Some Spiritual Implications Of Tar

This continues yesterday’s diary entry:

Lightening strikes and tornado alerts forced me to shut down my computer Friday. During the storm I huddled in a hallway sipping hot tea, smoking my pipe, eating peppermint sticks, and reading a book on the archeology of London — a great way to weather the storm.

Weather authorities say between six and ten tornados raged across north Florida. Many homes were damaged and two people killed in Lake City a few miles west of here.

Between two and four in the afternoon, using the cover of the storm, a thief broke into my next door neighbor’s home and stole some stuff. I did not see or hear a thing so I could be of no help at all to the police.

When the storm broke, I’d been blogging about my adventures with tar and I was just getting ready to write a transition about the spiritual implications I find about tar.

So here goes.

Three things strike me about getting stuck in tar:

First, thank God tar is the only thing I’m stuck in. All around me I see folks mired in sticky stuff and struggling like that mastodon in the La Brea Tar Pits. Stuck in dead-end jobs. Stuck in unhealthy relationships. Stuck with bills. Stuck in life.

All I have to complain about is a bit of tar in my hair.

While I painted Thursday, Warren, a concerned neighbor, came over to tell me about an 80+ year old man down the street. The bank is foreclosing on the old man’s home. He has a deadline to be out of the place where he has lived for many, many years.

Why?

I thought his home was paid for.

It was.

But then his grown son wanted cash to start a trucking business, the old man took out an adjustable rate mortgage on his home to give money to the son, the son defaulted, the bank is foreclosing and putting the old man on the street.

The son moved to another state.

Warren asked what we and our neighborhood watch group can do to help. We discussed this strategy and that, including taking up a collection around the neighborhood (A few years ago that worked to keep a family of renters down the block from being evicted). We began to devise a plan to help the old man.

But when Warren went down to talk about it, the old man turned down any help. He’s so sick of the whole mess he’s ready to give up his house and move to an apartment across town. He’s just weary and wants to get away.

He feels stuck in his situation.

The tv news talks all the time about America’s mortgage crisis where thousands and thousands of people are losing their homes daily, but this is the first time that I know of that it has stricken anyone in our immediate neighborhood.

What does that have to do with tar?

While Warren told me about the old man’s problem, he watched me work. “What you should have done, John,” he said, explaining about undercoating.

He gave me a bucked of tar.

Before I even started painting, I should have coated under the lower boards with tar.

But I didn’t.

So I had to go back and start from scratch again..

I’d jumped right in with cosmetic painting to pretty things up, while neglecting the basic cause of our wood rot.

That’s something I do all the time spiritually.

I want to look good.

I don’t want to fix basic problems.

Jesus speaks of tombs filled with putrefying flesh breeding maggots — but with pretty whitewashed walls on the outside.

Is that what I’m doing with my life?

Do I really want to live so hypocritically?

The New Testament Letter To the Hebrews speaks to me saying, John Cowart, “For when the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God…”

Instead of prettying things up, I need to go back to the foot of the Cross, to remember the foundational things of faith.

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

Such facts seal the wood rot of my soul.

No need to whitewash myself till the tar of God has been applied.

This brings me to the testimony of Saint Patrick of Ireland; there was a man who knew all about being stuck.

As I crawled on hands and knees in the dirt around my house applying tar to the baseboards I’ve been remembering that every year in early March I begin to get requests from teachers and students about information on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17^th.

Back in 1979 I wrote a magazine article profile of St. Patrick; it’s been reprinted numerous times and now forms a chapter in my book Strangers On The Earth.

As I wallowed in tar, I remembered a passage from my own book:

Patrick’s sense of gratitude to God for creating and saving him permeates his writings. “I was an illiterate slave, as ignorant as one who neglects to provide for his future. And I am certain of this: that although I was as a dumb stone lying squashed in the mire, the Mighty and Merciful God came, dug me out and set me on top of the wall. Therefore, I praise Him and ought to render Him something for His wonderful benefits to me both now and in eternity,” he wrote.

In my working on my house and thinking about Patrick, I equated mire with tar.

So I get my hands and hair and glasses and arms a little dirty, sticky and gooey. So I learn the taste of tar. So I wallow like a mastodon stuck in a tar pit. So I have to bathe in paint thinner to get cleaned up physically and have to go back to the very first principles spiritually.

No big deal.

My situation is not hopeless.

I’m not stuck.

Among other things, the blood of Christ acts as a great paint thinner.