, WHILE WALKING beside Gum toward a small diner in a stand of trees near Vernonia, Oregon, when I was a teenager, some angle of the light hit wrong. His arm instinctively shot out (still extremely strong), and he shoved me forcibly back and down behind him, out of what would have been the line of fire. “I’m sorry,” he said gently as he pulled me up a second later. “It reminds me of a spot in France.”
We carry our wars with us, no matter how well-fought or how well-laid the table. To discard the Pretend and to live is a work of difficulty, danger, and discouragement. Of course, you feel this in your own way. It means that you are fighting.
I work with writers, which means I often work with the discouraged. All true art contains an element of loneliness, but creative writing makes a craft of it. So it is natural to lose heart, to wonder if what you are doing is making any sort of difference at all. Is anyone reading? How can words, from people like ourselves, really do anything?
In chess, the pawn is the most easily discarded piece. There are so many of them, after all, and they can’t do much. Their movement is constrained; they attack awkwardly. It is for the knights and bishops to make grand forays, to inflict losses. I am not much of a chess player, but I have lost the game enough to tell you that this is not the pawns’ whole story. Sure, they’re slow and unimpressive. Alone, they are extremely vulnerable. But in a diagonal line, they form one of the strongest shapes in the entire game. They hold their ground. Like Shammah, son of Agee the Hararite (2 Sam. 23:11), who fought in a bean patch as his nation fled around him. He held that bean patch so well, that stupid plot of lentils, that the battle turned, and we still say his name thousands of years later in a language that was not yet born when he lived. We are holding ground. What pawn could see their true importance in the game? And yet the whole game may well hinge on one pawn.
And this is where I must turn to you, dear friend. For though I do not know you, I know that you have a part to play in this war. I know that you are made for goodness, truth, and beauty, made to “dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” I know there has been prepared for you a table in the presence of our enemies. I know that it requires considerable faith to rest at that table. To trust the shepherd with the rod of iron, who seems so slow to strike the wicked that are seeking whom they may devour. I know that it is difficult, almost beyond description, to participate in the work of beauty, and to resist the temptation to strike the various puppets that the old Snake bobs to distract us.
I know that you likely look about you, at whatever bean patch you are standing in, and you may be discouraged. You may see a cheap and unimpressive pawn when you look in the mirror. But no one else stands on your square. You do not know what pieces fall if you are taken. So hold the bean patch, friend. Strengthen the weak hands. Make firm the feeble knees. Be strong. Do not be afraid. For our God has set for us a table. In this—in us—he is crushing the head of all Wrong.
So let us keep the feast.
Paul J. Pastor
Author & Editor
Paul is a Contributing Editor for Ekstasis & Executive Editor for Nelson Books, an essayist, critic, author of the forthcoming book The Locust Years and Other Poems. What did you think of this essay? Share your thoughts with a comment!
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I can't put together how it is that I have been "sent" this missive at "such a time as this." I read each word while pressing through tears. To have this truth come to me into the place it found me is proof that what Mr. Pastor writes IS doing the thing proclaimed. I have carried this message in me in some fragmented condition, I have wanted it to be true & not just an optimism that keeps me out of a creative paralysis that seeks to steal momentum as I "work" to deliver beauty & hope into my bean field. Thank you for this encouragement & hope. I have been spurred on. The intersections between my reality & this balm astound me. I am so grateful.
Those are the most beautiful and encouraging words I have read in a long time (and I read a lot). So grateful.