Eat Like a Thresher

"The one who prepares the meals holds the memories." 

This line sprang from my spouse Willa as I read an obituary aloud.  Bobbie Widmer, wife of retired Iowa priest Marlin, was described in many ways, but her essence was captured for me in these lines: 

"Bobbie had a love for rootbeer floats, strawberry shortcake, and cooking for family gatherings. Food was a sacramental, an outward and visible sign of deeper meaning."

"The one who prepares the meals holds the memories." 

My little congregation of St. Luke's is all about hospitality, and food is the integral part of that hospitality.  "Feed my sheep,"  Jesus told Peter, and my congregation takes it seriously and literally.  But we also eat our fill spiritually when we come together.

At a recent "open mike" session at Uptown Bill's in Iowa City, one woman described the groaning table of a harvest meal.  She recalled with delicious specificity each dish from 60 years ago, and the one who prepared it. 

While I have my few specialty dishes, Willa is the one who knows the importance of the ritual of preparation and serving; how to get everything together and served at just the right moment.  It is a talent and a gift, but also a practice - a spiritual practice, even.  It's what makes her such a great preparer of holiday meals.  It's part of what makes her such a great priest. 

You've seen it in the Norman Rockwell painting - the meal that took the woman (the head of the house church) all day, or multiple days, to prepare.  

In my 33 years in Iowa, I have learned about people through the dishes they brought to potlucks, funeral dinners, fish fries, and Sunday dinners.  Each is as famous for her or his dish as they are for their personality.  Some are consistent and balanced.  Some are jiggly and colorful like Jell-o (which I soon learned is a salad in Iowa.)  Some add a touch of spicy adventure, while others are unpredictable.  Savory, sweet, salty, tangy - we all come together at least once a week and share our flavorful selves.

Once I sat across from a farmer friend at a church dinner.  I can see him as if today, head bent over the plate.  He had "tucked into his food," our British bishop would say, the fork rising and falling steadily between plate and mouth.  He did not look up until the plate was empty.  It was a habit honed over a lifetime, and it did not leave him on days of "rest."  He and his peers had probably set up the long heavy tables after completing their chores at home.  He ate quickly and efficiently, to fill the human machine and send it back out to work.  I have rarely seen anyone so completely consumed by the task at hand, so entirely focused.

My father would say that he was "eating like a thresher."  Maybe your family used that expression, or maybe "eating like a harvester",  or maybe "eating like a field hand".  This being Iowa, I think most understand what I mean, if we have not gotten too far away from our history.   If you need a refresher course, go to Mt. Pleasant for the yearly Old Threshers Reunion and eat at one of the church tents, or go to Living History Farms in Des Moines to witness life when it was so much simpler but so much harder.

Actually, that's what church is like - a living history farm.  We may not dress the same as 2,000 years ago, (or as during the past 170-plus years when our Iowa churches were being planted), but we come together for the same reasons.

We gather with our neighbors in community, to praise and thank God, to feed and be fed, to meet the spiritual and physical need of ourselves and our community, to send our prayers and means out into the larger community and the world.

He ate like a thresher, that young farmer.  It is that habit and focus that bring us week after week to the rail, the board where we offer the food that is us, where we are fed.  We come to God's table, fatigued and hungry from our labors, carrying all the meals and memories of the past.  We say grace, and grace covers us as we eat our fill.

I walk to the rail, and raise my hands, open and earnest as the beak of a little bird, hungry as a harvester needing to return to work.  "Feed me!  Feed me!  Please.  Amen."

"Well done, good and faithful..."

It is a Lenten morning, foggy and dank. It is the kind of morning she would love to be out in - when the snow melts and uncovers all those smells and memories from a former season. Our dog is dying. She looks out the window, strangely-tilted head bobbing.

The fog floats over the park, across the ball field, across the places where squirrels tease and possums run. A few geese are returning to the pond, reminding me of Joyce Rupp's poem in Praying our Goodbyes.

We got this strange-looking three-legged dog at the local shelter. "We have to take her - no one else will want her." The plaintive cry of the 11-year-old soon turned into, "We have to take her now - everyone else wants her!"

We pitied her, assuming she would be clumsy and slow and needy.  But taking her to a friend's fenced yard to enjoy some off-leash time, we discovered our error.

She could run like the wind, criss-crossing the grass in a wild dash that inspired her naming..

"She's so graceful!"  "That's amazing!"  Incredulous, we repeated those phrases as we watched, and her formal "Amazing Grace" (awkward to call out in the street while walking her) became, simply, "Mazie."

Her softest-fur-in-the-world caught a thousand tears from scores of griefs. The dying and deaths of parents and sibling and friends. Lost loves. Illness. Change. Bitterness, regrets. All. All. But also unbounding joy. Leaping with pleasure, Snoopy-like in a rapturous dancing twirling of delight. Glee at outrunning us, the last thing we see as she escapes; tongue flapping, eyes maniacally telling us - "you've been had..." All. All.

Mazie was a mystic, able to read us like an open book. She would stand in the middle of the kitchen when there was tension or sadness in our household, and look from one face to the other, communicating understanding, and empathy, and grace, begging us to be our best selves. She measured the spirit of everyone crossing our threshold, and was seldom off the mark.

She was with us for almost our entire marriage, with Jacob through his teen years. In her youth she was strong enough to pull him on his skateboard - until the local police officer put a halt to their neighborhood joyrides..

She would not eat until we sat down and started our meal. Willa remembers a time I was away and Jacob had moved on to college. Willa sat to eat; Mazie stood by her bowl, waiting. Willa finally realized what was holding up the meal... only after she said grace out loud did Mazie begin to eat.

Mazie was the pastoral care minister of our neighborhood. Willa took her to visit flood victims and workers - she always sought out the ones most in need, people we hadn't noticed. Exceedingly patient with tiny children in the park, she allowed them to face their fear and awkwardly pet her. Then, by visible example, she showed them that you don't need all your parts to be whole.

I wrote the opening words of this article a year ago, when we thought Mazie would die within days. She fooled us again, and lived another year, almost to the day of her stroke last March. In that year she taught us much about life, aging, disability, and dying.

Many people assured us that in heaven, Mazie would get her missing leg back. Willa insisted Mazie wouldn't need that leg in heaven any more than she did here, and recalled our late friend Nancy, who " was born with a foreshortened arm. It ended at the elbow with a stump of a hand. She always bristled when some religious person reassured her she would be whole in heaven. She said she already was whole. And she was."

So I quit wishing a new leg for Mazie, and wished instead for her a leg of lamb...

Now she is gone, and we have felt bereft and disconsolate, crying in this huge Lent-like void. We find ourselves bewildered by the sudden change in our 14-year routine. Death and grief do that - strand us in the wilderness for a while. That's where we are - in the "be-wilderness" of loss.

Mazie belonged to so many more people than the three of us. She was not a servant, nor a pet, but a spiritual companion who pointed the way for us..

On an achingly beautiful day in March, we said goodbye for now. Only remnants were left of the snow she loved to bound through, biting at it and burrowing her snoot to search for God knows what.

She was stuck at the end, stepped into a thin place but unable to cross through and out of it - circling, circling, always clockwise, searching for God knows what. She took me back to the deaths of my parents, the times they lay in the thin place and waited, as we kept watch.

We keep watch during Lent, hoping, hoping, every year, that it will turn out all right, that Easter will follow. 
It always does, thank God.

We believe in the resurrection, 
but does that include dogs?.

That, indeed, will be heaven.
______________________________________________

This article was first published in Iowa Connections April 2011
the newspaper of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa 

Helen Keefe is a research assistant at University of Iowa Hospitals and a member of Spiritual Directors International. Senior warden at St. Luke's Church, Ft. Madison, she and her wife the Rev. Willa Goodfellow live in Coralville, IA with the memory of their mystic wonder dog, Mazie.

Good Morning!

Good morning.

 

I am looking at sunrise over the Cascades and thinking about Aunt Vi.

Streaks of pink and gold and colors impossible to pin down are changing by the second.  The light outlines and gives clarity to the mountains and infuses hope into the coming day.  A new dawn. 

"Good morning". 

It was Violet Hager's standard greeting.  Phone call, letter, in-person conversation - - didn't matter, day or night.  Birthday or Christmas card - they all began with, "Good Morning". 

So we will miss that incongruous greeting now that we have lost Willa's Aunt Vi to the river of life and time.  But I am aware of her presence and the wisdom of her greeting as we step into Advent.

Advent marks the beginning of the new year for churches of the western tradition.

Like the morning, Advent is an expectant and hopeful time.  Some mornings for my prayer time, I light my little oil lamp and watch it rival the glow of dawn.

What better way to approach Christmas during this time of waiting and hope than to greet it with an enthusiastic "Good Morning"?

The new day lies ahead; anything can happen.  We are walking toward the birth of hope.  It is eternally a new day.  Good morning!

Violet Hager was old enough to have met the artist Georgia O'Keffe (she came to her rescue when the young artist was too preoccupied to keep her Jeep's oil level full). And Vi was young enough to welcome this similarly unorthodox Keefe into her family.  As elder stateswoman of her extended family, she could have made my entry into that family a rough ride. 

Instead, I found a vibrant and energetic welcome from the woman who insisted that "Take Me out to the Ballgame" be sung at all family gatherings.  I think she may even have cheated to declare us the winners of the sand sculpture contest at Rockaway Beach (although Willa, Jake, and I did have a fabulous design...)

Advent is like that.  God is like that.  No matter what time of day or night, there is the prospect of a new day wrapped in an enthusiastic welcome. 

Start over, be new, walk forward refreshed. 

Good morning!