Important Books

I was listening to a radio show about books that changed people’s lives. The interviews were funny, profound, moving, and interesting. It made me wonder whether there was a book that had changed my own life. I’m not sure I could name one but there are three books that have somehow have stayed with me from childhood.

One is a book I first heard when my mother read it to her fourth grade classroom after lunch. It was a small school with one teacher per grade so I was in her class, that year and the next in a different school. Every day, she read to us. Some of the kids listened, some put their heads down on the hard wooden desks and had a nap, some probably daydreamed about being somewhere other than school with its smell of banana oil, chalk dust, and warm sweaty children. But I listened to the stories. One of the books she read to us was On to Oregon by Honore Morrow. It is the story of a 12 or 13 year old boy and his family who set out to travel cross-country in a covered wagon. I can’t remember now if they were part of a wagon train or not, but at some point they ended up traveling alone, and both parents died. The boy, John, got his brothers and sisters over the mountains and finally to Oregon. It was a story of hardship and heroism, of stunning self-sufficiency. And I loved it.

The second book was one I read myself: The Boxcar Children. I don’t remember much about the specifics, except that a group of orphaned children basically lived on their own in an abandoned boxcar, foraging for food, furnishing the place, and supporting themselves. They made a home in the boxcar, cooked their food, and stayed together. It is the kind of thing that was perhaps plausible in the 1920s or 1930s when the book was written but certainly not now. I was fascinated by their self-reliance, their ability to function in a world with no adults. The story is kind of a precursor to Charlie Brown, where the children are the major characters and the adults are shadowy figures whose unintelligible words float over the children's heads while they live their own full and wonderful world with its own woes and drama.

The last book was one I kept checked out of the county library for weeks at a time. Lucky Mrs. Ticklefeather (which I remember as Mrs. Ticklefeather and Puffin Paul) was a most unlikely book to catch the fancy of a child growing up on a farm. The lead character was “a very thin old lady with a good sized feather in her hat” who lived in a high-rise apartment – something I had never seen in my whole life. She had been married (Mrs.) but there was no Mr. Ticklefeather. Instead, she lived with a puffin – another thing I had never seen. “Mrs. Ticklefeather and Paul were very fond of each other.” And she was also very fond of sunflowers. So one day Paul set out to get her a sunflower. She was distressed about his absence and called the police to find him. The story is all about the search for Paul, culminating in his rescue from certain death – holding a sunflower in his puffin beak -- by the police officer. All is happy at the end is when Paul returns home with the sunflower, and he and Mrs. Ticklefeather are reunited.

What made me love this story so much that even today I am occasionally referred to in my family as “Mrs. Ticklefeather?” I’m not sure. It is interesting to me, in retrospect, that the woman lives on her own in a city (as I do), is closely connected to the police (as I am), cherishes a non-human creature (in my case, Mr. Manny), and considers herself very, very, very, very lucky. Maybe this little book is not one that changed my life so much as one that foretold important pieces of it. And it is especially wonderful that my mother searched for years for a copy for me so that now I can read it any time I want without having to check it our from the county library. Lucky Mrs. Ticklefeather indeed!

Fall

It is cold and rainy, a dark and dreary day. But when I look out the window by the rocking chair where I pray, this is what I see. The maple seems to glow in the afternoon gloom. This must be what the poet meant when he wrote about "uncreated light." I know it is summer's last gasp, but what wonderful thing -- to go out in such a blaze of glory!

Rainbow Chard

There is a frost warning for tonight, but my little garden seems not to know that the summer is past. After a slow start, the veggies are thick and green. I have picked armfuls of rainbow chard today and packed it into the freezer. You are supposed to cut out the stems because they get tough but they are so lovely -- bright yellow, red and orange -- and I left some in. In January, when the snow is deep and the garden is covered, I will make sauteed greens from the summer bounty. Maybe this recipe from Tyler Florence and the Food Network:

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup honey
• 1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
• 1/2 pint walnuts, for garnish
• 3 bunches assorted winter greens (such as Swiss chard, radicchio, or escarole), washed, stemmed, and torn into pieces
• 1 tablespoon grainy mustard
• Extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/2 cup pomegranate seeds, for garnish
• Parmesan shavings, for garnish
• 1 shallot, chopped, for garnish

Directions

Cook honey and balsamic together over medium-high heat in a large saute pan, about 5 minutes. Toast walnuts in a small skillet; set aside to cool.

Pile greens on a platter. Stir mustard into balsamic-honey dressing, then whisk in about 1 cup extra-virgin olive oil; pour over greens. Season greens with salt and pepper and garnish with walnuts, pomegranate seeds, shavings of Parmesan, and shallot.

Or I will brown some onion and garlic in olive oil, mix in the chard and maybe a little spinach, add a few red pepper flakes and a splash of balsamic vinegar.

And maybe I won't wait until January to try this out!

Anniversary

This blog is two years old today, and what I wrote at the beginning is still true. Right now, I do not have a title or position or location that would commonly be considered a pastoral ministry. But even so, I do have that work; I am a minister. In these days when our community is so wounded, when relationships and trust are so shattered, when grief is overshadowed only by horror and disbelief, there are many who need a pastoral presence but do not know how or where to find it. It was this way after 9-11. Remember all those people who came to church those Sundays in September and October 2001, people who hadn't been in worship in years? They needed solace, care and community. Some of us need that now, too, and I encounter many who do not know where to go for help. So I go to them. I sit, I listen, I try to hear the fear that is under the words they speak. I do town meetings to talk about "security," but what I am really trying to do is to be a non-anxious presence.

In the eleven years since I was ordained as a Minister of Word and Sacrament, I have often worried about whether I would have a church. I don't worry about that today. Today, I know that my congregation is the world, that my calling is not to gather people in some Sunday morning sanctuary, but rather to go to the places of pain and confusion, fear and failure, sorrow and woe, to go where the people are in need and make a sanctuary there.

The prophet Isaiah (61:1-2) spoke words that found fulfillment in Jesus: "The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me....to bind up the brokenhearted,.... to comfort all who mourn." May these holy words, spoken to me at my ordination, continue to guide my work, my ministry, and give me strength and courage to be faithful to this odd calling that is mine.

A One-Eyed World

Mark 9:38-50

Have you noticed that people in the church don’t talk much anymore about hell. It didn’t use to be this way, of course. In one of the libraries at Yale, we have the original notes for a sermon that Jonathan Edwards preached in Enfield in 1741. It was titled, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Pastor Edwards painted a picture of us - all sinners that we are -- dangling as a spider or some loathsome insect over the flames of hell. God’s wrath towards us, he preached, burns like fire; he looks upon us as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the flames. And when was the last time you heard a sermon like that? Well, you’re not going to hear one like that today either. But we can’t be so quick to dismiss what Jesus is talking about when he speaks to his disciples about being thrown into hell.

While this is not a topic of churchly conversation all that often, at least in the churches that I’ve attended, interestingly it does come up a lot in casual conversation elsewhere. How many times have you heard somebody say “What the h__?” Interesting, isn’t it, that the world has taken over this language that used to be reserved for the church. And I think what that means is that hell, however we think of it, is no longer a serious concept for the most part. Rather than a fearsome, terrifying reality, it has become a casual swear word.

But when Jesus speaks of hell, he is not talking about something casual and inconsequential. So what exactly is he talking about? In the common imagination, hell is some kind of horrible underworld, down there, filled with flames and little cartoon-like devils tormenting the souls of the damned with their pitchforks, And although the Bible does speak about the flames of hell, it also contains a much wider and somehow more radical definition of hell. The writer of the second letter to the Thessalonians, for example, speaks of “the punishment of eternal destruction, [which is being] separated from the presence of the Lord”(2 Thessalonians 1:9a)(emphasis added). Hell, then, according to a biblical view, is separation from God.

It’s like this. Do you remember the story Jesus told about Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31)? Lazarus, a poor beggar, lies at the rich man’s gate as the rich man comes and goes on his daily rounds, stepping over that living heap of rags, ignoring him, not even really seeing him. When they both die, Lazarus goes to heaven to the arms of father Abraham and the rich man goes to hell. As he suffers in the torments of hell, he sees Lazarus in a place of comfort and love, and begs Father Abraham to send him fetch him some water. But the gulf between the two of them is too wide to cross at that point. The rich man has separated himself from the love of God forever because he separated himself from the godly love of neighbor in the here and now. And maybe the truth of that story is that the rich man existed in a living hell on this earth but was not able to see that.

This separation from God is not only a way of thinking about hell. It is also a way of thinking about sin. Sin, according to the Apostle Paul, is anything that does not proceed from faith (Romans 14:23). Anything that does not proceed from faith, anything that comes between us and our trust in God, anything, in other words, that separates us from God.

It is this kind of sinfulness that Jesus is addressing when he talks to his disciples in what is surely is a grand case of hyperbole. He gives outrageous examples to make his point. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. If your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out. It is better to live in this world with one eye than to be in hell with 20/20 vision.

So here’s a question. How can your hand or foot cause you to stumble? How can your eye cause you to stumble? As my colleagues and I are so tragically aware, a hand can be a weapon; it can kill and destroy. Less damaging, perhaps, but also offensive, it can remain closed when God calls you to be generous and open-handed. Your foot can lead you down the wrong path so you lose track of the way of faithfulness. And what about your eye? Do you know the old saying that the eyes are the windows to the soul? I think what that originally meant was that you look in someone’s eyes and you can see what their soul is like. But a window opens both ways, doesn’t it? So what enters the window of the eyes inhabits the soul; what you see becomes who you are. Those in monastic life talk about this when they speak of keeping custody of the eyes. Custody of the eyes. It means to control what you look at, to turn a blind eye, so to speak, to that which would contaminate your soul. It means keeping your focus on what is good and pure by avoiding offensive distraction.

It takes a conscious effort in the monastery to do this. Imagine, then, what a challenge it is for us. Our world is full of images of violence, destruction and exploitation. Through television, movies, video games, internet we open our souls to an ungodly reality, one that diminishes, demeans, and destroys the value of human life. The American Pediatric Association estimates that by the age of 18, American kids will watch 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence (Hartford Courant, September 25, p C6). You can’t even drive on the interstate without encountering billboards that border on pornography. Advertising images fill us with covetousness and lust for things we didn’t even know existed. These images infiltrate our being, almost without our knowing it. They are offensive to God’s intention for the way we are to live. And there’s Jesus saying, “If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out.” And when you have done that, when have only one eye, you will know what it is to live your life with a single focus.

So does that mean avoiding anything that is unpleasant? Does it mean closing your eye to that which is troubling in the world? It does not. In fact, we are called to seek out those places, the places of poverty and hunger, homelessness and injustice, oppression and disease; to seek them out and then to see them as God sees them, with a single focus on healing and restoration, on generosity and forgiveness. To look at the world with the eye of God is to see how God intends all of life to be. It is to see it and then to work to make it so.

This single minded godly focus breaks down our separation from others, those who have lives or practices or beliefs that are different from ours, and it draws us into the presence of God as we engage the wider world. In that sense, it is a turning away from sin because sin is anything that separates us from God. And maybe by extension, sin is also anything that separates us from any of God’s creatures, anything we do that causes a little one to stumble. Notice how radical Jesus is in opening up our view of those who are to be included in God’s love. They don’t have to follow us; they don’t have to be like us. All they have to do is offer the gift of life in their own way – what Jesus calls a cup of water.

And when we have removed the offensive distractions from our lives, when we can look on the world with a singleness of purpose, when we can be filled with clarity about God’s view of things, it is then that we understand God’s intention for all of life, an intention for oneness, for unity. No separation between us and others and no separation between us and God. No more hell on earth, or in the hereafter, but rather a vision of the kingdom of God in the world. May we see it and live it, even here, even now. May we create God’s on-eyed world. Amen.

(c) Martha C. Highsmith

In the mail

In our family, we think that you can mail just about anything. I have gotten rocking chairs, an air conditioner, and pecan pies in the mail – and once, a whole set of bent wood lawn furniture. My mama mails me a lot of things. So when I came home and found a package from her, I was pleased but not surprised, at least not until I opened it. It was full of fresh North Carolina okra, cut by my daddy and sent off to me “up north.”

I cooked it the way we do at home: roasted with a little olive oil in a very hot oven and then sprinkled with sea salt. As soon as I took the first bite, I was transported in my mind to our kitchen table. It was a taste of home, so good, so fresh, so precious.

Food is necessary for life, of course, but it is not just nourishment for the body. It also feeds the soul and strengthens the ties to those we love. The okra is more than a vegetable; it is a love letter from home.

Jesus Is Not A Mother Squirrel

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time (and money) watching the “Eliminate ‘em” guy remove a baby squirrel that had fallen down my chimney and was stuck in the area that surrounds the gas fireplace. Apparently, a mother squirrel had made a nest in the top of the chimney. The pest removal man attempted to get her out of the chimney by leaving the little guy in a big trap in the yard. The baby squirrel cried and called but the mama did not come. She remained perched on the side of the chimney watching the whole thing. Either she was afraid of the man or worried about leaving the other babies. Either way, she left the little squirrel on his own and did not attempt to rescue him.

This whole episode made me think about the story of the lost sheep:

What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. (Matthew 18:12-13)

In this wild world where we live, there is strength and protection in numbers. But in the realm of God, when I am lost -- one alone -- Someone will come and find me.

That is comforting, but now this morning there is another squirrel in the fireplace……

A Tiny Taste

from Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul by Tony Hendra, page 63:

It took my breath away: the curve of the great path, the contrasts of raw earth against rushing cumulus, of tumbled old stone against tall young grass, of leaf-speckled oaks against the sea. A very different landscape than my placid, green-shaded Hertfordshire; this was impeccable and classic, every element of natural beauty in exact harmony, a foretaste of perfection, an amuse-bouche of Paradise.

I confess: I like to watch the Food Network. That is where it have learned that an amuse-bouche is a wonderful little dish that is only one bite. It is meant to tempt and delight the palate, similar to but not to be confused with hors d'oeuvre. This is a tidbit, often tiny, served as a free extra to keep you happy while you are waiting for your first course to come. It gives you an idea of the chef's approach to cooking and the restaurant's attention to your appetite. It is literally a happy mouth.

What an amazing way to think about this beautiful earth: a tidbit, just a taste, given to us now to show us God’s approach to all of eternity and God’s attention to our needs. As the psalmist says: O taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34.8a).

Work

My garden has been slow in ripening this year. I planted things late and then the weather has been (until recently) cool and wet. But this week I have picked beans, cucumbers, and a few tomatoes. I’ve cooked food that has traveled only a few steps from plot to plate. It is good. I have also been sewing. Last weekend, I made pillowcases for my three young neighbors, two with cars and tools on them for the little boys and one with fashion items for their sister. I suppose that was a frivolous project, making something that is so easily available already made, but I loved doing it.

I spend my days in a job where “work” is something I do with my brain, and I live easily in that world. But the joy of these homely tasks where I physically do something reminds of the psalmist’s prayer: “Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and prosper for us the work of our hands—O prosper the work of our hands!” (Psalm 90.17)

And here is my version: Prosper the work of my mind. And give me work for my hands, too, because that will prosper the peace of my soul. May it be so. Amen.

Kitty Spa