I’m always wondering what exactly it is that makes me love coffee so much. I can give any number of cynical explanations. I might say that I’m addicted to caffeine, or that I idolize it. Maybe I just like it without any good explanation. But I hope there is something more, and I wonder how that can fit into an ordered understanding of who we are and what we do.
I have attempted to explain what I like about particular coffee shops. I like the atmosphere. I like a coffee shop that serves a good espresso, macchiatto, french press, or ever drip coffee. I like a coffee shop that reminds me of something from my past. I like a coffee shop that can help me to focus my thoughts. I like to inspired, to feel driven forward, to feel completely concentrated on something bigger or better. I like to come into contact with the transcendent.
But it’s not enough just to go to a coffee shop, and even there I wonder if the I’m not idolizing a little too much.
Dante knew how to love, or learned how to love when he went through the caverns, mountain, and spheres. He learned that our loves were always supposed to point us on to God. If we love them aright, we see them transformed into mirrors of God’s glory. While coffee is no Beatrice and no coffee shop will come close to being human (at least I would be highly suspect). I wonder if there is not something here that might help me. I want to figure out how to love coffee and not turn it into an idol. I don’t want my desire for coffee to blind me to God.
So how might coffee serve as a reflection of God. I think I can assert a couple of things here. First, the goodness of coffee is received from God. Implied in the first, there is something good about coffee.
But what is that good?
Coffee has a kind of good-in-the-moment quality to it. If you love coffee you know what I’m talking about. That first second when you start to drink it, it warms your hands as it invades your breath, filling you with an aroma that spreads through your veins. You feel strength and a new day at your hands, and you face the day ahead of you. Then you take that first drink, and you are face to face with the day that awaits you.
This good-in-the-moment kind of good is time bound. In fact it’s goodness is especially found in that momentary quality. Coffee is a passing moment, a moment bounded on either side. It is the moment we pass through one time and enter another, we move from one kind of living, to the singularity of a cup of coffee back into that moment ready to deal with it again. But if the coffee took up time, was anything other than that initial crucial point between making it and taking the first drink, it would become an idol. It would fill up its own time, and we would section off more and more time to redeploy it. Drinking more and more, as if we could regain the moment. But we cannot. Coffee fades away, bowing down before all of the more important things in our lives. It silently slips away as we turn our thoughts to our day, or to our work, or to a lively conversation. That’s what coffee does best, and it is that which makes coffee beautiful.
No Comments