Happy Thanksgiving.
I went home to my family, of course—I’m actually still
there, at my parents’ house. I’ll head back to campus on Sunday, not that I
have to get back by any particular deadline, but that’s when my ride is
traveling. For the past several years I’ve gotten rides to and from my
celebrations with Kit and Allen and their families. I always assumed they were
going to a Thanksgiving celebration of their own, but I never knew for sure. I
had not asked, and they had not volunteered.
As I think I mentioned, in our school community, information
flows oddly. It’s one of those things where I would have taken the normal way of
doing things for granted, and even when I did encounter an alternative at
school, it took me a while to figure out what the difference was. The
difference is that in the outer world, people share personal details out of
habit, or to be friendly, or simply because they want to share with someone and
don’t much care whom. Here, the masters, and even some of the more senior
students, do not share personal details—or any other kind of information—casually,
but only with a reason or in response to a question. It’s not an absolute rule,
more like a tendency or a habit, but it lends the most mundane occasions an
aura of mystery, almost as though each of us are ourselves a school with our
own entrance exam.
Mundane like what Allen and Kit and their families do for
Thanksgiving. This year I finally asked.
Turns out, they go to Allen’s parents’, who live in the same
small city as mine. He did not grow up here, but the family moved shortly after
his brother died--which is part of how he eventually got to be friends with a
member of the early masters’ group and find out about the school. Kit and her
husband go too because Kit has no other living immediate family and Kevin’s
family live on the other side of the country. They’ve been doing it for years.
Simple and undramatic, and yet how personal are those little details?
Especially if you already know these people and so can put it all in context?
I was thinking about that before dinner on Thursday—my sister-in-law
and I were talking about school. As I’ve said, she knows about it now and has
decided she wants her children to be Sprouts. She was asking, and I was telling
her, about holiday practices and what people do on Thanksgiving. Of course, I’ve
never been on campus for the holiday so I don’t really know, but I understand
that most people who don’t have family to go to for whatever reason go home
with someone else, like how Kit and her husband go with Allen’s family and
Andy goes home with Sadie, Kayla, and
Aidan. She liked the idea of people taking care of each other. She is extremely
pregnant now and kept having to get up and go deal with my nephew, who is up
and running around now and starting to talk. I mean, he’s been saying a few
words for months, now, but he’s starting to really use his words to
communicate.
Dinner itself—they asked me to say grace. There were no
intrusive questions about my studies this time, no inaccurate assumptions I
didn’t know how to cope with, just my uncle said that since I am learning to be
some kind of priest I should say grace.
I know how to say a Protestant Christian grace, obviously,
but I’m not in training to be a Protestant minister. For a minute I don’t know
how to do what my uncle asked, since we don’t say grace at school, and it’s not
like my studies actually include any form of leading others in prayer. But I
thought—what would Charlie do? What would Charlie’s grace be?
“Listen,” I told them. “Listen, but don’t listen to me. Grace
is not one man or one woman talking about God or to God, grace is when God
speaks and we notice. Take a moment to listen to God speaking through this
meal.”
I timed the silence for one whole minute, then said Amen.
And we all ate. But we ate more quietly than normal, for a while.
No comments:
Post a Comment