Snapdragons and Alleluias

I quit watering them when life went dark. 

It was more than I could handle in the middle of a life unraveled. I walked around the big empty house and drank too much; felt sorry for myself, went on regrettable dates with people completely unsuited to me, turned the music up loud when the pain got too unbearable.

I’d go down the front steps and look at the containers that should have been overflowing with flowers. The dried up husks of the snapdragons seemed infinitely better than an artificially cheery bouquet. I busied myself in my work and ignored the yard. Inside the house, I sanded the floors, choking on great quantities of poison-laden dust. I painted over the bright yellow walls with soft earth tones that felt somehow more honest, more real. And every day, the snapdragons seemed to wither a little more.

Spring collapsed into summer and summer into fall. The trees began to turn and the air grew cooler. The afternoon shadows were darker than I remembered and the nights colder than the temperature promised. And each day through the winter those snapdragons just sat. Weeds had sprouted in the containers, green against the shriveled stalks of broken promises. I let them grow.

 

Nature was unmoved by my self-pity. The winter rains came and what I couldn’t do, or wouldn’t do, it did without my help. One cold winter day, I noted the snapdragons were green. 

By then, I had hardly even noticed that I had learned to breathe again on my own. The soundtrack had changed too—the dark and furious chords of Wagner and Pearl Jam had faded into Tony Bennett and the Beatles.

Life wasn’t merely death delayed after all. My dog’s muzzle was still soft and warm and her yellow lupine eyes still gazed at me with love. A new relationship put the old into perspective. Winter gave way to spring. A year-long Lent became Easter.

The snapdragons bloomed. And I had nothing to do with it. It was grace, pure and simple. It was resurrection. It was music and dance. It was flowers and springtime and hope. 

Alleluia!

  

Ash Wednesday: Stuck in the Middle

Is not this the fast that I choose:
   to loose the bonds of injustice,
   to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
   and to break every yoke?  

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
   and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
   and not to hide yourself from your own kin?—Isaiah 58:6-7

And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.—Matthew 6:16-18.

Well, you started off with nothing

And you're proud that you're a self-made man

And your friends they all come crawling

Slap you on the back and say

Please, please--Gerry Rafferty, Stuck in The Middle with You

It’s a funny thing about Religion. You believe what you believe because that’s what you believe.—Mickey Spillane (in an interview by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, November 22, 1989)

 **********************************************************************************

The Ordinary Miracle of Christmas

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.  This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered.  Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.  

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’  And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, * praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours!’  

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.’  So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them.  But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.-Luke 2:1-20

We are still amazed at what the shepherds tell us, amazed even that we are amazed at this story. For the dirt-poor pregnant unmarried teenager who brings a child into the world upon whom she lays her nation's hope for salvation is not really so different from any young mother in poverty and oppression across the ages and around the globe. Young mothers always believe in the possibility that their child will be the one who ends the war or finds the cure for cancer or makes the streets safe again or sends the occupiers packing. And it is not really so miraculous that a child could be born apart from the usual way. For it happens every day in fertility clinics across the planet. 

It is in fact, the very ordinariness of the story that fascinates us. The ordinary hopes of an ordinary mother. The ordinary recklessness of ordinary young people taking chances with life and ending up struggling against poverty, pain and panic. In the ordinary face of a baby the story calls us to see a God incarnate in the ordinary. 

We can demythologize the Nativity story, chalking angels, shepherds, mad kings and magi up to  the myth-making of the religious enthusiast. We can find all sorts of ancient stories of Gods come to walk among us, of grand and wise prophets misunderstood by their contemporaries who meet sad and untimely ends, of mothers' broken hearts and the unfulfilled hopes of people living in darkness yearning to see a great light. But demythologizing this story will not rob it of its power. For it is our story and that is its power. 

The Jesus story is not true because of its miracles. It is true because its ordinariness. It is true because in the deepest part of our hearts we know that every mother fears the sword that may pierce her own soul, that every night angels sing, and that shepherds tell tales of music that echoes off the stars, and that every baby's face shines with the image of God. 

The ordinary story of Jesus, Lord and Savior, Messiah and Martyr, is the story of love, of hope, of goodness, faith and sacrifice. The human story. The Word made Flesh. Our story.

Everything is Political. Especially politics.

Thomas Mann, the German social critic and Nobel laureate once memorably said, "There is nothing that is not political. Everything is politics." Like much of what he wrote, he was dead on. Particularly in the politically charged atmosphere of a highly divided nation on the brink of an election that will decide whether or not it continues as a center-right social democratic republic or a hard right confederation of business-dominated special interests.

And nothing illustrates that like the debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known to Fox News viewers as Obamacare, but to the rest of us simply as health care reform. I'm not a huge fan of the PPA-ACA, but not because I believe it to be some sort of dark socialist plot to undermine the American health care system, but because I believe it to be a large-scale giveaway to insurance companies in the largest corporate raid on American pocketbooks ever. And because it does not solve the basic problem of health care for millions of people. Even the most rosy estimates of the PPA-ACA put the number of uninsured at 14,000,000 after the full implementation of the law in 2018. Single-payer, universal health care access would be cheaper, simpler and fairer. But the law is at least a start towards insuring that every American can get access to health care without using hospital emergency rooms as primary care centers.

One of the law's provisions is that each state must implement a state-run "health insurance exchange," a sort of Travelocity of health insurance, public and private. If a state elects not to do that, then the federal government will operate the exchange in that state. Back in March, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley issued an Executive Order creating a nonpartisan South Carolina Health Planning Committee to decide whether or not the state should establish a health insurance exchange.

Today's Charleston Post and Courier published an article headlined "SC Gov. Haley dictated health panel finding" with the subtitle "Outcome ordered before committee met." The article cited recently released emails among the Governor, her staff and the Director of the the Department of Health and Human Services, Tony Keck. The work of the Committee, it charged, was a sham, and all along the Committee's report was fixed.

Don't believe everything you read in the newspaper. I know, because I was a member of that Committee.

 When Governor Haley asked me to serve as a consumer advocate and representative of the nonprofit sector, I agreed without hesitation. I spend way too much time advocating for quality health care access as a basic human right to say no to an opportunity like that. Besides, I wanted to advocate for a federally-run exchange, because I simply don't trust South Carolina state government to serve the interests of people who are not a)wealthy and b) well-connected. Whatever problems the federal government has in its programs to serve the poor, the sick, or the disabled, (and they are many) it still does it better than we do things when left to our own devices in the Palmetto State.

We worked long and hard through months of meetings, reams of reports, mind-numbing Power Points and expert testimony. Some members of the Committee originally felt that South Carolina should run its own exchange and tell the Feds to take a hike. But after all the work, and more than a few good-natured political jabs around the table, we came together in a final report that said there were so many unknown factors around the implementation of the law that we could not, in good conscience recommend a state-exchange. As one of the Senators on the Committee noted, "we can't even get the computer systems we have up to federal standards, there's just no way we are competent to do something this complicated."

We encouraged some interim steps: staying in serious conversation and negotiations with the federal agencies charged with implementation, encouraging private exchanges, and promoting smaller-scale, community-based health access networks, like the Duke Endowment funded AccessHealth SC and Tri-County Project Care, run by Charleston's incredible visionary surgeon, Dr. Casey Fitts.

And you know what? Not once did I hear from Governor Haley telling me to support a pre-determined outcome. Because if she had, I would have raised hell. And though I may have been the token liberal on the Committee, I believe many of the other Committee members would have as well.

Everything is politics. The Committee's final report contained a lot of politically charged language that made me roll my eyes. But I voted for it because, in 2014, South Carolina will not have a state exchange and barring a Supreme Court overturn or a Congressional roll-back, the federal government will be running the South Carolina Health Insurance Exchange and hundreds of thousands of people who don't have health insurance now will have it.

It's precisely the opposite of what the tea-guzzling-tell-the-feds-to-get-their-goddam-government-hands-off-our-health-care crowd wants. And that's a good thing.

SNAP Challenge Day 5: The Banality of Poverty

There is a sameness to it, an endless, soul-sucking semi-existence that offers neither a way out nor a way through but only a way to exist. It is the banality of poverty.

We feel sorry for the poor. Sorry that they don't live the way we do, sorry that their values are not ours, sorry that they smell bad or don't pick up the trash in their yards or have all those loud and undisciplined children with the runny noses and the wild, animal eyes. Sorry that they stay poor. We pity them, for we are not in their dark cavern with them.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta wrote that "the poor do not need our sympathy and our pity. The poor need our love and compassion." Of course, she was a saint, so she often said outrageous things. Love and compassion are too much to ask for in a society where if you don’t have a job, you should blame yourself, as former and probably future GOP front-runner Herman Cain said the other day. We can feel sorry for the poor (probably Herman Cain does), but we will be damned if we are going to love them and feel compassionate towards them.

Love, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, has the sense of self-giving. It is not about throwing money at a problem, it is about throwing one’s very life at it. And compassion? It means “to suffer along with.” Teresa threw her life at the problem of the poorest of the poor. And the problem didn’t go away, in spite of all her prayers. And so she moved on to compassion for the poor—suffering along with them. She immersed herself in the poor, lived, worked and died among them. Still, poverty didn’t budge. It just went on and on.

The nature of poverty is to design itself for perpetuity. When Bill Clinton, that famous Reagan Democrat, conspired with current and probably soon to be former GOP front-runner Newt Gingrich to “end welfare as we know it” he succeeded. Welfare, as it existed from the time of the New Deal until the late 1990’s, ceased to exist. People were expected to get an education and then get a job. They would get temporary assistance from a society that felt sympathy and pity but not love and compassion. Thus ended welfare. Still, poverty didn’t budge. It just went on and on.

 Today, the welfare system has been transformed into Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program.  The first assumes that after 48 months of a poor person’s life, he or she would have the capacity to stand up and take responsibility and join the great American middle-class, replete with SUV, two-car garage, flat-screen television and soccer games on Sunday morning. The second assumes that the food budgets of the lower class would be “supplemented” until they accumulated enough wealth to be respectable and responsible consumers of gadgets, clothes, houses, and marble slab ice cream. But the assumptions were wrong. Poverty didn’t budge. It just went on and on.

The banality of poverty is clearest in its food: cheap, low in nutrition, but high in fat and processed sugars. It’s sameness is numbing. After awhile, you don’t even think about it, you just eat it. After awhile, it even starts to taste good.

Like my grits ($.15) from this morning. Or my peanut butter and preserves sandwiches on white bread ($.35 ea.) at lunch. Or my spaghetti with canned green pepper flavored sauce ($.88). It’s not bad. Not good, either, but not bad. It leaves you numb. Full, but not satisfied. And it goes on and on, just like the problem it was supposed to fix.

SNAP Challenge Day 4: On the Limits of Existential Activism

When the Hollywood types, who are unrepentant members of the 1%, were dropping by New York's Zucotti Park to show their "support" for the Occupy Wall Street protests led primarily by drumming, chanting unemployed young people in Guy Fawkes^® masks, I knew the movement was doomed. Just like the Tea Party (which is so 2009), was co-opted by the mainstream GOP, the Occupy movement was being co-opted by the forces against which it protested. Of course, the Hollywood types wanted to be identified with the purity of youthful protest. They wanted to experience, to live into, to participate somehow in this great generational Munchean scream against the power elites, because they knew in their heart of hearts that it had the moral high ground. It is an existentialist dream: to learn by pretending to be something one is not.

John Paul Sartre once described existentialists as people who "believe that existence comes before essence." The elites who show up and pretend to protest against themselves, gain not the moral high ground, but merely an absurdist henna tattoo of truthiness (to borrow a Colbertian term) designed to display what it means to be 25, jobless, highly educated and without hope for the future. The tattoo will eventually wash off and the elite can go back to their everyday world of money, power and privilege. But for now, they bear the marks in their bodies of suffering and protest.

I write this, not as an anti-government “conservative” (a lovely, but meaningless term), but as an enthusiastic advocate of activist, efficient and effective government. In today’s strange political environment, that makes me a “liberal” (another lovely, but equally meaningless term). It was my liberalism that caused me to sign on to the SNAP Challenge, where participants agree to live for a week on a $4 per day budget for food in order to “experience” what the people who really live on a $4 per day budget for food really experience.

I’ve been saving my money all week, so I could go out with friends tonight to Motor Supply Bistro and have a salad. I blew the $7.50 I had saved so far this week on a sliced Fuji apple salad with blueberries and pecans over curly leaf lettuce with feta and an orange-key lime vinaigrette dressing. It was utterly Divine. I would have worshipped it, but I was too busy eating and reveling in the incarnate glory of fruits and veggies. Strangely, I felt that I deserved it: I had grits for breakfast ($.15) and two peanut butter and strawberry preserves sandwiches ($.35 ea) for lunch.

Years ago, when I was much closer in socio-economic level to people who live on food stamps, I was visiting a friend in Atlanta who really did receive food stamps. He described the giddiness of going to the grocery store at the beginning of the month and carefully choosing a month’s supply of food. Carefully, because he was going to include a large, juicy porterhouse or rib eye as part of his monthly allotment. I was shocked—after all I paid full price for all my food, and as a tax payer, I was paying for his porterhouse. Shouldn’t he be buying more peanut butter?

“You just don’t get it, do you? We are barely scraping by most days. Can’t I have a day once in a while where I get to eat something I want, instead of just eating to fill me up?”

Here’s the real lesson I’ve learned this week. SNAP recipients are people for whom food becomes an obsession, not because they are gathering with other rich people to nibble on the latest Pate de Foie Gras washed down with Beaujolais Nouveau, but because they have to obsess with food to simply stretch their inadequate resources over a month. The poor are just like us, with less money. I have not been poor this week. I live in a nice house, I have a great job, I drive a fabulous car, I’m writing this on a computer that costs as much as some poor people’s cars. I could quit this experience anytime I choose. This is all experience, not essence. I am only existentially poor.

But I am more aware that my food choices are just that: choices, not necessities. And though I may not be in the 1% of American wealthy, I am in the 1% of the planet’s wealthy. And I can make better choices, every day, in my ethical and personal life. I can stand up for people who don’t have choices. That’s what this week has been about. And I am profoundly grateful for having been reminded of that. 

Woody Allen once said: “I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.”  There are no easy answers to the problem of food insecurity in the richest country in the world. But experiencing it, even for just a few days, even in such a limited and yes, hypocritical manner, has made me more determined than ever to keep working on the problem.

SNAP Challenge Day 3

It’s the third most popular grain grown in the world, after corn and wheat. But since so much of the corn grown is used other than for human consumption, rice and wheat are tied as the staples of human life. Rice provides more than 20% of all the calories eaten by all 7 billion humans on the planet.

I suspect it was at least that for me today. But oats and wheat put in respectable showings as well.

Day 3 of the SNAP Challenge began with a steaming bowl of oatmeal. I think I’m getting the hang of this now. You put about 25% more than the required water in the bowl before you flip the microwave to “irradiate” and it comes out with a milky colored liquid, which is nearly enough to convince you, if you’re not thinking too clearly in those pre-caffeine moments, that you’ve put milk on it. Which you haven’t because there’s not enough in the food stamp budget for milk. A bowl of oatmeal is only about $.15.

I was in Florence today, at the remarkable Southeastern Institute of Manufacturing and Technology at Florence Technical College where students can train for jobs that got sent off to Asia in the last decade of globalized economic madness. (In Asia, by the way, they eat lots of rice. So your food stamp diet can prepare you for a high tech career in some exotic Asian country where they still believe in economic development.) The SIMT was packed with business and education leaders from around the Pee Dee imploring an audience who already agreed with them that South Carolina should invest in early childhood education. There were in attendance as well, the usual suspect elected leaders, all of whom nodded dutifully, while checking their smartphones and hurriedly rushing off to the next meeting. The Business Leaders Summit featured a sumptuous buffet for lunch. But I went out to my car and devoured my two peanut butter and strawberry preserves sandwiches. Afterwards, I went back in to hear about brain development in children and was left to wonder how many of America’s children would have a diet that would let them excel, even with business leaders advocating for improving child care and early grade education.

I ran in the door at 6:45, my stomach grumbling and turned on the oven while I changed my clothes. I took out one of my five Wal-Mart chicken leg quarters, salted and peppered it and then put it into bake. Whereupon I made rice, loaded with salt, pepper and Blue Bonnet margarine.

Total food expense for day three: $2.15. Which means I’m ahead of budget by about $5.50. So the second half of my week might just see some veggies. Maybe even the banana that’s been dancing my dreams, which while definitely only a banana, seems every bit as sensual and seductive as Freud suggested that it would.

SNAP Challenge Day 2

There's an episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show (that I am not old enough to remember) called "the Gunslinger", a parody of the great Western noir film High Noon. In it, Sally serves Rob a perfect Southern meal:

Sally: "Here's your favorite -- fried chicken."

Rob: "Oh boy, and hominy grits!"

Sally: "Oh, I don't know, about forty or fifty..."

Laugh, you miserable Madison Avenue Yankees, but grits is what we got here to live on. At least during the SNAP Challenge. Or what I've got anyway.

My second full day of the SNAP Challenge began with a bowl of steaming hominy made in the microwave. Hominy is made from white corn that's been soaked in an alkaline solution and then sold by Wal-Mart. The reason that they are such a staple of the Southern diet is that they are cheap, plentiful and filling. Especially when they are mixed with cheddar cheese or shrimp and sherry like Emeril does it. 

Of course the staple form of grits comes sans cheese, shrimp or sherry. It comes with water, salt and butter. Unless you are on a SNAP budget and then it's margarine, which is basically a yellow glob of vegetable fat. But it melts quickly and makes a beautiful yellow lake of oil on top of the white mound of bubbling corn meal. And it's cheap. My breakfast only cost about $.15 and it lasted (sort of) until 2 PM. Let me warn you though: putting grits in your mouth before letting them cool off for at least three hours is hazardous to your tongue.

Of course I didn't eat during the lunch meeting with Upstate politicos, who dug into a beautiful salad, loaded with green vegetables, antioxidants and vitamins.  I sipped water. But I did hungrily devour my two peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches ($.35 each) in the car afterwards, which carried me through until supper time at 7PM.

That's when the Gwaltney Chicken Hot Dogs (With Pork and Beef Added) were served with the store brand macaroni and cheese mix. Why they are called Chicken Hot Dogs when they are made with Pork and Beef is a mystery to me, but they are only $.11 each, so who cares if the provenance is a bit shady? Besides I was boiling them anyway, since the grill has been put up for the season. I'll say one thing: these are definitely not your Rabbi's Kosher Beef Hot Dog. They are, however, nicely hot dog shaped, which is a plus. They taste like the parts of the chicken, hog and cow and that you really shouldn't eat. Especially without mustard. Which I couldn't afford on my SNAP budget.

It was the macaroni and "cheese" that was the best part of the meal. Made with my trusty Blue Bonnet and water (no milk, after all), it formed an interesting orange-tinted paste that coated the pasta adequately and almost convinced me that it was good old fashioned Kraft Mac and Cheese.

I only spent $.89 on supper. Today's total food budget: $1.74. Not counting the Prilosec.

I'm up by about $3 so far. And that means that Wednesday, I can actually have something green and leafy. I may survive this week after all. My blood pressure will be through the roof and I will require Lipitor by IV, but I will survive. Just don't tell my insurance company.

SNAP Challenge Day 1.5

Today is when reality met the rubber which was on the road that bites. Or something. It was Day 1.5 of the SNAP Challenge.

You see, everyone else started this morning, but I, in my usual Occupy Pantry Street sort of way, started last night, so that my final SNAP Challenge meal will be next Saturday’s lunch. I would try to explain it, but it’s a combination of Kabbalist theology and quantum mechanics, and you wouldn’t understand.

Anyway, this SNAP challenge thing is really pretty easy. As long as you don’t like to eat food that actually tastes good or is good for you.

Here (courtesy of the South Carolina Department of Social Services) is the list of what you might buy if you were shopping using a SNAP EBT card (which has replaced the old food stamps):    

·      Any food or food product except for ready-to-eat hot foods

·      Baby formula, goat's milk, Pedialyte and Pediasure  (Goat’s Milk???? It’s $3.50 a quart at Wal-Mart!! Are you freaking kidding me?? Why not Russian Caviar? It’s food, right?)

·      Seeds and plants used to grow foods including fruit trees (Excellent, I will just wait until May to eat while my tomatoes grow.)

·      Fresh produce items from authorized vendors (Don’t remind me. I saw a little kid today eating a banana. I would have stolen it, but his dad was bigger than me.)

·      Meals prepared and delivered by a meal delivery service such as Meals on Wheels

·      Meals at congregate meal sites such as soup kitchens (Soup kitchens charge? I told you a GOP majority was a bad idea.)

·      Nutritional supplements such as Ensure, Isomil, Boost and Sustacal (“Sustacal,” now that sounds yummy.)

·      Weight loss products such as Dynatrim, Slim Fast, Cambridge Diet and Nutrisystem (Seriously? Slim Fast? I can’t even satirize that.)

·      Artificial Sweeteners (Tastes like chemicals because it’s made from chemicals. Definitely not food.)

·      Distilled Water (Why distilled water and not mineral water?)

·      Ice (Ice made from distilled water, apparently.)

·      Lactaid caplets and Lactaid milk (Try the goat milk instead.)

·      Cooking Sprays, such as Never Stik and Pam (Sorry, I need the margarine to make stuff taste slightly edible.)

·      Prepared cold sandwiches or salads that will not be eaten in the store (As if I could afford one of those $4.95 sandwiches…)

Okay: on to the challenge. Breakfast today was oatmeal (store brand of course). But I couldn’t afford milk from any mammal, or even sugar, so it was plain. I tried it with Blue Bonnet. Cost: $.15 It didn’t taste bad, but it looked ferocious. Dr. Johnson, in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, defined oats thusly: "A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." The irony of an Englishman asserting that his native cuisine was superior to anyone else’s is delicious. After all, beyond fish and chips, what do the English have to eat anyway? But maybe Samuel Johnson once tried oatmeal with Blue Bonnet on it.

Lunch was rice and beans left over from dinner last night. Cost: $0 because I already charged it off last night.

So, tonight, I was faced with a repellent mash of rice and beans and leftover oatmeal. I had already taken an antacid and thought better of trying either. So I took two slices of my store brand white bread ($.05 ea.) and some peanut butter instead. Total: $.25 Maybe by Wednesday, I will have saved enough to buy a head of lettuce and a tomato. By Thursday, I will probably being willing to kill for a Honeycrisp apple. They are, after all, $1 each.

The SNAP Challenge Day One

When Jennifer Moore, at the United Way of the Midlands, asked me if I would like to participate in this year’s SNAP challenge, I accepted without giving it a great deal of thought. The SNAP Challenge, part of the National Hunger and Homeless Awareness Week is this week (November 13^th-20^th).  United Way of the Midlands and Harvest Hope Food Bank are partnering to launch the SNAP Challenge to help over-nourished people like me experience in a small way what the people who live on SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program—known by its more common name as “food stamps”) benefits experience every day. 

The guidelines are pretty simple: you have $4 a day to buy food. Go.

So, I set off to Wal-Mart to shop, figuring that Publix, Earth Fare and Fresh Market (my usual food sources) wouldn’t be likely to help me get by on my $4 daily allotment. I spent $27.82 and in return I got:

Hot dog buns $1.25

A loaf of white bread $1.00

A bag of black beans $1.22

A bag of white northern beans $1.22

2 1lb. bags of rice $1.26 ea.

Oatmeal $1.68

Quick Grits $1.16

A package of chicken leg quarters (5) $4.42

2 boxes of macaroni and cheese $.64 ea.

A package of spaghetti $.82

A can of mushroom flavored spaghetti sauce $.82

1lb. Blue Bonnet margarine $.92

Salt and pepper set $1.06

Peanut Butter $2.88

Strawberry preserves $2.08

A package of chicken hot dogs (with pork and beef added) $.88

2 sweet potatoes $1.01

2 baking potatoes $1.20

The 1% sales tax set me back another $.28. But still I figure I can make it stretch over the week. Even though there are no vegetables, no fruit, no milk, no French Truffle oil, no Cheeze-Its. Hell, there’s not even any Romano cheese for the pasta.

I realize that my SNAP experience will not be an exact replica of what the 45 million Americans who have to real choices about food experience every day. I will probably feel like crap, since my diet, which is usually very high in fresh vegetables and fruits, is going to be loaded with cheap chicken fat and starch. And since I am a of good Irish Catholic stock, I’ve taken the liberty of taking a couple things “off budget”: coffee and alcohol. (The Irish, you’ll remember, convinced the Pope to put St. Patrick’s Day in the middle of Lent so they could have a party in the midst of the great forty day fast…God, thank you for Canon Lawyers.) Caffeine is not a food, I reason, it’s medicine, hence the coffee. And I’m going to Pub Politics on Wednesday, and even though I can’t eat there, I can drink. Thank you, Jesus, Buddha and Allah. (Okay, not Allah, he’s a teetotaler.) And if you think that my “off budget” legalism is cheating, may I remind you that we fought two trillion dollar wars “off budget” during the George W. Bush presidency and nobody but Ron Paul cared. I’m not inviting him for dinner anyhow.

Tonight was my first meal, white beans, rice and chicken. It required a lot of preparation: soaking the beans overnight and then cooking them for two hours in a broth of water, salt and pepper. I cooked a chicken leg quarter slowly for an hour to make a broth for the rice and then put it in the refrigerator to cool and let the fat rise to the top. It didn’t really work though, so the rice was a bit fatty, but on the whole, it was pretty tasty. There are beans and rice left over for lunch tomorrow. Total cost for dinner: about $1.75, including leftovers.

This is going to be interesting. Unhealthy, but interesting.

To Everything There Is a Season

Years ago, when I started this exercise in vanity (in all its senses) I had no idea if anyone would read it. That was before the Twitterverse and when Facebook was largely the realm of college students. Before Nooks and Kindles and IPads. When I still got my newspaper in paper form.

But people did read it, and some of them became my friends. And some of my friends read it too. Over the course of the last year, however, I seemed to run out of things to say. Or at least things I could say outside the safe space of my spiritual director’s office. It largely became the place that I posted the sermons I preached at St.Martin’s in the Fields Episcopal Church in Forest Acres, a wonderfully diverse community of faith that stood as a bulwark against the narrow divisions of left and right, conservative and liberal. And then, I just had to choose silence while my personal life careened out of control. My marriage ended, my kids were gone, my house suddenly empty and quiet. Silence seemed to be a course of both wisdom and necessity.

As the ancient Hebrew poet once wrote:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

And so it is again, a time to speak. Perhaps this time, no one will read it, having decided that I had wandered away and wouldn’t be back. If you’ve stumbled here whether accidentally or by choice, I hope something I say can be useful to you in this new season.

The Fifth Sunday of Easter Year A: Waiting Tables

In Honor of the Ordination

of

Dianna LaMance Deaderick

and

Patricia Marie Gotautas

to the Sacred Order of Deacons

in Christ’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church

Acts 7:55-60 
Psalm 31:1-5, 15-161 Peter 2:2-10 
John 14:1-14 

He looked up to heaven and saw what no one else could see: Jesus, standing by a golden throne, in the empty blue of the Palestinian sky.

It had only started a few months before, following that great Day of Pentecost, when the streets of Jerusalem were filled with thousands of pilgrims from around the Empire: Galileans, Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Jews, Cappadocians, Pontians, Asian, Phrygians, Pamphylians, Egyptians, Cyrenes, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs. That day, three thousand people, from around the Empire had heard about Jesus of Nazareth and had been baptized in his name. Peter's words of redemption, hope and forgiveness had pierced their souls and nothing would ever be the same.

But of course, everything was still the same: Tiberius was still on the Roman throne, and Caligula, that man of lawlessness, panted in the wings, waiting for his uncle to die. The followers of Jesus were still a hated and heterodox sect of Judaism, who insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that their leader, whom they considered Messiah, was still alive. The twelve men who led them all claimed to have seen him, alive, and munching broiled fish and bread, washing it all down with great swallows of the red wine that they claimed he could even make from water. Joining them, amid the jeers of both the Bible-thumpers and intellectuals, was not the sort of choice one made sanely, weighing the evidence. For the evidence screamed a warning: run the other way.

But he had not run. He had buried himself under the water of the Jordan, as certain as the water which dripped off his head, that their message was true. And not just true in a narrative sense: true in the great galactic sense that the Universe had been re-ordered on that bright spring morning fifty days before. And he knew that day that there was something to this Jesus story, something so wondrous and graceful and joyous that there could be no going back to his home, his old life, the day to day numbness of life under the hope-crushing boot of Empire and Religion. He was called to love mercy, do justice and walk humbly before his God.

So when the followers of the Way, as they began to call themselves, settled in for good in the Holy City, Stephen was one of the voices that proclaimed that being a follower of Jesus meant more than just taking on some sort of religious vow: it meant that your life was suddenly lost and that there was a cross with your name on it outside the safety and purity of the Temple gate. Stephen was one of the voices who heard the hard words of Jesus about the “other sheep:” the women, the lepers, the drunks, the hookers, the gamblers, the insurrectionists, the collaborators and the poor, shoeless little children whose bellies ached for food but whose souls were full of Spirit.

Because, the followers of the Way, the ones who were risking the wrath of both Empire and Religion, of both Law and Prophets, lacked one thing: they did not understand the call to justice. And who could blame them: they had the Bible on their side, a thousand years of tradition, a great scroll of finely scripted liturgy that proclaimed the Lordship of Yahweh for a Hebrew-speaking Covenant People descended from Abraham, and bound eternally to salvation. But Stephen and a handful of others saw that, unless the Way distinguished itself from the rest of the Jewish people and embraced those who slightly less than pure, it would only fade into the irrelevant noise of a world more concerned with people who did things right than with people who longed for all things to be made right.

So when the Phyrgians, Asians, Cappodocians and all the rest set themselves up in a sprawling refugee camp it was Stephen and six of his friends who claimed that the Good News proclaimed by Jesus of Nazareth had nothing to do with Religion or Empire and everything to do with mercy, justice and humility. Even the Twelve were no match for the Gospel.

In spite of the fact that believers were pooling their resources together to help the poorest among them, the widows in the refugee camp were hungry and all because they spoke a different language from the majority of the followers of Jesus. Stephen and his friends knew that the Twelve could sermonize all they wanted about repentance and baptism and the prayers, but as long as even one of the baptized suffered, the whole body of the Way suffered.

For they knew that Cross was borne not by Jesus alone, but by everyone who felt the marks in his hands and in her feet and side. Following his Resurrection, Jesus had first appeared, not to the Twelve, but to the women among them, and in fact, one particular woman, the one who had anointed his head and feet with an alabaster jar of the world's most expensive perfume. The one unafraid to touch him, the kiss him, to declare him the single most beautiful thing she had ever laid eyes on. The woman who refused to stay an outsider. The widows in the camp were outsiders to the Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus, but if they stayed that way, the Gospel itself was imperiled.

The Twelve were concerned with more important things: “It is not right” they said with all the seriousness of Apostolic Order, “that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait at tables. Therefore, friends, select from among yourselves seven men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task, while we, for our part, will devote ourselves to prayer and to serving the word.”

The People of the Way thought that was a good solution. The Twelve, holy as they were, would devote themselves to making sure that the prayers, the word, and the liturgy were duly celebrated, that baptisms continued in the Jordan, that the great enterprise of Temple, Law and Tradition continued among the Jesus people. So they brought Stephen and his friends Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and the Syrian Nicolaus before the Twelve who laid hands on them and declared them servants of the Table. They would serve to make Christ and his redemptive love known, by their word and example, to those among whom they lived, and worked, and worshiped. They were to interpret to the Church the needs, concerns, and hopes of the world. From the moment the Twelve laid their holy, religious hands on the Magnificent Seven, the Church would never be the same: there would always be the voice of Servants of the Table, the ones who knew clearly that the life, death and Raising of Jesus meant, not a new religion, not simply Word and Prayers and the Apostles' teaching, but the loving of mercy, the doing of justice and the walking in humility to the place where their own Cross awaited them. To be sure, they worked to feed the hungry, but they had another dimension to their new vocation: to prevent the followers of Jesus from believing that it is more important to pray in the presence of poverty than to eliminate it.

And that's how Stephen found himself, on a high place, outside the walls of Jerusalem, his eyes focused on something in the blue sky that only he could see. Earlier that day he had dared to preach in the Synagogue of the Freedmen and declared that the word of all the Prophets and Yahweh himself were fulfilled in the life of Jesus, the Nazarene prophet whose presence still hung over Jerusalem a year after his death. Fury poured forth from the good, pious and holy people who were trying to pray and listen to the Scriptures that day. How dare this waiter—who could not even speak proper Aramaic—come into their place of worship and speak such unholy words. Had not the Chief Priests themselves ordered turned the Nazarene over to be executed by the Roman authorities? Had the Nazarene not died, on the hill outside the Temple, a sign of his false claims? Were they still not the Chosen Ones of Yahweh, the Children of Abraham, the inheritors of an Eternal Promise, the People of the Covenant, of the Land that stretched from sea to shining sea?

He'd been hauled before the same Sanhedrin who had condemned the Nazarene and there he stood, unrepentant before them all. He began a long and winding sermon that took them through the entire sweeping story of salvation, beginning at Abraham, through

Moses, David and Solomon. After declaring that God could not be confined to a building, no matter how holy or beautiful, he fairly spat his sermon's climax: “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers. You are the ones that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it.” Then he did it. He committed the act that would forever mark the short, glorious and tragic life of the first martyr of Christianity. Stephen, the waiter, the Deacon, the martyr, looked into that bright, empty unbroken Palestinian blue and told them: “Look! I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!”

That was all the crowd of promise keepers needed. They covered their ears and rushed him, a buzzing angry swarm of hornets, intent on only one thing: destroying this despicable man who dared to blame them for the injustice that they had committed. They dragged him outside the walls of Jerusalem, to demonstrate once and for all what justice looked like: like a rock, soaked with the blood and brains of anyone who would dare question whether that is really justice. The text gives us a tantalizing peek at the future of the Gospel when it notes, almost as a footnote, that “the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul.”

As the rocks smashed his skull, Stephen struggled to his feet. He raised his hands high to the blue vault above: “Lord Jesus,” he cried, “receive my spirit.” Another rock knocked him to his knees. “Lord,” he whispered, as his eyes rolled back into his head, “please don't hold this against them.” Then he crumbled into a tiny, dying ball of mercy, justice and humility.

The calling of these first Deacons might have passed away into the lost memory of the ancient Church had it not been for one blessed and ironic fact: the Apostles only wanted to get back to feeling holy and not have to encounter the unpleasant reality of a world that cries for justice. Yet, when they laid hands on the Seven, they managed to unhook the Gospel from Religion and turn its power loose on the world. From then on, the Church would understand that in order to devote itself to Word and Prayer, it had to to devote itself to waiting tables. It had to live a forgiving Gospel, an inclusive Gospel, a Gospel that reconciled and made all things new. That young man Saul, who stood there, arms folded, in approval of the murder of the young man Stephen, would later gaze into the sky in Syria, and see what Stephen saw. He would lead the Church into the fullness of the forgiving, inclusive and reconciling Gospel. And though the text does not say it, nor did Saul ever later discuss it in his writings, by the time he became the Apostle Paul, he, too, was preaching the message of Stephen. Some Gospel seed must have taken root in his heart that day.

The history of the Order of Deacons in God's One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is the history of the Church on its journey to discovering Gospel truth. As the message spread throughout the Empire, Deacons were deployed to the little house churches that sprung up everywhere the message was preached. They had a special role: to serve the poor, the sick, the hungry, and the imprisoned in the Name of Christ and to act that role out liturgically in the Mass for all God's people, wearing their stoles over their shoulders, like the towel Jesus used to dry his disciples' feet at the Last Supper. That's why Deacons proclaim the Gospel and set the Holy Table for the Eucharist. That's why Deacons' sermons are so very different from those of Priests. The Deacon's call is outward, towards the world, and the Priests' inward towards the Church. Because Deacons had a special and prophetic call to remind the Church that as a Body each of us is likewise called to do this, they often came into conflict with the hierarchical structures of the Church. By the time of the Middle Ages, the first Order of Ministry after the Apostles was reduced to a temporary, transitional step towards the Priesthood. Finally, by the mid-20^th century, the Church heard once again the message of Stephen and his friends, and the Diaconate was re-established, this time, one hopes, once and for all.

There have been times that the Church has forgotten the simple truth that the Gospel is not pie in the sky when you die, but is the hard, sweaty, dirty work of transforming the world now. And each time it does, the Holy Spirit raises back up the ancient order of Deacons to pick up a towel and start waiting tables. Amen.