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.