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."