Writing, Parenting, and Working in the Mess: Authentic Spirituality and Social Justice

In his "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," Wendell Berry opens with stanzas condemning consumerism and capitalism, then writes: So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Do the nonsensical, the radically compassionate, he says. Live in a way totally outside the structures we've created that limit our ability to be open to others, to love. When my daughter and I wrote the very first plan for Healing Ranch--which has now become Petalouda House--our intention was to create a place of healing that existed outside the structures of the ordinary world. I showed it to my partner, who thought it was beautiful, doable--this, among other things, made me sure we could make a life together. We wanted to build a place of radical hospitality, where people could come and cook and eat supper with us whenever they wanted, bri...

In " Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell ," Denise Levertov, the great poet I associate with the peace movement, describes the Orthodox icon of the Resurrection. In the Orthodox tradition, there is no Limbo now, but there was that place of waiting between the beginning of humanity and Jesus’ resurrection—and in the icon’s image, Jesus is pulling Adam and Eve from the depths.  Here is how Levertov describes it: Down through the tomb's inward arch He has shouldered out into Limbo to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber: the merciful dead, the prophets, the innocents just His own age and those unnumbered others waiting here unaware, in an endless void He is ending now, stooping to tug at their hands, to pull them from their sarcophagi, dazzled, almost unwilling. We are all stuck in one way or another, often because we don’t know how to move from where we are. Buddhist wisdom tells us to ask ourselves, gently, “Have I ever done this before?” and laugh at o...

We were at our first house, where we lived until I was about 5. We went outside on a new, spring day, the whole world that too-bright-green that lasts only about a week. Everything was in bloom, and it had been raining. There was a rainbow, full arch, directly over our backyard. We gasped, startled, and stood still, just staring. Where had that come from, color in the sky? And then we saw the deer, a family of three, walking casually just beneath the arch. Sometimes I dream this memory. Sometimes I’m not sure it happened. My mother was there, and my father, my aunts and uncles too—it might have been Easter, I’m not sure. Or, it might have been any other Sunday—we were together a lot, for all kinds of reasons. In her poem “The Faces of Deer,” Mary Oliver writes, When for too long I don’t go deep enough into the woods to see them, they begin to enter my dreams. Yes, there they are, in the pine woods of my inner life. I remember, years later, when one of our Sunday...

In the Orthodox tradition, the wine and bread literally become the body and blood at a particular time in the liturgy, while we are kneeling, expectant, ready. Communion requires a week of fasting from animal products, no food after midnight the night before, and a Saturday evening of contemplation. The faithful are supposed to also go to confession, but most don't go every week, just a couple times a year.  Only a priest can offer the body and blood, and nobody is supposed to touch the chalice besides the priest. Luckily, it’s rare for more than a handful of people to go up for communion, except on major religious holidays, so in general, the process doesn’t take too long. (Side note: I learned recently that if you actually follow the fast days of the church--which is to say, refrain from meat every Wednesday and Friday all year long, and meat and dairy for the 40 days of Lent--and don't eat after midnight, and offer up prayer and contemplation on Saturday, you could, the...

This is the first spring in Petalouda House. I must have walked past this house hundreds of times in the 15 years I lived here, but I never noticed the smooth, bronze-colored bark on the corner tree, or the blossoms that are coming, soon. I didn’t notice the giant lilac bushes along the edge of the yard, or the rose bushes by the garage, or the blackberries in back. We moved in at the right time to enjoy the roses and blackberries, but the lilacs and tree blossoms had come and gone much earlier. Today, my spouse and daughter and I stood in the yard, running our hands along the bark of the tree, standing on our tiptoes to try to smell the soon-to-be white flowers on its branches. “This bronze colored trunk has to be some kind of sign of good luck,” my daughter said, as if it had grown just for us. “I can’t wait to smell the lilacs,” said my spouse, pressing her face against the tight buds. “I can’t wait for this week to be over,” I said. Even though I continue to work a...

Let’s face it: there’s a good reason my father-in-law hates this stuff. Much like the pine needles from live Christmas trees (another thing my father-in-law won’t allow in the house), Easter grass clogs vacuum cleaners, shows up in late August, peeking out of the heating vents, and manages to wedge itself into corners of the wood floor—not to mention causing the way-too-many-animals-in-our-house indigestion. Plus, besides the color, and maybe the width of each strand, it doesn’t even look like grass. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about waste, because we’re due for a trip to the dump, and because, recently, my spouse pointed out that, for a green campus, the place where I work sure does love to water its grass.  Ironically, the morning after a two hour dialogue about global water shortages, I had to dodge sprinklers outside my building.  Still, Easter baskets look kind of funny without that Easter grass stuff, and apparently the need for bright, shiny grass for g...

When I was a kid, my uncle Elias raised bunnies in the backyard. They were so adorable—poofy cotton-puff tails, long hair, black button eyes. The cages smelled terrible, but we loved to press the bodies of those bunnies against our necks. They were pretty calm animals, always willing to be cuddled. Once in awhile one of them would “escape,” and we wouldn’t be able to find it. “Fluffy’s gone,” we’d say. We’d search the yard halfheartedly and take comfort in the fact that Fluffy had probably found some other bunny friends in the neighborhood. The same night, coincidentally, we always had “chicken” for supper. Apparently all the other cousins figured out what was going on long before I did—which is to say that it wasn’t until my uncle’s funeral when I was in my late 20s that the truth became clear. “How in the world did you not know?” my cousin Joanne said, laughing hysterically. We were in her backyard, drinking beer after the funeral, and it felt good to be home—I was in my las...

The work of the world is common as mud.  Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry, and a person for work that is real.  --from "To Be of Use" by Marge Piercy My spouse is particular about cups and bowls. There’s a certain simple small clay bowl she likes to use to hold snacks, small candies, or other treasures. There are certain mugs she always chooses over the others in our cupboard. Most of the cups and mugs she especially likes have small chips along the rim, or barely visible cracks—but this does not stop her from choosing them over the newer bowls, mugs, and cups we have. There are also certain cups she doesn’t like. They’re the ones that are hardest to drink from, whose mouths are so wide they spill easily, or whose cylinders a...

I'm cheating a little, because it's the busiest time of year in academia. This is not a new poem, but it seems an appropriate one for a study of the Resurrection. Rest in peace, Bob--never forgotten. Hard to believe it's been more than four years since we lost you--and since I had this amazing dream. Gathering             For Bob I dream I am sweeping flakes of wax from the floor of a long, narrow room. The other refugees turn in their sleep like a row of flags that curl and tighten, over and over, in the wind.  Only my daughter and I are awake.  “What are you doing, mom?” she asks me in the same small, steady voice she used, when I heard you died, to ask “What is the news? Why are you crying?” “Trying to save what I can,” I say. She says she wants to help, kneels and makes her hands into small dams against the floor. I sweep the remnants toward her. And then we begin to see what they ...

Jubilee Dreams Leviticus 25: 10-13 Sometimes, in my dreams, my 50 th year, the one I never believed would come, the one that means I have outlived my mother-- that year, the 50th, sometimes settles drearily, just another winter morning, and sometimes, train-bound for nowhere, clutching a bag of coins to my heart, the police flash a light in my face. But it's my birthday, I say, and everybody turns toward their windows, not looking, not looking—then, suddenly darkness, thick as the bottom of the coffee cup, the grounds I do not dare to read now that I am 50 and pressing my luck. Don’t press your luck I say over and over to strangers in cabs or on moonlit paths through mountains or in ordinary time, walking to work or running on the elliptical. Sometimes I wait, shivering, in a small, white room, thin hospital gown tied loosely around my waist, the one windowsill buried in snow, buried Don’t press your luck Sometimes a friend in ...

After a 40 day fast, Greek families slaughter a lamb, roast it on a spit, and eat every last bit of it. Perhaps relatedly, I am a vegetarian. Perhaps it was the wide open eyes of the lamb on the spit—it always looked like it was still alive. Or maybe it’s because my cousin Connie liked to gross us out by eating the lamb eyes. Or perhaps it’s because, when I was five, I once wandered into the kitchen for a drink of water after playing in the backyard and found a giant, dead lamb sitting on our counter. My mother was casually reaching into its gut to pull out the innards. Magiritsa, also known as lamb-gut soup, is a staple on Easter. The soup is actually pretty delicious, if you can forget what goes into it. “Why do we have to eat the guts?” I asked my mother once. “Because we shouldn’t waste anything,” she said, simply. As I got older and learned about the meat industry in the U.S., I became more convinced that refraining from meat was probably a just act—why support ...

Tuesday, Day 24: Easter Basket Here is an autobiographical poem that captures a post-Easter adventure (involving an Easter basket put to use in a new way) from a few years ago. My excuse for not posting earlier is that I lost my computer! Thank goodness I live in the kind of community where all things lost eventually come back to us. Saved When your daughter cups her gloved hands around the baby grackle’s downy skin, you think, This is going to end badly. Still, when she empties her Easter basket, lines it with horse hair-- when she spends her last ten dollars on worms—when she tells the clerk at Jerry’s U-Save to fuck off after he asks, Don’t you believe in natural selection? —when she sits on the deck for two long days, feeding the squawking bird fragments of worms carefully cut with your best kitchen knife, dropping water from a doll’s bottle into its open beak— you keep your mouth shut. And when the bird wakes you on the second day by crying out her ...

Sunday, Day 22: Koulourakia We taught the children at church how to make the Greek cookies called koulourakia—how to roll out three strands of dough and braid them—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They did their best to braid or at least twist the dough into shape, and loved brushing on the eggs and sprinkling on way too many sesame seeds. While we worked, we talked about the parable of the yeast, and all the ways that little things can become big. We talked about Rosa Parks refusing to get up and how that sparked the Civil Rights Movement, although one of the kids noted she hadn’t been the first, only the first that those in power wanted to make visible. I tried to talk about how Jesus called a couple fisherman to follow him, and that’s what started an entire movement to make love of self and neighbor the way to get close to God, instead of other things that weren’t so important, and how this small lesson was the Big Lesson we were supposed to learn from Jesus, but I pretty much...

The secret to delicious tsoureki (Greek Easter Bread) is the mahlepi. Mahlepi is the seed of a cherry tree that can be found in the Mediterranean. The tree is stunning, with beautiful white blossoms, not unlike the cherry trees that bloom in the U.S. The taste of mahlepi is impossible to describe. It is almost bitter, but also nutty, and fruity—see, that doesn’t do much for anyone who hasn’t tasted it. Its seeds are utterly ordinary. The recipe never calls for very much, if any. But there’s a clear difference between tsoureki without the mahlepi and tsoureki that includes it. This year, I made a loaf for American Easter and forgot to include the mahlepi, and it was good—but it just tasted like an ordinary semi-sweet bread. Luckily, my cousin Connie who raised me after my mother’s death has my mother’s recipe, and sends me a loaf every year. We cut that one after Easter Liturgy for Greek Easter and the difference was immediately palpable. Rising in a corner of our kitchen, ...

You cannot put a fire out; A thing that can ignite Can go, itself, without a fan Upon the slowest night. --Emily Dickinson As the Easter liturgy wears on—two a.m., three a.m.—we hold tightly to our candles, watch the flame to make sure the wick can hold it. The plastic cup secured to the candle catch the wax, but we have to remember to keep scooting it down as the candle burns so it does its job. In the process, sometimes a little wax escapes. The black cover of my Holy Week services book sports spatterings of wax, as do some of the pages toward the end. We carry the candle up to take communion, hold it carefully away from the cloth we take in our hands and hold under our chins. We carry it back to our seats to hear the joyful Easter sermon by St. John Chrysostom, including these words: "If any have struggled from the first hour, let them today receive their just reward. If any have come at the third hour, let them with thankfulness enjoy the feast. If any have ar...