Spirituality Column: Say what

A friend who still gets the paper on paper saves the advertising inserts from Home Improvement Warehouse and periodically brings me a stack. He does so not because he thinks I want to keep up with the price of a concrete block — on sale for $1.88, and after an 11% rebate just $1.67! — but because he knows I share his love for well-chosen words. This particular big box chain prints a different quotation at the bottom of each page of their fliers. The selections don’t seem to have anything to do with what they’re selling, except that they encourage a positive-thinking, can-do attitude, which they give away for free.

I noticed on one that he’d marked a couple of the snippets with scribbled stars: “The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress,” attributed to Joseph Joubert. My friend isn’t an argumentative person, but he’s politically active. Maybe that struck him as good ground to hold.

Another starred quote: “The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time,” attributed to Abraham Lincoln. I don’t know why he flagged that or what to make of it myself. Which is part of the point of an aphorism, isn’t it: to ask us to ask what we think.

I wondered, for instance, if I agreed with this, below another page: “Good designs come from the heart, not from the brain,” which is attributed to Danny Sengers.

My father also remarked and saved “sayings,” as he called them. Dad was an engineer; it took me a long time to realize he had a poet’s soul. But he loved this one so much that Mom, who was an artist, wrote it out in a fine hand and framed it like an art print for him: “LIFE is what you are awake to.” He kept it on his bedside dresser.

Call them sayings or adages, aphorisms, epigrams, maxims, proverbs or quotes: What is it about them that we like? Maybe it’s Alfred North Whitehead’s caution to “seek simplicity, and distrust it.” They’re short and snappy, yet a good one prods us to probe deeper than the surface of our experience. (As Fred Craddock cautioned, “If you boil a thing down too much, all you have left is the brown stain in the bottom of the coffee cup.”)

On point, I recently cut, pasted and saved a meme of a 12-ounce mug cheerfully proclaiming, “Tired of coffee mug platitudes?” Yes, always. I need more from my pith than something that, when chewed upon, dissolves like cotton candy.

In my intellectual youth, I was so impressed by an aphorism of literary critic Friedrich Schlegel that I wrote it out in fat red permanent marker inside the cover of one of my journals: “It is just as deadly for the mind to have a system as to have none at all. So, one has to make up one’s mind to have both.”

I’m remembering it now as I don my autumnal clothes. It’s not that I need less order, more chaos at this season of my life. It’s that, now even more than then, I need thoughts I haven’t thought to think before.

Other words, seen sprayed on a wall, have stuck in my mind since that time. Not even a sentence: “Grace and Havoc.” I might need that on a coffee mug. Or embroidered on socks, so they lead me forward. Step and think. Step and feel.

Life is, after all, what you are awake to.

The Reverend Doug Job does interim ministry for congregations in transition and keeps good memories and friends made while serving a church in Cape. At present, he lives in Hannibal, Mo., where you may contact him at revdarkwater@gmail.com.