Month: November 2012

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Sabbath Jackrabbits

A Parable*

“I recall my astonishment when, as a novice gardener, I first learned the miracle of perennials. Imagine putting a bulb in the ground one year, and having the flowers come back faithfully, year after year, without ever having to plant them again. It instantly deepened my respect and admiration for the immeasurable cleverness of the Creator.

Armed with this revelation, I pored through bulb catalogues and ordered a colorful mixture that I planted, in the fall, around the birdbath and in a small patch in front of the house. All winter I waited, looking forward to the sea of tulips that would arrive in the spring, just like the picture in the Smith and Hawken catalogue.

Sure enough, in April, a beautiful pattern of green pointed leaves peeked out through the cold ground. Two days later, they were all gone. They had been eaten down to stubs, each and every one. I was crushed. The next two years the same thing happened. The bulbs managed to push up about an inch of leaves, and then they would disappear back into the ground.

I had discovered a critical factor in the growth and cultivation of perennials that was not mentioned in the Smith and Hawken catalogue: jackrabbits. Jackrabbits about in the Southwest, and for the first three years I accepted their eating the tulips as my gift to them; all beings were getting some benefit from our garden, I told myself. Then I decided to build a fence.

The people at our local nursery told me that a small, ten-inch-high fence around the tulips would be enough to discourage the jackrabbits. Even though they could easily jump over if they tried, it would be enough to deter their curiosity. They would simply eat the abundant grasses and weeds instead.

Sometimes it is necessary to stop one thing before another thing can begin.

The following year, I saw for the first time the reds and purples I had only imagined. The fence was a simple prohibition against harmful activity. As soon as the harmful activity was prevented, something in the ground, waiting patiently to be born, could grow.

The traditional thirty-nine prohibitions against working on the Jewish Sabbath gave birth to what one scholar calls “the most precious, inestimable pearl” of Sabbath tranquility. Similarly, most of the Ten Commandments begin with ‘Thou shalt not.’ These prohibitions against stealing, lying, murdering, and the like, if practiced with a fullness of heart, set us free to turn our energies to other things more precious–to honesty, fidelity, generosity, and love…

The Sabbath is a patch of ground secured by a tiny fence, when we withdraw from the endless choices afforded us and listen, uncover what is ultimately important, remember what is quietly sacred.”

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*Muller, Wayne. Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives. New York: Bantam, 2000. p. 141-143

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Tastes of Sabbath

It’s amazing how taste triggers memory.  There are certain tastes that take me back to Friday evenings and Sabbath afternoons, and I would like to document some of them here, for the sake of nostalgia.  These days, Sabbath meals are very different, but I wanted to start with these older memories first.

Grandma Lowry’s Apple Pie

My grandma, Ruby Lowry, always claimed that these pies were “nothing special”, that “this one might be the bad one,” but we all knew better.  This is my best attempt to replicate the recipe from a conversation with my mother, in which we remembered together what Grandma always said about her pies.

First of all, you will have to decide whether you will make your own pie crust, or whether you will use 2 prepared crusts (one for the top, one for the bottom).  Of course, Grandma Lowry made her own, but she always claimed she “just used the recipe off the Crisco container.”  Well, none of the rest of us have ever been able to make that crust recipe work, but here it is if you’d like to try:  Flaky Pie Crust Recipe

“Never Fail” Pie Crust (makes 4 single pie crusts) from Dana’s Recipe

Ingredients:

  • 4 cups flour
  • 1 Tbl sugar
  • 1 Tbl salt
  • 1 3/4 cup vegetable shortening (non trans fat, such as Crisco or other). You can substitute butter or a mixture of both. Shortening makes the crust a bit more flaky and is easier to work with.
  • 1 Tbl vinegar
  • 1 egg
  • 1/2 cup water

Directions:

  1. Mix flour, sugar, and salt. Cut-in the shortening with a fork or cutting tool (or you could give it a whirl in your food processor for a bit).
  2. In a separate bowl mix vinegar, egg, and water. Add it to the flour mixture, stirring with a fork until moistened. Use your hands to mold into 4 equal balls. The dough may be frozen and thawed for future use.
  3. When ready to bake a pie, flour your surface and roll the crust starting from the middle and moving out, till it’s about 2 inches larger than the size of your pie dish. Remember when working with pastries to handle it as little as possible so the gluten doesn’t become overworked and tough.
  4. Gently roll your dough into a loose log or around your rolling pin (this is the easiest way I’ve found to transfer it into the pie pan). Lay it in the pan, unroll the crust, and gently fit it in-place–don’t pull or tug on the crust.
  5. Fill the pie (below recipe)

Pie Filling

  • 6 apples – softer than Granny Smith (Mackintosh are ideal), peeled, cored, thinly sliced
  • 1 pkg Minute Tapioca (found near the Jell-o puddings in your local grocery store)
  • Zest from 1/2 lemon
  • 1/2 lemon, squeezed for juice
  • Sugar to taste
  • Dash of cinnamon

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F (225 degrees C). Fit bottom crust into a 9 inch pie plate.
  2. Sprinkle a layer of Minute Tapioca into the bottom crust – just enough to cover the bottom.  (This will absorb the liquid so that the pie is not runny.)
  3. In a large mixing bowl, toss apple slices with lemon zest, lemon juice, sugar, and cinnamon
  4. Fill the bottom crust with enough apples to fill just above the edge, to create a rounded mound (the apples will cook down)
  5. Roll the top crust (as above) starting from the middle and moving out, till it’s about 2 inches larger than the size of your pie dish.
  6. Gently roll your dough into a loose log or around your rolling pin (as above). Lay it over the filled pie, unroll the crust, and gently fit it in place.
  7. Use a knife to trim the uneven edges, leaving about a 1-inch overhang. Tuck the overhang under on the edge of your pan. Then use your fingers to pinch the edges for a decorative finish.
  8. Cut 3 little slits on top to vent and sprinkle sugar on top
  9. Place on baking sheet to catch any drips; wrap tin foil around the edges of the crust to keep from burning
  10. Bake in preheated oven for 10 minutes. Lower temperature to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) and bake an additional 60-80 minutes. Serve warm.
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Friday Afternoons

“Sabbath is not dependent upon our readiness to stop.  We do not stop when we are finished.  We do not stop when we complete our phone calls, finish our project, get through this stack of messages, or get out this report that is due tomorrow.  We stop because it is time to stop.”*

I say this to myself most Friday afternoons, as Sabbath approaches and I start to panic that I have too much work that has to be done now. The closer to sunset, the faster I seem to go. But as the to-dos multiply before my eyes, around 3pm I start to see them separate into things to do before and things that can wait until after. I see the tasks start to fall into place, and I start to make peace with what cannot be done right away. Sunday will be soon enough for those tasks. And the before bucket is where I concentrate my energy.  But if I can’t get all of it done before Sabbath, I will stand up and leave it until after.

There is sometimes a fear in me, when I’m in the office on a winter Friday, that someone will see me leaving at 4:00 and think that I’m slacking. I get to work a full hour earlier those short winter Fridays, but I still worry about it. I make sure to tell anyone who looks my way that I’ll work Sunday for a few hours if need be. It’s just another part of my brain not yet settling into the mentality of Sabbath–the part of me still in Corporate America.  Every Sabbath my biggest goal is to unclench, to let my brow smooth, my shoulders relax; to get to a place where I can open my hands up to God.**  It always takes longer to do this than I’d have thought – most times, it takes all Sabbath to get there.  Some Sabbaths, if I’m not vigilant, I don’t get there at all.

In Sabbath-keeping communities, Friday afternoon is preparation time for Sabbath.  By 2pm, most people are done with their jobs or their classes.  I grew up in such a community, where Sabbath prep started mid afternoon, and my sister and I would divide up the chores – “This week I’ll vacuum and you dust.  Next week we’ll switch.”  We would make a grocery run, and Mom would start work on the evening meal.  My mother always emphasized that we should not work right up until sundown, but that we should “guard the edges” of Sabbath time by finishing at least half an hour before sundown.  So when sundown finally came, it was as if we had eased into it.  Everything was done.  The house was clean.  We could relax into the next 24 hours.

I miss that aspect of living in an Adventist community.  It has taken me a long time to get used to working a normal 9-to-5 on Fridays, because my idea of preparing for Sabbath has had to change.  Living in New England, where the winter means a 4:10pm sunset in December, I have had to get used to the fact that there is not enough time between work and sundown to get the house clean, to go grocery shopping, to get everything in order.  Unless I have worked from home that day, I will actually be on the train at the moment of sundown.  If I haven’t done house chores earlier in the week, then I have to accept the state of my environment and find ways to enter Sabbath without fretting over the dust or the laundry.

When we first moved to Massachusetts, Jonathan and I had a few fights over this.  I couldn’t let go of the Friday routine I’d had my whole life, so I would get home and try to whip the vacuum around the house even though the sun had set.  My rushed and frantic attitude made it impossible for him to settle into the evening.  He would ask me to please stop, but I thought I couldn’t enter into Sabbath before everything was in place.  Somehow I had missed the whole point.  “Sabbath is not dependent upon our readiness to stop…We stop because it is time to stop.” 

So I get up early on Fridays to make sure I can get 8 hours of work in and still leave by sundown.  I let my supervisors know that for the 3 short-day months of winter I will need to leave by 4pm.  I put my Hildegard von Bingen station on for my train ride home.  On Thursdays the house usually gets cleaned, but if it doesn’t, I at least clear the table when I get home on Friday, and I make a meal while sipping a glass of wine.  This week I made my version of Ratatouille.  We sat down together and watched a show, something we didn’t grow up doing on Sabbath but something we’ve opted to do once in a while now.  I got several texts and emails from my work, and so I wrote a quick note to them that I would be able to help on Saturday night, but not right now.

After we had eaten, watched our show, and had some chocolate for dessert, we went to bed, with no alarm set.

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*Muller, Wayne. Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives. New York: Bantam, 2000. p. 82

**Voskamp, Ann. One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010. p. 9-23

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Some Background

I have admittedly bitten off more than I can probably chew with the topic of Sabbath.  And yet I want to expand the topic even further to explore why I am not fully part of the Adventist tradition anymore, though I miss it in many ways.

It was two and a half years ago when my husband and I moved to New England.  We had left Tennessee with no intention of leaving Adventism – after all, we come from long lines of Adventists.  The reasons for our move I will get into another time, but suffice it to say that the move was not 100% joyful.  Even when I told myself repeatedly that I was moving to Gilmore Girls country, I couldn’t work up much energy or excitement.

I have lived in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Michigan, Florida, England, Costa Rica, Tennessee, and now Massachusetts, and until this move, I have always lived amongst Adventists.  Even when I didn’t know anyone myself, like when I went to England for a year abroad, my parents gave me a cheat sheet of people I could contact, who would undoubtedly welcome me over for a meal or a warm bed.  They even called ahead and let these Adventist friends know that I was coming.

One of the beautiful things about growing up Adventist is that you can walk into a SDA church anywhere in the world and find an old classmate of your mother’s, someone who knew your father back when, or a shirt-tail relation you vaguely remember, who will be thrilled to tell so-and-so that they ran into a Lowry daughter.

So we could have had that experience in New England.  My parents offered, Jonathan’s parents offered, and when my parents came to visit, they took us to a church so that they could introduce us around.

But what we hadn’t told them, and what I wish we had before they arrived, was that we’d already tried the local SDA church scene.  The first time, we actually did see some friends of mine from Florida, which was great!  But they were in the process of moving to Ohio and would actually be gone by the next week.  No one else talked to us.  The second time, we walked in and sat down, listened to newly elected General Conference President Ted Wilson preach via satellite, sang some songs, and eventually left.  No one had approached us, even to ask if we were visiting.

Now maybe we didn’t give it a fair enough shot – two visits to a church are hardly enough to get a solid idea of what they’re like.  And perhaps there were other churches around that would have been different.  But we got home that Saturday and started rethinking this whole thing.

Why did we want to be part of a church, anyway?  Was it because they held to the same 28 Fundamental Beliefs as we did?  That had certainly always been a big part of our church attendance.  But now, in this new place, we couldn’t get our heads around church for the sake of doctrinal agreement.  Wasn’t church supposed to be something more?*

For us, it boiled down to a thirst for authentic community.  My faith was brittle as it was, and I didn’t think I could handle “toughing it out” in a place where I didn’t feel welcome.  So we started looking around.

The first time we stepped foot into The Gathering church in Salem, we opted for the evening service on a Sunday.  We weren’t sure we were ready to be “Sunday Worshippers” – a veritable dirty phrase in Adventism.  The evening service was different enough from our normal Saturday morning churchgoing that it seemed ok.  So we drove from Wakefield to Salem for the 6pm service, where we were greeted by Phil Wyman’s smiling face and the warm welcome of fellow believers.  It was a small group – maybe seven of us altogether; we sat in a circle of motley couches and chairs and read Come I This Day. We sang songs taken by request from the worship band of one – Phil and his guitar.  And we took communion together with matzoh and grape juice.

We came back the next week, and the third week we opted to try the morning service.  I remember the smiling faces that walked towards us as we entered – some faces from the evening service,  but mostly new faces, eager to make our acquaintance.  As a group they felt so genuine, so loving and open.  We wouldn’t find out for many months that this community had just been rocked by major upheaval, betrayal and change.  And when I say that it didn’t show, it’s not because they were hiding it – it’s because they were living through it, together, as best they knew how.  The love and grace of Jesus was right there, with skin on it, and we couldn’t resist – we let it draw us in.

If we had stayed in Tennessee, or if we had moved down to my hometown of Orlando, we would probably not have explored other options, because the feeling of community was strong for us in those places, a gift from one generation to the next – a reward for staying where we had been planted as young children.  But we weren’t there – we were here.  And I firmly believe that God called ahead and let these friends know that we were coming. 

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*Jacobsen, Wayne, and Dave Coleman. So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore: An Unexpected Journey. Los Angeles, CA: Windblown Media, 2009. Print.

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Words of My Faith

Our Father

Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.

Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil;

for Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.

Amen.

–Jesus, speaking in Matthew 6:9-13, King James Version

Come I This Day

Come I this day to the Father,
Come I this day to the Son,
Come I to the Holy Spirit powerful;
Come I this day with God,
Come I this day with Christ,
Come I with the Spirit of kindly balm.

God, and Spirit, and Iesu,*
From the crown of my head
To the soles of my feet;
Come I with my reputation,
Come I with my testimony,
Come I to you, Iesu;
Iesu, shelter me.

*Iesu is Welsh for Jesus

The Apostles Creed

I believe in God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth:

And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord:

Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary:

Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, died, and was buried: He descended into hell:

The third day he rose again from the dead:

He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father:

From there he will come to judge the quick and the dead:

I believe in the Holy Spirit:

I believe in the holy catholic* church: the communion of saints:

The forgiveness of sins:

The resurrection of the body:

And life everlasting.

Amen.

*catholic small ‘c’ means “Christian”

I Believe in the Sun

“I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining.
I believe in love, even when I feel it not.
I believe in God, even when He is silent.”
-Words found written on the wall of a cellar in Cologne, Germany after World War II.

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A Return to Sabbath

When I told my Seventh-day Adventist family that I wasn’t going to an Adventist church anymore, the reactions were mixed, but the underlying fear was the same:  I was now a backslidden Adventist, in danger of becoming a Lost Soul.

Maybe I’m exaggerating slightly, but not by much.

To be clear, I am still a Christian.  And I’m not angry at the Adventist church or anything.  I am grateful for my upbringing, and I would like to call myself Adventist-Emergent, but that’s not a thing.  According to Ted Wilson, the SDA (short for Seventh-day Adventist) General Conference President, you can’t be Adventist and Emergent.  So I keep that term mostly to myself.

So I’m a Christian.  I have an amazing church family at The Gathering in Salem, Massachusetts.  So why was my family (who never really talks about faith, by the way) upset that I wasn’t attending their church anymore?

Because of the Sabbath.

On both sides of my family, Adventism goes back four generations.  One of my grandfathers was a pastor, and most of my family has always worked for the church in one way or another, with teachers in Adventist schools making up the largest group.

If you’re wondering what Adventism is, it’s best to start with the name itself:  Seventh-day Adventist.  “Adventist” refers to the church’s doctrine about the Second Coming of Jesus – how it will happen, when it will happen.   “Advent” is usually recognizable to most people in association with Christmas, the celebration of Jesus coming to earth as a baby born to Mary.  The Second Advent is what Adventists are awaiting – the time when Jesus will come a second time, this time to take us home to Heaven.  (You can read more about the doctrine here – scroll to #25, The Second Coming of Christ.)

The “Seventh-day” part of the name represents what I want to talk about in this blog: Sabbath.  Sabbath for Seventh-day Adventists is the same day as Jewish Shabbat – Friday night sundown to Saturday night sundown.  24 hours of…well, that’s the trouble.  24 hours in which most Adventists would agree on only a few acceptable activities, one of which is church attendance.  If you don’t go to church on Sabbath, you are not considered to be a Sabbath Keeper by most Adventists I know.

And that’s a big problem, because the SDA church holds that Sabbath as the 7th day of the week (Saturday) is the day indicated in the Ten Commandments, and that it was never changed by God; therefore, keeping Sabbath is a commandment, just like “thou shall not kill” and “thou shall not commit adultery.”  And that makes it a salvation issue.

Adventism also teaches that in the last days before the Second Coming, Sabbath will become a crucible to test true believers.  There is a founding writer in the SDA church, Ellen G. White, who wrote about a time when there would be a law enacted in the U.S. that requires everyone to go to church on Sunday – a Sunday Law.  The idea is that people who keep Sabbath will not be able to follow that law and still be faithful to God (refer back to the Ten Commandments paragraph above).

So when I told my family that I wasn’t going to church on Saturday anymore, that instead I was going to a church that meets on Sunday, they were understandably upset.  I mean, if you believe that church attendance is tied to Sabbath keeping, and that Sabbath keeping is a salvation issue, then it makes sense that you are upset when a loved one professes that they’ve decided to act differently.

The thing is, I love Sabbath.  I have not given it up.  I may not keep it the same way as I was taught to growing up, but I have no desire to abandon it.  “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” still resonates in my soul.

What I would like to discuss in this blog is what “keeping Sabbath” has meant to me, what it does mean to me, and what God is calling me back to, in to, each time I open myself up to Sabbath.