A Tear In My Cereal

I heard my first Buddy Wakefield poem today. And then my second. My third. My fourth. My eighth. And there, 40 minutes after waking up, four and a half minutes into “Convenience Store,” a tear dropped into my cereal.

When was the last time a sermon ever made me cry? Not that tears are the litmus test of truth, but when was the last time that someone talking about God tap into my emotions so ruthlessly, so thoroughly, so effortlessly? And WHY NOT? It can’t be the subject matter; Wakefield was talking about a gas station attendant. It can’t be that God is innately boring or incapable of rousting emotion; Wakefield talks about God all the time, but taking swings at Him like He’s made of confetti and has a candy center. I’m not in any way afraid for God, but I am ashamed of us and our inability to – No! – our worse than ridiculous insistence on making theology as stoic and plodding and dead as humanly possible. Rather than imbuing the mundane with life we take something vibrantly amorphous and beautiful and cram it and smash it and form it and conform it into something we already believe. We make theology our bitch so that we can go on living the life we want, but now with “Biblical sanction.”

I have this horrible vision of a bunch of people sitting down to listen, to divine truth. In front of them stands a preacher - even a good one - giving her best and most compelling sermon. She speaks for 20-30-40 minutes on the grace of God, on the love of God, on the wonders of salvation. People clap, and murmur, and fill in the blanks on their Mad-Lib sermon note cards. Then someone like Buddy Wakefield stands up and gives a 5 minute diatribe that, though it offers no answers, finds a way to connect with people, that latches onto the emotions and fears and misgivings and frustrations that we all share whether we admit it or not, and the crowd forgets the steady, well-intentioned words of the preacher. Because while she aimed for their minds, he captivated their hearts.

Watching the information man
behind his information booth
juggling predictable conversation
with folks who look like iceberg lettuce
and who believe that somehow
the flat lines of small talk will give us life.
I want them to leave,
like a big deal orchestra removing itself from the stringed section
so I can fiddle with fate and make music.
- Buddy Wakefield "Information Man"

My town knows that there is something so big inside of all of us
we have to suck
just to distract you from being directly overwhelmed by our real power,
the kind of power that makes you smile.
Everybody knows that smiling is for little girls, the gays
and certain kinds of fish
who are smiling by accident.
- Buddy Wakefield "My Town"