Margaritaville and the Leap of Faith

Key West, Florida

As today is our wedding anniversary, a stray memory of the Florida Keys caused me to again appreciate how ennui can be overcome by what the Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard [1813-1855] identified as “the leap of faith”, and how transformative that leap may become.

I first visited Key West in 1987. I was attending, as a diocesan representative, a conference in Miami on music and liturgy. As was often the case in those days, when it wasn't as obvious that mainstream Christianity was in decline, the discussions were mostly designed to allow the attendees to burnish their resumes, network for future elevation to the episcopate, permit the pompous to luxuriate in self-importance, and allow the clergy, musicians, and choir directors to drink prodigious amounts during the cocktail and dinner times.

In other words, for someone in his early thirties, except for the location, it was a drag.

Fortunately, a woman whom I had been seeing for a couple of years was there as the representative of her diocese and, in a moment of wildness [my life is a series of ordinary events punctuated by moments when I seem to lose my reason; isn’t yours?], I suggested that she and I play hooky and take a drive down the long highway to the Keys, just to see what they were like. We were in south Florida, so why not?

That was a propitious moment of wildness, as it turned out.

A word about Kierkegaard’s leap of faith is perhaps necessary before we continue, especially as it has been misunderstood and, hence, misused for about a century or so.

As the Danish philosopher was composing at a time when science and religion were just beginning their perverse separation from one another, a particular surprise given how much of science was enabled by Christian institutions of learning, Kierkegaard observed that there will probably always be things that lie outside the parameters of reason.

Since God exists outside of physical boundaries, using the tools of physical reality are inadequate for coming to a knowledge of God. As God cannot be physically measured, God cannot be scientifically known.

For the thinking person, it means spiritual knowledge comes through faith, but faith requires surrender to that which is beyond reason. Or, in Kierkegaard’s formulation, the leap.

I am not sure if that makes it any clearer, which is why I use the term “moment of wildness.” I have a well-organized life which is based on propriety and duty, and always with a Plan B in mind just in case. That can be a spiritually lank way to live. Thus, there is a need for the wildness.

Those moments have led me from an organized, if routine, life into a monastery, a seminary, ordained service, some unlikely jobs I was glad I accepted, and some waves that I would not have ordinarily ridden [that may be a metaphor].

So, while we were originally just going to drive to Key Largo, the day was beautiful, the traffic was light and, as it had been snowing every day back at my point of origin in dreary, gray Erie, Pennsylvania, the wildness kept driving us in that rented Dodge Neon (in hot rod red!) further and further south on the causeway over those glorious blue waters until the highway ran out.

Mile maker 0; either the end of the road or its beginning. Or both.

It should be noted that this was before Key West became the tourist mecca it is nowadays. Cruise ships were not allowed in port, for example, and the town still had some genuine characters about, rather than the ones who play to the visitors these days.

The gay community had discovered the charm of those tumbledown old shanties and had begun to transform the side streets into showplaces. Small, funky businesses were opening, a hand-rolling cigar factory still remained, and everyone knew that Ernest Hemingway really didn't hang out at Sloppy Joe's, but rather at Capt. Tony's.

Then there was this little, newly opened burger shop that was capitalizing off of the popularity of one-time resident Jimmy Buffet's then-ten-year-old song, "Margaritaville". Rumor had it that it was even owned by the singer/songwriter himself.

Buffet and the mayor at the ribbon-cutting

There really wasn't much to it, a narrow storefront that held a counter, some booths, and a few tables. All I recall of the menu was that I ordered a "Cheeseburger in Paradise", which was one of the songs that had once been on a well-used 8-Track in my car. Other than that, it was entirely ordinary, save for the fact it was a really good cheeseburger.

Well, maybe the menu was ordinary. The experience would be the opposite. I worked in those days as the bishop's assistant, serving as his driver and general dogsbody while we drove all over that empty, impoverished quarter of Pennsylvania. The days were dark, the roads covered with dirty late season snow, and the congregations tended to be more hostile than one would expect from a collection of Christians.

When you are the bishop’s hit man, you can expect that treatment.

I had not taken a vacation in a year and a half, was trapped by a job that I was beginning to dislike and saw the grim harbinger of the future looming before me in that empty rectory with its dodgy furnace to which I would return in the evenings.

Florida dispelled those things. I was free, and with freedom comes hope; with hope comes the rediscovery of joy.

In the sunlight, the azure waters, and the audacity of the Key West state of mind, I began to surrender my vexations. That evening, still in Key West and enjoying a late dinner before the long drive back to Miami, I extended the wild moment and proposed. She said "yes", I was grim no more, and the future's cast was far brighter.

That narrow burger joint has since become a chain of restaurants, bars, resorts, gift shops, cookbooks, a brewery, an RV park or two, and even a retirement community.

Key West has changed, too, and is far less funky and far more mercenary than it was thirty years ago.

Well, what isn't?

However, there was always a moment that presented itself when I experienced what Melville called the "damp, drizzly November in my soul", when job, co-workers, politics, the system in which I used to abide, the mortality of parishioners, the coercive directions of canon-quoting bishops, all begin to weigh on me and I would long for sun, surf, and those cerulean waves.

The memory of wandering in the casual ease of the Keys, and of what was achieved that was lasting, permits me to return to that quiet day that defined the rest of my life.

All because of a moment of faith-fueled wildness. Paradise, indeed.

“It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.” ― Kierkegaard