A sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward
and spiritual grace” according to the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. When a sacrament is engaged, realities long since gone are relived, not as a mere commemoration of a past moment but as a reentering into those events here and now just as they originally occurred.
Sacraments have a way of
making people long gone present once again. How many of us have had the experience of
sharing a story about a loved one not present with us, perhaps no longer even
living, and in the midst of the story, we who knew and loved this person find
ourselves transported to that time and place. We laugh as if the amusing
event was happening right here and now. Perhaps we weep as we remember the
sorrow we felt at that moment and our hearts ache as if that sadness was
occurring as we spoke.
Though we often do not know
how to explain it, we know there is something beyond mere recollection and
memory occurring there. For that moment, we are transported. We are there.
And the persons we remember are there with us.
Loved Ones Once Again Present
I recently got my 23andme
results. I have long told people I was Celt and Kraut to the bone. I had no
idea how true that was. My genetic lineage was 52% British Isles (a good chunk
of which was Irish) and another quarter of my genes came from Germany.
Celts have long understood the
notion of “thin places” where the veil between this world and the next was
particularly thin. When one visits a thin place, like the week I spent in Iona,
it is possible to feel the presence of what lies on the other side of that veil.
That includes the loved ones who are no longer physically present with us. Indeed,
the Celtic festival of Samhain which became syncretized as the Christian feast
of Halloween, celebrated the night of the thin veil when those on the other
side could cross back over to visit the living.
But it is not necessary to
travel to faraway places to have such an experience. I feel the presence of my
parents every day the moment I awaken to see their faces smiling back at me
from the photos above my family altar across the bedroom. I sometimes hear
their voices in my head: “Now, son, don’t be ugly,” my Mother softly chides me
when I am being particularly uncharitable, using my gifts of wit and intellect
to say something, well, ugly about
someone else. And I hear my Dad gently reminding me “Son, you worry too much.
It’s all going to work out,” when I am stressing about dealing with his estate.
But the sacramental ability to
be present with loved ones and to reengage the moments of your life they
filled, can be much less conscious, intentional or expected.
Clearing the Land for a New Home
I come from a long line of
gardeners. My Dad began and ended his teaching career as an agriculture teacher
with a long stint of Civics, Florida history and Driver’s Education in the
middle. My Dad taught me most of what I know about plants. And I have a jungle jammed
with foliage that reflects that legacy.
Those lessons began early in
my life. My father, brother and I cleared the land on which our home would
eventually be built by our best friend’s father. It had been a veritable
thicket before, a subtropical hardwood forest that had overtaken a former
settlement of mainly African-American families who worked at a turpentine
plantation there called Edenfield.
As we cleared the property we
found piles of tin slats used to gash the trunks bark of the pine trees and
then direct their sap into terra cotta pots which collected them. Fragments of
those pots were also scattered over the 12 acres we cleared as well as brightly
colored bricks from the foundations of their houses.
I came to respect the power of
lighter knots, the stumps of pine trees with their crystallized veins of pine
sap that once fed a naval stores industry whose products helped preserve the
wooden ships of the 19th CE. The lightard knot, as many in that
small town called it, was both a highly combustible starter for a hot burning fire
as well as a dense slab of wood that could do real damage when applied to someone’s
head. The threat of being “slapped up side the head with a lightard knot” could
readily bring fear and trembling to the offending child in the backwoods of
1960s Sumter County.
Even today as I laugh about
that expression, I do so with a tinge of more than a little nervousness.
The clearing we achieved was
selective leaving the big trees, including a majestic split trunk live oak that
is no doubt 200 years old or more, while clearing the brush from the ground to
create a 4 acre lawn. There we planted a wide range of ornamentals including at
least 300 azaleas. In the springtime, the new Edenfield was ablaze with color.
‘Stolen plants grow the best…”
Some of the plants came to be
at our home as a result of our Nanny, Henrietta. She was a middle aged
African-American woman who had raised her own five children and now was raising
a granddaughter and caring for an adult mentally handicapped son. I suspect she
had had little formal education in her lifetime. Schools for African-Americans
were not a priority for state and local governments in the early 20th
CE Jim Crow South. But what she lacked in the regulated system of knowledge
that European origin cultures have held so dear she more than made up for in
wisdom.
Our nanny was hardly a luxury
for an elite family household. My Mother worked full-time as the office manager
for a local USDA agency that made government insured loans to farmers. Truth be
told, she ran that office and her untiring work ethic prompted her to be in
that office long after closing and on most weekends though her pay grade never
reflected her contributions, thanks to the glass ceiling. My Mom was 40 when my
Sister was born. Henrietta was a godsend, not only caring for my Sister, whom
she came to call “my baby,” but doing the laundry, cleaning and cooking.
I suspect my love for soul
food and soul music comes from Henrietta. She was the one who taught me about
black people. “You know, we have a nasty name for you, too,” she revealed one
day upon inquiry. “Crackers.” Her very presence in our home was the mirror that
reflected the steaming cauldron of prejudice in which I was unknowingly being raised. As a result, I became familiar with the concept of cognitive dissonance
early in life. Her very existence prompted me to ask questions about “the way things are,” a process that continues to inform my
interactions with the world to this day.
I will always be grateful for
her loving care and her wisdom. I live my life aware of the debt I owe to this
unassuming woman who loved flowers and the white children she helped raise.
It was Henrietta who brought
the Rose of Sharon to our home. Henrietta was prone to snap off a tip of a
plant and take it home, nourish it and draw from that modest beginning a
full-grown flourishing plant. She sometimes said, “Stolen plants grow the best”
referring to the little slips of plants and pods of seeds she would sometime
collect and slip into her apron pocket on her walks around her neighborhood, a
practice both my Father and I also regularly engaged. Indeed, my jungle is
fully of plants and trees that have arrived here from around the world in just
that manner.
“You just stick this little
bit of it in the ground and keep it watered and it’ll grow good,” she said. And
they almost always did.
The Rose of Sharon, or Althea
as she and my Dad called it, flourished. I quickly learned that you could
easily propagate these plants by both cuttings and by the furry seeds they
produced in pods after the bloom had faded. Unlike the tropical hibiscus of whose
family this plant was a member, the Altheas were not cold sensitive and grew up
into northern states where the hibiscus we grew in our yard (and protected from
the occasional freezes) could survive for longer than a summer only in pots
brought indoors.
The Sacramental Moment
The progeny of Henrietta’s original
Althea (which still grows in the backyard of our family home in Edenfield) now
inhabit my jungle here in the heart of Orlando. This past week as I came out
the door to head to St. Richard’s to lead Morning Prayer, I noticed that
Henrietta’s Rose of Sharon was blooming. It was a deep crimson colored bud that
would open to a vibrant red flower before the day would close. By tomorrow, it
would be gone, a greyish lavender shriveled blossom which would eventually fall
to the ground.
No small analogy to the transience
of life, no?
I stood there savoring that
moment. The early morning sun had filtered through the green wall of trees and
plants in the front illuminating the flower. It was a moment in which an
outward and visible sign permitted an inward and spiritual grace to be present.
For just one moment, I could hear her voice and see her face. She was truly
present with me if ever so briefly.
Just as a wave of
bittersweet sadness began to sweep over me, I felt my heart warm. And as a smile crept across my face, I heard my own voice
say, “Good morning, Henrietta.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
If the unexamined life is not worth
living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is
not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound
bites.
For what does G-d require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
Do not be daunted by the enormity
of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are
not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi
Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry Coverston 2018
