"Tree of the Gods"
In
thanksgiving for the life and pastoral and prophetic and priestly ministry of the
Rev. Peter Denlea.
In
the weeks leading up to Christmas, I had read once more Truman Capote’s story,
“A Christmas Memory.” Some months ago I rescued it from storage in my crawl
space, a bit damp from its place of safekeeping. I allowed the boxed edition to
dry, and now it has character: a bit warped, like its author and the true life characters
he writes about.
I
know the story well. For years I read it at Christmastime to a Wednesday night
Bible study. I’ve also viewed two film versions, the most memorable having
Geraldine Page as the doting and doughty elderly cousin who befriended the
author as a boy, otherwise abandoned until
the age of ten.
One
day, late in the fall, she would announce, “Oh, my, it’s fruitcake weather,”
and together they assembled the ingredients and prepared the Christmas fruitcakes
that they sent to everyone from President & Mrs. Roosevelt to that nice
California couple who spent an afternoon on their porch when their car broke
down.
As
I read the story once more, I was delighted by Capote’s turns of phrase,
painting a portrait of a time long past—yes, harsh in its poverty and sad in
its way, but with a kind and gentle lilt to its voice that uplifted my spirit.
What
surprised me on this reading, however, was the glimpse of grace toward the end
of the book, reminding me of another Southern writer, Flannery O’Connor, at the
end of her story, “Revelation,” of which I wrote in a post entitled “Tricked by Grace.”
The
boy and his cousin fashion kites as their Christmas gifts to one another, as
they had done the year before, and the year before that. They go out to fly them with their terrier
Queenie in a neighbor’s meadow, when the old woman has a startling revelation,
“like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven”:
“My, how foolish I am! You know what I’ve always
thought? I’ve always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they
saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the
Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a
shine you don’t know it’s getting dark. And it’s been a comfort: to think of
that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I’ll wager it never happens.
I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes that the Lord has already shown
Himself. That things as they are”—her hand circles in a gesture that gathers
clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone—“just what
they’ve always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with
today in my eyes.”
“As
for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”
I
thought back on their sacramental preparation of a communion of fruitcakes, and
of the many, often women, who consecrated our kitchens with the incense of
baking, the breaking of bread, the squeezing of juice. I thought of my mother
baking Christmas cookies, red and green, and giving me the “failures,” the ones
that didn’t look as good as they tasted, as she sorted them in tins for
relatives and friends.
In
her poem “Answers,” Mary Oliver envies her unlearned grandmother picking and
canning fruits in the kitchen even as Mary “wakened / To books and music and
circling philosophies” at the kitchen table, concluding:
My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles.
Smiling, in faulty grammar,
She praised my fortune and urged my lofty career.
So to please her I studied—but I will remember
always
How she poured confusion out, how she cooled and
labeled
All the wild sauces of the brimming year.
This
poem brings back the aroma of my maternal grandmother’s Swedish pancakes, the
colors of my paternal grandmother’s jars of fruits and vegetables at the farm,
the salty crunch of the batter on my mother’s fried chicken—and it honors them
all as gods bringing order from chaos, as priests and poets and psalmists
reminding us to “taste and see that the Lord is good,” even as we are, in Mary
Oliver’s words, “sorting through volumes of answers / That could not solve the
mystery of the trees.”
We
didn’t have a Christmas tree this year, because we are downsizing, packing, and
moving. But I had the mystery of home and our deodara in my dream. And, as I
fixed breakfast for us, I heard Eugene Peterson (The Message) on the radio program “On Being” say, “Prayer matures
into the practice of memory.”
I
thought of a spiritual formation program paper I’d read earlier in the week by
a minister who works with the elderly, and how those with dementia and
Alzheimer’s seem to remember the ritual of Communion, even as they forget so
much else.
The
Lord has already shown herself.
Though the memorial line is new, I
posted this on December 28, 2016 and thought new blog followers might like to
read it. Have a meaningful and
hopeful Christmas!
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