Every Sunday, our church sings the Gloria, an ancient hymn of praise that hearkens back to the song the angels sang in the second chapter of Luke. At best, it is a joyful response to God’s mercy. But, oh, my Lord, it is long. The melody ambles upwards and down like the aimless tune hummed by a four-year-old girl braiding her doll’s hair. When you’re ready for it to be over, there are still 34 seconds left, which is equivalent to six hours in non-church time. Sometimes I close my eyes like I used to in seventh grade, singing “I’m Coming Back to the Heart of Worship.” I try to stir up awe and wonder, but the Gloria does not make it easy. Sometimes the heart of worship needs a defibrillator to get it working again.
Thanks be to God for James Parker’s instant classic Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes. It is not merely a spark of joy but a whole shower of sparks. The book is a collection of his “Odes” column from the Atlantic (“Ode to Small Talk,” “Ode to Squirrels,” “Ode to Sitting There”). They are, as Parker says, “short exercises in gratitude.” The small stuff of life projected on a big stage to give them their proper due. Parker has a knack for locating the glory of God in the overlooked corners of life. He is constantly scouring his surroundings for something outside of himself: “The grace of God, the piece of toast, whatever gets me through the next five minutes,” as he says. Like John the Baptist, he points away from himself and toward God and simply says, “Look!”
The book is a refreshing reminder that God is everywhere. Anywhere you look. From crying babies to BBQ chips to cold showers to mood swings. “Heaven and earth are full of thy glory,” Parker seems to sing as he pays tribute to everything from balloons to brain farts. He quotes John Donne and the Apostle Paul but pays equal homage to Jason Bourne and Conor McGregor. His “Ode to the Lost Cup of Tea” belongs alongside the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. Everything, in its particular way, sings praise to its Maker. In this way, Parker proves that the old saying, in fact, is wrong. The devil is not in the details. The details, in fact, have God’s fingerprints all over them. Like James Joyce once said, “In the particular is contained the universal.” And God, it turns out, is a sucker for the particular.
Parker has assigned himself the task of reminding people of the joy of life. Ever since the Enlightenment cast its shadow of doubt on the world, he argues, we have felt obligated to be in touch with our inner despair. “Today I’m beginning to think that joy, in the face of everything, is the big secret,” he writes. As so many of us spiral down the pit of despair, he reminds us of the miracle of life.
He does so, thankfully, without dripping with earnestness. He is playful, not instructional. Parker never tells us what to do. He merely points. There’s an “Ode to Meditation,” and then, 63 pages later, there’s an “Ode to Not Meditating.” Parker isn’t prescribing anything, but he’s giving you eyes to see. The odes do not tell you how to live; they simply show you what it means to be a person.
Don’t mistake Parker for some woo woo guru though. He is not singing to the universe. He goes beyond Mary Oliver’s call to merely pay attention. He intentionally avoids branding himself with the vapid “spiritual but not religious” moniker. While he respectfully refrains from ever showing his cards of personal beliefs, he has dropped enough breadcrumbs over the years to indicate that he is a Christian. He goes so far as to suggest that Jesus was not some moral compass to live by but the very same “Son of the Father who taketh away the sins of the world” from our Sunday morning Gloria. And, oh, he does it very well.
Whether intentionally or not, Parker returns the playfulness and wonder to steady Christian doctrine. “Ode to the Left Hand” is a physical expression of Luther’s theology of left-handed power. “Why?” he writes. “What’s it for, the weaker hand? Why this built-in asymmetry, this out-of-whack distribution of strength and fine motor skills?” His “Ode to Sitting There” unapologetically praises the bondage of the will: “I don’t know of any human beings that are free — they all have to make up their minds if they’re going to stay with Judy or go to work.” His piece on AC/DC begins as a tribute to the Nazareth Principle:
Beautiful world-altering things, when they enter history, when they enter time, it kind of happens off to one side. The cameras are always pointing in the other direction. The crowd is always looking the wrong way. So it was with the birth of Jesus. So it was with the sound of AC/DC.
Perhaps greatest of all is his tribute to the man himself. In “Ode to Sleeping Jesus,” Parker contrasts his own existential anxiety with the peace that passes understanding. True peace, he says, is not only exemplified but also personified in Jesus while he snoozes through a storm. To paraphrase it would rob Parker of his genius:
Ever been smashed by a big wave? Plucked from your feet, not far from the shore, and mashed face-first into the gritty floor by a racing heap of water with a delicately toppling crest? It’s phenomenally uninterested in who you are. You feel this quite clearly as the weight pushes you down, as the wave closes its fist on you: no venom in it, nothing personal, just this veering, crushing, glassily unthinking warp of sea strength in which you happen to be caught. Identity — the fragile shell, the craft, the little boat — is moot.
“And there arose a great storm of wind,” as Mark’s Gospel has it, “and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full.” The disciples begin to freak out: where’s Jesus? Where is he? For crying out loud? Shouldn’t he be addressing this? But Jesus is asleep. Very comfortably — and for the first and last time in the Gospels — asleep. “And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow.”
The disciples wake him with their fussing, Jesus (in perhaps a sleep-thickened, slightly irritated voice) “rebukes the wind,” and the situation is resolved. But this — the swatting down of the storm — is not the power image in this scene. The power image is sleeping Jesus, his lovely pillowed unperturbedness as the waves pile up outside. This surface agitation is nothing to him: His mind attaches to the depth, where the ocean sways on its quiet root. Afloat, preserved by his own fragility, he carries a secret that is no secret at all.
We can imagine him smiling as he sleeps.
So behold, my Summer Reading Staff Pick. Like manna from heaven, this book could easily be devoured all at once, but I recommend prescribing yourself one to two servings each day. It is full of sermon fodder, but is also a shot in the arm for anyone who has lost their joie de vivre. It is not meant to replace the Gloria on Sundays. But it will help bring you back to the heart of worship.
