Doormats Are Holy
This weeks’ blog comes from David Zahl. You can find this post (lightly edited below for context) and others at mbird.com. This week’s post is part of a series David wrote based on a class he was teaching, Things You Won’t Hear Anywhere Else (But Church). For fuller context, read the intro to the series.Of all the personality types we throw around these days, none is more ubiquitous than the Type-A vs Type-B dichotomy. Drop your Enneagram number into casual conversation and only a few folks will have a frame of reference. Myers Briggs code, perhaps a couple more. But describe another person as a “real Type-A” and odds are, you won’t need to extrapolate. That person is a go-getter. Driven, high-energy, assertive. Not what you’d call ‘chill.’
No one wants to be a doormat. I certainly do not. Not even a funny one. To be walked all over by another person — or the entire world — is undignified at best, degrading at worst. A human doormat isn’t respected; indeed, they are taken for granted, used, and even abused.
Doormats are the subject of one of Jimmy Webb’s lesser known creations. Webb, as you may know, is the great American master of tear-your-heart-out songwriting. He’s responsible for “Wichita Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Macarthur Park,” “Worst That Could Happen,” “All I Know,” “Didn’t We,” and a host of other soul-rending hits. In 1967, he composed one of the semi-lost classics of the era, The 5th Dimension’s Magic Garden. Top to bottom a behemoth of album, having stood the test of time ten times better than most everything else of its ilk. Even Sgt Peppers. [Come at me!]
The second single off the record was “Carpet Man,” a portrait of romantic doormat-itis that was also cut by The Nocturnes and The Charade. The song details the predicament of a young man who puts his girl on a pedestal, running himself ragged to “keep that girl’s feet clean.” She seems to enjoy her lofty position — until, of course, she doesn’t. “She walks all over you / You know she can (She knows she can)/ You’re the carpet man” goes the chorus. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well for our protagonist.
The message is clear: Guys, if you want love, you can’t be a doormat. Same goes for you, ladies. Don’t let things go lop-sided.
The conventional wisdom falls apart, however, when we get to the New Testament, especially any place where Jesus talks about forgiveness. In God’s kingdom, doormats are not to be shamed or looked down upon (ha). Instead, to invoke this week’s aphorism, “Doormats Are Holy.”
A few years ago, theologian John Barclay published an opus entitled Paul and the Gift, in which he plumbed the nature of grace. “Grace,” to first century readers, would have been closely intertwined with their understanding of the word “gift.” The two words were literal synonyms. A gift, Barclay writes, is an action that benefits someone else. And is any practice, either then or now, more steeped in convention than the giving of gifts? At least five different episodes of Seinfeld spring to mind.
Barclay maintains that the apostle Paul’s understanding of gift/grace differed from prevailing norms in several distinct ways. We did a whole series of articles about this, which I highly commend to you. For today, the attribute to focus on is Incongruity. There is a remarkable and even scandalous incongruity between giver and recipient when it comes to God’s grace. As Jonathan Linebaugh writes,
“The gift of Christ is not given to those who are socially, morally, intellectually, or religiously worthy; rather, by contextually shocking contrast, Christ is given to the unworthy — to the slave, to the social failure, to the sinner.”
The relation in question is out of whack. The value of the gift is not indexed to the recipient’s life in any way. And therein lies its miraculousness.
Billy Collins captured this incongruity in his hilarious (and profound) poem, “The Lanyard.” It will be the best three minutes of your day.
Love, in Collins’ poem, is portrayed as fundamentally incongruous. It operates outside the bounds of proportionality and circular exchange. The exchange, to the extent it exists, is cast by Collins as an absurdity, played for laughs yet undiminished in its sweetness. The mom gives her son everything — not just love but life itself! — and in return he gives her, well, you know. Pretty sure all three of my sons made them this past summer.
In the Bible, incongruity is seen most clearly in the instance of forgiveness. I’m thinking here of the Parable of the Unjust Steward (Mt 18:21-35), which Jesus tells immediately after shutting down his disciples’ attempts to place an upward limit on interpersonal forgiveness.
“Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”
In the parable that follows, a king confronts a servant who has racked up an astronomical debt of 10,000 talents (upwards of a few billion dollars). There is no doubt about how much this man owes, just as there is no doubt about his ability to repay. Forgiveness is the servant’s only way out, yet it rests entirely on the sole figure qualified to grant it, i.e., the king. This king — we’ll call him King Doormat of Judea — decides not to refinance the debt or pare it down, but to absorb the loss himself, thereby releasing the servant from the tyranny of the balance sheet.
Sadly, the servant cannot conceive of a life without the economy of deserving and promptly throttles a colleague who owes him a pittance. King Doormat steps in and sends the unmerciful servant to jail to be tortured. It’s not a happy ending for him, or for any of us who insist on living according to the congruity of a clean balance sheet. Then again, to take Jesus at his word, were the servant to come back the next day and beg the king for forgiveness once more, well, two is a lot less than seventy-seven.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that this picture of forgiveness is both awkward and unfashionable. As we know, the nitty gritty of forgiveness can involve hurt and trauma, vulnerability and remorse, grief and all its stages. The expected refrain of “yeah but” when the topic is discussed comes from an honest place, and as such, should never be silenced. Rushing to forgive often feels tantamount to dishonoring the victim, as if you’re erasing the wrongdoing.
Think about it: The presidential pardon process is never uncontroversial. If you’re looking for a reason not to forgive, you will always find one. But if you’re a Christian, you’ll have to figure out a way to ignore Jesus’s words, which hang there in the air, uncomfortably. You’ll have to rationalize away the radical incongruity of what he’s proposing. Like grace, the forgiveness you hear about in church targets the unworthy, and makes the giver into a doormat. Which is also why it’s so incredibly hopeful. (For an amazing illustration of these dynamics, I’d direct you to Paula Cooper or Bill Pelke, the two main figures in Alex Mar’s phenomenal and aptly titled Seventy Times Seven.)
And yet, if we think the ‘doormat ideal’ is something we can live up to, or worse, something we are living up to, then we are lost. Because the kind of forgiveness we see in the parable isn’t just hard. Humanly speaking, it is impossible. Our need for forgiveness surpasses our capacity to forgive others (or ourselves!) — and it always will.
Fortunately, Jesus didn’t just espouse this standard of forgiveness, he adhered to it. He allowed the failed forgivers and unrepentant grudge-holders to walk all over him, to wipe their feet on his loving-kindness. That’s just for starters.
The heart of the Christian message is not that we should forgive others like this, but that Jesus has forgiven you and I like this. Whatever lanyards we offer up in response are received not with expectation, but joy and yes, probably a little laughter.
Just be sure to address your trinkets of thanks to the Prince of Peace. Or, as some of us like to call him … the Carpet Man.