Tuesday, November 21, 2017

The Village’s Friendly Reminder

 


We have been eating into the spirit of the season — or eating ON the spirit of the season, to put a finer point on the matter.  A few weeks ago Lori retrieved from the cabinet downstairs our set of “Thanksgiving dishes” to enjoy in these waning days of autumn.

Called “The Friendly Village”, our little set consists of four place settings of this English China made by Johnson Brothers.  I don’t really know why we think of them as particular to Thanksgiving, lacking as they do the usual cornucopia and turkey iconography.  Perhaps it is the way their quaint brown images artfully and unobtrusively blur the transition between autumn and winter — precisely as late November is prone to do — with their snowy rural scenes encircled by fallen leaves and berries.  They are somehow warming, despite their chilly depictions; sweet and nostalgically bucolic.  They rather "feel like" the season, even if no pilgrims are pictured.

Warming, then, but also bittersweet, which perhaps accounts for their several years of neglect. The set was a gift received early in my ministry in Des Moines.  I don’t recall it to have been a special occasion — a birthday or Christmas or the like; we weren’t, in that way, in the habit of exchanging such gifts between pastor and people.  I rather recall it to have been something of a sunlit intervention in a particularly dark season of my life — a gesture of grace meant to convey sympathetic support.   A kindness more than anything.  But whatever the impetus, into my office one day breezed Evelyn carrying a wrapped box from which I later excavated the dishes.  A gift, as it were, from Harry and Evelyn, although it likely would have been news to Harry.

I had primarily known Harry and Evelyn as pleasant-faced members of the church’s older generation — reliably present among the pews on Sunday but otherwise peripheral to the busyness of congregational life.  They were kindly and implicitly supportive, but hardly the chatty type.  Other than the perfunctory exchanges of social obligation, I doubt we had ever enjoyed a true conversation.  I did not know them well, and yet here she was bearing gifts.

I’ll admit that while I was touched by the thoughtfulness, the dishes themselves left me...well, let’s say “neutral.”  Chalk it up to the superficial snobbery of youth, they didn’t really fit into my “aesthetic”.  Striking me as something more befitting my grandparents’ table than mine, I dutifully used them on seasonal occasions,  but they more generally lived toward the rear of the cabinet.

And then they began to haunt me.  In the years following the gift given and received, I rocked along through my tenure, busy with many things in my personal and professional life.  The church bustled programmatically along, the kids grew up; I got married, and Harry and Evelyn aged.  Eventually Evelyn went into a special care center on the far side of town and, left to his own religious devices, Harry sort of drifted away.  I visited Evelyn a time or two, but her memory issues made for challenging conversations, and I conveniently got lost in the proliferation of many and simpler things.  Or perhaps more truthfully put, Evelyn got lost in my proliferation of those many and simpler things.  The sum of it is that I neglected her —pastorally abandoned her and, by extension, Harry.  They eventually died largely forgotten by the church they had loved, save but one or two attentive friends.  And I grieve that negligence to this day.  

Which explains the bitter-sweetness of pulling out those dishes each year and setting the November table.  Their “aesthetic”, for one thing, is more compatible now — we have become, after all, the grandparents to whom I once consigned them; and God knows a “Friendly Village” is something toward which we can use every encouragement.  But mostly we use them to remember — Harry and Evelyn, to be sure — but more broadly the painful regret of negligent forgetting.  We eat off of these dishes to remind us to notice, to reach out, to be instigators in ways that we are able of precisely that “Friendly Village” in which we long to live; one encircling especially those more present to us who we easily forget or neglect.    

It’s just a small set of four, and we are only two, but whatever their other virtues and value, the dishes remind us that every village starts somewhere, and this one might as well start at our table...

...or yours, for that matter...

...Remembering, and giving thanks.

And reaching out.

Saturday, November 11, 2017

Maybe You Cry Too

“I wonder if maybe I had a heart attack sometime without knowing it,” I mused aloud.  “I’ve heard that people get more emotional after heart attacks.”  

Because it seems like I’m awfully emotional these days.  

Now, people who have orbited in my universe for any time at all will no doubt smile at such a speculation.  They would tell you that I’ve never had too much trouble getting emotional.  Despite my most willful intentions tears have leaked through the years into sermons, splashed  onto poignant passages of books and drowned out musical lyrics, while throat lumps interrupted conversation.  It doesn’t take a very deep well to drill into my personal water table.  

That noted, however, my tears these days seem to be ever more readily available.  

It could be, I suppose, that I’m simply and increasingly “losing it” — becoming more and more fragile, unstable and vulnerable to the shifting breezes regardless if they are favorable or deleterious.   I doubt it, but check with my wife who likely has better perspective on this question.

It could also be that there are simply more reasons to cry — a fact virtually indisputable.  
Think Puerto Rico and Houston and Miami and their hurricane-devastated lives.  
Think Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs, TX and their bullet-riddled bodies.
Think the record-breaking 24 homicides so far in low-key, middle-of-the-road, heart-beat of the flyover zone Des Moines this year — or is it already 25?
Think Bill Clinton and Donald Trump and Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes and Bill O’Riley and Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey and Louis CK and God knows how many others with their trailing wastelands of despicable behaviors that they somehow viewed, in their oddly dystopian parallel universes, to be normal and acceptable.
And think of the way the rest of us find ourselves interacting with one another, what with our incendiary social media posts and put downs.  

Who is there to listen?  We suddenly find ourselves surrounded by “voices” — “conservative” voices, “progressive” voices, voices “of the people”, and more.  And don’t misunderstand me, I’m not interested in silencing anyone.  Indeed, too many have been silenced for too long and who need, at long last, to be heard.  But therein lies my anguish.  No one is actually hearing them — listening, seeking to understand.  Once upon a time that was the purview of town halls and civic organizations and churches.  But town halls have been politicized, civic organizations, such as still exist, slide into the lowest common programmatic denominators, and churches have become simply one more “voice”, intoned with righteous — or is it sanctimonious? — edge.  

I rather think, moreso than “voices”, we could benefit these days from a few more true, unpretentious and resilient communities in which people take the time to actually listen to voices other than their own; in which “respect” is as much practiced as demanded; in which “wonder” and “curiosity” and “concern” are encouraged and nourished even when they drift into possibilities contrary to my entrenched dogmas; and in which we, who don’t always or ever agree, actually celebrate the sacredness of sharing that relational space — suspecting that the vigilant maintenance of that communal commonwealth may well be more important than whatever it is that we say and hear there.

But we don’t seem to have the time or interest in that, determined instead to over-shout each other, exploit, ignore, use, abuse, disdain or simply shoot each other.

And it makes me want to cry.

But even that, I suppose, is ultimately hopeful.  As Leonard Cohen famously said, "There's a crack in everything.  That's how the light gets in."

Which means that whatever else we are doing with all our fracturing, we are making room for all kinds of light.