Starter eggs...

The cute baby chicks have grown up. Out of fourteen peeping fluff balls, nine roosters emerged. Michael says sexing chickens is an acquired skill. Obviously we haven’t acquired it. Foghorn, Checkers, Marshmallow, Buff and the other roosters have been relocated and replaced with pullets leaving one lone rooster, a beautiful multi-colored Brown Leghorn to crow the morning sun up. Some of the new girls in the henhouse are mutts, mixtures of breeds. Four of the new pullets are younger and are keeping to themselves. They were used to being free range chickens so the henhouse community is foreign to them.
Only two are laying right now. Chickens begin to lay at different times depending upon their breed. Speedy, the Rhode Island Red, and the new California Grey girl are laying an egg a day. Speedy’s eggs are brown and she always lays them in the same place on the floor of the henhouse. Grey girl lays her white eggs out in the yard. Michael has to hunt to find them.
When chickens begin to lay, their eggs are small, mini eggs. These little starter eggs will slowly increase in size as the pullets grow into being hens, a process that takes about a year from chick to hen. With the right food (laying mash and crushed oyster shell) and time, the eggs will grow along with the pullets. Spring chickens become fall layers. Some will lay an egg every day, some every other day. Some eggs will be brown, others white, blue, green or cream. Every morning I can hear Speedy’s triumphant song as she lays that egg, the pullet version of the rooster crow.
Between watching the chickens and reading An Altar in the World, I’ve been thinking about the starter eggs of my faith. Barbara Brown Taylor identifies the practices that lead her to God in this world...vision, reverence, incarnation, etc.... and I am finding myself in the stories she tells. I am reading the second chapter for the second time. As a fast reader I find I often fly over words missing nuance and connection. Reading the second time helps me hear and see words and ideas I missed the first time through. This flying low through life is one of the characteristics of my ADD’ness. Often I will be leap frogging ahead of others, impatient to get on with it, frustrated by the slowness of my companions. So my first starter egg of faith is to slow down, take time, savor the moment, don’t hurry up through the days of my life. God has all the time in the world and is not on a schedule or working with a PDA.
The second chapter is titled “The Practice of Paying Attention... Reverence”, a logical follow up for my slowing down. I had always thought of reverence as an attitude you put on when you entered a sanctuary or traveled to a holy place. Taylor is helping me reshape myself into a reverent human being. “Some of the most reverent people I know decline to call themselves religious...The longer they stand before the holy of holies, the less adequate their formulations of faith seem to them. Angels reach down and shut their mouths.”
Albert Schweitzer advocated living with a reverence for life, all lives, and as a committed Christian, lived this reverence out in Africa, far from home. I am not Schweitzer living in Africa but I can live reverently here, at home on Sabbath Rest Farm. So today I will be paying attention to shutting my mouth about what I believe about God. I will live reverently, paying attention to God surrounding me in this world in the check out girl at Ingle’s, in Barney my big dog, in the rain that keeps on falling, in the old wild red tomcat dying in the hay barn, in the work of my hands, and all the brothers and sisters who cross my path today. In the world reverence, not out of the world...