OTIOSE AND ADIOS
OTIOSE AND ADIOS
By John Tuft
I was taught from an early age about helping others, as I have laid out here in this space previously. And yeah, I’m throwing adverbs around like M&Ms. It was part of my parents’ faith and a bigger part of their practice. From a ten percent tithe on my dime allowance to giving away my birthday dinner to a family in need. In the first congregation of perishables that I served in Piedmont, WV, they became known in the area as the church that cared. Again, I have laid out a lot about them in this space previously. Suffice it to say, it was not my leadership as a guppy in the Presbyterian fishbowl of being a professional pastor, it was their own attitude toward what makes for a community of believing. God as a verb with an indirect object. Sorry to take you back to sixth grade English class. I promise no diagramming of sentences.
Sometimes people are exactly what you suspect them to be. And sometimes people are a surprise. The difference is in being able to delineate between them before you are in too deep to make a course correction. Confronting the matter of otiose and adios. I have been a parent for forty-three years and I still don’t know what I’m doing. Just ask my children. With your own kids, you take what you get. Not very politically or eschatologically correct in the current climate of “I am whatever I say I am.” Loving them is a choice. Like all love is a choice.
Did you ever think about the most embarrassing fact of your own life? Or the most secret of all secrets that you hold near and dear even if it is painful? Only to be disclosed on your deathbed with your last breath so that you won’t have to suffer disgrace or consequence? That is the seat of our belief. For better or worse. No matter what any preacher may say from the pulpit or writer persuade with his wizardry.
I remember the magical approach of birthdays and Christmas when I was a child. I would hope against hope, wish piled upon wish, for various gifts. Offerings to the god of hideous fears hiding in my closet. Oh wait, those were my prayers. The most grown-up thing I have learned is that there is no such thing as an adult faith. The ethereal meanderings of grown-up theologians notwithstanding. There is analysis and dissertation upon ancient texts of other human beans. What has all of that philosophizing produced? Nothing anywhere near the impact of written language, moveable type, musical instruments, moving pictures, digitalized information systems, and the internal combustion machine upon this race of human perishables. Or the faith of a child.
Otiose and adios. It was my awful privilege once upon a time to study and ingest the horrors of the genocide in Rwanda of 1994. I was charged with digesting this horrible truth and trying to convey it as a story of hope in the form of a screenplay. It was a fool’s errand. I could show it to you. I could encapsulate the tragedy in some characters and how they interacted and struggled for their humanity in a caldron of the hatred of others. By portraying the haters as others. That task and what I learned haunts me to this day. I wish that I could say adios to it. But I cannot. My very words lose their magic in trying to tell you what may be true of all of us. True about me. Hate is the easy way. And I prefer things be easy.
We all have the once upon a time story version of our lives. We blur the focus of the uncomfortable pictures in our heads. Skip over the painful parts or the parts that portray us as fools. Or worse. I know for certain that I do. Really is the word currently used to convey both the asking of truth and the assumption of truth. Really. You are the reason that I write. Really? Really. An adverb. Take another handful of M&Ms.
Words are magic and writers are wizards.
