On washing dishes and being church.

I've been reading this book lately: Take This Bread by Sara Miles.  It's the first spiritual memoir I've read in a while that really resonates -- maybe in part because she doesn't try to gloss over anything or make church easy, and maybe in part because it's largely about food.  I could easily quote half of it here, although it's probably more worthwhile for all of us to just go read the original.  So instead, a story from the cantina -- and then Sara's words, better written than mine could ever be.

On Friday I made a giant tocaniță de cartofi for the cantina.  There were 17 hungry kids there, and they piled into the new upstairs room noisily, eagerly sniffing at the smell of stew wafting from the giant pot in the corner.  The other volunteers were late, so I started serving alone, trying to somehow maintain that delicate balance between authority and gentleness that seems practically impossible but desperately necessary.  I dished up stew and passed it out; I led the kids in prayer, trying to model reverence while keeping one eye squintily open to watch for punches and food-throwing.  I doled out scoops of sour cream and re-filled bread baskets, trying to fill everyone's plate and tummies while ladling out kind words and individual attention.  But mostly, I kept going back to Denisa and Emanuela to break up fights.  I'd turn my back to try and engage a shy kid who wasn't talking to anyone, and two seconds later hear a hollered, "Kelly! She threw bread at me!"  Needless to say, it was, well, only a few steps removed from anarchy.  And I was feeling far from cheery or reflective.

Eventually most of the kids were satiated and (amazingly) filtered out with little smiles and nods (or, in the case of two of the boys, by hurtling down the steps and jumping out the front door of the church directly into a big pile of melted snow-mud).  But Denisa and Emanuela stayed, picking slowly at their food and distractedly trying to get my attention.  I talked to them for a while as they finished eating their third helpings, and then said it was time to clean up.  "Can we help?" they asked.

I didn't want their help.  They'd been obnoxious and disrespectful and rude for the last hour, and I was ready to wash the dishes in peace.  But they had already run after the broom and the wash basin, so I sighed and said yes.  And soon we were tromping up the stairs, carefully balancing basins of warm water, bringing them up to the cantina room to wash the now-empty plates.  I washed, Emanuela rinsed, and Denisa wiped tables, the three of us settling into a soapy rhythm.  We chatted a little, not about anything important, and they lingered and lingered, not wanting to go home.

In Sara's book, she opens a food pantry at her church (St. Gregory's in San Francisco), and quickly people who come to the pantry to receive food begin offering to help serve.  The group is far from your stereotypical church volunteers -- mostly unchurched and poor, but faithful to this weekly Friday gathering.  Sara calls the pantry communion, the Table of Jesus, to which all are welcome to come and eat.  More than a "ministry" or "program," the pantry was church itself, God's people gathered to share and rejoice in the gifts of God.  And its magnetism was obvious, as one of her fellow volunteers said:

"... he insisted we had to keep giving people a chance to work if they asked, even if we had doubts.  'The thing is,' he said thoughtfully, 'a lot of people need to volunteer.  They want more than food.'   They wanted, in fact, church: not the kind where you sit obediently and listen to someone tell you how to behave, but the kind where you discover responsibility, purpose, meaning.  They wanted a church where they could bring their sorrows, their gifts, their entire messy lives: where they could find community."

The cantina is hard sometimes.  It's messy and cold and we still don't have a sink, or enough adults to help care well for the kids and also serve food.  I usually get exasperated and short-sighted about 10 minutes in.  But something in this caught my attention -- the sheer magnetic pull of church, for two little girls who don't step foot in Betel on Sunday mornings.  The desire to help, to give out of what they'd received, to find purpose, and to be known and loved: this is what the cantina is creating.  Imperfectly, slowly, haltingly... but truly.  Church.

Petitions.

Our IMPACT kids are working on a new project.  Lupeni has big problems with garbage -- there's a lot of litter, and the dumpsters around town where people from the blocks bring their household trash are almost always overflowing (partially due to dogs jumping into them and rummaging around in search of food).  There are still a few places in town where people just throw trash over the edge of a precipice (out of sight, out of mind, I guess), leaving enormous, slowly sagging heaps below.

The kids in our club want to bring recycling facilities into Lupeni.  Some of the other towns in the Jiu Valley have them, and there's a sorting plant only about 20 km away.  They have learned about recycling at school and think it's appalling that we don't have a way to do it here.  (Well, that's not totally true -- there are a few people who make their living picking bottles and jars out of the dumpsters and then carrying them on rickety carts to the sorting plant.  But it's certainly not a very thorough or efficient system, and a lot gets lost.)

So before Christmas, a few of the members went and talked to the mayor's office about it.  There they sat, three shy teenage girls, nervously twisting their hair around their fingers, while the vice-mayor, secretary, and environmental officer smiled kindly at them from across the huge conference table.  In that meeting we found out that the city was already trying to bring recycling services into Lupeni, but the process of finding a company who would provide it at a good price was taking a long time.  In the meantime, they pointed out, our club could do a lot to promote the idea of recycling, since simply providing a bunch of colorful containers is pointless if no one uses them.

Our kids jumped at the idea, and after we returned from Christmas break, we began planning.  They're hoping to do some promotional short videos, fun stuff like "the superheroes of recycling," to raise awareness.  They're hoping to design some posters to show people how easy it is to collect waste separately.  They're hoping to design flyers showing the benefits of recycling for the natural environment.  They're hoping to follow people around town to catch them littering and then talk about it.  (We'll see how that one goes.)  And in the meantime, they're doing petitions.

Most of the kids in our IMPACT club have a really deep-seated distrust of the local government, which I find fascinating -- it seems like an advanced level of cynicism for a bunch of 13- and 14-year-olds.  But they don't really trust that the city hall is going to keep their promise, or do it quickly, and so they are collecting signatures from Lupeni residents who also believe in the importance of providing separate collection facilities alongside normal trash pickup.  They want to bring these to the mayor's office as an extra dose of accountability and encouragement to bring the recycling infrastructure into our town.

On Thursday, the kids had a day off from school, so 10 of them came piling into the NHF office.  They had designed a really simple petition, so we printed out a bunch of copies, gave them official-looking folders to carry them in, made sure everyone had a pen, and divided into teams.  Then we traipsed outside and divided up stairwells (after I gave them a stern talking-to about respect, safety, and common-sense when going door-to-door).  I watched as the kids nervously entered the dark stairwells of the apartment building, folders clutched nervously in hand, their earlier bravado fading at the prospect of actually talking to real adults.  I waited behind the block in the cold, watching for them to come down.

The first group reappeared only about 3 minutes later.  They said they'd only talked to one older gentleman, who said the rest of the apartments were empty that time of day because everyone was at work.  They were a little disappointed, but jubilantly opened their folder to show me his signature adorning the top of the first page.  "Let's do another one!" they cried, and rushed off into another stairwell.

The next group had better luck, and almost everyone they talked to was willing to sign the petition.  "We figured out that we have to introduce ourselves a certain way so that they don't think we're selling something," the kids said, nodding at each other, proud of their discovery.  And they too rushed off to test their theory in another stairwell.

The third group took forever, and came back jubilant.  "We filled a whole page!" they cried.  After high fives all around, they explained that one of the women was on the phone to her sister, who was currently away in Italy, and her sister was so excited to hear about the petition that she asked to have the kids sign her up even from far away.  (We had to talk about the importance of everyone signing for themselves after that... but it was still fun to see the enthusiasm.)

And on it went.  Eventually I returned to the office, as the kids eagerly went through neighborhood blocks, calling me occasionally to report their progress.  In just two and a half hours, they collected more than 250 signatures, which they jubilantly reported on Facebook.  The next morning they were back again, ready to go out another time.

It's been so fun to watch the kids blossom in this project.  They aren't little anymore; they're mostly in 8th and 9th grade, so they don't need (or want) me and Jack to come with them all the time.  But they still need someone to run back to, triumphantly waving their folder in the air.  Giving them freedom to go alone, to go unscripted, to do as much or as little as they want, has been really exciting to watch -- because they're doing it, and doing it well.  It's a glimpse of their potential.  And there is so much potential in these kids.

The mountains.

It's melty and gray today, matching my mood at the political situation of the past week, both in Romania and back in the U.S.  So today I want to share one of the good gifts of life -- these beautiful, beautiful mountains.

 

 

Sometimes their bulk and beauty is all we need to remember who, and why, we are.