Do Something That Doesn't Compute
... a response to the poem you have (hopefully) just read! And an update on what happened in Maine.
This is a response to “Error: system falling,” a poem by CE Erickson, in our poet-to-essayist conversation project.
Do Something That Doesn't Compute
If life is good, it’s only good because God chooses to pour himself into people—and because some of these people, in turn, choose to pour themselves into others.
Whenever I learn I’m moving someplace new, I get utopian. I think it’s because travel in my childhood always was utopia—not so much because it was travel, but because I was a child, and when you are a child, everything is so beautiful it hurts. Oatmeal then, with a cup of hot milk, your jeans full of holes and your socks soaking wet, was so potent that the very steam made your cheeks flush apple red. I have a deep down instinct that tells me that if I run fast enough around the world, I will be able to catch my own heels and be young again.
So, naturally, when my husband got a contract in Maine for a month of teaching, my utopian travel instincts kicked in. I thought we’d live in a lighthouse with boiled lobster for dinner each night and begin a cross-species friendship with the local whales. (Not really, but almost.)
When we actually got there, my spirits sank. The town was cold and gray and strange. The AirBnB had dusty canvas wall art with the message “Travel Light” and the Hobby Lobby tags still on. $12.99. I thought, “What will we do here?” I found it a sorry place.
But I discovered out, as usual, that what makes a place is not the place (or your romanticized consumerist mindset) but the people who live there.
The first light in the dark was McKenzie, a tall, black receptionist at the local YMCA, who immediately memorized our names. As we toured the Y, I learned she’d given up grad school to care for a mentally disabled child from Texas. This child had been abandoned by her adopted parents not just once, but three times, before McKenzie found her. When I heard that, I suspected McKenzie was Christian and verified it next time we spoke. She says her now forever-adopted child runs about asking strangers if they love Jesus too.
The second light was the church we visited, which met in a school gymnasium dirty with bootracks from the melting mud-slush snow. They fed us lunch two weeks in a row—soups, stuffed chicken, tiramisu. The pastor and his wife had us over to their creaky 1905 fixer-upper, even though their family had just been hit by a miscarriage. The kids scampered, and our toddler jumped into the fray, following the big boys and fighting their toddler for toys. We stayed for hours, chatting over milky chai about parenting and apostasy and death. Then, we drove back happy and blinded by the 4 ‘o clock glare. We weren’t angels in disguise, but they treated us as if we were.
Both McKenzie and the church encouraged me because their actions so distinctly defied worldly expectations. They were examples of generosity, the truest kind, which gives without weighing the cost and asks for nothing in return. Wendell Berry captures this mindset well in “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front:”
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
These Christians stood out as Christian because their acts of love did not compute in terms of worldly logic. The world would say: “McKenzie, what are you doing, giving up prestigious career prospects to care for an unwanted child? You owe it to yourself to be successful.” It would say: “Pastor, you’ve got far too much on your plate. Don’t worry about these strangers. Just take care of yourself.” It would say: “Fools! You have not calculated the returns of your investments. The book isn’t balanced. IT DOES NOT COMPUTE!”
God has proven the unsystem is beatable. How? If we use the life of Christ as our example, it is beatable through: Overflow! Bounty! Generosity! Sacrifice! Finding value in every single person and thing God has made. All of which are the fruit of love and which, in faith, we are capable of imitating.
I said what made a place was the people. But what makes the people is their Creator. The light I found in Maine was God’s, and He is everywhere. In a world as bleak as Maine in January, what keeps us warm aren’t aspirations but God’s good sun refracted through the here-now lives of his children. If life is good, it’s only good because God chooses to pour himself into people—and because some of these people, in turn, choose to pour themselves into others.
In Cjersti’s words:
"The system is not broken, it is pending…
it is waiting for you to have the patience and intuition
to make an honest suggestion,
a possibility of a cleanup.”
They’ve shown me how to live, these Maine-ers, and encouraged me to go and do likewise.
Really love this piece. As you know I compute everything 😂 Kraig’s best friend found that Wendell Berry poem, printed and signed, in a bookshop and gifted it to us.