The recent conditions of my parents

Posted on March 28, 2011 by doradueck

Today, for the last time, I turned the lock of the small suite my parents moved into nearly nine years ago. It’s empty – everything of theirs given away, sold, or piled into a spare bedroom at our house!

My father died more than a year ago. My mother had hip surgery in October and, unable to return to independent life, is waiting for a bed in the Personal Care Home on the other side of this complex. Yes, she’ll return to her beloved Donwood Manor, but never again to these two-and-a-half rooms, to these particular conditions.

Eugene Peterson speaks of “conditions” in the opening pages of his latest book (a memoir called The Pastor). He means the fact that his work — with the “immense mysteries” of God and souls — was carried out in place and time. Place and time in their most specific dimensions. There’s no avoiding the conditions, he says, and so he wants to be “mindful” of them.

Closing down my parents’ suite has pushed me into mindfulness also of the recent conditions of their lives. Continue reading →

Watching bread rise

Posted on March 21, 2011 by doradueck

So I’m reading merrily along in an article about the “foodie” movement by Ian Brown, one of my favourite Globe and Mail writers, when I hit a Mennonite joke I haven’t heard before.

Describing activity in the pastry kitchen of a Canadian chef school, Brown writes,

[other students] were standing in front of the…bread oven, injecting puffs of steam and watching baguettes rise through its glass doors – ‘Mennonite TV,’ they called it.”

I’m not sure if that’s a dig at Mennonite connections to food (of the Mennonite Girls Can Cook or the More with Less variety) or – more likely – at the stereotype of Mennonites as “anti-modernist,” as technology-free. Well, either way, ha ha.

I can now confess that it’s been a long time since a TV program held my interest beyond a single episode. The miracle of yeast in bread, however, hasn’t lost its charm, and that’s going back to my first batch of buns at age 13. Just this morning, in fact, I got my hands into dough and made up this pile of them, because it’s nice to have home-made buns in the freezer.

Seriously though (we may laugh but not too long!), it reminds me of something else that Mennonites (a.k.a. Anabaptists) are alert to, ideally at least, and that’s the kingdom of God as something already begun, participatory, and as mysterious as the Spirit. And it reminds me of a small kitchen parable Jesus told.

What shall I compare the kingdom of God with? It is like the yeast a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour till it was leavened all through. Luke 13:20-21.

I mix and knead and cover the dough, and when I look again, it’s risen to a lovely mound. As if a fluke, I push the dough down, and pinch it into balls on pans, cover them and leave. And when I check, those irrepressible balls of dough have risen again. Stuck in the heat of the oven, they insist on swelling even more, until they turn brown and are deliciously done.

This Lenten season I’m trying to offer attentiveness to what God may be up to in my world. Watching bread rise, as it were. Last week that meant entering deeply into a number of stories of significant pain. But there was something moving and alive in them too, something good, something very vulnerable but real. Kingdom growth, like the yeast miracles of the kitchen.

Parable of the leaven, etching by Jan Luyken

Where’s the author?

Posted on March 15, 2011 by doradueck

One evening last month, the pastor and I were special guests at our church’s weekly club for neighbourhood kids. It was “I Love to Read Month” and we were invited to read stories to the kids – he because he’s a pastor who loves to read, and I because I’m a writer who loves to read.

Wandering around the church basement and observing the kids at play before the evening opened, I overheard one little fellow, maybe 6 or 7 years old, impatiently asking a leader, “Where’s the author?” He wanted to play outside, but not yet. “Where’s the author?” he repeated.

Hmm, I thought, sounds like they built this visit up a bit, but what in the world is this boy imagining when he hears the word “author”? How I wished I had something Inspector Gadget-y about me, maybe pens that shot out of my fingers or a miniature printing press I could pull from my sleeves! Yes, I wanted to make “author” seem more impressive than the ordinary, grandma figure I would surely seem to him instead. Continue reading →