Dispatch #31
Monday, October 7
Iowa City, Iowa

A bright, clear day after a night of winds blustering and cold. Thanne has been visiting--and, in consequence, my dispatches have flagged. She came late Friday night and left today from Fairfield, Iowa at 1 pm. Blessed days. We walked and talked. I must swallow these next two weeks as quickly as I can.

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This afternoon I sag-walked (my crutches and I) down several blocks to a grocery store on the southern rim of Iowa City. In the store I picked up three candy bars and managed to carry them to the register in front. "Managed," I say, because I did not want to put them in my small purse or else in my pockets, since someone might think this the first step of shoplifting. I pinched them, therefore, between the fingers of my left hand, even while I had to shift weight to both hands on the handles of the crutches. It is a slow go, to gristle this way forward.

Just as I cleared a narrow aisle, approaching a customer at the register before me, the toe of my right crutch hit the back of my right heel. I pitched off balance. Spontaneously, I threw the left foot forward and laid weight on it. But this is the leg of the broken hip: I yipped at the pain, skipped my right leg, and--inches behind the customer--again put weight on my left leg in order to bring the right forward for the rest of my bodily weight. I almost fell. I almost fell in a metal-and-bone tangle across the back of the customer, and certainly would have clawed her down like drapes in front of me. That second shift of most my weight to the left leg likewise shot pain through the break. And immediately I wondered (and do wonder still) if I stressed the healing break enough to wound it again.

But I saved the woman in front of me.

Since the cashier had seen my stumblings, I made a small self-deprecating joke, saying, "Not good, to fall on crutches."

The cashier acknowledged me with her eyes and with a nod.

The customer (blonde, medium sized, in her later 30's, possibly on the payroll there, since the Cashier said, "The end of a hard day, huh?" and the customer sighed a weary word about going home)--the customer, I say, never turned around--in fact, left the counter with a smooth leftward duck that avoided sight of me and any sort of human confrontation at all.

She was tired. She had a hard day. I paid for the candy and left, climbing a hill on crutches, testing the strains in my hip--

--And wondering: how often have we, each of us, nearly (nearly!) suffered some painful contratemps, but have at the last instant been saved both from the pain and from knowledge, never knowing the danger or our savior. Children, I believe, have been snatched again and again from peril by watchful parents. And then someone knows, though the child does not. But I genuinely believe as well that we as adults move in a sort of oblivion to the shocks that fall desperately close to us, missing us by dear inches--while we in the event miss divine opportunities of giving thanks. Yet we ought to, you know: give thanks, because the turning aside of our peril so often involves the suffering of another on our behalf.

This should be the difference between children and their elders: that the elders be witted enough to know they do not survive this difficult world on their own recognizance; that the elders may be--can be--alert to graces; that the elders might pause and give thanks unto the God who makes of strangers his angels ever present; that angels come even in the dress of the poor and the shape of the alien.

Amen.

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Last night I was a part of the annual picnic of First Lutheran Church in Fairfield, Iowa. Lutheran Vespers was invited to speak during a quieter moment of the party--just before the hay ride began.

Co-o-o-old the evening. The wind drove the cold into picnic shelters, into our clothing and to our bones. Nevertheless, more than a hundred people gathering, first to eat hot dogs, then to play scavenger games; little children, middle children with loud cries running through the woods; teenagers huddling in groups and standing cool; young adults, parents of all these children watching over: what a night!

When we gathered in one of the shelters for my little talk; when so many adults sat up and down the long lines of picnic tables, cloaked in parkas and sweat shirts, genuinely quiet before my strange-ish self, I said that I would have to write about them in my dispatch, for the sheer joy of finding a parish glad to come together, willing to laugh and applaud all ages together.

And so I do: I extol the church where the pastor willingly asks someone else to "Give us the note" that starts "Be Present at Our Table, Lord"--and the fellow asked turns out to be a tenor, selecting a note so high, the rest of the men dropped into their beards to sing along.

I extol the church where children gleefully, playfully arrive to race immediately up and down the jungle gyms, convinced of their protection, their freedoms, and the love wherewith this church loves them.

I extol the church where men shout out jokes regarding one another, causing laughter to spout all up and down the tables.

Let me repeat that: I find wonderful the church where jokes are told on one another with such affection that offense is neither meant nor taken, for community has overwhelmed the differences and every individual's self-importance has been laid aside like dirt at the doorway.

Gossip does not curl like the cat in such communities, purring as if it spoke but murmurous kindnesses. (But I have watched as gossip destroyed whole parishes like dry rot in the secret spaces of the building.)

Competition is an open game, not a secret jealousy.

Gifts are gifts, not bids for admiration by the givers.

Service is a spontaneous response to the goodness of God, not the labor someone shamed from another.

And the Word of God (pure, never twisted to someone's narrower theologies, nor ever used as a cudgel against pastor or people or enemies within or without) is the First Word for every other word uttered.

First Lutheran in Fairfield delighted me. For the true foretaste of the Feast to Come is not so much in my mouth as in the community which surrounds me at the Lord's table, the Body of Christ whom Paul enjoins us to recognize, that company which shall welcome every crutching stranger as a member of the family.

I ate with family last night.

I am content.

Walt