Dark Hollow stream and me...

Growth of the human person takes place in the dark. Matthew Fox

Sabbath Rest Farm has a lovely little mountain stream, sometimes called a creek where I grew up, running through it. It begins at a spring with hidden underground water and is hardly worth noticing. The flow of water is puny and insignificant. Somehow as it travels through the narrow little valley on its way to our farm, it gathers strength until it becomes a full fledged stream bouncing over rocks on its way to the French Broad River. It isn’t large enough to fish in but it is full of life and its voice sings as it flows into our pond. The course of the stream winds its way through sunshine and shadow, widens and narrows, shoots over rocks and flows through flat shallows. Underground water...unseen until it breaks out to the light...
My friend James and I laugh about being members of a minority in American culture... introverts floating in a sea of extroverts. We married extroverts and we love them but they are so different from us. Our children are a mix of extrovert and introvert further adding to the confusion. James and I can turn on the extroversion as needed for parties, work, church or life in general but it is hard work for us, work that leaves us drained. So we look like extroverts in our behavior... “I can’t believe you are introverted. You are so good at speaking in public!”... but pay a hidden price for that effort.
Introverts are difficult to understand unless you are another introvert. So much of what goes on with us lies hidden to public view. Even those who love and live with us have difficulty deciphering our interior selves. In every introvert flows an underground river of great depth that occasionally breaks forth into the sunlight like Dark Hollow stream. We live with the unspoken judgement that finds us wanting because we cannot measure up to the cultural norm, be like everybody else. Our forays into the Land of Those Who Live Outside can be fun, frustrating, and enlightening for friends and family.
Matthew Fox’s quote reminds me that darkness, quietness, underground living is necessary. Like seeds that swell and burst underground, our souls require the removal from light and sound to grow. Whether we be extroverted or introverted, the chatter and busyness of daily living can clog up our soul stream, separate us from our Underground Source. Quiet time, time to settle, time to let that which has been hidden come to the surface, time to flow towards God... Like Dark Hollow stream, Lord, let me run towards you. Help me bubble up into the sunlight sharing my hidden self with you and the other children in our family. Keep me balanced in light and shadow, self revelation and self shielding. And someday, Lord, let me flow into your loving arms with all my darkness and hidden self fully revealed, loved without reservation or expectation, free at last to be the one I was created to be. Amen.

church 101

Last night was hard, hard work and strangely satisfying. We have been meeting for nearly two years initially trying to figure out how to stay in a church we had loved for many years. When that became impossible, our focus shifted and we began to meet for worship, house church. And now it is time to move on from that. Face to face, straight on, fears, hurts, anger, needy people that we are, last night church happened. We named the reality that has been staring us in the face. We are already church for one another. We don’t agree on everything. We are as different as night and day in theology, stages in life, worship needs, personality styles, life experiences and church history. But we are church for each other.
Now we have to figure out how to provide church friends for Hannah, a group for our teenagers, worship that meets our needs enough to keep us going, mission to the community outside our small group, a 501 3c, find a central place to meet, and a name for this great adventure. Music and laughter and love and being known, love for God which is usually easy, and the really hard work of loving the child of God sitting next to me who just ticked me off or who must be nuts to think that way, teaching our young, witnessing to the world beyond our small group, how crazy these followers of Jesus must be to think they can be a church. We are crazy in love with God and with each other. One of our group, a newer member, put it nicely. She said, “I come here to find God and to just hang out with you guys. I love you.” And like all crazy love, the ragged edges pinch like a pair of new stiff shoes.
We are a room full of Chiefs and few Indians. Each of us has baggage from other church experiences, fear and hope living side by side in our hearts. We know how very, very good real church can be and we also know how badly it can hurt, how hard it is to do the work of being church. But, we can’t help ourselves because our longing for being with God and with each other in a “real church” has brought us to this place. And somewhere deep down in my heart, I wonder if God knew this was coming.
I pray a lot for God’s pillar of fire to lead us through the murky stages of our shift in being. I pray for this little Family of God, all the aunts and uncles, cousins, sisters and brothers, who are bound together in the ties that bind... faith, hope and love. The greatest of these is love. Somehow we will figure the other stuff out, find a place to be, organize ourselves into a self-governing body of believers, tend to those among us who need the care of a pastor and reach out to others in need, teach our children (and ourselves) about the life and ways of Jesus, and lay our lives down for each other.
We meet again in two weeks on a Wednesday night ( Oh, Lord... bi-monthly business meetings!) to hear what possibilities for place our search team has found for us. We will decide where to go and then we will continue the work begun last night, creating a map for this road trip. Everybody has something they can do and everybody has something they want to do. So here we go, like Columbus, sailing off to the end of the earth as we have known it, saying our prayers and trusting in the Providence of God to provide for us what we need even when we cannot name what we need. “He loves us and delights in us, and so he wills us to love him and delight in him and trust mightily in him, and all shall be well... you will see it for yourself, that everything shall be well.” I am taking Julian of Norwich at her word, trusting everything shall be well.

The fullness of time... family reunions

The hills, shorn on top for hay, wear wreaths of Black Eyed Susans, Saint John’s Wort, Queen Anne’s Lace, pink asters, and blackberry bushes laden with sweet berries. It is summertime, full and flowing over, on the farm. It is the year of the bean in the garden. Squash, usually so dependable, didn’t do well this year but every bean bush is extravagantly loaded with beans. Fireflies sweep through the dusk and early evening bearing witness to the quiet nightfall. Dusk falls a little sooner than it did last month but the sunsets are still gorgeous. Children run and scamper trying to collect enough fireflies in a mason jar to make a lantern just as my cousins and I did years ago at Cloverly. A fire in the chimenea on the deck flickers and lights the faces of family gathered around telling stories. Laughter floats on the breeze as I go to put the horses and donkeys up for the night. It is family reunion time at Sabbath Rest Farm.
Our reunion time began when our friends from Beijing, China came for a visit with their three daughters. They are staying at Montreat, a Presbyterian conference center near us, and come for a farm fix. Dan, a seminary student when we met, was an adopted older brother for our son Adam and a dear friend to us. A visit with his family was a wonderful opening to the reunion time. Tim and Jeannie, our farm partners, have their children and grandchildren visiting for the week. Our family and Michael’s brother and his family are here for the weekend. The farm echoes with the sound of laughter, children’s voices and roosters crowing, songs of praise and thanksgiving to my ears.
Michael’s parents, especially his mother, would have loved this party. Twenty two of the Hester clan gathered... children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, husbands and wives, girlfriends... and a new generation of children began to hear the family stories while creating some new ones of their own. This reunion will be remembered by the youngest generation, six boys and one little girl, as the Year of the Chicken. Playing with the chickens, catching them and petting them and naming them kept the six boys occupied. We had to schedule rest periods for the hens and rooster. Speedy, a little Rhode Island Red hen, was the one who got away while visiting outside the chicken yard. It took thirty minutes and ten adults to catch Speedy and put her up.
Family Tee shirts, a hay ride, a family picture taken by Tim, food and more food, doughnuts of every color and kind from Megan’s new job at Krispy Kreme, Angie and her boys sleeping in the pop up camper, sleepy dirty children who fall into bed without a whimper at night, parents and grown up children telling hilarious stories of how and when they fainted (a genetic vagal nerve response shared by at least six of them), mule rides (the mule was renamed the party-paddy wagon) with six little boys yelling and laughing as we rode up and down the hills, children riding Junie B, Will’s face split in half with a grin and a giggle as Junie B trotted uphill, Aidan insisting on saying grace at every meal, Max tenderly cradling a hen in his arms, Mead sitting at the wheel of the keyless mule driving in his imagination, Mason sitting on the tractor pretending to be Pop, Matthew, full of stories of coyotes and snakes, finds a plethora of tadpoles to bring to Nana’s water feature, and little Anna Kate watching them all, is a still point in the midst of flurried activity, memories of times past with gratitude overflowing, hope for the future in the young ones who are beloved reminders of days gone by... family at its untidy unruly best.
My life, like the family reunion, sometimes seems to be careening along accompanied by roller coaster ups and downs, much like a mule ride. But this one weekend gives me another image for my late mid-life early old age stage of life, an image of the fullness of time, hills wreathed with flowers and fruit, our children bearing and rearing the next generation. Joy at my age is always balanced with the sure and certain knowledge that Job times come and go but Love lives forever. So this day I give thanks for the “fullness I have received, grace upon grace.” I remember that I am not alone and give thanks for all of my family present and those departed from this life. To love, to be loved and to live with the One who is Love, will sustain me in the winter months that are coming. It is more than enough.

Aunt Peg and Mama

I looked out the kitchen window, my eyes blurred by sudden tears. The two sisters, white haired, one ninety and the other eighty three, were walking in the yard looking at flowers, arms linked for support and comfort. Aunt Peg (Awhnt not Ant) for whom I am named, is visiting her baby sister, my mama. Grandma heard Aunt Peg praying for a baby sister and her prayers were answered with a sister on her birthday, September 18, when she was seven years old. They have lived their lives separated by geographical distance but connected by a fierce sister love. Every night they talk on the phone, worrying when one doesn’t answer.
They are my only living link to a large family that is memory now. Aunt Dada and Uncle Booshie (who died as an alcoholic), Aunt Nina and Uncle Jack (who died from tuberculosis), Aunt Polly (the prize winning lady golfer) and Uncle Les, Uncle Carl and Aunt Vera (she was the married woman who divorced her husband and pursued my Uncle Carl, a SCANDAL!), Grandma and Granddaddy... all dead and gone with my grandma the only one who had children of her own. Of her three children, the two sisters remain. Birthdays, state fairs, holidays... all were grand occasions for the family to gather at “2204", the Fritzche family home in Richmond. My great-grandfather, Max Fritzche, and his brother established the first ether factory in America and sold it when my great-great uncle decided to return to Germany. Money from that adventure, I suspect, built the grand old home I remember. It had a library full of leather bound books that Aunt Dada had to sell for income after her father and husband died. Large rooms filled with Victorian furniture, grand porches with expansive yards, a kitchen that was always warm and welcoming, a family home for my great aunts, my grandma, my mama and her sister.
After graduation from high school, my very German grandmother gave my mama one week at home before she was packed off to Richmond to live at 2204 with the aunts and her sister to go to business school. Her sister paid her tuition for school because her parents were cash strapped farmers during the war years. They rode the streetcar to work together, shared a room and could put both of their wardrobes into one four drawer chest. They double dated brothers, flirted and played, worked and lived together until mama married her Georgia sailor boy. Their lives moved in different paths and now, widowed and old in years, they have this week together, sisters who love each other.
I sit watching them, seeing them with eyes of love, seeing pictures of them as young women hanging on the wall, remembering them through the years of my life, and give thanks for the loving ties that bind them, and me, together. One no longer young woman, two old women and all the women who have gone before us... bound by a shared heritage and lives lived as well as possible through hard times and good times.
I am reminded of some of the women in the Bible who lived perfectly ordinary lives, like Ruth and Naomi. Their lives, like Aunt Peg and Mama’s, hold for me the image of the Greatest Commandment, loving God while loving others. Most of us will never be great leaders, or perfect mothers or wives. Few of us will have the opportunity to change the course of world history but all of us can learn to love.
One of the old time churches my parents belonged to used the titles of “Sister” and “Brother” in front of your name. Everyone, even the preacher, had this honorific attached to the first or last name depending upon the degree of friendship... Sister Thelma or Sister Minter, Brother Howard or Brother Coody. You knew you were grown up, no longer a child, when this title was added to your name. In a world full of sisters and brothers, we can love one another as Aunt Peg and Mama do, clear eyed and by choice not just an accident of birth. So bless you this day, my sisters and brothers. I am loving you from afar and someday, near. I pray for you, your struggles, illnesses, pains and sufferings. I give thanks for your joys, your gifts, your connection to me, your sister in Christ, and look forward to a day of glad reunion at the family home place.