The return of Phillip of the Fountain Pen

  • PhillipWent to the St. Jo Star­bucks again for about the fourth or fifth time, and met up with Phillip of the Foun­tain Pen again. I first met him and wrote about the strange encounter back here in Jan­u­ary. Just as before, he was sit­ting in the cor­ner and appar­ently became intrigued by the fact that I was writing.

    Tonight, he came over and had writ­ten in his jour­nal some­thing like “Greet­ings. I’m Phillip. I see that you write. Bless­ings on you. What is your name?” (I’m going to have to para­phrase what was writ­ten back and forth this time, because it was all in his jour­nal, and I couldn’t very well ask to take that with me.)

    The sec­ond I saw that he had writ­ten some­thing, I had to smile. I beck­oned for his book and pen and wrote, “We’ve met before. My name is Grace.”

    He wrote back that he thought he rec­og­nized me and we exchanged some pleas­antries about the weather (writ­ten of course, not said), but he was already putting in ref­er­ences to the Lord’s Grace and things like that, which made me remem­ber that he found great por­tent in my name. Well­lll, I like the name as much as any­one, but see­ing as how he was also start­ing to veer into vague ref­er­ences about his min­istry and ser­vice, I thought we had bet­ter be get­ting those cards out on the lit­tle Star­bucks table.

    (me) “I’d be glad to think that our meet­ing was gra­cious, but I’m just an ordi­nary woman. What is your ministry?”

    (him) “Your appear­ing is Grace and it is min­istry. You are the Liv­ing Tem­ple of God. Do you have faith which has sub­stance and do you know this faith?”

    Sticky wicket that. I didn’t want to argue against the parts that were actu­ally (lower case O) ortho­dox, but … well, where to find the sense in it? In the end, I broke it down into bul­let points to high­light the dif­fer­ent points, which were, in brief:

    • Yes. I have faith. As I men­tioned to you last time, I’m Ortho­dox Christian.
    • I didn’t mean to say that I’m not made in God’s image, as we all are.
    • I just wouldn’t want any­one to think I was some kind of angel.

    At about this time, some young men his age who had come into the Star­bucks came over and greeted him. I couldn’t quite hear how they knew him, (I was busily writ­ing away, as well as doing a quick sur­rep­ti­tious sketch) but he shook hands with them silently and wrote all his remarks to them on another pad of paper he had. They talked to him once or twice and got writ­ten responses, wrote back to him a time or two and then retreated and left. I very much wish there had been an easy way to leave at the same time so I could’ve asked them how they knew Phillip and what was the story. But that didn’t occur to me until later. I men­tioned in my bul­let list that now he was hav­ing to carry on two con­ver­sa­tions and that must be hard.

    In his response to me, which took some time, he acknowl­edged my last point by say­ing some­thing about how there was more joy to be found in increased ministry.

    But he also went off into a whole long para­graph about the Faith and the Blood and the Word and the Tem­ple and the Vir­gin and the Lord, with none of the words hav­ing very much of the nor­mal mean­ing. It was prob­a­bly the weird­est thing he had writ­ten on either visit, and I had to stare at it for a while before I could fig­ure out what I could pos­si­bly write in answer to that.

    “You have a lot of thoughts and you have a lot of warmth for the faith,” I finally wrote. “Those can be good things, but even with those good things, I’ve seen young peo­ple get lost. The Bible is the inspired word of God, but He didn’t mean us to try to inter­pret it all alone. He didn’t cre­ate us to be soli­tary crea­tures. In the Ortho­dox Church, we talk about spir­i­tual fathers — usu­ally a priest. We know that we need a guide. You may need to find some­one like that to help you with all your thoughts.”

    This last sen­ti­ment must’ve pushed some but­ton (for bet­ter or for worse), because for the first time, he actu­ally spoke, which was rather a shock. His reply was rather long, very earnest and — unfor­tu­nately — quite nutty. He still had his half-smile for a while, but as he threw in his own inter­pre­ta­tions of sev­eral Bible verses and tossed very mean­ing­ful words about in an almost mean­ing­less way, he started to get a lit­tle less transcendental-looking. His hands started to shake and I thought he stam­mered a time or two (which I thought would’ve given a nor­mal expla­na­tion to why he pre­ferred to write. But no, it wasn’t that pro­nounced). It went on and on — some­thing about writ­ing always being wor­ship and God being all kinds of peo­ple, places and things. I stopped try­ing to fol­low it early on — there didn’t seem like much point, and I didn’t want to get thrown off of the best thing I could think of to say to him.

    “It’s a really good thing to think all of these things through,” I said. “I think you have a faith and a zeal that are really good things. But I also think that it’s pos­si­ble to get lost in those good things and not be able to find your way out. I know how excit­ing it is to feel like you see how every­thing works and I know that peo­ple can be ter­ri­bly bor­ing. But you need to find peo­ple that you can tell things to, because they may be able to tell you when some things are right, some things have already been said and — this is the hard part — some things are wrong. Since I’m your Grace, that’s what I have to say. It’s time for me to go again. I have to go feed my dog. [Poor Clemen­tine. She was my excuse last time, too.] But I know we’ll meet again.”

    I’m not sure why I said that last thing. Believe it or not, he had actu­ally been pack­ing up his stuff toward the end and was mak­ing his way out. (Come on, now. When’s the last time any­body got the last word in with a reli­gious fanatic? I rock.) I felt like telling him that one way or another, that wasn’t the end of it.

    It was only after I got in the car and headed out myself that my brain started to catch up with me and ask me what the heck I thought I was doing upset­ting the world view of some­one who was act­ing rather unbal­anced. Well, I hadn’t thought of that at the time. As I felt back in Jan­u­ary, I just didn’t see how I could walk away with­out try­ing to get some kind of mes­sage to who­ever was in there load­ing the foun­tain pen.

    So did I get a mes­sage to him? Was I his Grace of God after all, his angel? Who knows? I’ve had com­plete strangers be angels to me with just a few words. If I could ever be that — even if I employed too many words — I would hope that I’d be up to the task.


    Related posts:

    1. The Ortho­dox con­vert list

    August 13th, 2005 | Grace | 5 Comments |

5 Responses and Counting...

  • steven paul 08.13.2005

    Inter­est­ing encounter, Grace. Way back when, when I was really into the psy­chother­apy field I was going to do a paper on schiz­o­phrenic writ­ings and the gnos­tic writ­ings. I had a guy in a writ­ing class I took that was Looney Tunes with a full orches­tra and cho­rus. He wrote end­less “reli­gious” tomes and claimed to write 60–80 pages a day of this stuff that sounded a lot like the Nag Ham­madi library. It makes sense that reli­gion and men­tal ill­ness would inter­sect at some point since it is the image of God that is frac­tured at some deep level that only reli­gious terms can describe and man­i­fest to those out­side the mind of the one who is ill. I never wrote the paper, but after 25 years I still want to see if I can get sam­ples of crazy people’s reli­gious writ­ing and do a com­par­i­son. Some day in my spare time.…

  • Grace

    I don’t have any field expe­ri­ence beyond what any­one else encoun­ters these days, but I con­fess I get fas­ci­nated as well. The Jan­u­ary entry on Phillip is a lit­tle more inter­est­ing, since I could write exactly what he wrote rather than try­ing to remember.

    Funny you say that about col­lect­ing sam­ples. My first real job was read­ing let­ters for Robert Schuller Min­istries, and since I was about the only one work­ing there who wasn’t way into Robert Schuller, I always *loved* the crazy let­ters. I secretly took notes of some of them (which is prob­a­bly ille­gal or some­thing), which I still have around some­where . But most of them you couldn’t tran­scribe — they were pages and pages of things that might almost have made sense if you were really sleepy and drift­ing off to sleep.

    And yes, I’ve thought too how inter­est­ing it is that crazy peo­ple so often get obsessed with reli­gion. There’s some­thing a lit­tle tragic in how repet­i­tively and force­fully they try to make their points, as if part of the mania is just get­ting peo­ple to lis­ten to these things that are in their heads.

    In this guy’s case, he seemed quite calm com­pared to many I’ve seen, and there was noth­ing in his appear­ance that sug­gested a life in dis­or­der. Who knows what places exist in people’s heads?

  • steven paul

    “Who knows what places exist in people’s heads? “
    yeah.…all I know some­times is that I don’t think I’d even want to pass through some of those places on the way to some­where else. :)
    I have had sev­eral clients over the years that the thin veneer of
    nice­ness and san­ity rubbed through quickly. Unfor­tu­nately some­times you don’t see it until it is too late and there you are with a con­tract and
    sev­eral days of labor and mate­r­ial into the project. I’ve walked away from a few and wished I had from a few more.

  • Grace

    Well, that brings up another ques­tion: which would you rather deal with — some­one who’s crazy or some­one who’s sane but nasty.

    My first boss was crazy — yelled and threw tantrums, had unbe­liev­able mood swings, told me one morn­ing in all seri­ous­ness that thanks to her card-reader she had found out that the prob­lem with her life was that some­one had put a curse on her. (It might have been me, come to think of it.) On the other hand, I had a client for a year or two that I fired recently even though we needed the money, because though they were prim and gave the appear­ance of pro­fes­sion­al­ism, they were increas­ingly show­ing them­selves to be unrea­son­able, point­lessly crit­i­cal and com­pletely incon­sid­er­ate of my time and patience — not to men­tion firmly believ­ing that every project that didn’t come out to their lik­ing was all my fault. It was too exhaust­ing deal­ing with them, and they were shocked when I let them go. (Thank good­ness they were only my client and not my boss.)

    In the long run, I’d pre­fer the crazy lady. Though of course, you would kind of hope you don’t get too much of either one.

  • steven paul

    Good points all around. Crazy…at least you can excuse them and believe they have good motives just not good brain chem­istry. Nasty is another thing alto­gether. But, good ques­tion. I’ve given crazy peo­ple back their money, nasty people…well, they either sued me or screwed me and got it that way.
    Crazy and nasty, now THAT’S what I encoun­tered recently. I hope that’s the last one of those I meet for a long time.

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