Since we have begun attending an African American church, I have been paying attention to colors of all kinds... especially the language and the weight given to skin color. It fascinates me how often I hear someone white described as color blind, a virtue, in their interaction with people of color. I know what they are trying to say... this person treats everyone equally regardless of skin color... but I hope I never become color blind.
I love colors of all kinds... skin colors, flower colors, fabric colors, paint and ink colors. The color of spring green leaves and the deep green of loblolly pine needles, wild daisy white and Queen Anne’s Lace ivory, English shorthorn red and Rhode Island red, yarrow yellow and morning sunrise yellow, my farm tanned brown arm hugging Alexis’s cafe’au lait shoulders... Color is such a gift.
To not see our skin colors is to miss appreciating the wonderfully varied colored puzzle pieces of the creation that surrounds us. Our color, whatever it is, is a reflection of God’s creation and an important part of who we are. How can you really know me unless you know I grew up white in the south? And how can I know Pastor Pat unless I know she grew up with a different skin color in the south? How can we love one another unless we know and celebrate our differences as well as our likenesses? Skin colors are a part of our personal packages, a mirror image of a God of many colors, a technicolor God who has showered us with so many colors we can’t name them all.
As a child I would go to my mother’s home church, Bruington Baptist in Bruington, Virginia. After the Sunday School report had been given during the interval between Sunday School and worship, the children would stand and sing for the congregation led by John Ryland. This tall, spare man with a shock of bright white hair only knew two children’s songs, Jesus Loves Me and Jesus Loves the Little Children. They are two of my favorite hymns still and an accurate reflection of the bedrock of my personal theology. Jesus loves all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight...
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Gerald Manley Hopkins poem reminds me to celebrate fickle freckledness and dappled things, the beauty of color and shape and light and taste and feel in all their forms. Keep me from losing my sense of color, Lord. Remind me every day to sing my thanksgiving when I see your loving face in the faces of all colors around me. I always wondered where my freckles came from and now I know...they came from you.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Of hay and hospitality...
We are making hay while the sun shines this week on the farm. Around eight hundred square bales, five hundred and fifty of them ours, now are stacked under the protective tin roofs of hay barns. Plagued by early summer rains that kept us from cutting until the grass was high, and fell upon the first cutting, this last cutting is rain free. Hay is a gambler’s crop and your yield and quality are determined not by you alone but by the weather gods. Traditionally the second cutting in the mountains is the best quality hay, the opposite of the hay country where I grew up in South Georgia.
When the call goes out, all normal life ceases for awhile. Gary mows the hay then he and Michael rake it into tidy rows after it is dry. Cutting, raking and baling on our hills takes no small amount of skill and nerve. Gary runs our fifty year old baler, held together with love and prayers and good welding, up and down the rows as we follow to pick them up. Occasionally a part will break off and we all gather to look for it in the grass, hoping to find it or have a spare so the work can continue.
Hay baling the old fashioned way is not a solitary activity. We need a crew to help pick up the hay and put it in the barn. The day before we bale, we call friends, neighbors, teen aged boys, young men and women who need work saying we will be baling the next day, trying to gather four or five folks at a time. Upper body strength, enough to lift hay bales and swing them over into the trailer, is the only job requirement. A driver, two stackers and three or four to pick up in the field is a good number. Newbies take a lot of teasing as they are introduced to the hot physical labor in the field. There is a lot of laughter and joshing as we work and the pleasure of the company makes the work lighter. Riding back to the barn atop a full trailer load of hay is sweet with cool breezes and the grassy perfume easing your breathing. Cold water on the back of your neck and wrists cools you down quickly, water and lemonade to drink freely help cool you inside and out.
Hay work is hot, hard, dusty work that is also full of community and fun. We laugh at Gary’s dirt blackened face, giggle as a hay bale flies over the trailer when a young buck throws too hard, cuss when the baler breaks down for the second time, and I give thanks for those who have come to help. On hay days, I provide an evening meal when the work runs late or lunch if we work during the day. I keep the water coolers full of ice, water, Gatorade, lemonade and energy bars. I hand out sun screen and gloves and hats and long sleeved shirts for those who need or want them. Hay work is hospitality in action... the gift of hospitality given to us by friends and neighbors who come to do this hard work not for money but for love, and the gift of hospitality we extend as we include all who come in our farm family group.
Strangers become friends and friends become family as we each share what we have with one another. My need is met by your generosity knowing that tomorrow I may be meeting your need. That is hospitality at its finest... offering ourselves in ways that make us all the better for it... a two way street of sharing. So tonight I go to church to teach Vacation Bible School because my children were taught long ago by those who loved children and showed up. Saturday our group will have a HUGE yard sale and part of the money will go to a charity of our choosing. What I do not need will help someone who needs much. Saturday night our church has a fund raising dinner and I will help with the corn. These new family members in the family of God are becoming dear to me and I will help because we need to finish working on our fellowship hall.
In Romans 12:13 I read, “Contribute to the needs of the saints, practice hospitality.” And in 1Peter 4:9 I read, “Practice hospitality ungrudgingly to one another.” This weekend I will be practicing ungrudging hospitality because so many have extended the same kind of open hospitality to me. How can I do less?
When the call goes out, all normal life ceases for awhile. Gary mows the hay then he and Michael rake it into tidy rows after it is dry. Cutting, raking and baling on our hills takes no small amount of skill and nerve. Gary runs our fifty year old baler, held together with love and prayers and good welding, up and down the rows as we follow to pick them up. Occasionally a part will break off and we all gather to look for it in the grass, hoping to find it or have a spare so the work can continue.
Hay baling the old fashioned way is not a solitary activity. We need a crew to help pick up the hay and put it in the barn. The day before we bale, we call friends, neighbors, teen aged boys, young men and women who need work saying we will be baling the next day, trying to gather four or five folks at a time. Upper body strength, enough to lift hay bales and swing them over into the trailer, is the only job requirement. A driver, two stackers and three or four to pick up in the field is a good number. Newbies take a lot of teasing as they are introduced to the hot physical labor in the field. There is a lot of laughter and joshing as we work and the pleasure of the company makes the work lighter. Riding back to the barn atop a full trailer load of hay is sweet with cool breezes and the grassy perfume easing your breathing. Cold water on the back of your neck and wrists cools you down quickly, water and lemonade to drink freely help cool you inside and out.
Hay work is hot, hard, dusty work that is also full of community and fun. We laugh at Gary’s dirt blackened face, giggle as a hay bale flies over the trailer when a young buck throws too hard, cuss when the baler breaks down for the second time, and I give thanks for those who have come to help. On hay days, I provide an evening meal when the work runs late or lunch if we work during the day. I keep the water coolers full of ice, water, Gatorade, lemonade and energy bars. I hand out sun screen and gloves and hats and long sleeved shirts for those who need or want them. Hay work is hospitality in action... the gift of hospitality given to us by friends and neighbors who come to do this hard work not for money but for love, and the gift of hospitality we extend as we include all who come in our farm family group.
Strangers become friends and friends become family as we each share what we have with one another. My need is met by your generosity knowing that tomorrow I may be meeting your need. That is hospitality at its finest... offering ourselves in ways that make us all the better for it... a two way street of sharing. So tonight I go to church to teach Vacation Bible School because my children were taught long ago by those who loved children and showed up. Saturday our group will have a HUGE yard sale and part of the money will go to a charity of our choosing. What I do not need will help someone who needs much. Saturday night our church has a fund raising dinner and I will help with the corn. These new family members in the family of God are becoming dear to me and I will help because we need to finish working on our fellowship hall.
In Romans 12:13 I read, “Contribute to the needs of the saints, practice hospitality.” And in 1Peter 4:9 I read, “Practice hospitality ungrudgingly to one another.” This weekend I will be practicing ungrudging hospitality because so many have extended the same kind of open hospitality to me. How can I do less?
Friday, June 18, 2010
Of handwipes and hallelujahs...
I am beginning to feel like an alien in my world... the only living human being who doesn’t routinely use sanitizing hand wipes on her shopping cart. From Sam’s to Ingle’s to Bed Bath and Beyond (I”ve always wondered where beyond was in that name), there are dispensers at the door of sanitizing wipes for your hands and the carts. Grizzled old timers and young trend setters alike stop to conscientiously wipe themselves down, free themselves from germs before they enter the hallowed germ free halls of shopping.
I know, I know... I hear the nurses and doctors reciting the statistics of germs passed along on our hands, flu and other nasty bugs we can pick up on those shopping carts. But the truth of the matter is we are surrounded by germs everywhere. Sometimes I think it was God’s way of making sure our immune systems developed as they should. And other days, I admire the marketing ploy that has convinced us to buy all these little plastic canisters full of individual wipes to preserve our health. What happened to soap and water and common sense? Just because it is new and improved doesn’t mean it is better and worth it.
The real reason it bothers me so, though, is the implications of this cleanliness ritual. We no longer seem to trust our world, its ability to nurture us, to care for us, to provide what is needed. Our bodies have become not temples for God’s spirit but fortresses to be defended with hand wipes. Our companions in Sam’s are not neighbors but potential sources of illness and disease. Those who don’t step up to the plate, or the wipe dispenser, are viewed with disdain.
Somehow we humans can take a perfectly good creation and ruin it with overuse. Antibiotics... literally a life saver... we use them too much and suddenly the germs they destroy adapt and are immune to its effects. Immunizations... again life saving possibilities until we begin giving all newborns a plethora of shots for diseases before they leave the hospital. Food... once a delight and a pleasure, is now seen as a controlled substance. You can’t eat too much or too much sugar or too much fat. Food became fast, we slowed down and we became fat. It wasn’t the food’s fault.
God created this world and pronounced it good. We have forgotten that, I think, because we have isolated ourselves from this world. Sitting in air conditioned houses with all our windows closed, riding in air conditioned cars with our windows rolled up, riding through our neighborhoods instead of walking, buying food that we did not grow from countries far away, avoiding the eyes of those we pass by, living in places where ambient light wipes out starlight. We have forgotten how to walk barefooted on the Ground of our Being and we are the poorer for it.
So I will continue to pass up the hand wipes so generously offered and take my chances. I will celebrate the world around me as a good and precious gift not as a field of germs and death. I will eat with a grateful heart and grow as much of my food as I can. I will be sensible about my health but not obsessed with protecting my body. It is a temporary creation anyway. I will remember that God created this world good and so it is... good and beautiful and bountiful. And I will give thanks for all who share this blue space jewel with me whether they sanitize their hands or not. They are my neighbors and as I love God, so do I love them. Now if you all will excuse me, I am going to go play in the dirt a little while and sing hallelujahs while I pick bugs off my potato plants, pull weeds in my flower beds, muck the stalls and swat flies. Have a lovely day in this world of ours... germs and all.
I know, I know... I hear the nurses and doctors reciting the statistics of germs passed along on our hands, flu and other nasty bugs we can pick up on those shopping carts. But the truth of the matter is we are surrounded by germs everywhere. Sometimes I think it was God’s way of making sure our immune systems developed as they should. And other days, I admire the marketing ploy that has convinced us to buy all these little plastic canisters full of individual wipes to preserve our health. What happened to soap and water and common sense? Just because it is new and improved doesn’t mean it is better and worth it.
The real reason it bothers me so, though, is the implications of this cleanliness ritual. We no longer seem to trust our world, its ability to nurture us, to care for us, to provide what is needed. Our bodies have become not temples for God’s spirit but fortresses to be defended with hand wipes. Our companions in Sam’s are not neighbors but potential sources of illness and disease. Those who don’t step up to the plate, or the wipe dispenser, are viewed with disdain.
Somehow we humans can take a perfectly good creation and ruin it with overuse. Antibiotics... literally a life saver... we use them too much and suddenly the germs they destroy adapt and are immune to its effects. Immunizations... again life saving possibilities until we begin giving all newborns a plethora of shots for diseases before they leave the hospital. Food... once a delight and a pleasure, is now seen as a controlled substance. You can’t eat too much or too much sugar or too much fat. Food became fast, we slowed down and we became fat. It wasn’t the food’s fault.
God created this world and pronounced it good. We have forgotten that, I think, because we have isolated ourselves from this world. Sitting in air conditioned houses with all our windows closed, riding in air conditioned cars with our windows rolled up, riding through our neighborhoods instead of walking, buying food that we did not grow from countries far away, avoiding the eyes of those we pass by, living in places where ambient light wipes out starlight. We have forgotten how to walk barefooted on the Ground of our Being and we are the poorer for it.
So I will continue to pass up the hand wipes so generously offered and take my chances. I will celebrate the world around me as a good and precious gift not as a field of germs and death. I will eat with a grateful heart and grow as much of my food as I can. I will be sensible about my health but not obsessed with protecting my body. It is a temporary creation anyway. I will remember that God created this world good and so it is... good and beautiful and bountiful. And I will give thanks for all who share this blue space jewel with me whether they sanitize their hands or not. They are my neighbors and as I love God, so do I love them. Now if you all will excuse me, I am going to go play in the dirt a little while and sing hallelujahs while I pick bugs off my potato plants, pull weeds in my flower beds, muck the stalls and swat flies. Have a lovely day in this world of ours... germs and all.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Of Roses and Rainbows...
It has been a sad week in many ways. Walking down to the stable last night to put the horses and donkeys to bed, my soul was dragging. A friend has died from cancer and another friend is waiting for test results that could be bad news. In BCD days (Before Celeste Died), I would have called Celeste and asked her to pray with me for these friends. We had an agreement that allowed us to call, ask for prayer and know that we were heard and loved as we prayed for each other and those we loved.
Prayer, believing in the power of prayer, is like sex in the olden days. Everybody wants to know about it but no one wants to own up to actually doing it. God forbid we should desert our belief in the rational long enough to let the irrational sneak into our daily lives. Pastor Pat used a quote from Wendell Berry Sunday morning in her sermon that nailed this double standard. A paraphrase... We stumble and quibble over the miracles in the New Testament like turning the water into wine but ignore the miracles that surround us everyday like seeds that lie underground, grow towards the light, are watered with rain and produce food. Miracles abound and we take them for granted in their “dailyness”.
I have for years believed in prayer for no good reason at all except I believe in a loving God. In my belief system, love is balanced between “just because” and “just do it”...passive and active. God loves me just because I am and because I am, I love God and love my neighbors. Prayer is the verbal and non-verbal expression of faith and belief that a God of Love will hear my heart, will care about my needs, and will answer one way or another. Sometimes there is no answer and sometimes there are no answers for what happens in this imperfect world. Children shouldn’t die before their parents from cancer or starvation. Good people shouldn’t have to bear the same burdens as those who serve themselves without consideration for others. Life is not fair and God knows that. Nevertheless, sometimes there are answers to prayer for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
For years I have found evidence of God’s answers to my prayers in strange ways. In my darkest times, God shows up in rainbows, roses, the faces of small children laughing, old mountains worn smooth by generations of time, sunsets and sunrises. Last night as I walked to the stable, Michael called from the deck, “Look up, Peggy!” And there it was... a double rainbow. Beautiful, bright, fleeting assurance that God is still in covenant with us, still present in our times of trouble, and all will be well even when all is not well. I walk to my front door where I have planted roses in memory of Celeste, breathe in their sweet fragrance and give thanks for all the gifts of love that have come my way. Most of all, I am grateful for my tears, a leaking heart, that connects me to the Heart of God that is broken for us all everyday. Thanks be to God for laughter and tears, love and light, rainbows and roses, life and death. It is all good.
Prayer, believing in the power of prayer, is like sex in the olden days. Everybody wants to know about it but no one wants to own up to actually doing it. God forbid we should desert our belief in the rational long enough to let the irrational sneak into our daily lives. Pastor Pat used a quote from Wendell Berry Sunday morning in her sermon that nailed this double standard. A paraphrase... We stumble and quibble over the miracles in the New Testament like turning the water into wine but ignore the miracles that surround us everyday like seeds that lie underground, grow towards the light, are watered with rain and produce food. Miracles abound and we take them for granted in their “dailyness”.
I have for years believed in prayer for no good reason at all except I believe in a loving God. In my belief system, love is balanced between “just because” and “just do it”...passive and active. God loves me just because I am and because I am, I love God and love my neighbors. Prayer is the verbal and non-verbal expression of faith and belief that a God of Love will hear my heart, will care about my needs, and will answer one way or another. Sometimes there is no answer and sometimes there are no answers for what happens in this imperfect world. Children shouldn’t die before their parents from cancer or starvation. Good people shouldn’t have to bear the same burdens as those who serve themselves without consideration for others. Life is not fair and God knows that. Nevertheless, sometimes there are answers to prayer for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
For years I have found evidence of God’s answers to my prayers in strange ways. In my darkest times, God shows up in rainbows, roses, the faces of small children laughing, old mountains worn smooth by generations of time, sunsets and sunrises. Last night as I walked to the stable, Michael called from the deck, “Look up, Peggy!” And there it was... a double rainbow. Beautiful, bright, fleeting assurance that God is still in covenant with us, still present in our times of trouble, and all will be well even when all is not well. I walk to my front door where I have planted roses in memory of Celeste, breathe in their sweet fragrance and give thanks for all the gifts of love that have come my way. Most of all, I am grateful for my tears, a leaking heart, that connects me to the Heart of God that is broken for us all everyday. Thanks be to God for laughter and tears, love and light, rainbows and roses, life and death. It is all good.
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