Breakfast

I have always favored breakfast. And, I love to eat breakfast food for lunch and dinner, too.

I think this has been true since childhood when my mother served me scrambled eggs and then later taught me how to scramble my own. One of her little tricks was to add a quarter teaspoon of sugar, pancake syrup, or vanilla extract to the scrambled batter. Or, as my wife and her parents later insisted: add a dollop of mayonnaise.

One of the great surprises of nutrition research as far as I'm concerned is the conclusion that eggs are good for us. This ranks second or third only to those nutritionists' assertions that coffee is beneficial in restricted amounts as is dark chocolate.

As a younger writer I often ate breakfast at a restaurant counter and finished my coffee and toast while writing in my journal. In college, my dormitory mates and I often drove across the river to the next city for all-night breakfast served at a local diner. I can remember at that time thinking my avocation in life might be to become a short-order cook at a diner.

Restaurants such as Ihop, Dennys (which was a favorite when my family lived in Tokyo), Waffle House (despite the jokes it engenders, it makes the best home fries--and there are three of them within a mile of our house in Georgia**), Perkins, Sonic, Bob Evans (which much too late in life I learned was my late older brother's favorite eating place--well, after all, Mom probably taught him to scramble eggs, too) and Cracker Barrel all specialize in serving breakfast all day.

A development in the restaurant world is the growing popularity of gourmet breakfast shops. A recent article by list-maker Malika Harricharan* rates the ten best breakfast shops in Atlanta; I'm certain there's a similar list provided for a major city near you.

I'm told that sometime before the end of this year (2015) McDonald's will be serving breakfast all day in many locations. About time, is all I can say.

Whether eggs are served with ham, bacon, sausage, grits, fries, or even fish, they always comfort and enrich me.

And, be at ease, my friends. Breakfast was apparently important in the life of Jesus.

The gospel of John tells us that the resurrected Jesus instructed the disciples who were fishing offshore to heave their nets to the other side, and moments later as his followers with their new huge catch moved ashore toward the fire he had built on the beach, Jesus invites them with the words: "Come and have breakfast."***


*http://www.10best.com/destinations/georgia/atlanta/restaurants/breakfast/

**After his victory in the 2014 Masters Golf Tournament, golfer and big-tipper Bubba Watson apparently treated his family and staff to a meal at Waffle House (as per waitress at restaurant).

*** (John 21:12).

Planting Spiritual Sequoias

Planting Spiritual Sequoias

            A friend and colleague, who retired from his school superintendent’s job just a few years before I left the same school, was killed last month in a three-car pile-up on an Interstate highway in southern Wisconsin.

          Larry Dean Kooi and his wife Gail were en-route to family celebrations with their children and grandchildren in Minnesota, having driven from their retirement home in northern Georgia. Larry slowed for a construction delay on the highway and his vehicle was rammed from behind and pushed into the car in front of him, according to press reports. Larry died instantly apparently, and his wife was hospitalized for several days after the crash.

          From every place Larry had ever led or advised a school, messages of sympathy came to his family underscoring his reputation as a wise, thoughtful, fair, caring, listening and loving man of Christ.

          Larry, a native Iowan, as far as I know had never lived in the vicinity of big Sequoia trees, which are native to the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California and among the largest and oldest known trees on the earth. He and Gail did travel quite a bit and may have visited the national park that is home to the gigantic trees.

          However, Larry told me once in our casual conversations that he had a favorite poem, and it was about Sequoias, but he couldn’t remember who had written the verses. I researched a little bit and came up with the poem “Planting a Sequoia” by Dana Gioia. Larry was thrilled to have rediscovered the text.

          It is well worth reading Gioia’s poem so I have copied it below:

                              Planting a Sequoia / by Dana Gioia

All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
Of an old year coming to an end.

In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son's birth—
An olive or a fig tree -- a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my            father's
orchard,
A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs, 
A promise of new fruit in other autumns.

But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant's birth cord,
All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.

We will give you what we can — our labor and our soil,
Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of
    bees.
We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
A slender shoot against the sunset.

And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
His mother's beauty ashes in the air,
I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to 
     you,
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.

               (“Planting a Sequoia” by Dana Gioia from The Gods of Winter, Graywolf Press, 1991.)

Dana Gioia’s website is at:  http://www.danagioia.net/poems/sequoia.htm

Even if Larry never visited the Sequoias, they held a place of admiration in his consciousness. And I had the privilege of knowing and working with this poetry appreciating educator who planted spiritual Sequoias everywhere he lived and worked.

It seems humorously poetic to me also that Larry, with three successive vowels in his four-letter last name, admired a poem by a poet with four successive vowels in his five-letter surname writing about a tree with four successive vowels in its name.

I chant those vowels as a prayer for Larry: ooi-ioia-uoia!

Lent Madness 2014--Part 1

I’m in the midst of following my tournament bracket—not the March Madness of the NCAA, but the LentMadness.org selections leading to the Golden Ring crown.

This morning I chose Simeon (of the Gospel of Luke and the Nunc Dimittis of Evening Prayer) over Phillips Brooks (19^th-century Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts and long-time rector of Trinity Church in Boston, popularly known for penning the Christmas hymn, “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem”).

Unless one knows of the Forward Movement [www.forwardmovement.org], a devotional (Forward Day by Day) and publishing arm of the Episcopal Church operated in Cincinnati, Ohio, LentMadness.org is a stranger. For about five years two priests of the church, the Rev. Tim Schenck and the Rev. Scott Gunn, have been running this tournament of spiritual champions during the days of Lent. They see it as a fun and educational way of providing Episcopalians (and others who enter) a casual means of getting to know some of the saints.

In the Episcopal Church, saints have been honored and recorded in a volume known as Lesser Feasts and Fasts, edited and reissued every three years, and most recently revised, reedited, and published as Holy Women, Holy Men.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church has no formal process of canonization of saints so the General Convention, which meets triennially, decides who gets into the publication and is honored with a commemorative feast day in the church’s calendar.

The Revs. Schenck and Gunn, both avid basketball fans, grasped the idea of the NCAA’s March Madness and turned it into a tournament game featuring stars such as Alcuin, John of the Cross, Anna Cooper, Thomas Gallaudet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nicholas Ridley, Johann Sebastian Bach, and John and Charles Wesley. Schenck and Gunn act as a selection committee and set up the brackets with 64 chosen saints. Those who sign up vote on a daily basis to determine a victor, who is crowned as the Golden Halo Winner during Holy Week. Throughout Lent, the tournament goes through a Round of 32; a round of the Saintly 16; a round of the Elate 8 (that’s not a typo; look up the word elate); and a Faithful 4.

To date, more than 5,000 voters have made daily selections in the 2014 tournament by clicking on a winner after reading informative and educational biographies of each competing saint. Many of those who sign-up also post comments on why they voted as they did; why they think a certain person should have been included; or why some other’s choice is unwise. Buried in the comments are lots of theological, worship, and social justice debates. (By the way, nothing bars one from entering the tournament at any time and voting in the remaining rounds.)

For me, this Lent Madness tournament coincides with my own developing interest in knowing more about the saints.

As one baptized a Methodist and a Baptist and confirmed an Episcopalian, I’ll discuss my discovery and growing interest in the saints of the church in Part II.

A Little-Known Martyr and Saint

I have lately been spending time learning about some saints.

Take, for example, Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian peasant, born in 1907 and beheaded by the Nazis in 1943, five years, two months, and four days after I was born.

Jägerstätter was 36 years old when his life was taken, but I never heard of him until 2013. He was a conscientious objector tried in Berlin for refusing conscription into the German army and executed as "an enemy of the state."

Jägerstätter, a farmer and church sexton, reported as ordered for military induction rather than flee as many of his friends advised. He refused to serve and spent the next five months in prison before being murdered.

The story of this little-known martyr is documented in a 1964 book by Gordon Zahn: In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter (Springfield, Ill.: Templegate Press, 1964, 1991).

For more information than I can provide, I suggest you view the embedded video presentation below from the Institute of Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.

(This is a lecture by Notre Dame historian and theology professor Robert A. Krieg, and the video runs for almost one hour.)

The video is readily available at YouTube: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdxBBLXhAJA


I learned of Jägerstätter in Robert Ellsberg's 1997 collection, All Saints: Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses For Our Time (NY: Crossroad, 1997).
Ellsberg is editor in chief of Orbis Books in New York City, and is the son of Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame.

Ironically, Daniel Ellsberg's decision to copy and disclose the secret papers of the U.S. government in the wake of the Vietnam War was influenced by his learning of the experience of Franz Jägerstätter in World War II Germany and Austria. 

Later, the younger Ellsberg, after learning that Jägerstätter's letters and papers had been published in German in 2007, and knowing of Jägerstätter's influence on his father, arranged for their translation and publication by Orbis in 2009. His choice of translators was Notre Dame's Krieg.

As Krieg quips in his lecture: "The Holy Spirit is alive and well."

Pope Francis and the radical theological importance of leisure

Pope Francis converses with two Argentinian journalists on “his life in his own words” in a new book released this week by Putnam (Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words. 2013).

New York Times reviewer Mark Oppenheimer says the conversations reveal “cute facts” about the new Pope but “not much interesting theology.”

Oppenheimer is sharp enough, however, to see a slight “radical note” in the pontiff’s words. That note, which has to do with faith at ease, lies in Pope Francis’ admonition for us to “relax.” And contrary to Oppenheimer’s assertion that these conversations contain “not much interesting theology,” they may point to the single most important theological consideration addressing the overwhelming consumer culture in which we toil.

Asked by his interviewers, “Do we need to rediscover the meaning of leisure?” the leader of the world’s Roman Catholics responds: “Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.”

The Pope lays the blame for modern culture’s inability to truly relax largely to the destruction wrought by the culture’s creeping elimination of a day of rest—a Sabbath.

Oppenheimer’s review provides a capsule history of Sabbatarianism in America, noting that it has been “a Protestant thing,” but his survey indicates that in America keeping the Sabbath has largely been a social and legal debate, not a theological one.

I began this blog, “Faith at Ease,” by calling attention to the exposition of German philosopher Josef Pieper’s 1948 book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, in which the author suggests that the oft-quoted admonition of Psalm 45, “Be still, and know that I am God,” is more appropriately translated as: “Be at leisure, and know that I am God.”

Leisure, from Pieper’s perspective, is not just a time-out or a break from the usual action; it is a celebration of creation and its commands; it is, as Pieper’s title says, “the Basis of Culture.” Contrary to Oppenheimer’s “slight” aside, leisure is theology at its most basic, what John Dominic Crossan reminds us is the culmination of the Biblical Creation narrative in the book of Genesis.

[Readers may want to view my earlier posts on this topic. 

Regarding Pieper: 

http://faithatease.blogspot.com/2007/02/be-at-leisure-and-know-god.html and 

regarding Crossan: 

http://faithatease.blogspot.com/2009/03/ease-and-worship-gleaning.html]

Incidentally, the new book reveals that a favorite movie of Pope Francis is “Babette’s Feast,” a Danish film that won the 1987 Academy Award for Best Foreign Motion Picture.

I heartily urge you to see this film if you have not yet watched it. The story is a tale of grace and giving, and it will undoubtedly encourage you the next time you partake of a leisurely and sumptuous meal.