One good humiliation a day...

Yeah, most days I wish it were only one.

You have heard about apples and doctors.

Similarly, Fr Richard Rohr says that one good humiliation a day is what we need to keep the idolatries away.

I could wish as much. Most mornings I’ve got at least one humiliation in the bank before I approach the Keurig, which does not keep my idolatries from percolating like the Folgers.

What kind of idolatries?

Well, I am both seventy and a decade removed from my last bitter gig: I was a step flat singing “Margaritaville” on the Courthouse Square in Shelby, which got me kicked out of my last band. Still, I keep guitars and basses near at hand just in case the rock and roll dream finally comes calling.

Or the country dream. I have a 4-string banjo, too, in case Taylor wants me to sit in on “Mean.” Of course, if she calls, I will have to learn to play the banjo I have.

Really, though, I am more of a singer/songwriter. Can it be very long before those in the audience hear, “And now, to present the Grammy in the “Best New Septuagenarian Artist With Vast Orthopedic Issues Who Sings Off Key and Can’t Play a Lick”—please welcome to the stage Miss Taylor Swift. And Lady Gaga. And Allison Krauss!”

Yeah, that is how my vain imagination drips. More in keeping with my life’s work, however: I imagine that I might yet get an invitation to preach at The National Cathedral; or speak at the Festival of Homiletics; or give the Beecher lectures; or become a “Voice” in The Christian Century.

And can I just ask? Why shouldn’t The Nobel Prize for Literature go to… me?

+

The most obvious (and common) idols come in predictable shapes and sizes, and one to the other are made of the same basic materials: flesh, gold, wood, sheet metal, acreage.

Mine are not so obvious, at least I don’t think they are.

I have never desired riches or fields, for example. Nor one of those low, wide European sports cars you see in Facebook clips of Friday nights in Monte Carlo, from which long thin legs gingerly emerge like a spider’s from its hole onto four inch heels. Now, as to those legs…

And I know you think you know what I am thinking, but prostate cancer (and, yes, age) have done their work to transform the last vestiges of physical lust into a child’s Saturday morning hope and expectation for slapstick: that one of those spindly hotties will fall cartoonishly on her ass.

Which to me is a supremely gospel concept: to see the tall and rich brought low. To see the stooped and crooked raised up and made straight.

Okay, so maybe not so gospel, at that. But kinda. Looking to that end without tears, however, is another instance of idolatry.

+

I am increasingly aware that my corrupt heart manufactures other idols all day long, every day, just about as often as a thought crosses my, to all available evidence, unregenerate brain. Of late, however, the most of them are related to… not… having won the Nobel Prize in Literature. And why haven’t I won the Nobel Prize?

To hear Lorenzo tell it, the reason none of my old books have attracted an audience of any sort is a lack of good promotion and publicity; which he supposes is the very same reason my Substack has less than 200 free subscribers. He checked Amazon and noted I had no five-star reviews—which for this new book he can guarantee at $50 per, which will start the avalanche of sales and celebrity.

“Lorenzo,” is a manager with a vanity publisher who is printing and binding a book for me. As, sadly, I was unable to place it with my usual (or a new) publisher; and as more sadly still, my sometimes rep said a) it is too long and b) you are nobody, there is no way I will get it published conventionally. She didn’t say it quite that way; only that I have no platform. I am not famous. I have never served a large church or preached in a notable venue. Yes, a few of my essays have appeared here and there but I have never been invited to speak at a conference or event. I am a member of no speakers’ bureau. Nothing.

Further, I am an old white guy, and who needs more words from an old white guy? Especially, these days. Even if some of them are good.

And some of this book is, in fact, good. I think. I noticed as much when I began journaling just before I retired. Since I did I have continued jotting notes, scribbling ideas, writing sentences that were thumbnails for what would become essays and criticism. My observations are equal parts insight and irreverence, touching on everything from my syllabus for these latter days to replacement windows, from Bull Durham to the incredibly complicated question of whatever happened to Jesus’ prepuce. The book runs to well over 500 pages, and therefore could serve as a doorstop—which it may to anyone in possession of a hard copy, given the fact that, really, who wants to read about an old man’s retirement and his preparing for death?

Still, the material was beginning to stack-up, its scope ever widening, and somewhere in there I got the idea to collect the pieces into a kind of reversed festschrift: instead of multiple writers honoring one person with an essay, one person (I) would write essays in honor of three colleagues, two friends from college and one of our professors. These are guys I love, friends for a lifetime. Accordingly, I did not start out with any desire for the collected result to have a wide influence or impact…

So, why did I try to place it with a fistful of publishers and an agent in the first place? Vanity. Idolatry. Literary intoxication. The Nobel Illusion. Impressed with my own opinions and turns of phrase, arrogance seeped in and I began to be sure people were waiting, breathlessly, desperately, for my next word, eager to trade their hours to read what I had traded mine to write.

It was a good humiliation, then, two of them, to discover a) nobody was waiting on anything—and everybody was breathing just fine; and b)I would have to publish it myself, on my own nickel.

“Self-published” used to be, for me, every bit as much a punchline as “remaindered” was for authors of a previous generation. But things change.

The company I chose has been good. They have been fastidious to work with me in editing and formatting, and soon, I will see a hardback and a paperback for final approval. So far, the cost has been minimal, but today was the day.

When Lorenzo asked me why my legitimately published books had not sold much at all, I replied. “For the same reason my kids don’t always read the poems I write for them daily as a kind of check in.”

He was not listening, but waiting to suggest that my other books would have sold, and the new one will sell, with better marketing, and if I fork over $3000…

I coughed, and he immediately came off that price $750. So for $2250, the Nobel is back within reach.

I am as impulsive as I am idolatrous, and I might have been tempted. One last chance to be that writer—another Pat Conroy, Beatrix Potter or ee cummings—whose self-published piece becomes a classic. Such lightning has been caught in the occasional bottle.

But no, I said. It had nothing to do with advertising.

He told me of all the ways his company could promote, advertise, advance and puff my book—“It really needs to get out there,” he said—but by grace I was able to remember why I was doing what I was doing. But only after a struggle.

Do you remember when Aaron made the golden calf at the base of Sinai? And God said to Moses, who was atop Sinai getting the commandments, “Go down, for your people that you brought up out of Egypt have been quick to turn aside from the way that I enjoined upon them.” Moses replied, “Hey. They are your people not mine. We will discuss that later.” In either case Moses went down and found Joshua waiting, who said to him, “There is a sound of war in the camp.” It was not war, but the people singing and dancing and generally acting-out before their idol.

Which is another way of describing “the sound of war” in my brain.

I too dance to idols. I sing of the untold hours I pour each week into this Substack. I act up: trying to be clever, relevant, a part of the conversations as to what is going on in the world. But it’s idolatry, I know: a vain dream of popularity and influence.

If I despair that few read what I write, I know me well enough to acknowledge that if I had actual (paying?) followers, that would bring pride, which is worse than despair.

Meanwhile, I write new sermons each week. I trumpet that abroad as well, along with the fact that, except on Easter, I am heard by less than 15 people, total, in two churches each Sunday. This past week I wrote and preached what I think was the best Easter sermon I have ever composed (you can read it here: https://tomsteagald.substack.com/p/if-this-were-my-last-sermon), and I preached it to...wait for it… about 25. Nor am I convinced they heard all I said.

When I posted it on Substack, I immediately had… no reactions. And people went on either believing or not believing in the resurrection without my help.

When a buddy called to tell me that he had had almost 800 in his service, I felt like I had been made to drink the ground up gold of my own golden calf.

“A good humiliation,” indeed.

And still, everyday I take to the keyboard. I don’t know what else to do. And if I don’t always know why I am doing it exactly, it is surely not for fame. Which I do remember most days, and serves as an inescapable humiliation.

I do hope that Fr Rohr is right and that soon, all my idolatries (like my lusts) will give way to true humility.

So maybe I shouldn’t publish this essay… but I will, because I have now written for 120 weeks in a row, save one, which is more than 98% of other Substackers. How about that, huh? And someone important might read it and restack it and soon, it will go viral and I will be famous!