“Do you know what time it is?” That is the insistent and persistent question of Advent, regardless of the color of candles or number of Sundays. The scriptures press this question with urgency. Wake up. Someone is coming. How you prepare for that arrival will depend on who’s coming and if you believe everything depends on your answer.
Romans 13:11-14
It’s a matter of faith to believe in the seasoning of time. This wisdom is hard won. Ten days of tubes and treatments, tests and a portable“throne” is an eternity but each day becomes a season of healing.
I find myself using a phrase from the 16th century : “in the nick of time”. It means: at the crucial moment, at the exact instant at which something must take place.
Bill’s hospitalization is in the nick of time. The word “ acute” is listed five times beside his conditions. When something is measured by a “nick” that means it’s precisely where it should be. Bill is exactly where he should have been (hospitalized) for the sake of where he needs to be (home).
Timing is everything. Was. is. Will be. Was hospitalized in the nick of time. Is discharged late last night. Will be making his first visit to a dialysis center today.
In the nick of time, precisely where prayer and medical care needed to be, there is and was, and will be. Amen.
We will, as the psalmist sang, learn to “number our days”, but we can not count all the blessings and acts of kindness. They are more than the grains of sand, be it hourglass or beach. And best of all, when we awake, God is with us.
Time is not running out. It’s being fulfilled.
Some old stories can haunt us for generations. Some old structures can house a ghostly presence evident to some, if not all. There is at least one ghost in the Little Kanawha Hotel. One of the reasons we renamed it the Apple Pi Inn is to make our resident ghost feel more at home.
Our ghostly presence seems to be a young woman who’s waiting for someone. She’s has been seen, sensed standing at the head of the stairs or looking out the window in Room 2. There are those who swear to having heard her softly sighing or singing. I’ve not had the privilege of an introduction, but I love a mystery.
There’s also a haunting story that reminds me of our ghost. It’s from our great grandmother, Mary Rebecca, who fell in love with a red-headed soldier who went to fight for the Union and the new state of West Virginia.
She waited for him for three years, watching every day for news or a letter. She waited, like our sad ghost waits, sometimes singing, often sighing. After three years without a word, she gave in and agreed to marry the older widower her father preferred. On her wedding day, after the ceremony, her father gave her all the red-headed soldier’s letters that he’d hidden from her for three long years.
Our grandmother, Flora, Mary Rebecca’s third daughter, lived the last five years of her 106 years in this old inn. Her mother’s bed now rests in the room where she died.
Grandma Flora told us the story about her mother, and red-headed soldier that she loved and waited for so faithfully. She said her ma told her that she took the letters that her father had hidden, went to the outhouse to read and cry over the words she’d never received. She then put them in the fireplace and picked up what was left of her heart and went on.
That’s what so many women had to do, and their stories haunt the places that hold their memories. The Pioneer Day is hosted by the little county seat in hopes that life will go on so that the entire town won’t become a village of ghosts. This year we decided to put our ghost and the Mary Rebecca’s heart-breaking story together. We invited a lively lovely ghost to welcome all visitors to the Inn on Pioneer Day with a song and a story. It was a haunting kind of hospitality.
If you’re in this neck of the woods, come by. She’s waiting for company.
There’s a Norwegian researcher who is studying chickens’ ability to learn and remember. She studies their working memory regarding food sources and their recognition of relationship between her and themselves. Chickens are inquisitive by nature, and can learn from watching each other. They form social hierarchies, “pecking” orders, and demonstrate singular personalities related to that order. They look out for one another, particularly their young. (see Luke 13:31-35)
They even comprehend cause -and-effect.
This fact reminds me of the ICE raid on seven food processing plants on August 7th: cause and effect. It’s been three weeks since the arrest of 680 Latinix workers. Three weeks after a mass shooting in El Paso by a domestic terrorist targeting “Mexicans”.
Researchers say three weeks is the limit of working memory in many of us. Cause and effect relationships that seemed so clear almost a month ago are blurring into random particles.
Even eating free-range chicken and eggs doesn’t seem to help, despite the memory boost from their choline. Who will take care of the children? The courts have ruled their parents are “felons” for working hard to feed them and US. Where will they find shelter, now that the chicken boning jobs are gone? What will happen to the small grocery stores who depend on selling chicken and eggs every day including Sunday? It’s chicken pickin’ business as usual for managers and owners. They’re not facing a judge for having “knowingly” recruited these workers for years.
I study my painted chicken file, looking for some kind of pecking order. It presently roosts in a Delaware attic, awaiting a move to the old Inn. Cause-effect. Chicken-Egg. What happened to our ability to form life-sustaining relationships? Why has our working memory of our nation’s immigrant alienness failed? No chicken ever crosses the road alone.
I see the image of the mother hen calling to her chicks who refuse to take shelter in every headline. “O Jerusalem. O Washington!”
The final relationship is the truth and trauma of our betrayal. “We don’t know him, this Jesus. We don’t know him. We don’t know him!” I don’t need to imagine the damning sound of a rooster’s call. I hear it every morning.