To Love Anything Good: A Personal Eulogy For Sourland Coffee

I had just stepped away from a job that I’d held for ten years. Ten years with a place to sit that was yours, a group of friendly colleagues to say hello to and shoot the breeze with, and for the pastor the unique understanding of a parish—a defined people that you have been tasked to walk alongside through the triumphs and the tragedies and all the sacred mundane in between. And now, I was venturing to start a church from scratch with no building, little resources, and only a few people. And one of the first questions that I faced as I set out to work in early January of 2018 was: where am I going to go? Not where is this organization going to go and how I am going to lead it there, but literally, where am I going to sit and do my work? Who are my colleagues? Where is my parish?

So I went to the only place that I knew I could find a seat and an exceptional cup of single origin coffee, where I knew some of the friendly staff, and where there might just be some people: I went to Sourland Coffee.

Sourland publicly announced it’s permanent closure yesterday due to the ongoing hardships of the pandemic. In a year where I’m no stranger to larger losses, I found myself deeply saddened by the news. Listen, I understand, especially given the events of the past year, to mourn the loss of a specialty coffee shop may seem like the height of bourgeoisie banality. “Really?” you may be asking, “300,000 people have lost their lives, several millions have lost their jobs, and bread lines look like parking lots after major sporting events, and you’re worried about your precious 3.50 cup of coffee? Marie Antoinette called she thinks you’re being tone-def.

I get it. But I also reject the notion that our laments are limited. Lament flows from the well-spring of love. There is no scarcity in love. “Love never ends” says St. Paul (1 Cor. 13v8). Love is inexhaustible, eternal, extravagant. Annie Dillard reflects on this profligate and prodigal abundance:

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world (A Pilgrim At Tinker Creek).

Love, because it reflects the extravagant giving of God, is an unquenchable fire. To grieve well then, to express love even in loss, does not need to be limited to the larger tragedies of our time. Perhaps to grieve these small losses is to place small pieces of brush and tinder on the fire that is already blazing, to tend the fire, to feel its heat. Wendell Berry wrote of the extravagance of love:

It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.

Sourland was a joy and treat for our kids. Every day after school, they would ask, “Can we go to the coffee shop?” It was part of the scenery of our lives, a fixture of our place. And it was world-class, Jon’s taste and acumen for brewing coffee and pulling espresso shots is on par with any of the best shops in New York and Philadelphia. And its cast of characters from the neighborhood were of the highest quality–just the right amount of kind, personable, and quirky.

Over the years, Sourland became for me a parish of sorts. Of course not everybody who walked through the doors was interested in God, much less knew who I was, that’s not my point. But it immersed me in humanity, the small-town conversations, the way you look at a stranger trying to honor their story with compassion and curiosity.

But even more than a parish, Sourland became for me a kind of second seminary. An apprenticeship in the art of pastoring in the real world. A place to learn what it means to be as shepherd not just to people who are showing up to church and asking about Jesus, but to people who (at least at this point in their lives) would not darken the doors of a church and generally just know Christians from their infamous political exploits (and the way cunning politicians exploit them). Sourland taught me to trust God, to bless, to simply extend the goodness of God to people I saw every day, who may not have known I was praying for them and I may not have known exactly what to pray for them.“Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world” (Berry). At Sourland, I learned to listen, to ask good questions, to be unhurried and to attend to the person in front of me. And one of the best, hardest, and most important lessons I learned through my days at Sourland was so vital to my life as a church planter: stop seeing people as potential participants in my thing, and rather, seek to participate in what God might be already doing in their lives. Sourland gave me the lens to see the grace of God that abounds in every heart and the words to try to point that out in their lives.

It’s not that I ever “figured out” how to get this start-up church off the ground. But eventually, this church that was only the dream in the minds of a few began to be formed into a people, a people with a shared vision to live in the Jesus way and to bless our neighbors out of the joy of that life. And so many people that were to become a part of that people, I met through Sourland: our first employee, our first launch team members, one of the first people that we baptized. At Sourland with its warm natural light, I conducted staff meetings, counseling sessions, I prayed for people, and helped them explore the gifts “where their great gladness” meets “with the world’s great hunger” (Buechner).

And personally, one of the things I’m most grateful to Sourland for, as I think back to those first terrifying days of trying to start something new and having no idea what I’m doing—Sourland gave me a sense of security, a people and a place that were steady in a disorienting and anxious time for me. As so much felt untethered in my life and vocation, I could pull up a chair in the corner, open my laptop, and try to figure it out, often being interrupted in the middle of it, much to my delight. Little did I know at the time, but that, perhaps more than anything else, was exactly what I needed.

So to Sourland Coffee, to Jon, to Kristin, to Bambi, to Lucy, and to the many other staff members that proceeded them, I simply want to offer my heartfelt thank you. Thank you for the rituals of coffee, of conversation, of having a place where I was known. You have been a gift to me and I know you have been a gift to this community. And at least from my own vantage point, the seeds that you have sown, by showing up and doing something beautiful have changed destinies, changed eternities. And you’ve certainly changed me.

But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time…of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here…It is in the world, but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here. (Berry, Jayber Crow)

We are out of time and our rhythms will change. So I lament the little things. Because to grieve well is to defiantly hope in an unforeseen future, to love against all scarcity and closure. And to love anything good, at any cost is a bargain.