Last Friday night I sold $500 worth of food and took home $80-some in tips. Not bad after tipping out the bar, the hostess and the busser. The next night I sold twice as much food but netted only $10 more in tips. Why? you ask.
It was the eve of Valentine's Day, which brought out what my co-worker calls "upgraders." People who usually don't mind eating a greasy pork sandwich out of a dirty ash tray decided to take that special someone whose name is tattooed on their neck to our casual dining establishment.
It was off the chain. The Jerry Springer Show could have held a casting call in there. People showed up drunk, and we seated them. I approached one table and all five of them started yelling what they wanted all at once, like a bunch of little kids whose Ritalin had worn off. I had to become a preschool teacher just to take their order. "OK, let's take turns, starting with you, Ma'am. What would you like to drink?" I said sweetly while thinking, How do these people function in society?
I knew my tip was doomed when I presented the check. The two couples got into an argument over who was going to pay for the kid sitting in between them. After they settled up, one guy stuffed a couple of dollars into my palm and said, "Sorry I can't give you any more, but I didn't know the bill was gonna be so high."
Well yes, three sangrias, a martini, a Long Island, two mudslides a hurricane and a margarita do add up. Thanks for chugging my tip! After my tip-out to the bar, I'm pretty sure I lost money on you. But you do get points for honesty.
II
When academics talk about class, they often speak of the poor in reverential tones. It doesn't matter if they're Marxists who think that history belongs to the proletariat, or if they're liberation theologians who believe that God has a preferential option for the poor. They tend to romanticize the underclass.
Well let me tell you, the poor are not noble savages. A lot of them are jackasses.
Yes, I know all about institutionalized racism and sexism, failing schools, dysfunctional families and generational poverty. I know how an unjust society grinds people under.
I also know that the meek shall inherit the earth, that the last shall be first, that God does have a preferential option for the poor, and when the saints go marching in, the Jerry Springer crowd will lead the parade, as Flannery O'Connor showed us in Mrs. Turpin's vision of the last judgment in the short story Revelation.
And I also know, not only from waiting tables but from ministry and non-profit work too, that many in the underclass are co-conspirators with the very forces that slowly corrode their humanity. I think that most people in a helping profession who fall somewhere between youthful idealism and grizzled cynicism know what I'm talking about.
True, every social class has a gracious plenty of jerks. But only someone who knows the poor from the safe vantage point of a textbook would equate the meek of the earth with the salt of the earth. Even if the underclass is the butt of more jokes than the overclass, it does no good to rectify that wrong by romanticizing the poor.
Besides, if you can't say that a jackass is a jackass then grace is not grace. In that case, the last being first might be poetic justice or some kind of social program on steroids, but it is not the scandal that God freely justifies the ungodly.
III
Back to that O'Connor short story. What's arresting about the finale is how O'Connor turns the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory on its head. While Mrs. Turpin watches amazed as all the trashy folk go into heaven first, the respectable middle class folk like Mrs. Turpin bring up the rear. They enter heaven with shocked faces, the purifying fire consuming their virtues. Not their vices.
Now isn't this taking the last being first a bit far? Is there something wrong with paying your bills on time, saying please and thank you, staying in school and getting married? Why can't Mrs. Turpin and the rest of us go to heaven with our bourgeois values intact, supplemented by a bit more tolerance, a bit more love, and a bit less sanctimoniousness?
I think I found an answer this week in Evagrius Ponticus. Evagrius Ponticus was a climber in the fourth century Church until he fell hard for a married woman. In fear for his immortal soul he fled the capital on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and then for a cave in the Egyptian desert.
After years as a hermit he compiled some aphorisms on prayer for a friend, and they have an interesting take on morality in general. Obedience to God's laws is only a first stage, Evagrius maintains. The purpose of obeying God is to get your lust and greed and anger under control in order to enter a state of apatheia.
Now apatheia is not apathy or indifference. It's where you aren't getting jerked around all the time by what's going on in your gut or your groin, or the bad news on TV. Only then are you able to love, to truly love, and love is the precondition for a vision of God which divinizes you.
Which may be why the respectable people (like me) in Mrs. Turpin's vision have to have their good works sandblasted off their souls before they can enter heaven. Morality and manners are what we make do with when the Pure Light gets refracted into a thousand pieces by the haze and dirt that clouds our vision. Beyond morality is not immorality but the integration of our fractured lives into oneness with the Divine.
So it would seem that there's a conundrum here. If you can't call a jackass a jackass then grace is not grace. But as long as you see the world divided between jackasses and non-jackasses, then you'll never see God.
I'm also wondering whether living in a cave in the desert or waiting tables in an awful economy is the best place to figure this stuff out.
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