we need each other

My family had two cats.

The first one, Stella, is the softest kitty you ever saw, with the sweetest, tiniest meow you ever heard -- but her personality is anything but soft and sweet. She's cranky and standoffish, and if you're lucky you can pet her once before she strikes with claws and teeth. She became part of the family the day after my first "date" with J; when asked about the beginning of our relationship, he always brings up the photo I sent him when I came home from work to find her there after picking her out at the shelter. She was about 6 months old, one of the youngest (and most vocal) cats in the social cat cage.

The second one, Furrgus, came to us as a tiny black ball of fur, his eyes barely open. He was found in a gutter and lived in our guest bedroom for 6 weeks in quarantine until he could safely come out and meet Stella. He was goofy and rambunctious from Day One, always sneaking out between our feet, climbing our pant legs, and tripping over himself. He's also fearless; while Stella would shoot off at the slightest noise or disturbance, Furrg chased the vacuum cleaner, the ceiling fan and the buzz saw.

Later we came to the conclusion that he was also deaf, because have you ever met a cat you could sneak up on?! We kept him inside for a long time, knowing that he wouldn't blink at a passing car or the other gigantic cats on the block (with whom Stella gets into regular altercations) or the neighborhood's crew of bored teenagers. But eventually his cabin fever was getting everyone down, so we let him out.

And he was so happy! He and Stella started getting along better; he cuddled more, slept more, cried less. He would just sit, for hours, watching us work outside, or having staring contests with Stella's arch-enemy cat from next door. His reflexes got sharper, and he mellowed out, became more affectionate.

And then on Saturday, my dad called to tell me he'd been hit by a car and died.

***

I can't say we didn't all see it coming. We knew he was too full of life to be the kind of cat who lived to a ripe old age of 20, when he would quietly fade away with 8 lives still intact. At two, he'd already burned through his backup lives, and it wasn't slowing him down a bit!

But I didn't see it coming this particular Saturday; I hadn't planned for it. And I didn't expect to mourn so deeply and immediately. My hurt usually soaks in slowly, over time, so I can deal with it when the time of action is over. Besides that, I'm used to being the Leaver, not the Left-Behind. We've had pets before, but we always moved (to a different country) before we had to make any tough decisions -- and have been miraculously spared a sad event like this one 'til now.

Furrgus was the kind of pet that teaches you how to be comfortable in your own skin, reminds you not to take yourself too seriously, encourages you to stay curious. He schooled us in living on the regular.

And, in a sense, he schooled us in death too. He went quickly, sleeping. And then he gathered us together -- even Stella.

Sharing grief is a powerful thing. It's critical: the element of touch; the way different people in the group trade off the caretaker role; the sharing of stories, that laughing-with-tears-streaming-down-your-face -- you can't do that by yourself so well. And two cups of tea, shared, taste so much better than one.

***

What I am left with is this: We Need Each Other.

We all need a Furrgus... or a few Furrguses. (My other "Furrguses" include my friend Chris Lund, my Grammi, Morrie Schwartz...) And we all need people to be around when tough times strike.

There is a lot to cry about in our world: layoffs and breakups and failed tests and pitch after pitch that falls flat.
Delaware (and the rest of the nation) is mourning our well-loved former AG, Beau Biden. The collective pain is palpable here in Wilmington.
People in cities across the country mourn the violence that named Wilmington Murder Capital of the USA last year, and has recently brought Baltimore to a 40-year high in shooting deaths, and strikes almost every city and town in its own way.
There are sunken boats and plane crashes and bombings and wars and extreme weather events.
And although the hype has subsided, the world has been mourning the 9,000+ dead in Nepal's series of earthquakes last month, and the many others affected still by the stricken infrastructure and loss of family, community, and home.

We have our personal tragedies, and our shared tragedies. Our mourning filters through every aspect of our lives, and adds a gritty complexity and weight to our days. And it intensifies our humanity, which seeks company and community. We teach each other and catch each other and do our best to salve the pain of others and to keep on. It's why we Walk for the Cure and donate or volunteer for relief efforts and community services and clean-up crews. It's why we go to wakes and hold each other while we cry and inevitably stumble over words that we know can never really take the pain away -- because we are human and that's beautiful and we need each other to remind us of what's important and why we even bother slogging through the shit at all. And to remind us to make the most of it, and to do what we can to make the world better, even in very small ways.

soul food

You might remember my life-changing service event from The Gathering in the summer of 2012, where our group was served food by members of the New Orleans cooking school. Kevin, the man in charge, said, "We love our food here, but we know what's important. It's not what's on the table that matters, but who's at the table. It's about sharing a meal together."

That quote, and the experience of being served as a service project, changed my perspective on everything. On eating, which is a way I spend a lot of my time, and on service, and on sharing gifts with other people.

This past weekend was the ELCA Delaware-Maryland Synod's annual high school youth retreat, which last year got me thinking about reformation. This year, the theme was soul food.

And if I learned anything this weekend, it is that I am hungry.

Food, and eating, has been a major source of unrest since I left college. Maybe more than any other "figuring out" I've had to do, the eating, eating affordably, eating on time, eating healthy, and eating things that don't make me feel ill has been an almost constant obstacle course in this adult life.

So I am intimately familiar with the significance of food, and how closely it is tied to emotional and mental well-being. It is an apt and long-lived metaphor for spirituality.

At the retreat we talked about the different things we can be hungry for. We talked about food shortages, food deserts, and the host of social issues that tend to accompany hunger and poverty. We talked about satisfying our hunger, about the church's response to hunger in our communities, and about the different ways we can feed our own hunger, the different ways we find spiritual fulfillment and relief.

As an anthropologist I know that church plays an important social role for individuals and communities. And so it was this weekend.


I was dreading the trip because, until Thursday night, I had been planning on driving down to Ocean City alone after work on Friday. But on Thursday night I bit the bullet and called my friend Abby to see if she wanted to carpool. We were both happy for the company, and we got to reconnect after not seeing each other in months.

She told me how she found a new church in the city whose congregation is mostly made up of young people, like us. Every single thing we talked about had to do with our social needs, fulfilled and unfulfilled - what we are hungry for.

Through the course of the weekend I realized that I have been lonely. There is something I have been missing, something I realized sharply at the Ole wedding in Kansas in December. I am missing community, and I found it at Roadtrip, kind of.


In the fall or late summer, my dad gave a sermon about our demands as a congregation, about the point of worship and the ways in which we give back. It was a tough sermon, but I liked it. It was about commitment. And the point that changed everything for me was when he said Worship is not for us. It is for God. We are saying we don't get anything out of worship, but shouldn't we be worried about what we're putting into it? About what we're giving to God? Anyone brave enough to say Amen to that?

He's right. Worship should be about God, however we go about it. Praise and prayer are about our relationship with God, and relationships are a two-way street.


But if we are hungry, how can we feed anyone else?

My friend Audrey told a story about being a camp counselor sending kids down a river and pulling them back out again. Her job was to pull them out on the other end. And, she said, if she went in too deep, she would lose her footing and both she and the campers would go sailing down the river. If she lost her footing, she couldn't rescue anyone else.

But what about when we are fed by our own feeding of others? What about at Roadtrip, when we find our spirits filled in the process of offering ourselves and our gifts to others? What about when we share a meal together, when we serve the fruits of our labor to another person and take the first bite together? This is community, and this is what I'm hungry for.

Our dinner on Saturday night was called the Agape meal, a meal of love. It was like Communion, beginning with the breaking of bread and ending with the pouring of "wine" (in this case, grape juice). There is a church in New York City that hosts this kind of sit-down Eucharist weekly. I talked with my small group (13 inspiring 10th-graders) about the difference between sitting together and talking with other people, and eating together with other people. For a multitude of reasons, it brings us closer together.

And indeed, after the meal our group found its stride, a deeper level of trust and rapport.


J and I have our routines, the order of operations for holidays (whose parents' house we go to at what point in the day, and where we eat our different meals). We usually eat dinner at his parents' house on Sunday nights, and at my parents' house on Mondays. His family dinners begin with everyone crossing themselves and reciting the same prayer: Bless us O Lord, and these our gifts which we are about to receive... My family starts by holding hands, and singing. (If I reach for my neighbors' hands at his family dinners out of habit, he puts me on the spot and makes me sing.)

In college I dated a guy for awhile who always bowed his head before he began to eat. I rarely did. By senior year I often ate with friends who began a meal with a "pause for the universe." And after graduation, I got in the habit of "clinking" or "cheersing" or "toasting" the first bite or the first sip of everything with my eating companion before we start our meal.

That's what J and I do most of the time now. But last night, as I sat down to eat the dinner he had made, he took both my hands in an almost-joke. We just looked at each other for a minute, smiling, and then I said, "So... what do we do now?"

"I don't know," he laughed, but didn't let go. Instead, he looked at the shirt I was wearing, the shirt from this year's Roadtrip, and read it out loud. "Soul food. Patience. Goodness. Love. Peace. Joy. Faithfullness."

"Seems fitting," I said.

And then, at the same time, we said Amen.

a fitting snapchat i received while at roadtrip talking about soul food!

posted from Bloggeroid