Refrigerator Cleaning and Lent

I spent part of my day cleaning out the refrigerator. It was long overdue. Cranberry sauce forgotten in the back on the second shelf... a testament to the efficacy of preservatives... not yet molded... leftovers of all sorts and colors... almost empty packages of grated cheese... an over ripe cantaloupe... two kinds of gumbo and vegetable soup... magic potions and beer... it was an educational experience.
For those of you who have not yet cleaned a refrigerator, there is a proper way to do it. You start by unloading the top shelf. Always start at the top so any drips won’t fall on already cleaned surfaces. Use the cleaning solution of your choice. My mama taught me to use baking soda dissolved in water. Wipe down the shelf and the walls as you wipe off the bottoms of the containers. Replace what is still good and sift through all the items making sure to cull the inappropriate foods... ex. Dill pickles do not belong on the milk and juice shelf. Repeat until the entire refrigerator has been cleaned... take out the drawers and wipe them down... put all moldy food in the compost heap... do not feed to the dogs. When you finish, stand back and admire your handiwork. This is an important step because the next time you open the frig door, it will have transmogrified into its former state of messy glory.
Lent is the liturgical equivalent of cleaning out the refrigerator. There is an order to the Lenten season. We begin by considering the contents of our lives... recognizing and naming the moldy places in our souls... bringing them out into the Light and considering them. As we empty the shelves of our lives, we have an opportunity to re-shape... re-order... reclaim... re-name what is stored in the depths of our being. Not much fun... what we find can be overwhelming, painful. But like the refrigerator contents, until we see what is in there, how can we know what we have?
This season gives us the amazing opportunity to clean up and start over in our soul journey. After I name and claim my moldy spots, there is a chance to see if they can be restored... if I can scrape away the mold to the good underneath and have a second chance. So I am examining the state of my being this season for Lent. I will find some fun surprises... writing is forcing me to be a conscious soul... some nasty items... the mold of procrastination runs deep in a lot of items in my soul’s shelves. The process of examination and cleansing is necessary for my celebration of Easter.
There can never be new life without death. Around the farm I see this repeated every year. An old cow dies as a new one is born... perennial herbs die back in order to grow again... the pasture grass turns brown and withers away, resting until spring brings green growth again. We, too, must have a resting time... a time when we are not "up and running" so that our growth can be strong and true. And like the refrigerator, our souls will grow moldy again... our new green growth will turn brown... Easter does not last all year long.
"For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope... But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it". Romans 8:24-25 I am waiting and hoping with patience ... thanking God for the rituals of Lent... a pattern for living and dying that lets us start over and over and over... like refrigerator cleaning.

sowing and reaping... tears and joy

It has been cold at the farm... cold but clear. The light has been bright and sharp edged. When the sun comes up over the mountain, I can watch the light spread over the distant peaks coming to me. Yesterday, the warmth of the Holy One’s Light washed over me all day long.
When I fed the barn kitties, Bud, Helen and Prince Hal were there. They twined around my legs... purred when I picked them up, let me pet them and gave me their blessing. That doesn’t happen often. They are semi-wild and often fearful when I come. I stayed awhile in the barn letting the cats love on me while I love them. We both needed it.
The cows began to bellow... the cow version of yelling. They had heard the mule coming down the hill and had gathered to be fed. I was too slow getting there and they let me know. I loaded the hay, opened the gate and drove to the glen. They were standing in a group, looking at me as I drove around the curve... their heads turned towards me... Tilly with her magnificent horns... Sassy with her new baby bull Betty... Annie great with child... her twin Fannie... Buttercup with her mule ears hanging low... the two yearlings... Annabelle swinging her head back and forth impatiently.... and Ferdinand our sweet old bull.
I went to the tack shed and got the feed, put it out quickly so I wouldn’t get stepped on in the rush. I spread the hay in the hay ring for the day and then put some hay on the ground. For some reason, our cows like to eat their hay spread out. Daddy used to fuss about them standing in the middle of it while they ate, wasting it. He had an elaborate system worked out to prevent that... it didn’t work very well. So I laughed as I spread the hay, hearing Daddy’s voice telling me how to do it right.
And then I stood and watched... waited. Barney our yellow cur stray and Betty were playing a slow game of catch. Baby calves run for the sheer pleasure of it with their tails straight up in the air. Betty will still let me pet him if I am still and wait for him to come to me. Cows are curious creatures, like cats, and they will investigate you. Like a cat, a cow’s tongue is slightly raspy and they will lick you as a greeting. Betty tiptoed over, nose extended, sniffing, to my outstretched hand and licked me. My giggle scared him and he scampered away, tail held high.
On Thursdays, I teach two classes of picture matting and framing, each three hours long. As a functional introvert, six hours of extroversion in one day wears me out. But yesterday there were several grace notes that kept me lifted up... students who told me how much fun they were having in class... completed pictures framed and matted by students who were scared to death three weeks ago... an unexpected invitation to share lunch with friends in town...a nap in the sun... It was a sweet day.
Last night I stepped out the front door and looked up. In the country there is very little ambient light and we are on top of a small hill that is not closed in by trees. In the dark night sky, the stars and planets glowed. There was no competition from the moon and each little light was so distinct... so sharp... so beautiful... so many. It took my breath away. That was my bedtime blessing.
The Psalmist says "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy"... Yesterday I gathered joy and I am grateful.

come sit awhile under the vine and the fig tree...

I don’t believe I have ever read the Book of Micah all the way through. In the middle of this short book full of dire predictions and terrible judgements is a verse I never heard before. The prophet has described in lyrical prose the gathering of many nations on the mountain of the Lord. There will be no war and everyone will sit under their vine and fig tree, unafraid. The verse that caught my ear was verse five in chapter four... " For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever". What a lovely image for our world today... for our church... for us as neighbors of those whose God is different from ours.
As a child in a small southern town, a different God could be Presbyterian or Catholic or Jewish or Hardshell Baptist... or the God of Mr. Cargile who sat in the right front pew every Sunday. We knew about the Gods from other countries because missionaries like Miss Pearl Todd came to our church to speak about their lives in China, or Africa, or Palestine. Those Gods were far away... mysterious and intriguing. It was easy to imagine living next door to a Buddhist. That would be so different and offer such possibilities for educational interchange. It was difficult to imagine living next door to the Swilley family... Church of God... unshaven legs for the girls, no make up or jewelry, more children than the law allowed, women who married early and seemed to turn into carbon copies of their mothers. They worshiped the same Christian God I did but I did not recognize their God’s name either.
I have watched the world collapse in upon itself... grow so small that we can see and hear the Gods all around the world as they are presented by their followers. The multiplicity of voices and religious practices now can seem overwhelming and confusing. The danger for me is losing my clear call... my revelation of God in my world here in North Carolina... as I honor and respect others visions of God.
There have been so many ways to seek the Holy in the lives of all the peoples of the world since the beginning of time. It is wonderful to see how many different ways we have tried to address the Mystery. My way is not the only way. My way is right for me for many reasons and I believe the Christian way has many gifts that other ways do not. But I am not arrogant enough to pretend I understand the mind of God. These other creations of paths to God may have come from God just as mine has. They have gifts I do not know. Just as the Christian way has struggled with its imperfections, so have these other paths struggled. We are all imperfect beings using different paths to travel to our homeplace... God.
So today... just for today... I will try to carry the image of all the people walking on the mountain of the Lord God... sitting under vines and fig trees...all kinds of seekers... Muslims, Jews, Hardshell Baptists, United Church of Christ, Buddhists, New Agers, Hindus, agnostics, fundamentalist believers of all kinds... all of us under the sheltering wings of our loving God.
Maybe I will plant a fig tree on the farm...

Going Home

I woke up at 4:30 a.m. The dogs were barking in circles around the house. After I put them back up and closed the doggie door, I couldn’t sleep. It was a full blown funk... bouncing from one worry to another... thinking of all I needed to do that I hadn’t done... nothing new, but it felt different. This morning while I sweated out the funk in exercise, it came to me... my mother is not the only one losing home when she moves here this month. I am losing home, too. As I formed the words in my heart, the tears began to flow. Of course...duh... what took me so long to notice?
Home... the farm... my mother and daddy’s dream... the house they built... the greenhouse dream... planting the pasture sprig by sprig during the hot summer...the years of raising cattle and gardens and grandchildren... sunsets over cypress knee ponds and green hayfields... fishing with crickets... watching my parents walk and love the land and the cows... all the laughter and grief, hard work and tears, memories of sister and father will be no longer tied to one piece of this sweet earth. I am caught off guard... surprised by the intensity of my grief... the tears that keep running down my face as I write about this ending.
All the stories... the history of our family in that place now live only in the memories of my mother and me... having to plant the pasture three times because the summer was so dry we couldn’t water the fields enough by hand... picking butterbeans in the garden until I thought my back would be bent permanently...I remember what the new house smelled like when we moved in... my new bedroom painted yellow... how proud my mother was of her new kitchen... her dining room... the sound of the screech owl that lived in the woods in the side yard... the rattlesnakes that could often be found coiled under the clothesline in the back yard... my sister ... oh, dear God... my sister. My sister’s death in 1980, a suicide, changed my family patterns in so many ways. Everywhere I look in the house I see her... wearing those Villager dresses that she loved.... getting ready to move out to the college dorm.... coming home for supper because she couldn’t stand the dorm food... her pink bedroom at the back of the house is still full of her presence for me.
I am a grown woman with a home of my own for over three decades. I have mothered three children to adulthood and now celebrate the presence of four grandsons in my life. The family farm has not been my home since 1969 but it is still my home in my heart. How can I let go... let the natural order of life and death comfort me as I face the ending of my childhood home as I have known it?
The words from an old hymn help... Be still my soul: thy God doth undertake to guide the future as He has the past. Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake... All now mysterious shall be bright at last. These sweet words remind me that I can only see through a dark glass as I move into the future but the vision of the past... the sense of home... the place where my family settled for a short while in South Georgia... my childhood home will shine brightly in my heart and in the memories of my children. I give thanks for my parents... that farm in South Georgia... the dear memories I carry with me as we pack mother up for the move to our farm in North Carolina... for the gift of memory that will continue to warm my heart long after I leave my childhood home for the last time. To every thing there is a season... this is my season for letting go... going home...

I quit...

I used to be an activist until I plumb wore out. I was raised in the bosom of activism... the Southern Baptist Church. As a family, we went to worship twice on Sunday accompanied by Sunday School and Training Union, Wednesday night prayer service and choir practice, attended associational meetings and rallies, visited the sick and housebound on Sunday afternoons, did my homework while mama and daddy did the Lord’s work at the church building. I became the children’s choir leader at the ripe old age of twelve, was a member of the Sword Drill Team, joined the adult choir again at the age of twelve and learned to sing alto, was a camp counselor at our local church camp. Southern Baptists knew how to teach the young the routine for getting the work of church done... the nuts and bolts... the unglamourous jobs that must be done to keep the machinery running. My mother kept a purple stain on her fingers from running the church worship programs off on the mimeograph machine (remember them?). My dad helped keep the grounds tidy and when the building needed painting or plumbing repair, he was there.
It was no accident that the Civil Rights leaders came from church and the movement was centered in the church... not only because of the justice "what would Jesus do" part of the call to change... but because they knew where the trained leaders were... the committee members... the ones who showed up to run the mimeograph machines... the ones who had the church keys and knew where the light switches were... the ones who acted because they were called not just to causes, but to be Christians in a world community... a family that taught me the first lessons in differences, how to get along with those who disagreed with you, how to find common ground on which you could stand together, how to be the family of God.
The paradox that I have lived is in two passages I learned in Sword Drill from the books of Ephesians and Second Timothy. "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is a gift of God: not of works lest any man should boast". And, I learned this while studying to "show myself a workman that needeth not to be ashamed".
For many years I have been busy about good works. When I was a social worker, I raised money from churches to send a twelve year old girl, pregnant by incest, to Nevada for an abortion which was then illegal in Texas where we lived. When the Green Revolution hit in the seventies, I switched to cloth napkins, threw out my paper towels (but kept the newly discovered paper diapers), saved my newspapers and tried to be a responsible consumer. When the large state mental hospitals were closed down and the patients were sent back to their home communities so they could be helped to become productive community members, I was there to see the disaster that followed. I was teaching old men and women who had never lived anywhere but the hospital how to make change, how to catch a bus, how to cook, how to find the doctor’s office, how to manage in a world that knew them not... in a world that they wandered lost and often alone with few safe havens for soul or body. I did grunt work for political campaigns handing out literature, making calls.
And as our children came, I began to lose my balance. I could see change in some individual lives but the system kept rocking along. I chose for my soul’s sake to retreat from what had become a life draining weight and focus on the new lives in our family. I still helped in various ways... continued to recycle... do volunteer work... be involved in the larger world through our church... but I could no longer bear the weight of feeling so responsible for change, so guilty for lack of change, so tired from work that seemed to have no end. So I quit. I quit trying to be God in the World and started looking for God who was already in the world. I quit feeling like the work I was doing was more important than the work others were doing. I quit worrying about what would happen if I quit. I just quit.
Now as I sit in my pew, watching those I love file by to take Communion, I pray. I pray for Doug who has a passion to care for the Palestinians and South Americans. I pray for DeeDee who has made the homeless community her place of ministry. I pray for our Christian Action Committee that they not grow weary in well doing. I pray for Elizabeth and all those who staff the shelter in our church for homeless women. I pray for all of us who do the work of peace and justice. My prayer is that we may find the balancing point between faith and works... between soul work and grunt work... between this world and the next life to come... We are not God. We are God’s.