on unpacking dishes and a return to friendship

I saw a friend last night that I haven't seen in a year and a half. This was a purposeful year and a half that I had not seen her. We hit a crisis point in our friendship shortly after I returned to the States, and I stepped back for some serious evaluating. And I dug deeply into my cave of introverted, intuitive processing, and I did not see sunlight break on this particular issue for quite a while. I had a dream a few months before things reached the breaking point; I felt it was a warning not to allow small or petty things to become a point of contention, upon which something fragile might break.

This is my dearest friend from my university days and we have a decade and a half of true friendship together; it was not something I would throw away lightly, nor without regret. Jamie and I were both Spanish majors in college and we shared similar enthusiasm for the outdoors, languages, cultures, and literature, and travel. We worked together at our university bookstore for several years, and saw each other nearly every day during each semester. We made meals for one another at our respective apartments, did the occasional ski trip, studied Latin American poems together, and celebrated our small victories in our classes with bottles of nice beer or a bottle of French wine.

Jamie went to France and to Cote d'Ivoire; I went to Latin America and the UK. She married a wonderful man she met biking up Mount Evans and moved to the Colorado mountains. I stayed in Scotland and eventually made my passage back to Colorado, where I am now home for a while. Letters, post cards, small gifts and treasures have coursed between us for years. Coffee from Central America, a beautiful cafe bowl from France, Alfonsina Storni poems, our dreams, written out in longhand. Jamie is an organizer...definitely a J on the MBTI, and what she doesn't use or want, she throws away. My letters are some of the only things she has kept over the years. I saw them bound up in small packets in a large chest she kept, one time when she was moving, and I mused that my letters had made the final cut. And I have done the same with her correspondence. Certainly not in so organised a fashion, but her thoughts and expressions of friendship, all kept, because they are dear to me.

When I moved to my current flat, I had brought along boxes from my parents' home that had not been opened in over 7 years. Kitchen stuff, utensils, cutlery. As I went about this mundane task of pulling out these necessity items from a box marked Fragile, I unwrapped the newspaper from a small, porcelain bowl that bore the words, Pillivuyt, France on it's simple foot. Jamie's bowl. I held the bowl and felt it's smooth lines and thought how elegant yet uncomplicated it was. I wished for this in our relationship, now fraught with what I don't even know, just fraught, and unresolved. Perhaps it was time to be in contact again?

And so, I decided to return to her bearing "a plate of cookies" as she likes to say; a way back, a place to meet and reconvene, and begin afresh. We had dinner in Golden and went to a presentation by one of America's foremost mountaineers, Arlene Blum. She had written a book that inspired me in my late teens and early 20s called Annapurna. It documented the story of the first all-female team to climb one of the world's 8,000 meter peaks. It brought us back to what brought us together at the beginning of our friendship, our love of mountains and challenges, and our desire to live lives of passion.

I think this was a good place to start.

Bienvenida, Jamie.

Saturday leaves Sunday

Tomorrow's Sunday, and with Sunday comes The Decision. To church or not to church? I grew up going every Sunday with my parents. Well, until I became a Christian at 16, and decided it was too "establishment" for me, so I refused to go.

Every week for years I have agonised about going to church. I hate it (usually). It's boring. The sermons are long-winded and like store bought bread just leave you wanting for the real thing.
Fresh bread, made by people's hands -- not pushed through some lifeless machine --, moving and pushing and kneading the dough, changing the proofing time and baking time, based on the conditions of that particular morning. There is nothing quite so sustaining or yummy.

Hmmmm. The Rules say: Good Christians go to church every Sunday (or most Sundays!). But when I go, you can always know, I forced myself to be there. I never go because I want to. When I lived in the UK and the village church bell rang at 10:55am to 11:00am to remind everyone it was time to go to church, I would cringe. My flatmate and I called them the Bells of Guilt as we stayed at home and read the paper.

Sometimes when I go to my homegroup, I feel that is more like church for me. We worship, pray, talk, laugh, cry, eat, and discuss hard stuff together. And I certainly felt like the group of people I worked with in the UK...with them, I had my deepest experience of a living, breathing, moving church. Mess, pain, and difficulty it was definitely fraught with, but it moved me, changed me profoundly, drew my attention to Jesus and what he has to say about life and how we treat one another. I could only wish this experience for everyone. Though, I do know that some, even if offered it would not want it. It is not polished or perfect, it can be threatening, harrowing, and downright hard. But it is worth it.

I miss that, and long for church to be that. But I don't ever think it will be. I grew up in a liturgical tradition, and when I feel the need to worship, I most often am pulled back to the kneeler in the pew, to the Eucharist, to Cross hanging above the altar. I read in someone else's blog today that "liturgy is not preaching", it is pared down of extraneous unnecessaries -- those things that preachers, pastors, teachers like to add on to embellish, but really only seem to diminish. I think this is what I want. I am tired of the perpetual footrace to make church "appealing" or relevant as if it were a show to be staged each week. Putting on a good face. It's so incredibly boring because it is a reflection of mere human personality. It is not a place open to the many voices of Us, We, that is Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and The Bride -- together --empowered to reveal the Risen Christ, the Glorious Lamb of God. I am tired of the one-man band that heaves on its harmonica, pounds it drum, and crashes its cymbals together each week.

Bread and wine, Jesus, forgiveness, mercy, goodness, a hand to hold. Here I am at home.