Chapter Seven

THE PARADISE OF TEA

Darjeeling

All Darjeeling tea comes from India, specifically the district of Darjeeling in the province of West Bengal, India. The tea gardens in this region have become so famous that they’re now a popular tourist destination where people come to see and savor. Many consider Darjeeling the champagne of teas. While it’s usually sold as a black tea, you can also find it available as a semi-oxidized oolong tea.

An important step in serving Darjeeling and other fine teas is the art of scalding the pot. Before you steep tea, pour some of the boiling water from the kettle into the teapot, swirl it around, and pour it out. This ensures a clean, hot teapot. The best infuser for Darjeeling is a simple stainless steel basket that allows the leaves to plump up and move freely, releasing all the flavors.

A DREAMY ISLAND NEAR NAPLES, Florida, seems like a close approximation of what paradise must be like, so I jumped at the chance to go there to speak at a retreat. I headed there with an exotic tea I had never tasted before, but according to the seller, it tasted close to perfection. On the first morning the beach was quiet, and the sun was greeting the day with new life over a sparkling ocean with pelicans dive-fishing and an osprey making a broad sweep. As I was crossing the boardwalk, I could see sweet little sandpipers scampering on the sand like a flash mob that all received the same text. What I couldn’t understand was why I was completely alone in this paradise.

But as soon as I stepped onto the beach with my tea in hand, the stench was almost overpowering. The tide was going out and where the high tide usually leaves a spattering of shells and seaweed, there were tons of dead fish. I mean tons. There were blowfish, grouper, and manta rays, along with smaller baitfish, too many to number. I kept walking, wondering what had happened to all these fish and this beautiful beach. About another mile down, I ran into a uniformed biologist who worked for the state who explained to me the die-off was from a red tide. Red tide is an algae bloom, which the scientist explained came from fertilizers that get into the brackish water. As the red tide enters the bay and mixes with the salt water, it becomes a toxic mixture. Paradise on that beach was just an illusion, and the truth of how broken and hurting the world can be was visible in the huge mounds of dead fish and seaweed. This was a moment when the curtain was pulled back, and I faced a truth I hadn’t considered before. I had never thought about red tides or how lawn chemicals mix with seawater. It was sad and sobering to see how quickly and quietly a paradise can sour. As I kept walking to learn the lessons of this illusion, I kept my tea close to breathe in its aroma. Paradise is surely an idea of better times and better places, but maybe it is a part of the way of tea and justice, too.

My friend John Prine writes about paradise in one of his songs and says that when he dies and floats away, he will be about halfway to heaven, and paradise will still be waiting just a few miles down the road. Many of us carry that feeling with us most of our lives—that paradise is about five miles away from wherever we are. Paradise is just yonder in the sweet by-and-by and it’s something coming our way. Humanity has always thought that way. If one thing or another would change, then we would be happy in the illusion we call paradise. We can’t imagine that in the midst of our trouble and shortfalls, paradise is already here. If we define paradise as life with God, then wherever we are, we can find paradise. Paradise is almost impossible to see or feel most of the time, though. In the Gospel story about Jesus walking with the disciples James and John, He is trying to help them grasp this concept of paradise.

In the tenth chapter of Mark, Jesus is walking to Jerusalem with the disciples as He predicts His death for a third time. He uses James’s and John’s misconceptions about paradise as a way to talk about living within the bounds of love. They imagine a heavenly banquet where Jesus presides, where they feast on His right and left. They are walking with Jesus and still imagining that paradise is somewhere else. Paradise was right there, and they couldn’t see it because of the brokenness around them and their own fears. Jesus then explains what it is to have a life with Him and teaches them about the three things needed to live in paradise.

Laying hold of paradise takes a willingness to suffer for the sake of love. We have to be willing to allow our lives to be about redemptive suffering to understand the profound depth of living in the presence of eternal love. We also have to be willing to let go of what we claim is ours to see the magnitude of the paradise Jesus offers us. The third aspect of being able to live in paradise now, Jesus explains to James and John, is a willingness to live without judgment. No one can decide who gets to reside there; it is not even Jesus’ prerogative to judge. All we can do is love. There is no true paradise with judgment, ranking, or power. Living in paradise means looking for every opportunity to serve. When we live a life full of service in love, we are there already. In the beautiful hills of Darjeeling, where some of the lushest gardens for tea are tended and where some people eke out a life on subsistence wages, paradise can be found. It’s found in loving families and committed communities trying to work toward a more just system. In places such as Darjeeling, paradise rises with the sun in hills with pleated colors and spins out to the world like a dervish in midprayer. When we see that the place where we are holds both beauty and devastation, we can find paradise. Our breath catches or our eyes water as we see the world washed in love. That’s when we can lift our eyes to the heavens and hear our calling on the wind. I am right where I need to be, drinking this tea along the ghost-town coast in Florida. This may be as close as I get to paradise. From this place I can sip tea like communion. The red tide is passing and I am walking its wake. When we are gifted with eyes that can contemplate the universe, it is a short walk to feeling like we are surrounded by holiness.

I recently read about the Tea Board of India, a large alliance of tea growers and traders who determine the rights of trading and naming tea. A ten-year battle has been fought over the name “Darjeeling tea,” because of how the name is used in branding. The board has given growers of Darjeeling tea the same rights as growers of some wines. People can no longer buy blended tea called Darjeeling. The Darjeeling tea makers have waited a decade for this victory. If they kept up their will to keep fighting for the rights of their tea, surely we can keep going and working to see the café come to life. We have spent many hours in our work at Thistle Farms feeling frustrated by the busy pace, the chaotic nature of more than fifty folks in recovery trying to work together and trying to accommodate all the volunteers’ needs. Sometimes it’s almost like we can feel the temperature rise in the room. It is not unheard of to have to leave a meeting to go to another part of the facility because you can hear voices rising and I wonder if this time the kettle will blow. We are all working in a new area and trying to grow a company that lives the ideals of love. It is like birthing: hard and miraculous. Sometimes when I start to hatch an exit plan to escape, I think about Carole, who is a full-time volunteer in her seventies who works to plan events. She practices her contemplative prayer life, even in the midst of that stress. She has laid hold of one of the great secrets of living in paradise.

One summer day not too long ago in the middle of a sales drought, the manufacturing department started complaining that we needed more raw materials. But we also needed money from new sales to purchase them. We were told by some of our economic advisors that it might be better to put the whole capital campaign to build the café on hold. I went upstairs frustrated and stressed, only to find Carole quietly working at her desk with an aura of peace surrounding her that was powerful enough to calm even me down. She loves creating a paradise in the midst of a storm, and it rubs off on others. Carole stirs a hunger in me for more of paradise.

There may be no better way to get there than through the path of deep silence. Silence is a great environment in which to encounter God and ourselves. Silence is the deep presence of truth, not the absence of words. The words “nausea” and “noise” come from the same root, and one of the greatest sicknesses is all the noise that fills our world and our heads. Noise keeps heaven at bay. Seeing Carole working silently and at peace, I realized I was watching someone who had firmly set herself in heaven while we wailed. I thought everything was falling apart, but she was in communion with the spirit. We don’t get to paradise by stressing or being pulled into a vortex of chaos. We get there by heading in the direction of silence and toward our interior castles.

St. Teresa of Avila wrote about the seven mansions that live within us in her prayerful autobiography, Interior Castle14. The path to this interior castle is the path of prayer, no matter how much we struggle to maintain a life of prayer. When we find the way inside our souls, we remember that paradise lives within us. It may be hard to find due to the stench of rotting fish on a beach or broken dreams that we counted on, but it is there for the seeking. This is it. This is paradise, and from this vantage point, we can see the paradises that we missed.

In 1908, Marcel Proust described with poetic imagery how tea creates paradise. He was in his apartment and still shivering from a late-night walk when tea was brought to him. “When he idly dipped in it a finger of dry toast and raised the sodden mixture to his lips, he was overwhelmed once more by the mysterious joy which marked the onset of unconscious memory.” He caught the scent of geraniums and was carried back to his childhood. This tea epiphany led to his writing A la recherché du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).¹⁵ The memory of tea is powerful, like the image of paradise itself. Tea can carry us around time without the constraints of a timeline. It can carry us back to childhood, to its roots in China, or even to a paradise we only dream of. A cup of tea can be the vehicle to carry us, wherever we are, right to where we need to be. It can bring us to a place of peace no matter where we find ourselves.

Tea has been a companion to poets and a muse for dreamers since the first person thought of the idea of paradise. In The Wind and the Willows, Toad has tea with a girl. “Toad sat up on end once more, dried his eyes, sipped his tea and munched his toast, and soon began talking freely about himself, and the house he lived in, and his doings there, and how important he was.”16 Of course a fanciful toad wanting to woo a beautiful girl to help him escape his fate would turn to tea to create a vision of paradise. Even toads can dream of being princes through the gift of tea.

There is a reference to the teapot (the “billy boiling”) in one of the best-known folk songs, called “Waltzing Matilda,” a dreamy rendition of a harsh farming life in Australia. The song describes a wanderer carrying a matilda, or bag, who sets up camp under the shade of a tree: “And he sang as he looked at his old billy boiling, / Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?”

Authors and poets can hear the pot of boiling water calling like a siren to delve into their imagined paradises, lost and found. Tea becomes a means for toads to escape and for homeless wanderers to find a moment’s peace. It is a path of hope for all of us that we can dream of better times and live better in the time we have.

In all of the spaces and places of life, tea helps us remember that the journey of walking toward paradise is remembering how we were walking in paradise all along. We are walking in paradise even through the longest nights and through the valleys of the shadow of death. Like St. Teresa and St. Julian before us, we can find the gift of paradise as close as our next breath when we remember that even that breath is a gift from our loving God. But it is hard to keep visions close and remember we are walking with the holy.

Even with a perfect cup of tea, there are times as we go through the valleys that it feels as if visions become blurry and distant. We feel so far away from abiding in paradise we almost can’t imagine it. During these months of planning the café venture, paradise feels like it’s too far to reach. There are so many pieces and so little time that we need to postpone the opening. I write of peace, yet the thought of opening this café made me feel frantic. I had to leave a meeting just the other day to rush to the hospital to give last rites to a dying woman not too much older than me. As I pulled up to the hospital parking lot, a hawk was perched on the church across the way and another was circling overhead. The scene was a haunting gift. There is no need to get frantic, I saw the hawks say as clearly as a banner behind a prop plane flying on the shoreline. Being frantic just blurs visions and tempts us to think that paradise is a mirage. Believing that we have been left out of paradise is reinforced by old fears and the criticism of others. This day is a gift, and there damn well might not be another one. Tomorrow may be the day another pastor is called to say prayers over me. Our hope in faith is to live in the eternal paradise and not wait. Not wait until the café is built, or the kids are bigger, or we aren’t in debt, or we are in love. This is the day that we have been given to live in our dreams, no matter how distant or blurry those dreams are.

I met with a businessman who told me to put on my tough skin as I poured him a cup of hot water over a rich Kenyan black tea bag in a china cup I had received from Scotland. I told him I didn’t own that skin and it would be better if he started and ended on a positive note, which to his credit he did. But the middle, oh the middle, the middle is where he questioned whether any of this venture of Thistle Farms and the café was sustainable. He asked me if, because Thistle Farms asks for money every year, we were ready to open a new business while this one was still in need. He made some good points, but I think he missed the real one.

We are not serving tea to strangers just because we love tea. We are serving tea because we love women, and the way to continue loving women is to serve tea. As we were talking, I realized that he never took the tea bag out of his cup, and the tea was so dark it looked like espresso and was probably horribly bitter. So after I explained the financial workings of my dream, I told him the story of a woman in the community who was raped by a relative for many years, trafficked, and along the way was arrested more than a hundred times. After three years of her sobriety, today her daughter and six-month-old grandbaby are living with her and healing together. The outcome for the grandbaby has dramatically shifted, and because the child will grow up safe and secure, we as a community called Nashville are more sustainable. I couldn’t tell if he captured a glimpse of our dream of paradise out of the harsh reality of life, but he took another sip of his sad cup of tea before he left. I wonder sometimes if paradise might even be harder to see from the vantage point of great wealth and power.

Historically, people have paid high premiums for fine tea, for the sweet dream of power and success it offers. Tea has always been seen as a valuable commodity in the West, and we lose sight of the precious pearl it offers us to heal and be at peace as people race to trade and gain wealth from it. I don’t want to focus on the dream of paradise sold by tea traders. I want us all to remember how tea led us to the precious pearls on this earth, as described in the Gospel. These precious pearls are the nuggets of truth that are worth so much that people sell their land to buy them. They are elusive and instructive. They make us pay attention to every detail and nuance in the life of the tea. They make us want to craft the vessel that will hold it and the fine linen to place underneath it. They call us to our best and make us yearn to help the women serving it. It is not just the way of tea that is precious; it is the women in all their stunning blessedness serving it. The paradise of tea lies in its ability to help us find our way to the altars of truth.

As stated in Isaiah 43:1–7: “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you. Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you, I give people in return for you, nations in exchange for your life. Do not fear, for I am with you.”

I first read this passage at sixteen years old. I was on a search for meaning in faith and tried to reconcile that desire with the exilic experience of high school. I loved this passage so much I carved “I have called you by name, you are mine” into a piece of wood and shellacked it. Our lives are the precious pearl nurtured by the gifts of creation like tea or oil or food. When we honor one another as beloved, put out our good cups, lay our nice clothes, stir toward our hearts, and take time to offer compassion, it’s easier to remember how everyone is a precious pearl. Discovering the precious pearl in us feels like paradise on earth.

When we see the precious pearl within another person, we take on the pain of loving and bear the burden of grief. So it is that in discovering paradise, we are willing to bear the cost of loving eternally in temporal time. Living in paradise means we are willing to pay the cost of buying the field that held the precious pearl. Loving one another is the joy that makes us want to work toward justice and seek the beauty of this world. There is no tea that can take away the sting of death or the cost of loving. There is simply the renewed strength to live closer to our ideals of paradise. It is amazing how quickly everything but love returns to dust. The hours spent organizing don’t keep the chaos at bay; the lawn goes to seed quickly after years of tending. Seeing death blurs our vision, making us nearsighted so that our weeping eyes can’t see the forest for the beautiful falling oak. Seeing love illuminates our vision so that not only can we see the forest holding the tree, but we can glimpse the eternal sky under which it grew. Tea is the leaf that helps me see the paradise and promise of the heavens. If you listen closely, you can hear paradise calling as tea whistles for us to come. It beckons us like an old friend to sit with our dreams and memories and wonder.

Paradise is within reach when we surrender to love without judgment and to service to others. We surrender to love and service not so we can get to paradise but in gratitude for the truth that we are already there. We are walking with Jesus down a road, heading to Jerusalem, and it may never get better than this moment. Tea is a companion to awaken us to the truth that wherever we are, paradise is found. As we hold a steamy cup close to our hearts, we’re reminded of the presence of hope and paradise in our midst.