The Waning Years Of My Calamistrate

As I have been cleaning, culling, and reducing the clutter that my office had become I have discovered a chronicle of my almost quarter of a century with the Roseville Church of Christ. One prize possession that was excavated from the cavernous mounds of artifacts was a California driver’s license that revealed that I am not only a greater man than when I first arrived (by pound that is) but I’m certainly in the waning years of my calamistrate! Okay, Dan, we know how much you love odd, strange, obtuse and dust covered words of the past… pray tell, what is your calamistrate? I’m so glad you asked… as you remember from your High School Latin the word “calamistratus” means “curl” usually as regards hair and is a word borrowed from the calamus reed that resembles in fragrance and color a cinnamon stalk. Yes, yes… I’ve lost much hair and thereby much curl! I’ve gone from redheaded to deadheaded and thereby are in the waning years of my calamistrate but wait… there’s a special nexus with Scripture here that must not be missed: One of the ingredients of the anointing oil (Exodus 30:22-33) is calamus (NIV has “sweet cane”). Like cinnamon, calamus is reddish in color and therefore what I’ve experienced is an anointing of fragrant oil that has consecrated me as Roseville’s priest while honoring my redheaded past and recognizing my graying and sparsely curled present… or maybe not!

I hope what I have illustrated is not just my creative abilities to twist the truth until it fits my curly nonsense but what I’ve been trying to preach and teach these many years. It’s been a few years but I have always offered the wager that one could give me any wild idea they could conger up and I could find Scripture to back it up. O, it would be twisted, curled and out of context but it would be convincing enough to fool some. My wager has never been for entertainment or to promote the twisted postmodern view that there are no absolute truths just individual perceptions… but rather to point out that we must be careful with God’s Word and listen more than we speak, digest more than we divest and meditate on it day and night (Psalm 119:97). If it is a two edged sword then we need to handle it with care realizing its power as well as its beauty. Above all else we must maintain its simplicity and resolute truth and free it from our wandering complexities and juvenile incessant questioning of peripheral trivialities that miss the forest for the trees!

Paul uncurls it this way, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:13).” -DAN