Marbles in the Muzzle

Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance, and begin not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father. (Matthew 3:8,9)

Cowboys

In a different era of my life, I received a phone call that went to voicemail. The voice on the recording was smooth and gentle, benevolent like a doting grandfather wishing a happy birthday on a favorite grandson. Yet the man behind the voice was a complete stranger to me, and he was calling not to wish me happy birthday but to schedule a carpet cleaning job.

I was in my first year of taking over the business, and I hadn’t yet met all the clients. He informed me in his kindly way that he needed a few rooms done, and that it always cost about a hundred bucks.

I winced. Even though it was still my first year of business, I could see that a painful price hike was in this gentle creature’s future.

I set up an appointment for Mr. Grayson and warned him that prices were different than they were a couple years ago, softening the blow by offering to work this time for the old price, and providing a quote for next year. He agreed this seemed fair.

On Friday morning, I eased my van to the curb on Melrose Street outside an unremarkable brick house with a weary wrought iron fence and an overgrown yard. Mr. Grayson met me at the door with far more grace and chivalry than one might expect from a grossly overweight man in his sixties with tufts of wispy blond hair sprouting more confidently from the knuckles of his pudgy toes than from his balding head. After a little professional small talk, he showed me what needed to be done, and I began writing up the job. Before I could finish, he waved me over.

“Married?” His face beamed with condescension as he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Kids?”

“Not yet.”

He stretched out a soft hand with two small objects. Was that a... pocketknife?

“Go on, take them,” he said grandly, “One for you and one for the missus.”

I reflexively received his offering. Two cheap folding knives, a rather odd tip. He explained that it was a hobby of his, collecting knives, and he enjoyed giving them as small gifts. He gave them away to get others interested in his hobby. Also, he had “hundreds more” in the basement, which I did not ask to visit. He opened his mouth, hesitated modestly, then revealed a second unexpected personal interest.

“I collect guns, too. Not assault rifles—I like cowboy guns, the lever-action rifles, single-action revolvers, that kind of thing. Gary Cooper, John Wayne stuff.”

He drew my attention to a rack in the corner where seven or eight lever-action rifles leaned upright against wooden supports in a row of brass and blued steel and dark wood. Little glass balls rested in the divot of each upturned muzzle.

The line of gleaming artillery was striking, but he didn’t offer to pair a Yellowboy carbine with the folding knife, so I went about my business. His demeaner cooled visibly when I presented my estimate for what the cost would be next year, and I briefly wondered if he regretted his earlier generosity with the knives. While I worked, he planted himself deep in his couch and tranquilly strummed a guitar, which neither of us could hear for the noise I was making, lifting his pudgy blond toes in the air as I worked my way past him.

Wrapping up, I ventured a few leading questions in an attempt to repair the rift that my clipboard had created earlier, and he was soon chatting happily and giving me a closer look at his guns. He heaved his bulk over the edge of his struggling furniture and swiped at a cartridge belt and holster hanging nearby on a hook.

“This,” he panted proudly, “Is a Colt .45, exactly like the one John Wayne carried in most of his movies. And this,” hoisting himself again, “Is a perfect replica of the revolver Gary Cooper shot in High Noon!”

Lowering his voice conspiratorially, “I had these belts custom made to match the movies exactly. Was a bit expensive but they sure are nice…”

He handed me a .45 revolver, butt first. I obligingly hefted it and sighted down the barrel as he smiled indulgently.

Collapsing back into the furniture, which caught his bulk with a desperate yelp, he mused reminiscently, “I do like those old cowboy guns. My grandfather, you know, he grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. He grew up riding horses and shooting these guns. He got involved in some of the real Wild West. He personally knew Frank and Jesse James and all those guys, you know.”

As a matter of fact, I hadn’t known.

This continued for a few minutes, with him name-dropping infamous outlaws with studied carelessness and casually connecting them to assorted ancestors of his own, while I cooperatively nodded along. The pride and dignity fairly oozed from his soft, corpulent person as he rehearsed their various escapades.

“My great uncle—he was a gambler and fighter all his life. They said if you were his friend, he’d give you the shirt off his back, but if you double crossed him, he was one mean SOB.” He grinned happily at the cliché, seemingly convinced he had made it up on the spot. “So, you know, I’ve got the heritage.…” He trailed off, smiling distantly at his collection, his mind evidently recalling the distant glory of blazing guns and smoky saloons.

Handing back the perfect replica of the movie prop that Gary Cooper carried in High Noon, my attention returned to the gleaming row of long guns. Was there anything special about these? No, he said, they were mostly .22 caliber reproductions of Henry and Winchester .44 and .45 repeaters. Did he shoot them much? Oh, he shot the .22 calibers once in a while down at the range. The few actual .40 cals were too expensive to shoot, he explained, winking knowingly at me. I chuckled and nodded. Hey, who can afford to shoot the real guns when .22 replicas poke holes in paper just as well? Not us.

We were getting on pretty well, so I chanced a question about the glass spheres resting calmly in the barrel of each polished weapon, standing upright in their supports against the wall.

“Oh… those are marbles.”

Marbles? Apparently, the marbles kept the dust from settling into the maw of the spotless, polished muzzles.

Now, this was very new to me. I did a fair amount of shooting on the farm where I grew up, and I always felt that wiping the mud off the gun before dropping it in a corner or behind the truck seat was a reasonable threshold for responsible gun ownership. Extra points for clearing the chamber if you weren’t planning to shoot again in the immediate future. Where there was no obvious rust, one could be confident that the firearm was in good hands. When I learned from Grayson that one could buy plugs for dust control, but marbles are cheaper and just as effective, I struggled to find a mental category in which to file the information.

Perhaps I wasn’t taught well; after all, I was just a farm kid without all the advantages of a bona fide gunfighter heritage like Grayson. No doubt this marble tip was passed down, mentor to mentee, from his brawling great-uncle who was known as one mean etcetera. “Look here kid, never forget to replace the marble in yer shootin’ iron after resolvin’ yer differences. It’ll save yer bacon one day.” Digging in his pocket for a small glass orb as he mounts his steed and departs the dead and dying in the saloon behind him.

Mr. Grayson was utterly enamored with the image of a hard-riding, gun-slinging past, so he propped a replica armory in the corner of his living room and kept the dust out with marbles, which are cheaper than plugs, to help disassociate himself from his obese, thrice-divorced, government-pension reality.

Martyrs

Are there parallels between a wannabe cowboy outlaw collecting obsolete weapons from a different era and wannabe saints dreaming of spiritual heroics from a different era? I suspect there is. When I left his lower-middle-class neighborhood, it was not gunfighter stories ringing in my head, but martyr stories and missionary stories. Stories from my own heritage of Anabaptist radicals.

Perhaps we are dissatisfied, and rightly so, with our domesticated existence as a sort of religious mascot in America. We feel a need to make some sparks fly, to do something, to stir a revival, kindle a flame. But the truth, as it often turns out, is too prosaic to easily stir a revival or rouse a following. It needs some fire and indignation to get a crowd going, but naïve truth doesn’t always share such ambitions, and so we must wax eloquent about the past and excoriate the present and do a little supplementary stomping around. It all makes for good, clean, religious fun and leaves us with an inexplicable sense of being refreshed and vindicated. Enough hot air can feel like the beginnings of a fire.

The impulse to liven up our faith is an admirable thing, but I can’t help wondering why it is that we are so drawn to the specifics of past heroics. Is it a form of negotiation with our conscience, where we eulogize obsolete exploits of history to help us sidestep the messy chores waiting stubbornly on the front step of today? Just as it is often safer to aspire to heights comfortingly out of reach, like K-2 or Annapurna, than to climb a ladder and patch my own roof, so also it seems safer to aspire to martyrdom and evangelistic crusades than to make eye contact with an offended brother. And yes, it is much easier to write pithy essays than to live them. Everyone wants a revolution, as Dorothy Day once said, but nobody wants to do the dishes.

I live here, and I can attest that the American West today has little use for gun-slinging cowboy outlaws or vigilante justice. Should we be surprised that today’s world also offers a different set of spiritual challenges and calls for workers to forge a different set of tools than it did decades or centuries ago? Some things never change and there is nothing new under the sun, it is true. But what is also true is that a great many things do change, and yearning for a romanticized past brings little honor to the God of the eternally present I AM.

This is no cheap shot at tradition; healthy traditions are powerful and meaningful and not something to be lightly abandoned. Humans do not flourish in chaos but in an environment of order and stability. But what if God wishes we would stop polishing our imitations of the past and forge new tools that are needed now? What if he wishes we would take less satisfaction in maintaining our inherited identity as a subculture at odds with society and have more satisfaction in being His hands and feet in our neighborhoods? Less time admiring confrontations with atheists and more time washing the neighbors’ windows. Less time mocking transgenderism and neopronouns and more time doing the emotionally exhausting, unappreciated, and seemingly unproductive work of understanding and loving and walking with the deeply broken people around us. More time cultivating the humility to see that my own brokenness is not so far removed from theirs. Less feeding of our culture war persecution complex and more seeking reconciliation with the sharp-tongued gossip in the next pew.

In other words, less time dusting cheap imitations of the past and more time learning what it means to walk humbly with God, today.

I didn’t see much more of Mr. Grayson in the six years I ran the business. I assume he preferred a more budget-friendly service for his nylon carpet, just as he preferred budget-friendly dust plugs for his imitation weapons.