Peregrine's Progress

Ever since Murky Coffee fought the law on Capitol Hill, there has been no reason to leave my apartment for a cup of my favorite dark liquid. Murky still exists across the river in Arlington, but one of my wife’s own hand-crafted espresso with a touch of cinnamon renders the Metro ride to our southern neighbor that much more unappealing.

Don’t get me wrong, there are several decent coffee shops on the Hill, with nice places to sit and lose yourself in conversation or in the New Yorker. But the coffee all across the board is sub-par, even when it is organically grown, fair trade or supporting Christian relief efforts. Generally speaking, the quality of coffee in the district has been disappointing since I moved here. I am not enough of a coffee snob to abstain from the corporate chains or the (blessedly) free coffee I drink at work to feed my caffeine addiction. But considering the significant Ethiopian minority in the District, you would think there would be tastier options. (As an aside, I could simply be on the wrong neighborhood. The Northwest does seem like a better place for a coffee culture, and I know of a genuine bean roaster who goes to our sister church).

Murky was, as they said it, “the best damn coffee in Washington D.C.” Until, of course, the taxman came to the door with a bill to hefty to keep the shop open. It was good coffee, run by genuine coffee snobs who wanted you to love coffee as much as they do.

This weekend, Murky’s long awaited replacement has arrived. I won’t go into the details with their story, but I encourage you to read about Peregrine Espresso on their blog. Coffee snobs have returned to Capitol Hill, in the same cramped strip on Eastern Market. Since Justin is home in Michigan, I thought I’d pinch hit and write a (much wordier) review.

My wife and I missed the opening festivities, but we took time this Saturday come on by. Peregrine means pilgrim, which is appropriate, since we have been waiting with religious fervor for the place to open. As I write this review, however, I cannot escape comparing it to its predecessor.

I have mixed feelings about the atmosphere. Murky had a disorganized since of freedom that the best college roasters have. The workers were a colorful crew of funny, young coffee snobs. Chairs and tables were less uniform. Rilo Kiley (along with an assortment of music that the kind of people who like Rilo Kiley would listen to) would add to the noise of coffee orders and banter, yet would not distract you from your reading. There was the eclectic mix of people that made Capitol Hill on a weekend beautiful.

Peregrine in contrast is rather uniform. The mugs and furniture seemed all selected from the same catalogue. It was generally less colorful, and if there was music playing, I don’t remember. My wife prefers it that way. It has Ordnung. But I enjoy the colorful craziness. That being said, they owners say there is more decorating to be done.

Of course, the disorganization led to drawbacks. Half the time at Murky, I could not find a seat. Peregrine’s use of space was much more efficient and therefore more comfortable. There was room to breathe, room to sit. Hopefully, this noticeable step towards organization will mean all the bills will be paid, and that they will be on Capitol Hill a long time.

Of course, all of this is just window-dressing. What truly matters is the coffee. I regret to say that I was so craving the soy macchiato (my regular drink at Murky) that I forgot my normal litmus test for a coffee shop: a regular cup of black coffee. If they do that right, they will do other things right. I will have to report on this later. In the meantime, the macchiato was superb. My wife loved her cappuccino. It was worth leaving my apartment for.  

Collectivity and Its Discontents

Last night, between saying our final farewells to those “go world” visa commercials, my wife and I sat in our hotel room and watched the closing ceremony from Beijing. Instead of watching the opening ceremonies, we had watched Batman: Dark Knight in the theater, and it seemed like everyone else, from students to colleagues to NBC broadcasters were gushing about how great it was.

The Olympics have been a joy to watch this year. Phelps & company produced enough drama and made me excited about non-league sports in a way I probably won’t be again, at least until I am schlepping my own kids to swim practice and track meets.

Before the Olympics began, David Brooks gave me some food for thought. Or, to write it better, he focused a swarming group of thoughts that I already had by putting words to them (writers I like tend to do this for me). Brooks writes that China is showcasing an alternative to the more individualistic American Dream. The great nation is presenting a vision for a people based on collectivity and harmony.

The closing ceremony, as well as the highlights of the opening ceremony that I managed to see, argued Brooks’ point for him. This astounding show proclaimed a unity to form that the best marching bands could only dream of. Thousands of drummers drummed at once with purpose and power. The dancers moved in grace, the colors were red, gold, beautiful and Chinese. There was no one star, even when China’s most celebrated gymnast flew to the top of the stadium to light the torch, he, dressed in red and gold, was one of many, among drummers and dancers. It was something different than the surprise appearance by Mohammed Ali in Atlanta twelve years ago. Parkinson’s or not, he stood out from us as “the greatest,” and we wanted to be like him, to talk his talk and put our fists where our mouths are. China, in contrast, beckoned, if not demanded us to admire the collective dance of a great, ancient people. Everyone drums, dances, knows their place, and the whole is more beautiful than any of us.

Community is in our lifeblood. We need each other for survival. It is deeply spiritual as well. One of the reasons I am a Christian is that Jesus offers a ministry of reconciliation, based on love of God and of each other. He beckons us to lay our own lives down, as he did, in so doing loving our creator with all we have and loving each other as we love ourselves.

These primal and spiritual urges add appeal to the narrative of collectivity and community. Indeed, ever since I moved to Washington, I have attended a church that is more liturgical than what I am used to, simply because liturgy celebrates community in ways many modern evangelical churches do not. Prayer is beautiful, but it is lovely when we say the same prayer, together, acknowledging that we all need God’s will to be done, on earth as it is in heaven. What could be more pleasing than being one people?

Of course, China is a massive and present-day illustration to the historical difficulty of community. What happens when someone does not wish to confirm to the norms of the community? The collective identity ends with this non-conformist. What if a Chinese person wishes to worship in a church that doesn’t parrot the state sponsored religion? What if he thinks the Chinese claim to the land of his religious heritage was unrightfully made?

I know people who have boycotted watching the Olympics in memory of such non-conformists. Collective identity loses its beauty to those who no longer desire to be part of it, worse so for those who find partaking of it impossible. Ironically, when societies attempt to smother these non-conformists, they either lose the collectivity, or make the society dangerous, brutal and un-livable (see North Korea).

There is much to criticize about American individualism. We do need each other, and we wannabe-cowboys would do well to learn it. However, community cannot be forced. Often, it must be endured; it must be allowed to change us to make us better so that we can truly reconcile to those around us. It takes time, patience and an often-unsavory amount of bearing with one another. A top-down enforced (violently or otherwise) collectivity, where there is only one drumbeat, is not a good alternative.

One part of the closing ceremonies stood out to me. To represent the transition of the Olympic games from Beijing to London, a double-decker bus appeared. Before western celebrities (David Beckham among them) ascending from the bus’ roof, out of the doors sprung a group of dancers, evidently representing London residents. They were different colors, skin colors and clothes colors. Even though there was chorography, they did not move in a way to celebrate mass collectivity. Rather, they crept, jumped, ran and crawled in ways that celebrated a loosened sort of freedom that was noticeably lacking from the remainder of the show. And that I found very appealing.

Melancholy, Reviews and Religious Adherents

The professor who lives in my neighborhood has moved on, leaving the pale pink pages of the Financial Times Arts & Weekend for scavenger readers to pillage. Of course, with the internet, one really doesn’t need to raid the front porches of neglectful neighbors who forgot to forward their publications. However, August has been unseasonably mild, and in such good weather, the only way to read the newspaper is the old-fashioned way, which is what my wife did last weekend in the Bartholdi flower garden as I took a refreshing, Olympics-inspired run on the National Mall.

Sunshine and good cheer aside, I have always had a bent towards melancholy, lurking behind my eyes like a heather-gray wraith, keeping more colorful emotions from exposure. Thus, this FT article caught my attention when I returned, huffing and puffing under the open blue.

I like the tongue and cheek opening of the article describing dissatisfaction driving our economy. Indeed, I have been impressed as I have watched the Olympic coverage this weekend how the (mostly excellent) commercials have created a since of inspiration while subtly hinting I won’t be happy until I bought their product (proud sponsors of the Olympic games). It’s a lesson we all should have learned in all those anti-climatic Christmas morning moments, five minutes after the biggest present has been open, this surprising whisper that owning a Lego castle is not the closing chord of a symphony, resolving dissonance and achieving, finally, satisfaction. Perhaps an appreciation of what we have above what we want (what we feel we “deserve”) could do much to end credit card debt. Of course, our economy would take a huge hit.

Of the books reviewed in the article, the one I would be most interested in reading would be Julian Baggini’s Complaint, because, to my great interest, he brings up religion. “Baggini’s arch-enemy is religion,” writes FT, “all the major variants of which teach us to accept our miserable fate as God’s will. Christianity, for example, tells us to turn the other cheek.” Baggini writes “Complaint is a secular humanist act. It is a resistance against the idea… that suffering is our divinely ordained lot and that we can do no more than put up with it piously.”

I’m curious if Baggini’s sense of theology or history is as bad as the review (unintentionally) makes it out to be. Indeed, it seems that a large complaint against religion, by it’s other “arch-enemies,” is that the faithful are trying to make changes to the system and to others, not only now, but throughout history, in varying degrees of severity (and, I would argue, morality). The Christian right dares to involve itself in politics. Al Qaeda and its cohorts have not been turning the other cheek. Some of the most effective positive social change in the past century have been religiously driven (Gandhi, King, Tutu).

The famous “turn the other cheek” passage, interestingly enough, is from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the very text which inspired King and Gandhi.  Dan preached a sermon on it a couple months ago. The Sermon on the Mount, he argues, teaches an effective, moral middle way between the weak, opiate religion Baggini and Marx criticize and the fanaticism of fundamentalists from the barking Brother Jed to the biting Osama Bin Laden.  To turn the other cheek is to neither back down, nor result to violence. It does not ignore reasons to complain. Martin Luther King understood this, and he stood up to racial inequality without resorting to violence, and he led others to do so. James understood this too, when he wrote, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Religion, when done well, is active and peaceful.

Among Christians, there will be a sense of melancholy and dissatisfaction. We possess an awareness of how the world is fallen and how it should be.  Our complaint is against the world, the flesh and the devil. Our hope is in Christ, who gave his life to overcome them. We work to reverse the effects of the fall, in ourselves, in the world’s systems and in each other. Theology of an inactive stoicism or violent fanaticism, whether from religious teachers or from critics, is bad theology, and disregards a rich history of Christian activism.