This morning I find myself typing quickly, because I need to run down the hill to Wegman's for oat milk to put in my coffee, and I have a mediation in a couple hours. Unrelated, you say? I begin every Zoom mediation appearing on the screen with a cup of coffee frothed to the rim of my favorite cup, emblazoned in large white letters with the question, "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"
I ordered that mug for myself in 2015. What would I do, back when I bought the mug and called myself up short over breakfast each morning with those words? Pretty much what I did, I guess. I live in a world completely different from the one in which that mug and its question arrived from Amazon all those years ago.
A couple nights ago we watched The Fisher King, a flawed but thoughtful movie starring Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges, two of my favorite actors. Bridges plays a shock jock whose incendiary advice to a mentally disturbed caller leads to a mass murder for which our radio personality is blamed and shamed. The wound of that night causes him to fall out of the limelight, constantly drunk and working in a video store owned by his endlessly patient girlfriend, played by Mercedes Ruhl (another of my favorites). Bridges meets a schizophrenic homeless person, played by Williams, and learns that this ranting madman was once a professor at a private college before seeing his wife, the love of his life, blown away by the same gunman whose actions were in response to Bridges' character's words.
I won't spoil the movie for you, lest you decide to watch it one day. It's flawed in that Williams at the time was deeply into the homeless rights movement, and the urban homeless are treated in the script as wise but perhaps disturbed, and essentially harmless. That wasn't my experience living in downtown LA decades ago. At the same time, the story makes the point that the only way each man can find redemption, can heal his wounds, is through reaching outside himself to help the other. And in the end each finds his way back into life, now lit by the reflection of the other's experience.
The legend of the Fisher King always baffled me a little. The king shows up in Arthurian legend, but seems to have been around as a far more ancient Celtic tale, later Christianized. In the most familiar telling, the king is the final keeper of the Holy Grail, and fails in his mission, suffering a wound in his groin by his own weapon that never heals. The wound is generally seen as a metaphor for a youthful sexual transgression that derails him from serving God and colors the rest of his life. He sits impotently either in his lavish castle or fishing on the adjacent lake, unable to partake of life because of the wound, desolation all around him. There is a question that, if asked of him, can heal his wound, but he does not know the question and waits in hope that someone will arrive, ask it, and heal him.
Eventually he is visited by Percival, one of King Arthur's knights, who is on a quest for the Grail. Percival knows the question, but forgets to ask while he is enjoying the luxuries of the Fisher King's castle, leaving the king to suffer forever. Or in some versions he asks, and the king is healed. I have to say that is my favored telling of the legend.
The question: "Whom does the Grail serve?"
Christian scholars are quick to answer "God", but I'm not so sure. This is the cup of life, and Jesus came and offered the cup as God the Son, to serve man. Didn't he?
The movie seems to take this tack. Each man bears the wound of a horrible day that has ruined everything that came after, and is utterly lost in his sorrow and anger, focused on his loss. It is only when he finds meaning by helping the other out of the depth of his grief that he regains himself, a wiser, kinder self. And it is the wound that makes him uniquely suited to heal the other, to approach this flawed, despondent person with an empathy that is only possible through shared suffering.
That has been my own experience. The shadows of my life that haunted me for a very long time are lifted now, and I hate to sound mawkish but it is the love, empathy, and strength shown by the other in this house that raised the pall and allowed me to grow into a life I never could've imagined before. I've been redeemed, but not by a preacher.
Is that God? I hope so. I like to think He acts through us, giving us the opportunity and discernment to exercise our free will in a way that brings a little divine joy to the others in our life, a taste of the heavenly banquet that is always around us if someone helps us heal our wound and experience the kingdom at hand.
Sorry for going all theological on you. Consider yourself lucky that you never had to sit through one of my sermons (most likely).
Time to go get some oat milk, so I can make myself a latte and ask the question on the side of my mug when it, and I, appear on that Zoom screen in a few minutes.
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