Month: November 2020

 

 

 

Meleagris. It’s the gobble genus; gobble being the native language of America’s fine feathered friend, the turkey. It’s not clear if there will be an official Presidential pardon this year, but the social media is stuffed with recipes for turkey alternatives. Good luck hunting a bird under 10 pounds in the grocery aisles.

I’ve always sided with Ben Franklin’s spirited defense of turkey written in a letter to his daughter in 1784.  The turkey is “a true original native of America” and “a bird of courage that would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.”

I can vouch for that. The back road from the Cokesbury parsonage led to a T with stop signs. My car had paint chips missing above the bumper due to the wild turkey that would launch an attack as soon as I slowed to a stop. It was as if I’d invaded his stomping grounds.

There are turkey tracks across my landscape. Turkey is the centerpiece of my family thanksgiving. A bird big enough to fill the plates of family, neighbors, and often strangers. The wish bone is a prize, and the wish making and bone breaking a sibling ritual.

Our living room in the desert north of Tucson is the place of origin of a church, now St. Marks UMC,  but between its hatching and its final settling in, the community roosted in a turkey shed.  The Meleagris were replaced with Methodists for a season. I remember wondering if we’d ever outgrow the teasing of being “turkeys”. The Holy Spirit occasionally appears in my dreams as a feathered being that’s not a dove.

Manifest destiny isn’t a healthy theology for either native peoples or native birds. I try my hand at role reversal in a children’s play I write at Rough Rock on the Navajo Reservation. I remember their delight when Turkey Lurkey corrals the cowboys and banishes the BIA. Not great literature, but very good medicine.

This Covid season of caution has affected my relationship of Lions and Turkeys. I did not help pack Thanksgiving boxes; I just donated food. We quarantine because I want Bill and Daniel and Jess at our family table next year. I didn’t watch kids carry groceries into their neighbors, full of pride. But turkey was on the menu, cooked by Bellevue volunteers and food boxes were still faithfully packed to overflowing, then carried to cars along with Thanksgiving cards made by children.

I look at the thanks giving that rests on my kitchen table: sliced turkey, organic potatoes, broccoli, celery, and bananas, all from local farmers. If talking turkey means telling the truth and the whole truth, so help us, God, Franklin was right. We can survive if we serve others. We can thrive if we trust and share. Courage is what America needs now.

 

We’re spoon fed at the start and at the finish, if justice and mercy have any say in the way the world turns.  Human life requires feeding in its beginning and to its end.  Somebody has to feed us or we wouldn’t be here. To be spoon fed should be celebrated but it’s a sign of vulnerability. It means we’re either too young or too infirm to feed ourselves, and yet a spoon is a revelation of a holy human relationship. To stretch out a spoon is to extend a table of hospitality in God’s name, and in my household of faith, for Christ’s sake.  Good spoon work requires remembering how we’ve been fed and blessing the hands that have fed us by feeding others. Memorial and thanksgiving form the centerpiece in this table of sacramental life. We need help, however, in our table manners.  We need daily reminders of how to say grace.

We also need lessons on how to bless, not bite the hand that feeds us.  My best teacher of table manners was my mother’s mother, Flora.  At the age of 106, she’d moved from feeding to being fed.  She’s been the daily bread source of our young lives. She cooked plain, not fancy, until her late 80s. She moved from the stove to setting the table in her 90s.

I’ve framed her final lesson. My older sister’s kitchen is filled with the noisy sounds and smells of a 3-generation thanksgiving dinner.  My oldest sister, Sandy Lee Mace, inherited our grandma’s care and cooking DNA. Brucilla Campbell, my younger sister adds the global and gourmet sense to dining. Wilson Cloudchamber, youngest of the Murray girls, is a true believer in organic life.

I’m missing all of the above, so I do as I’m told:  feed Grandma. Turkey is now beyond Grandma’s ability or interest.  Long after other tastes have departed, the sense of bitter and sweet remains, so she’s having desert.  I spoon feed her ice cream, my attention elsewhere, until she stops the spoon. She traces the spoon to my fingers, then kisses my hand. She then returns to the ice cream.

A gesture of gratitude. To kiss the hand that feeds you. To feed others as you have been fed-with a grateful heart. This is what Thanksgiving means. This is Eucharist. We are spoon fed, start to finish.

Stirring Women

 

We are stirred by a sense

   as common as spoons.

   Amen.

 

We are capable

   of cupping God.

   So be it.

 

We believe in the destiny of dining.

We ladle grace like gravy

   over the bread of life.

 

In a hard-to-handle time

   we are good at getting to the bottom,

   gripped in Necessity’s hand.

 

We invent perpetual motion

   from a rounded shape

   and a hungry sound.

 

Few if any

    are born to the taste of silver.

Most acquire stainless steel.

 

We inspect tear spots.

   and expect tarnish.  

We polish tea spoons

   and offer sympathy

   with just a trace of acid.

 

Let others sharpen their wits,

pare away distinctions,

separate the jointedness of time.

 

We are spoon fed, start to finish.

Stir, lift, and blend mercy

   served warm.

 

Let us be good and godly as spoons.

   Amen.[i]

 

[i] Heather Murray Elkins © 1987, revised 2005. Worshiping Women (Abingdon), 1995. All rights reserved.

 

Our back deck is now bedecked with a tomato plant that’s over 12 feet high. As a very novice gardener, I’d prepared for the three small plants I’d purchased with a reasonable support system. Two of them behaved nicely, reaching a modest height, producing medium sized fruit. One reached the end of its lattice and threw a green tendril skyward, latching onto a passing bee or sparrow, then letting go to land deckside up.

 

I pinched back the pert yellow blossoms, as advised, but they seem to have resurrected themselves by morning. Perhaps that explains the name, “Nightshade”. I now count 7 new little tomatoes arranging themselves in the leaves and I worry about the odds of frost.

 

Jack’s Magic Beans come to mind. Perhaps I should collect the seeds and store them in a safe place. Such extravagance, the green generative force of a single Solanum lycopersicum.

 

But generative power is not limited to the ability to reproduce. There’s another kind of creativity I had the privilege to witness; a procreativity I was invited to participate in.

 

It started with a tomato plant, a very tall plant on a porch. We’d just moved in next door, starting married life and two graduate degree program at Duke. We’d not met our neighbor, but I noticed that the plant was too tall for its pot. It kept falling over. I didn’t know it was a tomato plant; there weren’t any tomatoes, but I keep picking it up when it takes a header. It’s the only plant on the porch, and so it must matter to our unknown neighbor.

 

On the fourth rescue, the neighbor arrives, a tall woman, with an extraordinarily warm voice and wide smile. She introduces herself and the plant. Her name is Helen and the plant is Sarah. I knew we were in the Bible belt when she explains that Sarah is apparently barren, but there’s always hope.

 

I’m cheered up by the prospect of a down to earth neighbor with a sense of humor. I rattle on about the drama/trauma of being an Appalachian exile, literally just off the Navajo reservation, starting studies at Duke, the Harvard of the South. I don’t mention how newly married or how financially limited we are. I think Helen could see that for herself.

 

I tell Bill we have a wonderful neighbor; she’s kind, funny, and she asks me to keep my eye on Sarah while I study.

 

Imagine my surprise when I fill out my work/study forms and I’m called to meet the Dean of the Duke Chapel. When I enter his office, plush with plum colored carpet, and lined with books in high walnut shelves, Helen is sitting to the right of the Dean and smiling. Did I want to work as the Religious and Arts intern for the Chapel?

 

Helen. Helen Crotwell. Associate Minister to Duke University. She of the tomato plant named Sarah. Generative within and beyond the structures of higher education and ministry. Her creativity and courage took her into civil rights work and peace work achievement, employee labor unions, and better wages, a center for Women’s Studies, an ecumenical network of chaplains, and of course, religion and the arts.

 

My most singular memory of her “conceivability” was her work on the “Red Mass”, a yearly worship service designed for and inclusive of every judge in the state of North Carolina. It was her liturgical vision of peace and justice embracing in every small town and steepled courts in Carolina’s cities.

 

This green life extravagance, this ability to originate can threaten those who rely on externalized authority.  Three months after I’ve left Duke Chapel for a WV parish I learn that the Dean of the Chapel has decreed that Helen is to be replaced by someone of junior rank and experience.

 

Helen not only survives the forcible uprooting; she thrives as a pastor, is appointed Superintendent and then, shortly before her death, is nominated as a candidate for the UMC episcopacy.

 

The antonym for generative is not “barren”; it’s consumptive. The opposite of a generative life is a consuming lifestyle or a wasteful heart.  “Don’t be afraid”, I tell my brave tomatoes, “Bloom and grow. You will not be forgotten.”