The Kindred Spirit

Yesterday, a friend took me on a long beach walk to visit a spot known as the Kindred Spirit.  It sounds as though it might be a bar, but it’s not!  Instead it is a mailbox on an ancient weathered post tucked into some dunes with two benches nearby. Inside the mailbox are several notebooks and a handful of pens.  People who visit write whatever messages they want/need and leave them.  I wrote in one of the books, a note about gratitude for my visit and the blessing of sea and sky and brisk breezes.  

 

Visiting there reminded me of a story I listened to on “This American Life” about a phone booth in Japan. After the 2011 tsunami, people came there to call their loved ones who were swept away, never heard from again, never found.  The phone is not connected to anything … except hope, memory, grief, love. Those who come dial remembered phone numbers and speak into the wind. The Kindred Spirit wasn’t quite like that, but the messages people left, including mine, were offered up to whomever, to the universe, to God.  

 

Last Suppers and First Meals

Julie Green, an artist who died in October, painted white ceramic plates with depictions of the last meals of inmates about to be executed. She started her project to call attention to capital punishment. The images are beautiful, blue on white, and poignant. She called the collection “The Last Supper.” 

Her obituary includes some of the stories behind the meals. I suppose all the stories are tragedies: lives lost to violent crimes, lives spent with the trauma and mourning of those losses, lives spent in prison, a waste all round of one of the Creator’s greatest gifts. But one story in particular struck me as almost unbearably sad. “In Georgia in 2009, a mentally disabled inmate asked for half a pecan pie. He didn’t understand the concept of execution, and he intended to save some of the pie to eat afterward.” I don’t know what crime this man committed, what horrible act destroyed his life and the lives of unknown others. But he was not able to comprehend his own death, and I wonder if he knew what he had done, if he could participate in his own defense, if there was a point in his life when someone might have been able to save him – and thus save his victims. I don’t know.

https://greenjulie.com/last-supper/

Ms. Green did not stop with paintings of the last suppers. She also painted some “first meals,” what the newly exonerated chose to eat when they were freed. “Working with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s Pritkzer School of Law, she reached out to recent exonerees like Jason Strong, who had been convicted of murder. His first meal, ordered at the diner near the prison where he had been incarcerated for 15 years, was a cheeseburger with bacon and mushrooms. As he waited for it to appear, he talked about how much he loved oranges, a fruit he had been denied while he was in prison. A waitress overheard him and brought one from the kitchen. He spent 40 minutes just holding it, turning it over and over in his hands.” 

How much I take for granted: safety, intellectual ability, personal protection, freedom, food, life itself. And oranges.

 

Root-Bound

Just weeks before the pandemic shut down the world, we moved back into our house following a major (and lengthy) renovation. We had planned a big open house for friends and neighbors, but that was not to be. We were able to have a thank you party, though, for those who had worked on our old house, even with boxes all around and without much of the furniture in place. One of the guys came with a small plant, an anthurium, in a little red pot. In all the to-do of the party, I just set the pot on the window sill over the sink. And there it stayed for months and months and months. It was in a convenient place for watering, and it got good sun. But after a while it stopped growing and it stopped blooming. It was badly root-bound. A while back I decided to repot it. With its roots loosened and fresh soil, and in a new sunny spot, it began to grow and put out new shoots that started blooming. 

And I think that so many churches are like that little anthurium – they have become root-bound. It is so comfortable and convenient to stay the same, do things the same way, avoid the kind of uprooting that change can bring. Those churches may not die but they don’t grow either. They don’t flourish. They don’t bloom. 

The pandemic has kept us all in place. Now that the threat seems to be easing, maybe it is time to repot, to change the things that have hindered growth, to look for new ways of being. This is hard and disruptive and often painful. It is so much easier to keep on with what we were doing before the pandemic. But the stark reality for many churches is that if they can’t change, if they can’t spread their roots into new soil, if they can’t enlarge their vision beyond their own s(pot), they will die -- maybe not overnight, but eventually. But those who can be honest about the past, who can do the hard and messy work of repotting themselves, the ones who can change, may just start to thrive and grow and bloom again. May it be so!

Anthurium in a new pot and a good sunny spot!

 

Connections...

Our friend buried her horse at the farm last week. He was very old and very sick, and it was really sad. There is a special connection between horses and their people, and he had been with our friend for a long time.  

And I am reminded that in the beginning, “God brought [the animals and the birds] to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field.” (Genesisv2:19b-20a) When we name a creature, we bind ourselves to it. It becomes in our eyes what it has always been in God’s eyes – precious. And in the naming, we are connected. Although it might be better to say that we are made aware that we are already and always connected. We are all part of God’s creation, God’s created: humans, animals, birds, fish and sea creatures, plants and ferns and amoeba – everything living. 

We are all connected, but some of those connections are stronger and more powerful. We wept with our friend. The man who came with the backhoe to dig the grave made a cross of small branches, and my sister cut flowers.  And we were glad that she came to this place to lay her horse to rest. She wanted a place where she could return, and she knew we would always be here. We are connected to this farm, and now, so is she.