If you want to sell your house, they say, make it look like you don’t live there. People can’t imagine themselves living in the space if you are still present. I don’t know how to disappear, I say. I can’t erase myself as I leave every day. How can I leave this house to someone without imagination enough to see it? Just three years shy of one hundred, our house stands on stones and stories; it can’t be a blank slate anymore than we can act like we don’t live here. Our laughter and longing have colored the walls and settled into the carpet. Our feet have worn down the stairs; our hands have fixed what we have broken. Real estate is measured in square feet; the imaginary estate belongs to those who can see themselves sharing space with all who helped build their home.
Sometimes, our lives are like a joke, or at least the opening of one.
Yesterday, Ginger and I performed a wedding together that included a Buddhist, a Catholic, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Jew, and a lapsed Presbyterian. She looked at the gathered crowd of friends and family and said, “It sounds like we should all go into a bar.”
The setting was amazing. We were standing on a hillside on the grounds of the Beach Plum Inn on Martha’s Vineyard, the late summer sun shining down like a spotlight. The ceremony began with the groom, a Pakistani, and all of his extended family parading down the hill with him under a colorful canopy, banging drums and cheering. Not long before, many of them had cheered as Ginger and I got to the Inn. At 10:45 that morning, we had walked out of our worship service early (with appropriate explanation) and driven the fifty-three miles to Wood’s Hole to catch the Vineyard Ferry, which left at 12:15. We got there with seven minutes to spare. We docked in Vineyard Haven where they had a guide for us to follow to the Inn, where we arrived at 1:45 – in time to put on our robes, drink a glass of water, and start the ceremony at 2:00.
We had lots of reasons to cheer. Almost two years ago to the day, the groom was beginning chemotherapy; we weren’t sure if he was going to live. Almost six years ago, after the fall of the Twin Towers, he answered a knock on his apartment door one evening and was greeted by two FBI agents who interrogated him for several hours without allowing him to make a phone call or even get up and go to the bathroom simply because he was from Pakistan and his name was “suspicious.” As of yesterday, this week in September will now be remembered as a week of celebration because their wedding far outshines those former fears.
The couple, and most of their gathered congregation, defines their spirituality different from mine. We are not without commonalties, but (how do I say this?) they would be tentative in places where I might be more emphatic when in comes to Christianity and Jesus in particular. And they called and said they really wanted Ginger and I to perform the ceremony. When the four of us met together, we had great discussions not only about the details of the wedding but also the spiritual significance we found there. Though Ginger and I were challenged, at times, to find the vocabulary to give voice to our diversity, what happened as we stood in the Vineyard sun was filled with the winds of the Spirit.
One of the things the couple wanted to do was to have everyone touch the rings before they put them on, as a symbol of the connectedness with and the support they felt from everyone there. Ginger and I had been trying to figure out how to make that work all week. As we sat on the ferry going to the Island, Ginger said, “I’ve got it.” We worked out the details together.
At the appropriate time, Ginger took the rings and walked out into the middle of the congregation. She explained what the couple wanted and then explained how we were going to adjust their idea to make the same point. She invited those closest to her to put their hands on her shoulders and then the next layer of people to touch the shoulder of the person nearest them until we were all connected. The contagion of contact rippled all the way up to where I was standing with the bride and groom. The visual image was startling and sumptuous. “Now,” I said, “when you look at your rings in the days and years to come, you will be reminded of the promises you made here and you will always know that you’ve got people.”
Sara Miles talks about marriage in her book as well. (Yeah, I thought I was through quoting her as well.) She and her partner were among those who were married in San Francisco when the mayor made provision for equal marriage, and before the state voided them all. She describes a scene where the priest at her church calls on those gathered to bless the marriages in much the same fashion as Ginger called us to bless the rings. Miles says,
The marriage of a couple, I understood then, was more than personal: it was a rite binding people into community and, beyond that, pointing to the union of all humanity with God. A marriage such as ours prophesied the politically inconvenient but spiritually resonant truth that the unlikely and outcast were part of God’s creation, in all ways. It was like communion: when some people were shut out of the rite, the picture couldn’t be complete. (234)
As the afternoon wound down, one of the co-best men and the Pakistani equivalent of Napoleon Dynamite, sang a karaoke version of Journey’s “Open Arms” that only his closest friends could truly appreciate. With consuming passion and complete disregard for pitch or melody, he blared,
so, now, I come to you with open arms nothing to hide believe what I say so here I am with open arms hoping you’ll see what your love means to me open arms
Yesterday I sang at the funeral of a man I had never met and I cried.
He sounded like a great guy – someone I would have liked and would have shared a great deal in common. His family loved him. The line that killed me was his son-in-law saying, “I’m so grateful that my children got to be his grandchildren.”
I had to sing after that. He loved Elvis, so they asked me to sing “an Elvis song”. I chose an old gospel hymn that he covered:
there will be peace in the valley for me someday there’s gonna be peace in the valley for me, dear Lord I pray there’ll be no sorrow, no sadness, no trouble I see there’s gonna be peace in the valley for me
Sharing in the grief of his family and friends connected me to the reservoir of sorrow that floods all of humanity. One of the linchpins of the Incarnation is that Jesus was “acquainted with grief,” which I think is poetic understatement. For him and for us all, grief is a lifelong companion. Loss is one of the necessary threads in the tapestry of our existence. As I drove from the church to the restaurant, trying to shift gears so I could work, an old T-Bone Burnett song rose to the surface of my memory and I sang as I drove:
there’s a river of love that runs through all time but there’s a river of tears that floods through our lives it’s starts when your heart is broken into by the thief of belief in anything that’s true but there’s a river of love that runs through all time
Until I read the lyric at his website, I always thought the line was, “It starts when your heart is broken in two,” as in pieces, but he’s singing, “broken into,” as a thief would do. The rivers of love and tears fill the same banks.
Tonight, as I sat down to write, I learned that Madeleine L’Engle died on Thursday. One of the lights of my life has gone out. When I was in fourth grade, Mrs. Reedy, my teacher, enticed us to get our work done by promising to read from her favorite book at the end of the day. That book was A Wrinkle in Time. I went on from there to read most everything Madeleine wrote from the rest of the books in what became The Time Quintet to her young adult novels about the Austin family to her nonfiction works. Some time in the eighties, I wrote her a letter that began, “Dear Madeleine, you are one of my best friends but you just don’t know it.” I told her about Mrs. Reedy and what her books had meant to me. She wrote me back (I found the letter just this week as I was packing up my office to get ready to move) and we corresponded intermittently until her husband Hugh (who was Dr. Tyler on All My Children) died. I got the form letter she sent out that said, “Hugh got sick around Epiphany and he died just after Pentecost.”
Madeleine L’Engle taught me how to mark and keep time.
I never got to see her in person. Once, while we were corresponding, I wrote to say I was going to be in New York City and asked if we could share a meal. She wrote back saying she was going to be at Crosswicks, her family home, for the summer, and included her phone number in New York if I got there another time. I called once and spoke to her granddaughter. Then I decided the reason I wanted to meet her in person had more to do with hero worship than relationship; I could keep our friendship in my reading. That’s how I knew her.
On the afternoon she died, I was sitting in my favorite Boston (actually Somerville) pub, the Burren, with two dear friends who I got to know when I was teaching in Winchester. When I think of people who have helped me keep and mark time while we have lived in New England, Jack and Jenn are in that group. I love the combination of Jack’s adventuresome nature and compassionate heart and Jenn’s artistic eye and unflappable spirit. I am ten years older than Jack and he is ten years older than Jenn and we are friends. When we arrived on the planet doesn’t matter nearly as much as we gotten to share time together over the past several years.
Madeleine is dead, but I can go upstairs and find her by pulling one of her books off the shelf and letting her words come alive. I imagine that those who really knew and loved her don’t share my consolation. They, like the family at the funeral yesterday, are dealing with the physical reality of her absence. She’s gone. She will not be there for dinner or for holidays or for whatever she was always there for. However deep their pain, they don’t know what it feels like to walk out of the Burren and realize Jack and Jenn and I have only a couple more afternoons like that to share.
When we make ourselves vulnerable, we do open ourselves to pain, sometimes excruciating pain. The more people we love, the more we are liable to be hurt, and not only by the people we love, but for the people we love.
Ginger and I spent this morning in Charlestown, the neighborhood of Boston where we used to live. Our breakfasts were seasoned with the tears and laughter that resurrect memories as our hearts were broken into once again. We sat for a couple of hours, holding past and present, talking about the things we carried and some of the things weighing us down in these days. Madeleine used to talk about being every age you’ve been at the same time, life stacking itself up like altar stones, our experiences singing out in chorus rather than speaking one at a time.
And so I am a fourth grader hearing A Wrinkle in Time for the first time, twenty-something writing Madeleine a letter, thirty-two seeing Ginger for the first time; I’m sitting in the Burren with Jack and Jenn, walking through Charlestown with Ginger, watching the Schnauzers bound down the beach in the moonlight, making dinner for whomever comes to eat, singing at a funeral, packing boxes to finish our time here and start new things in Durham.
Truly, there’s a river of love that runs through all times.
I’m not one of those people who remember dreams, for the most part. Something about the way I wake up in the morning makes my mind work like an Etch-a-Sketch, erasing whatever was created during the night as I shake myself into consciousness. But I think I had a dream last night that refused to go away, one that has taken all day to break the surface, one with a haunting quality that I don’t think plans to fade away anytime soon. It’s pretty straightforward. There aren’t any symbols to unpack or metaphors to mine. I’m sharing it in search of resonance. Somewhere in the world, someone is already doing what I dreamt; I don’t have to reinvent the wheel (or the stove) to see my dream incarnated. Someone out there knows whom I need to know. Therefore, trusting in the connections of grace that bind us together, I share my dream.
I dreamt I had a restaurant – a diner, actually – that was open for lunch Monday to Friday. The inside of the place was filled with round tables that sat six or eight people. There were no tables for twos and fours. In the kitchen was a team of good cooks, people who were serious about making good food to draw people together. Each day we prepared a plate lunch: salad, entrée, sides, and dessert. The menu changed depending on what we could get our hands on to cook. Regardless of the ingredients, we made comfort food, community building food, food made to be eaten together.
The doors opened at ten-thirty or eleven, and people found a seat wherever they could as they came in. The point was to break bread with people you knew and some you didn’t: to break barriers and open hearts. When folks sat down, we brought their drinks and then started bringing their food. When the meal was over, those who could paid for lunch and those who couldn’t, well, didn’t. Some learned to give out of their abundance and paid for more than one meal without making a big deal about it. Some paid by joining the staff of the restaurant and doing what they could to help feed folks. When the food ran out, we closed the doors for the day and started working on what we were going to make the next day.
What we learned, over time, was there was a way to feed people’s hunger for food and community and make a living doing it. (Here’s where I need to know who has figured out how to actually do this.) There has to be a way to create excellent food and make it available to anyone who is hungry, not just those privileged enough to afford it. I dreamt of a place Isaiah described:
Hey there! All who are thirsty, come to the water! Are you penniless? Come anyway—buy and eat! Come, buy your drinks, buy wine and milk. Buy without money—everything’s free! Why do you spend your money on junk food, your hard-earned cash on cotton candy? Listen to me, listen well: Eat only the best, fill yourself with only the finest. Pay attention, come close now, listen carefully to my life-giving, life-nourishing words. (Isaiah 55:1-5, The Message)
What I dreamt is real. Someone out there is living my dream. Please tell me who they are. I need to learn from them; I need them to feed me.
Yesterday was Ginger’s last Sunday of vacation, so I spent the morning, once more, reading Sara Miles. The heart of her book is about starting a food pantry at her church in San Francisco. In the process of telling her story, she says some profound and confrontive things about faith and action.
As a grateful member of the United Church of Christ, I’m a part of a denomination that willingly owns the labels “liberal” and “progressive.” Words like justice, peace, and inclusiveness are a regular part of our vocabulary. Someone has said if Christianity were a neighborhood, the UCC would be the last house on the left. When I read about Miles’ Episcopal church in San Francisco, I imagine her congregation is not so different from the ones I’ve known in the UCC: mostly well-off and well-intentioned white people whose faith matters to them and who as averse to being made uncomfortable by their faith as anyone else. I think we do want our faith to matter to us and what we do with our lives to matter to God and to others, and it’s hard to break out of our patterns of faith, action, and relationship to be converted and transformed by the Spirit.
As Miles talked about the growing pains and gains of the food pantry, she said, “We were all converting: turning into new people as we rubbed up against each other” (138). I immediately thought of fiddlehead ferns. (Didn’t you?) To clean fiddleheads before you cook them, you put them in water and rub them up against each other. The dark outer layer – dirt, skin, whatever – comes off leaving a beautifully bright green skin that sparkles in the sauté pan. They don’t clean up well one by one; they have to rub up against each other to be transformed.
As she began to get to know the people who came to the food pantry and then volunteered to help run it, Miles writes,
Where had all the people like Nirmala been, all the years that St. Gregory’s was holding services and trying to entice worshippers, one or two at a time, into the experimental liturgy?The people who came to get food at the pantry had been, to regular middle-class churchgoers, basically like Jesus – that is, invisible. We knew they were there, but we couldn’t see them, and their sufferings and loveliness were imagined, not incarnate in a specific body.But as I got to know them, I started to ee more clearly now the people who came to the pantry were like me: messed up, often prickly or difficult, yearning for friendship. I saw how they were hungry, the way I was. And then, I had a glimpse of them being like Jesus again: as God, made flesh and blood. (128-29)
I picked up my pen and wrote in the margin of my book, “How do we make church more physical, more visceral?”
Chef made a mistake during service last night. He knew we were going to be busier than usual for a Sunday because of the holiday weekend, but he only put one dishwasher on the schedule. Since Sunday is usually Chef’s day off and he worked, he left about eight-thirty. As Ashad and I were cleaning up after service, he commented on the huge stack of dishes that faced Leonardo, our Brazilian dishwasher who leaves work at eleven or so to go to his second all night job.
“We should help him,” Ashad said.
I finished wiping off the counters and headed back to the dish room. I started rinsing things out and stacking them so Leo could begin washing. Ashad joined in a couple of minutes later and began putting away the things that were clean. By staying an extra twenty minutes we had cleared the dish area and kept Leo from being there for a couple of extra hours. Sous saw what we were doing and had a couple of cold beers waiting for us to say thank you. It wasn’t about doing the dishes nearly as much as it was about helping Leonardo. We work together, we rub up against each other; we are being transformed.
This morning, my friend Jay, who is staying with us for the weekend, told me about a story he saw on the Today Show about an organization called Kiva that makes micro-loans to people around the world who are trying to get out of poverty. Since the organization was founded in 2005, they have loaned almost $11 million from 94,000 lenders to fund almost 15,000 loans averaging about $650 each. The repayment rate on the loans is 99.72%. The average lender gives in $25 increments. I found this Frontline documentary, which gives a more personal picture of the process:
The first week Sara Miles and her friends opened the food pantry they served thirty people. Now, on average, they serve 500 families a week. The food is set up in the sanctuary of the church and people come in, ten at a time, with grocery sacks and “shop” for what they want. The pantry is staffed almost completely by people who were once standing in line to get food. They have become “The Church of the One True Sack,” as she calls it. Miles, again:
This is what gets left out, I was realizing: not just left out of the national public debate but also left out of religious discourse. Politicians talked about welfare – usually to blame and scapegoat – and occasionally made speeches about poverty. There was no shortage of talk about the poor and social service from church leaders off all stripes. But the experiences of people such as my volunteers, the texture and specificity of their incarnate lives, were missing from the story of what Christianity was like now in contemporary America . . .
The thing that astonished me sometimes – listening to tales of terrible damage, psychosis, loss – was not how messed up people could be but how resilient; how, in the depths of suffering, they found ways to adapt and continue . . .
You can’t hope to see God without opening yourself to all God’s creation. (216-17)
At the last church I served, as part of my sermon one Sunday I had people get up and physically change seats as a way of encouraging them to find a new perspective. At deacons’ meeting the next week, one person was less than complimentary of the sermon. “I don’t do come to church to be made uncomfortable,” she said.
As easy as it is to demonize her, when I look at my life I have to admit I understand her sentiment. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that a truly incarnational faith is messy work. Bumping up against one another is uncomfortable, even painful. Christianity would be easier if it were only about ideas and concepts. Perhaps that’s why we emphasize and fight over orthodoxy more than orthopraxy. It’s not so much about believing the right things as it is doing the true things:
Feed my sheep.
Bear one another’s burdens.
Forgive and forgive and forgive.
Love one another.
Ginger and I have spent the last two days finishing all the things we’ve lived with unfinished for the last six years so our house could go on the market today. As we were leaving our realtor at the house, a couple was coming in to try and imagine themselves in the space we have called our own. I found myself humming this song as I drove away.
if I travel all my life and I never get to stop and settle down long as I have you by my side there’s a roof above and good walls all around you’re my castle you’re my cabin and my instant pleasure dome I need you in my house ’cause you’re my home
This poem is a response to two prompts: one from Christine with this accompanying image and the other being the final prompt at Poetry Thursday, which was “open window.” They reminded me of jazz artist Chet Baker, whose story I first learned of through David Wilcox’s song, “Chet Baker’s Unsung Swan Song.”
open window
The smell of the sea wafts in through our open windows, curtains billowing like full sails of a tall ship riding waves of adventure.
From upstairs, I can see the small whitecaps landing on the sand with gentle introductions; it’s hard not to feel free on such a day.
They found Chet underneath his upstairs window early one Amsterdam morning. Despite all the melodies, he thought he needed
a needle to be free. When I hear his horn I wonder why he couldn’t find wings in the music that carries my heart
out beyond my burdens. Perhaps it felt different on the other side of the horn. Some places breezes can’t blow no matter how open the window.
One of the things I admire most about Chef is his thriftiness: nothing goes to waste.
Last Saturday our produce supplier left a case each of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries – about $130 worth of fruit — when all we had ordered were a couple of pints of each to use as garnishes on the dessert plates. When Chef called to tell them of their mistake, they said we could keep the fruit since they couldn’t get back to pick it up. They gave us a credit for it as well. Even though it was free, Chef hardly lost a berry. Our pastry chef used some of them in special desserts and then Chef made a blackberry sauce to use with a duck special this weekend, a raspberry vinaigrette, a blueberry-vanilla vinaigrette, and a strawberry chutney. We made a mistake and ordered an extra case of arugula, so he had me make an arugula pesto to use with a halibut special tonight. In the six weeks I’ve worked there, I’ve not seen him throw away anything that went bad before we could use it.
The amazing thing to me is he is thrifty and creative at the same time. The surplus of greens and berries gave birth to the evening’s salad special: rocket greens (a cooler name for arugula) on a bed of Bibb lettuce with raspberry vinaigrette, Blue Hill gorgonzola cheese, and candied walnuts. The halibut dish was a pan roasted filet served with lobster mashed potatoes (that’s right: mashed potatoes with pieces of lobster meat mixed in), arugula pesto beurre blanc, and a salad of baby arugula and tomatoes from our garden. Both dishes were made with things we were using up and things we always have on hand.
He makes it look easy. It’s not.
Our kitchen is set up, much like many restaurants, where each station has containers to hold both hot and cold items to be used to prepare the dishes. The restaurant term for this is mise en place, a French word that translates “everything in place.” The idea is to do as much of the preparation as can be done ahead of time so the final dishes can be prepared in a timely fashion. At my station, I have a cold bar that holds sixteen “six pans,” each one with a different item or sauce. I also have four refrigerated drawers that hold the fish and the vegetables I need to function. Each drawer holds six or eight things. Chef has a similar set up at his grill station and between us is a steam table with all the sauces we use.
One of the ways he keeps up with things is to have us change out all containers that hold our mise en place every night. No exceptions. The primary issue is one of sanitation, but not too far behind is the idea that we have to check everything every night. We know what’s there, what’s not, and what needs to be done the next day.
This morning before I went to work, Ginger and I spent some time working on getting our house prepared to go on the market this weekend. (Want to buy a house at the beach?) I carried some things out to the garage, which is the antithesis of Chef’s kitchen. Besides the jumble of things we use, there are boxes in the back that have not been opened since we moved them from our last house in Charlestown and put them in the back of the garage. I don’t even think I’m going to open them. I’ll just take them straight to the dump.
In the kitchen I keep a clean and efficient station. I have what I need and only what I need. At home, I’m a pack rat. I have way more than I need. If mise en place means “everything in place,” I need the French term for “everything in every place” – maybe mess en place would work.
Ginger and I are working hard to take as little stuff with us as we can. Rather than telling the movers what we have and let them tell us how much room we’ll need, we’re thinking about choosing a container and then letting it determine how much stuff will go with us. When it’s full, that’s it. I hope we can pull it off. I have shelves and shelves of books, most of which have served me well and deserve to find life with someone else. I have a number of them I consider to be life long companions, but a good deal of them – probably most – need to find new life without me. The library is just the beginning. I need to do the same culling with my clothes, my CDs, all of my belongings. If everything is to be in place, then I need to have less everything.
What I want to take are the things I need to be myself and to be prepared to do what I need to do. Truth is, I’m not sure that’s a very long list at all.
I was at the fish station and Chef was on the grill, which are the two main sauté stations. We share eighteen burners, three ovens, and more sauté pans than I can count and, once dinner service gets into full swing, we keep the burners blazing and the pans flying. For the first hour and a half of service, everyone that came in ordered meat. I had only two small tickets. That changed around seven-thirty: I got slammed. All of a sudden I had five salmon, two swordfish, two or three cods, and a couple of pasta dishes that are assigned to my station. Chef had a line of tickets of his own and called for the Sous Chef, who was the floater for the night, to come and help us get the food out. I had thought through the orders and had a plan for getting the food out expeditiously and well timed with the food from the other stations. She stepped on to the line with her own plan and in a matter of minutes I felt superfluous.
Chef and Sous have worked together for seven years along with two of the other line cooks in our kitchen. They have all been very welcoming to me and willing to help me learn the ropes. I get along with everyone in the kitchen. And as the two of them fell into their familiar rhythm, I knew I was an outsider. I also knew they had no idea they were pushing me out of the circle. Sous was stepping up to a station that was hers before I was hired; she had no need to ask what I was working on or how I planned to deal with the tickets. She had her way. She was going to do her thing and she did.
As I drove home reflecting on the evening, I thought, “This is how church feels to some people.” People join a church because they feel welcomed and they are encouraged to get involved. Somewhere along the way they have an experience (or seven) much like my night on the line when one of the Ones Who Know steps in to help and simply takes over, leaving the new person on the sidelines not knowing how to get in the game as something other than a sub or a replacement player. The action by the long term member is not malicious, but it is alienating. It would have felt different to me if Sous had simply asked, “What can I do to help?”
Saturday night, Sous was on both pizza and garde manger. My station was closest to her, so Chef asked me to keep an eye to whether or not she needed help. Again, my station started slow and her tickets were stacking up. Every time I saw three or four salads come up closely followed by a pizza or three, I asked her if she needed help.
“I got it,” she said.
She didn’t have it. She was in the weeds, but I was not the one who could help her. Not long after she waved me off, I looked up to see one of the cooks she has known for years at garde manger making salads. I don’t know if she asked for help or if he just went in there and started throwing lettuce in the bowls, but the situation reminded me again I am not an insider. I am welcome but I don’t belong.
One of the ways we describe ourselves in the UCC is as people of “extravagant welcome.” I love the phrase and the sentiment, and church has to be more than a welcoming place if we don’t want people to end up feeling like I did this weekend. We need to be a community of extravagant belonging.
When Ginger pastored in Winchester, one of the enduring phrases within the youth group was, “There are no lunch tables at church,” meaning we all belong as much as anyone else. Jesus calls us to crash through cliques and disregard labels. We had kids from every layer of high school society in the group and they learned, both at church and at school, how to break the boundaries between the lunch tables and belong to and with one another.
Somewhere along the way I heard or read of someone saying, “If you’re on a church committee or board and you are not actively training your replacement, you’re doing it wrong.” I think at some level it’s hard for us to remember that when we say “our church” the pronoun is descriptive, not possessive.
I don’t know an easy way to do it. I’ve been the one in Sous’ position – both at work and at church — and barreled over whomever was trying to be a part of things with much less tact than she pushed past me the other night, I’m sure. Here’s what I wished had happened: when she came on to the line she would have said something to the effect of, “It looks like you have an idea of how you want to handle these tickets. How can I help?”
What I wanted was for her to treat me as a member of the team and not the new guy.
In every church of which I have been a part, I’ve seen people stand on the sidelines trying to figure out how to get in the game. I think a lot of folks get tired of being welcomed but fade away because they aren’t given clear indication of how they can belong. The shared histories of those already there is often intimidating. The mostly unintentional code of conduct and procedure that exists in most churches is unintelligible to the uninitiated. The biggest difference between being welcomed and belonging is in the vulnerability it takes to trust one another.
Tonight, she was doing pizza and garde manger again and, at one point, she said, “Milton, can you help me by making two baby spinach salads and one Caesar to go with these pizzas?” I jumped at the chance. She had no idea how good it felt to me for the two of us to be standing there in “our” restaurant.
Lat night at the restaurant, I was the utility infielder, if you will, doing whatever prep projects I could find and then jumping in to help whoever was getting “in the weeds” as we say. A good deal of my time was spent shucking oysters since Gianni has a hard time doing it. It’s not that I’m a super shucker myself, but I was the one with the time to do it. I found this video clip that shows how it’s done:
Multiply that by about fifty and you get an idea of how my night went. Needless to say, I’m a better shucker than I was when the dinner service began. Practice, in this case, improves both confidence and competency.
But that’s not true of everything.
I’ve spent most of my life moving. I’m fifty years old and I’ve lived in five countries, close to a dozen cities and towns, and have had at least forty different addresses. I am practiced at saying goodbye but, unlike oyster shucking, it has not gotten any easier. In fact, I think it has become more difficult.
This morning, Ginger announced to our church that she is resigning to become the Senior Pastor of Pilgrim United Church of Christ in Durham, North Carolina. It’s goodbye again.
One of the things I love about the UCC is the intentionality to which they call their pastors and parishioners when it comes to parting ways. I grew up in Baptist churches where the preacher stood up one Sunday, resigned with a two-week notice, and was gone before anyone had time to feel much of anything. The UCC suggests somewhere in the neighborhood of a sixty day farewell process, ending with a wonderful liturgy where both pastor and parish give and ask forgiveness; offer words of affection, gratitude, and encouragement; and release one another to what is yet to come. Yes, two months is a long time and the goodbyes are hard and yes, it’s worth it. We have stories to tell, things to do, and – of course – meals to share. What lies ahead in Durham is full of good people and amazing possibilities. At coffee hour, some folks asked me questions about the church there and the town as well. It is a cool church and the move is the right one for us.
But today was the beginning of goodbye, which we must do well both to honor those whom we love here and to open our hearts to those whom we will love in the days ahead. Ginger and I married in April 1990 and moved to Boston in August. For the last seventeen years we have had a Massachusetts address and a zip code that begins with 0. We have been able to listen to Joe Castiglione call the Red Sox games on the radio when we couldn’t see Remdawg on TV or get to Fenway in person. We watched them build the Big Dig from start to finish (well – sort of a finish). Ginger has weathered not only the Boston winters, but my three major career changes and my depression. We found our home in the UCC here in churches in Winchester and in Marshfield. Ginger earned her doctorate and has carved out a significant place in the Mass. Conference of the UCC. We know how to drive in Boston traffic, know what a “regular coffee” is, are both loyal and addicted to Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, regularly use “wicked” as a superlative, can push a mean snow shovel, have laid on the grass along the Charles to hear to Pops play on the Fourth of July, and, week in and week out for the last seven years, worshipped and fellowshipped as members of North Community Church.
As much as I love gospel music, one old hymn that has always bothered me is
This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through . . .
because I can’t come to terms with thinking of our lives as nothing more than way stations. All the joy, pain, sorrow, hope, love, and heartbreak are the existential equivalent of a bus station: we’re just waiting for our ride.
No. I’m not here forever, but I’m doing more than passing through.
One conversation I had at coffee hour today was with a woman who is a wonderful artist. She was asking me about my new job (which I get to say goodbye to as well) and I rambled on for a couple of minutes. She then noted she could see my passion for cooking even though she didn’t share it. In the course of her explanation, she said, “I think part of it for me is it’s so temporary. You finish fixing the meal and then it’s gone.”
Yes. Exactly.
My culinary art is lucky if it stays intact two or three minutes from the time I put the final garnish on the plate and notify the server. As we talked some more she said, “I guess what endures is you get to create something that lives on in what happens at the meal.”
Again. Exactly.
The table nearest our open kitchen filled up about eight last night and, when I finished cleaning my station at ten-thirty they were still sitting there. The food was long gone, but their conversation and laughter had been the soundtrack for the final hour of my evening. In the course of human history there have been very few days, if any, that resulted in something permanent. All of our art is housed in temporary exhibitions.
What a gift that we have been created to attach to one another, to love one another, even when we know the goodbyes are inevitable. If we were only passing through, it wouldn’t hurt like this.
