Thoughts on apple-picking

Ahhh, September, time of warm days, cool nights, golden corn, and apples.  Apples are everywhere on my facebook feed.  Kids in apple t-shirts picking apples at an apple orchard, riding apple-themed carnival rides, eating apple cider donuts while drinking apple cider.  It makes me want some apple brandy or something.  Seriously!  When did apple-picking become THE not-to-miss fall adventure?  When did something so simple and basic as buying fresh apples from the grower become a contrived extravaganza?  Why do I feel like a slacker parent if my child’s apples come from the grocery store, not hand-picked for $25 on a sunny September day in a picturesque orchard and posted on facebook, twitter, and instagram?

OK, maybe I’m a little cranky and a little harsh.  Shouldn't I applaud the parents having a wholesome outing with their kids?  Isn’t it admirable that people want to connect with the places their food is grown?  Isn’t it a positive trend to buy locally and support local growers?  Yes, yes, and Yes.  But, I’m still cranky.  See, I know about freshly picked apples, from way back.

My childhood Septembers were also apple-heavy.  There was the church apple fritter stand at the town festival.  If I have ever eaten a piece of heaven, it is a cored, sliced, tart, fresh apple, dipped in batter, deep fried, and sprinkled with powdered sugar.  The ladies of First Mennonite Church of Sugarcreek guard the batter recipe with their very lives.  Those apple fritters have caused me to drive 400 miles one way to indulge in them.  There was also the apple butter my mother’s family boils every fall.  As I kid, I played in the leaves while parent, aunts, uncles, and grandparents boiled apple butter in a cauldron big enough to boil a few of the grandchildren.  By tradition, the oldest woman adds the spoonful of cinnamon.  When I was a kid, it was my Great-grandma Smith.   Now, it’s my own mother.  We would come home with enough jars of canned apple butter to last until next fall.  So, trust me, I know about the joy treats made from fall apples.

I also know the joy of picking fresh apples from a tree.  Growing up, if we wanted some apples during September, we walked out to the northeast corner of the pasture.  Some previous farmer had planted a few apple trees that yielded the little red and yellow kind.  I used to ride my horse out to pick them and feed him the cores when I was done.  They were lumpy and small and I had to watch out for worms and rotten parts.  But, the taste of them on my tongue--tart and sweet, crunchy and juicy--that was the taste of the end of summer.  So, I know the beauty of an apple just liberated from its tree.

I guess it bugs me that my natural childhood memories, picking fruit because it was there, making special treats to raise money, and canning to preserve for the rest of the year, are now hijacked by themed t-shirts and carnival rides.  We celebrated apples in September because that is when the fruit came in, so that’s when it affected our lives in my rural community.  It was work, not entertainment.  Today, it seems so contrived to me, so artificial, and so compulsory.  After all, are my slacker ways are costing my kids a great "apple experience"?  Will they be mad at my if there aren't any pictures of them in apple t-shirts, picking apples from a tree, with their little faces covered in apple donut?

Perhaps I am missing the point.  Bravo to the smart farmers and orchard owners who thought of this.  Maybe I should get on the bandwagon.  As a matter of fact, I should put my mind to it.  If my family could come up with some cute hay-bale themed t-shirts, some hay-bale carnival rides, and treats like haystacks or something, maybe we could sell admission when the hay comes in.  People could pay $2 for the chance to lift and stack the hay bales into the mow.  Throwing them from the wagon costs $3, and it’s only for people over 40 inches tall.  Why stop at stacking hay?  For just an extra $5, people could spend 10 minutes shoveling fertilizer.  They could have the experience of spreading it on the fields, or take it home for their own gardens.  We would supply the pitchforks and shovels, and you can take as much as you can carry.  I wonder what kind of shirts I could sell for that?

Why the Episcopal Church? Because it broke my heart

Why the Episcopal Church?  The Episcopal Church exists for people like me, and people quite different from me, of course.  People who differ in race, ethnicity, background, social status, occupation, theology, and preferences of pizza toppings, but people who are similar in their commitment to the saving grace of God in Christ.  I tried to compose a list, or an essay extolling the virtues of the Episcopal Church.  However, I guess I am becoming a true Episcopalian, because all I could come up with was a story of when the church broke open my heart.

Three years ago, I was a fledgeling Christian searching for a new spiritual home.  I was all atwitter with thoughts.  The mystery of Christ entranced me, the mystery of a God who so loved the world--this crazy, messed-up, petty, polluted world and all of us crazy people in it--that he gave up his own son--a part of himself--to save it. Once I bought into this incredible story, then I wanted to experience it.  I wanted to be knocked down by it, made quiet by it, brought to tears by it.  I wanted the whole extravaganza.  But, I was nervous.

What would I find there?  Would they preach a message of the shame and guilt, hell-fire and damnation?  Would I be welcomed?  Would I hear from the pulpit that women should submit to men, or that homosexuality was a sin?  Would someone ask me, “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”  Any one of those things would have me running for the hills.  Or, would I find the message of holy, catholic, loving grace for which I longed so desperately?  For weeks, I sat on the edge of my seat, every Sunday, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

For the next few weeks of Lent, I attended church regularly.  I figured that if I wanted the extravaganza of resurrection and redemption, the Episcopal Church at Easter was a great place to find it.  Then, came Good Friday.  As I sat in the darkened, bare church through the Gospel reading and the moving sermon, I was overcome. In the image of Jesus’s final sacrifice for all of mankind, I could see how those moments of grief, bound by love, were possible.  I could see an image of the most powerful human being to ever walk the earth submitting to the evil of the world and experiencing excruciating pain, all the while with God holding him in the palm of his hand.  Here I found the context for that mysterious idea of Anthony de Mello’s that “all is well, though things are a mess, all is well”.   I had been looking for the answers to this for a long, long time.  Of course, I have not really found the answers, merely a language and a context from which to ask the question.

But, all of this intellectual thinking wasn’t really what happened that night, in the dark, with hymns playing, as the congregation went forward to venerate the cross.  What was happening was my eyes tearing, my throat closing up, and my heart breaking open.  The only thought in my head was, “make me worthy of this sacrifice, Jesus.”  I didn’t want to be made worthy so I could be saved, because Jesus already saved me.  I longed to be worthy of the immense gift of God’s love.  I knew something powerful was going on because I could hear the sounds of quiet crying all around me.

Why the Episcopal Church?  There are other churches who celebrate Good Friday and teach a message of grace.  But, my church is the church that wraps the message of saving, transforming, transcendent grace in beautiful symbols, poetic language, traditional liturgy, and inspirational music.  Because of the Episcopal Church, my heart broke open to the transforming grace of God.  

The Craziness of Christianity

Lately, church has become a habit with me--a good habit, like exercise, or eating well, or spending time with people who you love--but a habit nonetheless.  It is easy for habits to become routine, even to become chores.  After all, church is a regular, mundane thing.  My parents did it, my grandparents did it, my great-grandparents did it, and so on and so on.  It is nothing extraordinary to belong to a church.  Then, I read something like this:

“Being a Christian should just scare the hell out of us. It’s like on Sunday we need to rush together for protection. “Oh, I’m not crazy.” That we believe that God was in Christ reconciling the world is craziness. It’s going to make your life really weird. And you just need to get together on Sunday to be pulled back into the reality of God’s kingdom.” Stanley Hauerwas

Suddenly, I remember the days before I walked through those red doors of my church.  I remember the longing, the desire to find a spiritual home, and the anxiety about what I would find there. Becoming a Christian really did scare the hell out of me.  As much as I wanted to, when I came face to face with the salvific mystery of Christ, I couldn’t quite believe it all.  That’s why I had to go to church, to see if it was for real.  There was something compelling and absolutely crazy about Christianity. I longed for it, but I couldn't quite buy it.

It all started with the books, especially Robert Farrar Capon.  Capon’s explanation of pure, catholic, unearned grace was inspiring and unbelievable.  When he described Christ as “the light of the world, not the lighting company”, my mind lit up.  The story of the catholic, eternal grace of God in Christ blew me away.  God, the creator of the universe, the ultimate ground of all being, had also been a part of man since the beginning of time.  This part of God came into reality as an incarnated, flesh and blood person.  That holy God-made-man lived with and loved humans, so much that he lay down his life to save us.  He lay down his life to be the saving sacrament of grace, which had been in the world since the beginning, but became real in order to teach us, to save us, to shock us into accepting grace. God, in Christ, gave up his incredible power in order to show us a way of love and surrender.  That is an absolutely CRAZY idea.

I lived with this crazy thought on my own for many months--as long as I could stand it.  I read and reread the gospels, and religious books, I downloaded hymns on my Ipod, I prayed the Lord’s Prayer.  Capon and the other writers made Christianity sound like a big party, and I so longed to join it.  But, it was crazy, wasn’t it?  How could it truly be real?  Wasn't church where people went to "be good people" and to make sure they go to heaven?  Wasn't it just an old-fashioned social club with some bread and wine thrown in there?  Did people there  REALLY live in the mystery of Christ?  Did people REALLY find “the love in which we live and move and have our being” at the feet of the cross?  My curiosity and loneliness got the best of me and I went to church one day.  To my surprise and relief, I was not alone in my weirdness, rather I found an entire community to embrace, support, and challenge me.

Every Sunday, I worship with other people who believe this same craziness.  They, too, have felt the reconciling and redemptive power of God in their lives.  They, too, know the love, greater than all our sin, love without end, love without condition.  They, too, worship a God whose biggest and most important act was lying down and dying, an act so powerful in its sacrifice that it broke death itself.  They believe in loving their enemies, in serving the least and lowliest, not the most powerful, in giving up their own lives to save them.  Who in their right mind would do those crazy things in this post-post-modern society?

We lose the power of our Christian faith when it becomes commonplace, when we stop marveling at the audacity of it, when we no longer regard the love and grace in our lives with shock and awe.  No matter how habitual worship becomes, we must remember the craziness, the weirdness of the glory of Christ.

Feeling before Faith

Recently, I read an Op Ed column in the Sunday NY Times, “Between Godliness and Godlessness”  (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-between-godliness-and-godlessness.html?smid=nytcore-ipad-share&smprod=nytcore-ipad&_r=0).  It’s about a renowned atheist author, Sam Harris, who describes a moment of transcendent peace while walking in Jesus’s footsteps.  The article explains that atheists, agnostics, and spiritual-but-not-religious people also experience moments of connection to ideas bigger than themselves, but lack the language and connection to express it within the normal “church” options of American culture.  Columnist Frank Bruni asks, “The question is this: Which comes first, the faith or the feeling of transcendence? Is the former really a rococo attempt to explain and romanticize the latter, rather than a bridge to it? Mightn’t religion be piggybacking on the pre-existing condition of spirituality, a lexicon grafted onto it, a narrative constructed to explain states of consciousness that have nothing to do with any covenant or creed?”  To which, I respectfully reply, “Uh YEAH it is!”  

My worldview of a Christian religion, my commitment to a journey with Christ, the organization of my life around the Episcopal church as a cornerstone, is all a result of moments of transcendence and the pre-existing condition of spirituality.  My religion is most certainly a lexicon, a context, a language, with which I can express the divine.  I mean, what else is it?  Excuse me as I sound like a 7th grader, but, “Duh!”  I'm sorry to sound dismissive of the argument, but I can’t see religion any other way.  Remember the Taoist idea that religion is a finger pointing to the moon, or a boat that can carry us toward enlightenment?  It is neither the moon, nor the distant shore; it is the direction and the vehicle.

This is why I genuinely like atheists, agnostics, humanists, pagans, Unitarian Universalists, and all other people who cannot quite find their niche in the buffet of organized religion.  This is why I honor the seeker in all of us.  My relationship with God is not a product of my religious upbringing; as a matter of fact, I could only come home to a church after a journey through agnosticism, atheism, Buddhism, and Unitarian Universalism.  My relationship with “the great love in which we live and move and have our being” (as my beloved UU pastor used to say) is because of the moments of transcendent peace I experienced, on the back of my horse, after the death of my father, in my classroom at work, or while sobbing in despair on the tile of my bathroom floor.  Something incredible happened to me in those moments of my life, which spurred me on to a search for truth and meaning.  Eventually, I found a connection to truth, in Christian theology, the Eucharist, and the liturgy of the Episcopal church.

Unitarian Universalists have a saying, “One Light; Many Windows” to describe their expansive faith.  They explain that the light of God (or no God, if you’re an atheist or a humanist) shines through the windows of our worldview, like the windows of a great cathedral, which lights the multitudes within it.  Bible scholar, Marcus Borg, calls religion a lens; a lens through which we view the world, through which we construct meaning.  For me, the teachings of Christ and his church are my lens, but not everyone has the same prescription. 

It makes me smile when my atheist friends make rational arguments against the existence of God.  They don’t see things through the same lens.  As a matter of fact, their rational arguments sometimes refine and temper my own faith.  Atheists often argue against a God I don’t believe in anyway--a God of judgment and wrath, a God that is an old man up in the sky, a God who manipulates our every move with dispassion and calculation.  That is not my God.  I don’t need to prove to anyone that my God exists.  As a matter of fact, I could be absolutely wrong--there may have been no divine incarnation in Jesus Christ, no resurrection, no ascension, no promise of coming in glory.  At the end of the day, I could live this life and find out, well, nothing in the end.  If at the end of the day, all the peace and love I’ve found at church is merely a product of my own brain’s endorphins, rather than the grace of God, I will be no worse off than before. That possibility of being wrong doesn’t keep me out of church.  I don’t go to church for proof, for validation, or for an eternal reward.  Right or wrong, I have a strong faith in a God of Love--a faith of questions, of experience, and of longing.  I go to church because that’s where I find my lens with which to view the world, my language to discuss the divine, my connection to the transcendent mystery that creeps up and taps my shoulder at random moments in my life.

So, yes, Mr. Bruni, my feeling came before my faith; without the feeling of transcendent peace and connection, there would be no faith at all, no need for doctrine, no need for liturgy, no need for any organization at all.  My religion is “piggybacking on the pre-existing condition of spirituality, a lexicon grafted onto it, a narrative constructed to explain states of consciousness that have nothing to do with any covenant or creed”.  Isn’t everyone’s?