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.