This is Me. Coming Out.

Lately, as I've been spending time praying and meditating on the Psalms, the Holy Spirit has been reminding me of certain events in my very early childhood. I'll be reading and praying and then I'll be back in 1979 standing in my back yard again. From the time I was born until the time I was about eleven, my family lived in a house with a big back yard on Bishop Creek. Bishop Creek is fed by a little spring in Shelby County and it flows through Alabama until it meets the Cahaba River near Selma. One day, I overheard my parents talking in the kitchen. "Bunny," Dad said, "I know you won't believe me, but I saw an alligator in the creek." I'm sure Mom was nice, but probably didn't believe him. But sure enough, the next week the Shelby County Humane Society had Steve Irwin's redneck cousin Bubba standing on the Crosscreek bridge hauling a five-foot gator out of the creek. Dad installed a chain-link fence between my play house and the creek that summer.

Dad kept two hives of three-banded Italian honeybees in the back yard. Almost every-other week in the summertime, he would suit up and rob the bees. He had an old fashioned honey extractor with a handle on top. He'd load a few frames in that extractor and crank and crank and crank until the honey would run out a little spout at the bottom. I'd put my face under the spout and drink the honey straight. (I never had bad allergies!) Mom would make homemade brown bread and we'd have honey and butter and bread for supper.

I got honeybees in my hair from time to time. I always knew not to be afraid, but to find my dad and let him pick the bees out before they stung me. I would often step on a honeybee and be stung, but a little meat tenderizer always made it feel better. Honeybees, unlike wasps and hornets, have barbed stingers that literally pull the backside of the bee off when they get stuck in your skin. They can't sting more than once and then they die. If you ever get stung by a honeybee, scrape the stinger out, don't pull it straight out or more venom will go into your skin.

One of the memories I recalled recently was of a time I was playing in the back yard by myself. I was crouched down behind my playhouse underneath a white oak tree stirring a stew of leaves and sticks and mud in my mother's mop bucket. I remember feeling warm all over my whole body and instinctively holding very very still while this warm presence hovered over me and then was gone. It's almost as if the Holy Spirit was saying That was me, Su. That was me all along. I must have been about three years old.

I'm not what you'd call particularly "reformed." I'm not sure that I believe in predestination. But I do know that from my cradle,  Jesus has been calling me.

 When I was about seven years old, the P.E. coach at my school came to speak to us for a chapel program. He told us that we were all sinners and couldn't ever be good enough to please God. I was horrified. I wanted to please God and I wanted to be with him in heaven forever. But even then, I recognized my sinful nature. I knew I had this "sin" in me. Then Coach Young told us that Jesus, God's son, had come to earth and lived a perfect life. He told us that Jesus had been crucified on a cross so that we could know God. He said that if we would pray and ask Jesus to come and live inside our hearts, he would. And we could know God for ourselves. I was absolutely amazed. When Coach Young asked us to raise our hands if we wanted to pray to Jesus, I raised both of my hands.

Later, I realized how totally absurd this story was. I realized that the idea of a God sacrificing his only son for us was kind of weird and bloodthirsty. Surely that isn't true, I thought. Not entirely. Surely there had to be something...else.  I knew that I was just a child when I prayed that prayer. I wasn't all that serious about it after all. But, Jesus was. Jesus was serious about it. And he tracked me down some more.

When I was about 12 and living in an apartment with my parents while our new house was being built, I would lie awake and pray "God, have mercy on me and don't let me die. I am not ready to be one of your crazy Christians." I was starting to believe that I did need Jesus to go to live with God in heaven, but I was also starting to believe that to become a real Christian meant that I had to somehow stop being Susan. It was a battle I waged within myself for the next ten years.

Part Two.

Kitchen Meditation

I'm experiencing a little melancholy this morning. It's just a bitter little signal from my soul that implores me to listen up. Slow down. And pay attention. So I don't of course. I get busier and more restless and avoid the unmistakable call of Jesus to my spirit that lets me know he has something to say.

And in the practice of my avoidance, I come to Modobject at Home and see Christian's pictures of spinach leaves in a colander in her kitchen sink. I wonder, no marvel, at the beauty of their pink root-ends. And He catches me.

I'm sure I've written about it before at Answered Prayers for Owen Meany, but I spent two of my high-school  summers working in the kitchen at a camp for girls in Tuxedo, North Carolina. It isn't your average camp kitchen. The "kitchen manager" (quotation marks because I think you can safely say "chef")  graduated from Le Cordon Bleu and apprenticed with Frank Stitt here at Highlands Bar & Grill before coming to North Carolina. Like his mentor, he picked the freshest local produce he could find to feed the campers and I chopped and peeled and diced and sliced for about nine hours a day for ten weeks. This is where I learned to cook.

One afternoon, I sliced open a cantaloupe and stopped in absolute wonder at the rows upon rows of seeds suspended by tiny creamsicle threads in the middle of the melon. The order and design was a world unto itself. All the beauty of God's creation lay hidden in darkness until I opened it to the light. I began to marvel at the universe inside a bell pepper (don't you love to find those strange little tender bits that attach themselves to the stem inside?). I began to notice the world of beauty in the dimpled skin of a fresh strawberry. I became intoxicated by the smell tomato stems make when you get them just a little bit wet. And I began to consider what kind of God makes such beauty solely for our bodily consumption.

Is this not a kind of Communion? To ingest the beauty of a living God and feed upon it in our hearts with faith and thanksgiving?

At the end I write these words as my testimony and as the song of my heart to all of you who read it. I have looked upon the beauty of the Lord. He has taken me to the banquet hall and his banner over me is Love. All of my black dogs slink into shadow when his presence fills the temple and sings rejoicing over the works of his hands. Amen.

ministry of reconcilation

Today I am lead to consider reconciliation. I am tempted to say that I am more familiar than most with fractured communication and estrangement, but I think it more truthful to say that these are aspects of the universal human condition. Every plate is filled with a helping of estrangement. Without exception, I imagine.

Our first estrangement is from God and we are not reconciled until Christ stands between the people of earth and the Person of Heaven and propitiates for our sin. It seems that once the fundamental reconciliation is begun, we cannot help but long to be reconciled with ourselves, with nature and with other people.  I long for these reconciliations and the restitution of our prelapsarian glory. Don't you see it sometimes? Doesn't it make you sure that you will see it again? I long for the coming of the Kingdom in truth and fact and in the recesses of my heart.

I'm wondering if this unsheathed longing is a fundamental aspect of my observation of Lent this year. I'm hoping to consider it as Easter approaches and I'm hoping to consciously submit myself to this longing for the restoration of the human relationships I've lost. I will pray about this fervently and see what will come of it.

St. Paul writes in 2nd Corinthians 5 about the "ministry of reconciliation" granted to every believer who has been/is being/will be reconciled to God through the work of Christ. It's a mystery ministry and I'm not sure what it means. But I like that idea. I like the idea that we can at once show other people how we were reconciled to God and participate in that reconciliation in some way.

The more I think about the riches of God and the idea that we as believers are co-heirs with Christ the more I am absolutely gobsmacked at the earthly power we are afforded and with my own complete inadequacy. I feel like an ant with a really large sword.

The Bells of Highlands UMC

This day began with an explosion of the scatological variety, last-minute ironing and burned breakfast. I'm not a "morning person" on the best days and by "morning person" I mean that I sometimes find it difficult to wake up at 4:30 am which is when the alarm clock rings. (So, don't get all judgmental on me you sad wake-up-at-seven sacks.)  I felt anxious and harried and it was difficult to keep my composure and stay in the moment. But when I went outside with the trash, I actually heard the bells ringing at the Methodist Church about a mile away. They rang for an unusually long time and I lifted my hands in prayer to receive that blessing that must have been borne on some strange wisp of cloud. I came inside a different person.

Christ was. Christ is. Christ will be. Present in the moments. A fully-attentive father. Amen.

Olivet Mantra

I hired a landscape designer who came with her graph paper and fancy pen and sketched a plan for the Quintessential Southern Cottage Garden. My excitement knows no bounds.

I am concentrating on my life as the papier-mâché that I form around the values of simplicity, joy, and beauty. Beauty is the superlative of godliness.  God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.  

My life isn't simple, but I strive to pause to savor the pleasure of simplicity as a sort of meditative practice. Form in function. And art in a pot of strawberry preserves or a sleek pimento-stuffed olive (or five) bobbing languidly in a martini of the filthy variety. 

Hawks. Wind. Mystery.

Photo from here.

This morning, I stepped outside and saw my broad winged hawks surfing the currents between the television towers on Red Mountain. They aren't all that common in Birmingham, but I often see these two on the mountain. I think they pick up some of the smaller birds who hit the guy wires on the towers.

The wind is whipping across the mountain today. We're gonna have some weather.

The hawks and the wind are messengers and to me they say that I am seen and known and useful. 

I am amazed at the mystery in the world.

What the Refrigerator Said

When you live in a 100-year-old house, you're not just living in your house—you're living in the house built and re-built over the years by the people who lived there before you. You'll find little quirks everywhere. In our house, for example, there are notes written on the basement support beams from an apparently absent-minded carpenter who built a table in 1954. (He dated his notes. Maybe thinking of the moment I would find them?) I found a bag of pipe cleaners and a very strange antique key taped under a shelf in my butler's pantry. I found a strange little poem wadded up and stuffed in the door. At one point, I think we even shared the house with the original owners, but that's another post. What I want to write about now is the refrigerator.  When we bought this house (our first) we were thrilled that it came with a REFRIGERATOR! We didn't have any extra money and didn't want to have to buy one for ourselves. Well, six years and two babies later, we're still living in our little house and we're still living with our little fridge. But she isn't the hard-working help meet she used to be. Now, she's more like a cranky grandma who likes to freeze your kale or let your cream get glumpy depending on what direction you shoved the milk jug. So, I start to wonder if refrigerators, like cocker spaniels, take on the personalities of their original owners. I start to wonder if this particular refrigerator had an abusive childhood.

Yesterday, as I got myself geared up to make a delicious Orange-Banana-Wheat Germ smoothie, I realized that my delicious Greek yogurt was frozen solid. (And I have no doubt that this was caused by a less-than-precise restocking of Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, but that too is another post.) Dammit. I said. Dammit yogurt. Dammit fridge. Dammit real-estate market. Dammit President Obama. (But, I didn't of course, blame Wall Street. That would be silly. It isn't their fault.) Suddenly, I heard in my spirit, the voice of Jesus whispering to the tempest of my emotions and I complied to His suggestion. Thank you fridge. I said out loud.  Thank you for this opportunity to be inconvenienced. Thank you for this speed bump.  In my heart I said, Thank you for this opportunity to learn. What do you have to teach me refrigerator? I am willing to hear. 


I think the point that Jesus was making is that all of those little sandpapery inconveniences we experience on any given day (my cable is out! my tire is flat!) are opportunities for refinement. And we need to submit to them. Yeah, like face them head-on and ask what they have to offer. Because I believe, I really believe, that they have lessons to teach. So I shouldn't gloss them over. I should give them an opportunity to re-direct and refocus. I'm going to try and do that from now on. But I warn you now, it's probably going to make me late sometimes. And through this, I start to see what a truly pernicious sin it is to complain. It's rejecting the teacher of your circumstances. I'm going to try and stop complaining, even to myself. And, after all, those of you who know me know I don't have much to complain about anyway.

I'm going to take this posture of learning into my study of scriptures, too. Yesterday, the suggestion was planted in my mind by a radio program to really spend some time wading through Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Sounds great, right? But it is an incredibly difficult text. (And this from a lover of difficult texts.) For me, the problem of reading scripture is always compounded by these simple facts: 1) I'm reading in translation 2) I'm reading completely out of cultural context and 3) thematically, well, Jesus is just kind of all over the place.  If I were reading Scripture to teach or write about, I would be scared. But I'm reading it as a map for life, so that's not scary—it's terrifying. As I do my first reading this morning, I think of myself flinging the bulk of my body against a hard metal grate. I may pass through this grate into understanding, but I ain't gonna do it in one piece. You see what I mean? My worldview is going to be fragmented when I'm finished. Yet, there is Jesus peeping from the corners coaxing me like a mama coaxing a baby off the first step of the swimming pool ladder. Come on, He says. You can do it. I'm right here. The water is warm. You've just never done it before.

So, I think I'm going to try. I hope you'll read my rambles as I continue to struggle with this passage and with my household appliances. For each struggle has it's purpose in Life and Godliness. And Home Economics, I'm sure.

May the Lord of Peace Himself give you peace in every way,

susan