Drink this

After Joel 1

Drink this new wine,

this wine of disaster,

the wine that devours you,

this bitter grape you

planted in your vineyards,

the vineyards of the locusts,

An army of locusts

buzzing and feeding

upon the land

upon your soul.

And then the dreams

and then the visions

and then the wind pours out,

the wind pours out.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Drinking, Culture, and Faith

When we moved to St. Louis from Houston, we had a difficult time finding a church. Houston had no dearth of good churches. St. Louis had a lot of churches, too, but they tended to be mainline Protestant or Catholic, and we tended to the more evangelical. (The four houses of worship closest to where we lived were Catholic, United Church of Christ, and two synagogues.)

We visited a lot of churches. We found one that seemed to have solid preaching and teaching, with friendly, welcoming people (more of a problem than you might imagine). A small group from the church came to visit us at our apartment, and in the course of the conversation the subject of drinking alcohol came up. To join the church, we were told, we would have to sign a no-alcohol pledge.

That would be a problem. We drank alcohol. Not much, and most days none. But we did consume alcohol.

We didn’t join the church. I later learned that the elders at the church occasionally had champagne breakfasts, that many people at the church signed the pledge but drank anyway. After all, this was west suburban St. Louis, one of the wealthiest parts of the metropolitan area.

None of that sat well with me. If you have a no-alcohol pledge, fine. But don’t have a pledge and then blatantly ignore it with champagne breakfasts, by the elders, no less.

What we encountered could be a story out of Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty. Author Brett McCracken, in the final three chapters of the book, focuses on drinking, and the attitudes of Christians about drinking alcohol. Over the years, I’ve heard all the arguments, pro and con, and I agree with McCracken – the Bible doesn’t teach against consuming alcohol, but it does teach consistently against drunkenness.

McCracken provides a good overview of the history of Christians and our attitudes about alcohol (the Puritan Pilgrims in the New World were “largely friendly to alcohol,” he notes, with the Mayflower well provisioned with beer and wine). And he finds five themes in the Bible concerning alcohol and its consumption:

·       Drunkenness is a sin.

·       It is part of the joy and blessing given by God.

·       It is an eschatological (last things) symbol of the bounty of the new creation.

·       Abstinence is a good option, but it’s not mandated

·       Moderation is the operative principle.

What he does point out is that we need to understand Christians’ historical opposition to alcohol within an American cultural context. Drunkenness was common in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and associated with family breakdown and crime in general. People could easily see the effects of drunkenness in their communities. We Americans still carry our historical baggage with us. “Ours is a culture,” McCracken points out, “of college binge drinking, keggers, underage drinking as rebellion, and Bud Light commercials.” And how many stories of drunken drivers killing people do we have to read before we say “Enough!”?

It’s easy to ridicule Christians’ historical antagonism to alcohol. But drunkenness wasn’t then and isn’t now simply a personal choice. It’s a personal choice with public ramifications.

Over at The High Calling, we’ve been discussing Gray Matters. Today concludes the discussion. You can read comments by others by visiting The High Calling.

My previous posts on the book:

Navigating the Gray

Food and Idolatry

Separate, Engaged, or Transformed?

Going to the Movies

Photograph by Holly Chaffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The street stained red

The street turned red,

a deep red scarlet, after

I spilled communion wine

on the sidewalk in front

of the hardware store.

I used the bread to sop

it up, but it kept pouring,

spreading to the street.

Too slow to chase after it,

I watched the stain

turn the street scarlet red,

the wine now sloshing

its way to infinity.

The Red Rhone

It occupied its shelf, resting,

this green bottle holding

memory and promise, waiting

for its moment of glory.

The young proprietor, speaking

only a fraction of English, smiling,

had offered it, assuring

in his English-less French, nodding

his recommendation.

He would not see the two, leaving

France the next day, Americans

again, but the green glass containing

his suggestion would be a gift,

a red from the Rhone Valley, reminding

them of the young proprietor managing

his shop on the Rue des Martyrs.

In 1999, my wife and I were in Paris, and some two blocks from our hotel discovered the Rue des Martyrs, with its flower stalls, food shops, candy shops, bakeries and a wine shop with a young proprietor. The bottle, when we opened it later back home, lived up to the English-less recommendation.

This poem is submitted for the TweetSpeak Poetry prompt offered Monday by Seth Haines – Gluhwein Memories.

It’s also submitted to Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. To see more poems, please visit the site. The links will be live today at 2 p.m. Central time.

Color and Descent

We sit on a hillside, still

green but the leaves are

turning in the endless cycle

of color and descent.

Between us rests a half-full,

half-empty bottle of dark rich

red, and we drink the liquid

grapes and we drink the prayers

and the sweat of the Rhinelanders

who settled here and dug stones

from the ground and planted and

survived and flourished and died,

adding their bones to the stone

and the clay and the soil, to birth

new memories of bottles of red,

and bottles of white.

About 40 minutes west and southwest, and 50 minutes south of St. Louis begins Missouri wine country. The area around Hermann and Augusta, Mo., was certified as an official US wine district even before any areas of California received the designation (as stubborn as Missourians can be, they managed to agree on classifications before the Californians did). Oktoberfest is big in this region. The wine industry died during Prohibition but began making a comeback in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, some 16 wineries are located in the area.

This poem is submitted for the prompt at TweetSpeak Poetry, which in October is all about wine and beer. (Seth Haines, who’s behind the prompts, must be getting free samples for promoting this.)

This poem is also submitted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

The bottle of wine in the photograph is Augusta Winery’s Norton, made from the Cynthiana grape, and my personal favorite.

Wines and October

You tell me it has faint strokes of citrus,

and I wonder how citrus could find

its way into Missouri clay, but it does.

Or that robust suggestions of cherry,

black courant and toffee (toffee?),

punctuated by smoky oak and pepper,

will splash my palate well with pasta,

grilled meats and Brie. But a hint

of cigar? Down my throat?

Accompaniment to duck and steak

and meaty stews replete with fatte

d’animal?

I think not; instead, I will sit atop

this hill of stones, this mount of pleasant,

my glass of Oregon redness in my hand

inhaling its silky smoothness,

its ripe black fruits and rich suppleness,

and turn my eyes to the sun.

I am not a beer drinker. There are two kinds of beers I have been know to occasionally partake of:  Guinness Extra Stout (“Taste It. Believe It. Become a Believer.”) and Corona Light – occupying two ends of the commercial beer spectrum. I live in the land of Anheuser-Busch, so you think I would average more than a beer every other year.

This may have something to do with how much beer my father drank. He liked Falstaff, which was brewed in St. Louis. I occasionally bike past the old Falstaff brewery on South Broadway, and see the company symbol sculpted in stone on the building façade, and think of my father.

Over at TweetSpeak Poetry, Seth Haines has posted a poetry prompt about Octoberfest. We didn’t have Octoberfest when I was growing up in New Orleans, but when we landed in St. Louis, we discovered Octoberfest about 90 miles to the west, in the little town of Hermann. Hermann was settled by immigrants from the Rhine River Valley, and they liked their wine. Today, Hermann is part of the wine production industry in Missouri, which stretches west, southwest and south of St. Louis. Even nearby southwestern Illinois has added a few wineries.

We’d go to Hermann in October, and we would find us some wine. At other times of the year, we head to Augusta, Missouri, much closer than Hermann, and visit the Augusta Winery (the town is also home to Mt. Pleasant Winery).

And having been blessed with a bottle of Merlot from Sineann Winery in Oregon, well, you can see where this poem came from – a found poem using fragments of promotional and advertising phrases about wines from Stone Hill Winery (Hermann), Augusta Winery, and Sineann Winery.

To see what others have been writing about Octoberfest, please visit TweetSpeak Poetry and say hi to Seth.

This poem is also submitted to Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

Photograph: Bottles of wine by Jiri Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Lord's Supper

Bread had to be

broken

wine had to be

drunk,

so that bread

could be eaten

so that wine

could be drunk

that day