Tithing mint and dill and cumin

I frequently shop at a very special grocery store in Austin known as Central Market. I'd never heard of it until JB returned to Shreveport from his first interview at the seminary. It was thanksgiving, and he got off the plane with an entire stalk of Brussels sprouts. He knew that a whole stalk of Brussels sprouts would make my heart beat the way other women would respond to two dozen red roses.

The variety of produce they have is staggering. Right now it is probably eight or ten different kinds of peaches. The meat counter is long and inviting...bison and rabbit and quail in addition to what you'd usually expect. Whole fois gras. Seafood fresh from around the world. For what it is, it is not overpriced, but at Christmas I see people taking home prime standing rib roasts that cost $300. There is a Spanish ham that costs $95 a pound, and I guess somebody buys it, because they have it. My own purchases are typically more modest. A couple of pork chops or marinated chicken breasts, sweet local corn, arugula, organic milk. I like to stop by on my way home from work to see what looks appetizing.

But there is one department that has a whole different feel to it, and that is the bulk spices. There are I'd guess a couple hundred square glass jars with metal lids that contain every herb and spice you can imagine. One day I counted 37 different kinds of chiles and chile powders, but we are talking Texas. They keep metal spoons in jars of rice and small zip loc bags to be filled with an ounce or two or three of what you need. You then place the bag on the scale and tap in the number on the front of the jar. You might have seven cents worth of mustard or sixteen cents wort of tarragon or a whopping thirty cents for smoked Spanish paprika. You have to place these little bags in the top tray of your cart or they'll get lost.

I can never buy bulk spices without thinking of Jesus' remarks about tithing mint and dill and cumin. I don't think I could spend a dollar on all three without buying multiple bags of each. And yet they require a different kind of attention from me than the pork chops or the red carton of milk. They cause me to slow down. They cause me to pay attention. In working with this image and metaphor, I want to turn Jesus' intention on its head. Well, actually maybe not. He was fussing at the Pharisees, and his fussing was a frustrated way of inviting them into authentic generosity. That little bag of feathery green dill is a lens through which to see the incredible bounty of the whole market as an invitation into celebration and gratitude. Laying three tiny zip loc bags onto the check out belt to make sure they don't get covered up, to make sure I pay my thirty-two cents is a crazy way for God to open my heart, in the big scheme of things. Maybe they are a version of the still, small voice. Maybe they are holy.

One of those nights...

Insomnia by Dana Gioia

Now you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you've learned how to ignore.

But now you must listen to the things you own,
all that you've worked for these past years,
the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,
the moving parts about to come undone,
and twisting in the sheets remember all
the faces you could not bring yourself to love.

How many voices have escaped you until now,
the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
the steady accusations of the clock
numbering the minutes no one will mark.
The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

from Daily Horoscope
© 1986 Dana Gioia 

 Insomnia
By Billy Collins

 

Even though the house is deeply silent
and the room, with no moon,
is perfectly dark,
even though the body is a sack of exhaustion
inert on the bed,
someone inside me will not
get off his tricycle,
will not stop tracing the same tight circle
on the same green threadbare carpet.
It makes no difference whether I lie
staring at the ceiling
or pace the living-room floor,
he keeps on making his furious rounds,
little pedaler in his frenzy,
my own worst enemy, my oldest friend.
What is there to do but close my eyes
and watch him circling the night,
schoolboy in an ill-fitting jacket,
leaning forward, his cap on backwards,
wringing the handlebars,
maintaining a certain speed?
Does anything exist at this hour
in this nest of dark rooms
but the spectacle of him
and the hope that before dawn
I can lift out some curious detail
that will carry me off to sleep—
the watch that encircles his pale wrist,
the expandable band,
the tiny hands that keep pointing this way and that.

Play Date

I'm good at nine of the commandments. I'm fully 100% successful so far with murder and adultery. The one at which I am a failure is Sabbath. So I should probably be posting this under "Sabbath," but that is about the rare occasions when I do briefly succeed with Sabbath, and I'm not sure that is what this is about.

It is Sunday afternoon following a strenuous week. Our daughter just boarded the plane back to Memphis and my husband is at the nursing home packing his 90-year-old mom (if you are thinking any sort of diminished intellect or spunk or even the slightest degree of feeble...get over it!) for her move to a new place on Tuesday. I have the house to myself and I am not doing the laundry that needs to be done or packing up our kitchen for the remodel that began on Friday. No, I'm here, listening to the gorgeous music of thunder and meditating on pot holders.

At my church we have an organization of awesome people called the Community of Hope. There are CoH chapters all over this country, and what they do is take on training so they can become lay chaplains. That means that they do the lion's share of pastoral care in the parish. At the end of church on Sundays some of them come forward to be blessed to take communion to our home bound parishioners. And non-parishioners as well, if you want to be technical about it. At one assisted living facility, where they  go every Friday, they have gathered a whole congregation of women who come to receive communion even though they have never set foot in an Episcopal Church.

Every summer our CoH group celebrates the feast day of St. Benedict because their training is based on Benedictine spirituality. This year my friend Janice and I led them in a playdate, leisure being one of the elements of the Benedictine life of balance. Yes, you could call it Sabbath.

Our worship was creation-oriented, light-hearted, and high-spirited. Remember "My God" (to the tune of "My Girl") from Sister Act? Yes, there were fifty of us and we rocked the church. Then we came to the parish hall and started in on story telling, more singing, and crafts. Oh, and food. We were there from 9:30 until 3:00 and they were served four (4!) meals. But let's get to the crafts. The likes of which most of these folks hadn't done since they were in day camp, which let's say was more than a couple of decades ago.

They had wooden crosses that they decorated with glitter and gold and rhinestones. They had gimp out of which to make lanyards. (See earlier post for Billy Collins' poem "The Lanyard," which was basis for theological reflection.) They made a torn-paper collage about creation, which is now a lovely mural on the wall of the Assembly Room. The doodled and made outlandish creatures out of pipe cleaners with googly eyes. But the hit of the day was the pot holders.

I haven't made one since I was maybe ten, which was more than a couple of decades ago. We only had six looms, so they had to share. They share well. But almost everybody made one, and they were all beautiful and all unique. They reminded me of Joseph's coat of many colors, as hands knotted with arthritis stretched the loops on frames and then wove carefully plotted patterns or randomly chosen hodge-podges to make pot holders.

Not a single person arrived in the morning thinking that they needed a new pot holder, but they knew they did by the time they left. It is telling that a couple of crosses got left behind, but not a single pot holder. Some will be gifts. Others will be put right to use at home. But each one, no matter how it gets used, carries a story with it.

It is a story of time taken apart from the chores of our lives, time spent with friends old and new. We'll remember the stories people told of camp days when one night dinner was simply all the corn on the cob you could eat, or of getting up before dawn and watching the sun rise over Lake Michigan. Of being homesick and then not wanting to leave when camp was over. Of lightning bugs and chiggers and loons crying over northern lakes. Of horses and archery and canoe paddles dipping into water still fogged with morning mist. There wasn't a whole lot of Jesus talk in this part of the day, but it was holy, holy, holy. It was rich with gratitude and wonder.

And so it's just a pot holder and it's a lot more than a pot holder. And I'm going to make one this week, when I probably ought to be getting some work done. And I'm not going to apologize for it. Au contraire. I'm going to celebrate it.

What I sent to the Wall Street Journal

I cannot believe I did this! I've never written a letter to the editor. But Jay Asakie's op-ed in the WSJ is just sooooo wrong! I really didn't mean to hit the send button, but I did.

In response to the diatribe by Jay Akasie:

The great church historian Jarislov Pelikan wrote:   “Tradition is the living faith of dead people to which we must add our chapter while we have the gift of life. Traditionalism is the dead faith of living people who fear that if anything changes, the whole enterprise will crumble.” Mr. Akasie's vitriol betrays him as a traditionalist, one who is able to view the world only through the lens in which life is a continuing struggle for power, for which he is afraid. One of the most-oft spoken phrases of the Gospel is "do not fear."

It is notable that nowhere in his essay does Mr. Akasie mention Jesus Christ or the message of the gospel, which has been a threat to the power structures of the world for two thousand years now. I am proud and humble to serve as a priest in this church. The vast majority of clergy, whom he seems to perceive as a privileged and elitist bunch with an agenda to increase their power at the expense of the laity, are extremely overworked and underpaid. Burnout is a very real threat. We see ourselves not as somehow above our flock but as their servants. Whom else would you feel free to call on their day off, their vacation, or at five o'clock in the morning? More often than not your pastor will drop anything to be at your side.

In our Baptismal Covenant, which we repeat on many occasions, we promise to respect the dignity of every human being. That includes Mr. Akasie and our sisters and brothers who do not agree with us on the issues presented at General Convention. It includes those who have chosen to leave the Episcopal Church. We take this covenant seriously.

But what it means to be church is not our infrastructure. It is how we serve the world in the name of Christ, who commanded his disciples to love each other as he loved them and to take that love and his gospel to the world. To my little parish, which is twelve miles south of Austin, Texas and worships only about 150 people a week, that means filling the shelves of food pantries, adopting four refugee families in the last two years, adopting an underfunded elementary school, driving for Meals on Wheels, teaching literacy in our local prison and taking care of each other and pretty much anybody who shows up on our doorstep with a broken heart. Jesus cares about that. He doesn't give one hoot what kind of cross Bishop Katharine carries. Nor does he care about the address of the building from which we do the business that must be done.

The Rev. Margaret Waters
Rector, St. Alban's Episcopal Church, Austin, TX

We'll be looking for you, George and Lili!

This week is the city of Austin's bulk trash pick up in our neighborhood. From dawn on Sunday pickups with trailers have been trolling the neighborhood to glean treasures before the city trucks start rolling. It's turned into quite a swap meet and something of a block party. Who knew God would be involved?

Our pile would be diminished -- the vacuum cleaner and trash compactor were the first to go, quickly followed by the huge water jugs for the aquarium that we got rid of about ten years ago. The dog crate went, along with other random items, but as the day wore on we kept adding to the pile with enjoyment in the knowledge that somebody was going to be getting use out of something that was just taking up space. This kind of purging feels so good.

We had just put out an old hose when a nice looking black SUV drove up and the passenger rolled down the window. We assumed they were asking directions, but instead the driver said, "We are the ones who come along before the city trucks get here." We told him to come on and take whatever he wanted. So he got out and claimed the hose and told us he was up in our neck of the woods visiting friends, who told him that it would be good to drive around and see if he saw any good stuff. That's when he told me he lived in Kyle.

That's when I told him I'm pastor of a church down by Kyle. And that's when the fun began. His wife got out of the car and they introduced themselves. He is George, from Kenya, and she is Lili (I may not be spelling that right), from Mexico. They know the church. George works in Onion Creek. He asked what kind of church it is, and when I told him we are Episcopalians, he announced that he is Anglican and that they will be coming to church.

So, my St. Alban's friends, be on the lookout for George and Lili. I don't have to worry about you giving them a warm welcome, because that's what you always do. But you already know that they are coming because they were on a treasure hunt. Only they didn't know the kind of treasure they'd be finding. Or that they would be a treasure to us as well.

And, George and Lili, if you see this, you know we are just waiting to welcome you and send you home with a whole new family and a loaf of home baked bread to boot. And you thought it would be all about a hose. 

Life Like a River

 

from Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry:


Back there at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.

And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time. Toward the end of my life at Squires Landing I began to understand that whenever death happened, it happened to me. That is knowledge that takes a long time to wear in. Finally it wears in. Finally I realized and fully accepted that one day I would belong entirely to memory, and it would then not be my memory that I belonged to...

Some days, sitting here on my porch over the river, my memory seems to enclose me entirely; I wander back in my reckoning among all of my own that have lived and died until I no longer remember where I am. And then I life my head and look about me at the river and the valley, the great, unearned beauty of this place, and I feel the memoryless joy of a man just risen from the grave.

So many Fourths of July live in my memory.

Diving for pennies in the pool at Mayfield Country Club and cheering the big kids as they raced. Running around in a wet bathing suit and bare feet on the golf course after dark waving sparklers and catching lightning bugs in a jar.

Picnics at Whitford Woods, where my dad hunted and where we gathered sap in the spring with the Amish kids. Families seated on blankets around the small lake. Tweens strategizing how to get noticed by the cute boys, who were utterly oblivious to us. Paddling canoes and roasting hot dogs and marshmallows as our parents drank martinis and when dusk finally came they set off fireworks bought illegally just over the border in Canada.

Parades in the neighborhood as the children grew up. Scott Green, dressed in a kimono and coolie hat pulling my toddlers in a cart like a rickshaw. Grilling with the same group of friends and their children after chasing rockets in a cotton field.

What seemed to be endless Fourths at the Roberts' camp on Lake Bisteneau before we had the first thought of leaving all our friends behind to move to Austin. I imagine them all there today but with all the children grown and a new crop of children riding in the four-wheelers and behind boats on boogie boards. Ron will take credit for the ribs Betsy spent the week preparing...well, he will pull them off the grill. Then will he light the fireworks or will it be Trey and David? And the kids will fall asleep in the back seat of the car on the ride home.

One lonely day in my car driving home from Colorado with the few treasures I retrieved from the home I so loved in Telluride. The grief of having to sell that sacred place because we could no longer afford it. Allison Krauss on the radio singing on the Mall in Washington, DC.

And, oddly, today we spent a couple of hours in the basement looking through old stuff that has been stored too long and that needs to make way for the life we are living now, a life blessed with nine grandchildren so far and even one who lives in town and who has caused our living area to be stripped of every little tchotchke, which obviously we didn't need in the first place. These children are our reality and have no share of those memories, standing as they do at the beginning.

And so JB just got home with his 90-year-old mom, and Michael will join us, and among the four of us we will have a quiet Fourth. The Star-Spangled Music Fest was more than enough to sear this holiday in my memory, so we'll watch the concert on the Mall and the fireworks in Washington and over the Hudson and eat a wonderful dinner of pulled pork sandwiches with cole slaw and corn on the cob and lady cream peas and watermelon and apple-blueberry crisp.

Star-Spangled Life

July 2, 2012



It was a work in progress. Well, I guess we ARE a work in progress....





Someone asked someone else after the Star-Spangled Music Fest last night whether I cried as I was making my introductory remarks. "Yes," she answered, "during the Star Spangled Banner." It was far from a boo-hoo. A tear or two or a tight throat is pretty predictable for me when something touches my heart. But it wasn't the Star Spangled Banner, which, frankly, leaves me pretty darned cold, given the hideous renditions I've heard by rock stars at major sporting events. It was the veterans who stood to be recognized and thanked by all of us. It was memories of my dad, gone so long now, who came home from WWII a hero at the age of 24, a bomber pilot who had crashed and broken his neck and been present at the liberation of Paris, and for whom the whole rest of his life was a disappointment. It was the memory of my youngest son's year in Iraq at the beginning of this interminable war, which began in idealism at least as far as the troops were concerned. That was the longest year of my life, when I would stand in the back yard at night, my only comfort the knowledge that I was looking at the same moon he was seeing. The tears were for the many parents whose children have not come home whole and healthy as he did. And tears of joy seeing the 325 people who crammed themselves into our church, which comfortably seats 175 and whose air conditioning was utterly overwhelmed and who waved their flags when the organ and piano played John Philip Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever. And tears of gratitude for the privilege of serving this quirky congregation in the middle of nowhere and where kick-butt good music is the norm. Good tears. And you can count on more of them as we continue down this lovely, bumpy road together.

A work in progress? Yes, indeed. We will do more of these events at our terrific little hard to find church. We will work on getting better parking. And we will try to figure out a much more efficient way to judge 18 apple pies. Recipes will be forthcoming for the winners. It was a great evening all around.