Dropped Coffee Doctrine



I was chatting with a buddy yesterday about my refusal to drink bad coffee. What constitutes bad coffee is two-fold: 1) Poor taste; 2) Weak. Good taste is the first element, it is a necessary but not sufficient grounds for a great cup of coffee. The second element is that the coffee has to be strong. So, if a coffee is poor tasting, the strength of the brew actually compounds my revulsion. Yet a good coffee served weak is like the cup has been castrated. Eunuch brew. I gave McDonald's McCafe a shot awhile back on a trip up to Boston. Bad on both elements and poured it out like a bucket of watered down piss.

Above is my coffee this morning. In good hipster fashion, I have take an old process called Cowboy Coffee and gentrified the title to Dropped Coffee and feel special because I did so. Like the long-beards who ferment cucumbers and create artisanal pickles and then charge four bucks for one. And all the Foodies fawn. Essentially, Dropped Coffee is boiling some water, putting the grounds on top, and letting the grounds get saturated, thus releasing their essence, and sinking to the bottom to die, fulfilling its mission in life. I have cut out the massive coffee-maker because I am becoming increasingly concerned about the toxins in plastic that get released by heat. In general, I am attempting to cut plastics out of my diet. There is research today which posits endocrine disruptions due to the toxicity of plastics.

The taste of the coffee is unmediated and pure, and a bit gritty initially because not all the grounds sink. Grinding the beans into a finer blend seems to help and I have to wait to let the process of dropping grounds occur naturally. Some jostling of the cup will prematurely cause the grounds to submerge but not sink. A gentle shake should be all that is needed to finish up the procedure. I am waiting for Dropped Coffee to become the new craze. Nothing new under the sun I suppose.

As you peer upon the picture below you will see said coffee mug with a barista-like buffet of books:


One of the immense joys of my life since commencing the Ph.D. and writing the book has been a resumption of reading for enjoyment. I am no longer on the gorging narrow diet of research. Force-feeding of facts and grinding out the sausage of knowledge. Really pretty brutal, Academia is a bloodless blood sport if that makes any sense. The wounds are intellectual and the Coliseum is the university. I did learn how to type in the process, so that is a plus.

So, there is Tolkien, Kierkegaard, Kerouac, Nouwen, plus my remotes for the TV. My most constant TV channel is CSPAN 2's BOOKTV whose tagline is "Television for Serious Readers" which is really ironic like "Junk Food for Health Nuts."  Not quite of course because the programs are dedicated to authors' talking about their books. My idea of a good time.

One book not mentioned is the yellow covered tome that is folder over. It is titled Imagination Redeemed: Glorifying God with a Neglected Part of Your Mind. The authors Gene Edward Veith Jr. and Matthew Ristuccia form a philosophical (Veith) and theological ( Ristuccia) tag-team of sorts. It is a great book that is both tasty and strong, like the Dropped Coffee. I know you were wondering where I was headed with this analogy.

On page 111 in the paperback, one of them writes, "A Christian imagination comes from internalizing Christian truth, not just for knowing a set of doctrines abstractly. They have to penetrate deeply into the heart and become part of one's identity. The way that happens is through the imagination." Like Dropped Coffee, truth must drop into our hearts and not just stay in our heads.

One of the conclusions from all of my studies is that knowledge is critical yet facts alone are not enough. The German suicidal pilot who just crashed the commercial jet in the Alps illustrates the horrible dilemma modern humanity finds itself. He knew how to fly the plane but he used the knowledge to destroy himself and 150 others. Islam is demonstrating the same demonic destruction, knowledge used as a destroyer. So, does the blind West that finds no purpose outside of living for the weekend. Facts float like bubbles where any meaning is illusory and fleeting.

Grounding ourselves in God's Word, rejoicing in all of its implications, ultimately results in tasting and seeing that the Lord is good. Imagination creating experience, truth imbibed and expressed. Loving God and loving others and ourselves. Letting our idols die by inattention and neglect. Amen.

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