Greenblade - creation - faith - justice
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Extending the Table
Expansion: Chapters 16-20
From the beginning, we know that she has an unconventional job, but you almost wonder if she is doing any other work at all beside "church" these days. How does she pay her bills? When does she do her own grocery shopping? When does she spend time with her partner and child? Of course, these aspects of her life are brought in sparingly, if at all, since this story is about her conversion and how the food pantry fits into it. The dizzying, intoxicating interactions recounted here took place over the course of several years. For me, the ability to so thoroughly immerse oneself in a new endeavor and to explore the possibilities was a wonderful daydream into a life that I can't participate in at the moment.
Early in chapter 16, Sara talks about the importance of morning prayer in her life, sometimes just her and one other person alone in the church chanting the Psalms and reading the Gospels (another perceived luxury on my part!). "The Psalms were lodging in my mind, with their complaints and reverence and ecstatic praise and viciousness: They were such an accurate mirror of my own conflicted human emotions, it could be startling." As we continue reading, these emotions are portrayed in sometimes humorous, and sometimes startling, ways. What passages struck you as meaningful? Offensive? Do you want to hang out and cook with Sara Miles, or run the other way when you see her coming?
Comments
Stephanie writes: "For me, the ability to so thoroughly immerse oneself in a new endeavor and to explore the possibilities was a wonderful daydream into a life that I can't participate in at the moment."
I felt the same way in these chapters. Miles the character in this book has a sort of unreality about her, in part because she says so little about how she is supporting herself and how she is handling family life and the quotidian logistics of existence. Is her partner more or less an independently wealthy stay-at-home mom? Or is her partner the breadwinner while the child is at daycare? Are there parents, bills, errands, PTA meetings, and repairs involved in her life?
The craft of memoir writing is tricky, I suspect, in that the author wants to highlight the unusual, singular, or epiphanic, but risks making her life seem like all mountaintops and valleys while most of us are slogging away at the middlle elevations.
I agree, in any case, that it would have been nice to hear a little more about the everyday here and how it was transformed or affected (if at all) by her conversion and these other stand-out moments.
Odd, isn't it, that while she is describing a spirituality of embodiment, the story she tells is disembodied? And I agree that it is. In life there is a constant tension between the vision and how that vision works on the ground. Sara managed to combine these as she carried out the food pantry, but it is almost as if it is confined to her, at least that particular manifestation is. It is her story and how she makes it work is part of her own mystery. Do we even have a right to know how she did it or only that she did it? Would saying how intrude on the privacy of her partner and daughter? Is she telling only the public story deliberately?
When Jesus called the disciples and they dropped everything to follow him this is presented to us as the model of faith. But we know that at least some of these men left behind wives and children who had to fend for themselves. How did they work that out? The Gospels are silent on this point.
I guess we all want an instruction manual and that is just what we don't get.