Talitha’s Take
We’re coming up on Kickoff Sunday this week (or, the day which I’m hoping people call “bring your cappuccino machine to church Sunday”). As I wrote last week, we’re going to have a “Blessing of the Tools,” so you can bring a symbolic item to join in this fun ritual. So now I’m stuck wondering what item I should bring, to symbolize my work. A pen? Notebook? Or laptop? Is that too obvious? This week I spent a lot of time taking care of my physical office at MPC, painting and rearranging furniture, so should I bring a paintbrush? It’s certainly easier than trying to think of an object metaphor for the work of listening and pastoral visitation that I also do. Well, I still haven’t decided what I’ll bring, but I have plenty of choices. But there’s one tool I used in my ministry this year, which I certainly can’t bring, but I can tell you about.
This summer on our Youth Group Mission Trip to Chicago, I got to use a lawnmower for the first time in my life. Now, to excuse this lapse in my agricultural education, I must say that I grew up in New York City, where I could mow my lawn with a pair of scissors stuck out the kitchen window. I did have a lawn when I spent one year on a seminary internship in rural Oregon, but the congregation had pity on the city girl and took care of it for me. So it was with great trepidation but equal excitement that I put my hand up this summer, when the community garden coordinator asked who would like to mow.
Our group was cleaning and clearing a small community garden in a relatively blighted area of Chicago’s West Side, and the grass edges were overgrown. So I learned to pull the cord thingy, and hold the other thingy, and push it, and eventually mow. I didn’t learn technical terms. But I was thrilled when I got the hang of it.
Later that night our group heard the life story of one of the men we’d been working with. He described what it was like to live in a neighborhood full of empty lots and abandoned buildings, and how he wanted to get out of there as soon as he can. But then he also described what it was like, today, to work in the same kind of neighborhoods and to beautify them. It’s not just beauty, he said – it is value. Mowing lawns and pulling weeds keeps neighborhoods worth living in, worth returning to, and worth working for.
As we enter our “peacemaking season,” and will take our Peacemaking Offering on October 2nd, I’d like to remind everyone that peace, in the Christian tradition, is not (just) something you meditate your way toward. It has to be built, like relationships, and buildings, and neighborhood walks… and it has to be maintained, like lawns. This summer I used a lawnmower to try to build peace and value, in an undervalued neighborhood. What tools are you using, and for what ends?
Every Blessing,
Talitha