Chapter Eight

MEDICINAL TEA

Recipe for Throat-Coat Tea

One of the great joys of the journey of tea is to make your own blends of loose-leaf tea mixed with herbs and seeds known for their healing qualities. It is not hard to do and can be a beautiful gift. I learned about a great blend for throat-coat tea that includes black tea, dried lemon rind, licorice, and a bit of slippery elm bark that soothes your throat. You can add a pinch of orange rind or a stick of cinnamon bark to bring an added layer to the flavor to the tea. Purchase these ingredients at a local natural food or health store or online.

Mix 2 teaspoons black tea with ¼ teaspoon lemon rind, ⅛ teaspoon licorice, and ⅛ teaspoon elm bark. Place the ingredients in an empty tea bag. Yield is 2 cups tea. Feel free to add honey to the warm water after the tea bag has steeped for 3 to 5 minutes.

I WOKE UP WITH THAT familiar feeling of a scratch in the back of my throat. I never like that eerie sense that I’ve caught something somewhere. Whatever that something might be, we must squelch it before it makes a nest in our bodies and becomes a full-blown cold or infection. The medicinal teas that line my windowsill are my go-to on mornings like this. It was still dark as I crept into the kitchen to find the Eastern blend of herbs and green tea designed to coat my throat. The first healing notion came when I realized that my cup runneth over, literally. It was so dark, I couldn’t see the water line and poured hot water all over the counter. The old-school herbal teas ward off all kinds of bad things like aches, pains, and itchy throats. I can drink them and imagine my immune system kicking in and my body flushing out every bad germ as the tea coats me with a loving feeling. I was going to sip tea all day and get ready to feel the scratchiness in my throat and heart being soothed with each kind cup.

These are the kind of healing teas that I hope we serve in the café. I want our teas to heal the mind, body, soul, spirit, and heart. These kinds of teas don’t just have medicinal qualities to heal physical discomfort; they also heal human inequality. When we began Magdalene, we thought helping to heal five women took a large group. Looking back, we can see that it took a whole community. We will pour out tea and feel a healing power in the brew and in the love with which it is served. We want to serve teas that nourish us and the women who harvest them. But as I sip the healing tea, I wonder if the café itself isn’t making me feel a little sick—especially our recent meeting with the contractors. Because our budget is under theirs by a hundred thousand dollars, they believe all we can do is leave things like demolition, flooring, painting, interiors, lights, and countertops to volunteers. Once again, it feels as if our small group is being asked to conduct an orchestra without knowing how to read music. It wasn’t the contractors’ fault or our fault; it was just that the reality of the gap between what we hoped to build and what we can afford to build is vast. Right now it’s as wide as the Mississippi. Because we need to cross it soon, we need either to find a boat or to make friends with some bridge builders.

All we could do after the meeting was make adjustments, figure out what skill sets we needed, and trust that the rest of the money will come. During the meeting, the contractors waived parts of their own fees, called friends to donate a few hours, and promised they would continue to reduce costs as they worked through the project with us. Despite our capable and beautiful team doing the footwork, the to-do list and budgetary needs continued to pile up. When thoughts of being overwhelmed enter our unimaginably busy lives, a scratchy throat is not a bad wake-up call.

Tea is a whistle calling us to pay attention to our bodies. Tea whistles sound like old church bells that take the time to ring out each hour. The pot calls, and we know a respite from the stress and pace of the busyness of this world is before us. In fantasy and fact, tea calls us to the table to sit and reflect and delve deeper into our hearts. The healing quality of tea, therefore, begins before we ever take a sip. The act of preparing and anticipating a hot cup of tea can begin the process of healing us from the outside forces that want to curb our ability to sit in peace and our desire to dream without judgment. Like no other drink on the planet, tea invites us to stop and rest our weary souls. I wonder if Jesus would have liked to raise a cup of tea when He promised His disciples that His yoke is easy and His burden light. Tea would have been the perfect drink for that lesson. We can bear the injustices in the world and the stress of trying to live well when we sit with fellow travelers and prepare tea for one another. We are just beginning to wake up to the healing elements of tea in the United States. While Native Americans have mixed tinctures of herbs for healing, it wasn’t until the Eastern traditions got traction in our open markets that people started craving green tea and the traditional blends of herbs.

One way to experience the medicinal gift of tea is to sit at a tea party and watch the healing that unfolds in the stories and sharing offered by the guests. Tea parties can be simple or fancy, and can offer intimacy along with scones. Wherever and however tea is prepared and offered, an invitation to tea conjures up images of lovely place settings, linens, friends, and discussion deeper than the beverage. Tea gatherings are becoming an endangered, rare gift in the United States that connects us, honors the people we love, heals the broken, and offers rest to the weary. The twenty-first-century’s Tea Party political group in America is in some ways the antithesis of the inclusivity and communal atmosphere called for in an old-school tea party. The political group’s verbiage condemning compromise and the notion of the common good devalues the beauty of a tea party that celebrates varied opinions and stories to create a new vision for all.

One of the fanciest tea parties I’ve ever been to took place in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was given in honor of Thistle Stop Café’s desire to collect teacups from around the world. The setting looked like an English country estate at 4:00 PM, or at least how I imagine country estates look on afternoons. The entire tea service was silver, and the cup and linens were of the finest quality. The guests were dressed without an unwanted wrinkle or stray hair. The host held the party in the fellowship hall of Christ Church, and women were invited to bring an old teacup or linen to donate to the café and share their story. It was beautiful, healing, and lavish. Women from all political parties and representing several countries and generations shared their hope in the story of the cup they offered to the café. As each woman stood and told the story of the cup she brought, we sipped tea, laughed, and cried at the resurrected memories of dead ancestors and the heroic tales of our mothers. Tea transformed into a balm for hearts that needed hope.

I felt like I was in the story of the toad and the girl in 1908 or sitting in a scene from Little Women. The age range of the women attending was between forty and ninety-eight. The oldest woman brought a tea saucer that came from Japan during World War II, when Japanese Americans were put into internment camps. She showed us the marking on the bottom of the plate and explained how the United States had banned imports from Japan at the time. But this piece, with a Japanese stamp, was brought in by a friend. The next woman, who had a thick Russian accent, brought a piece that belonged to a friend who had been a refugee. The cup was chipped, but she had stored it for years. Now she wanted to pass it along to the survivors of the streets. One of the many ways tea brings healing is by challenging us to examine our past and embrace a new future. There was a cup donated by a woman who was trapped in a violent marriage. She felt stuck, thinking that somehow it was all her fault.

An image came to her in a dream from which she woke with a start to a voice saying “Your cup is empty.” She offered her cup to the café endeavor with the truth that we can refill cups with a spirit that revives, not leaves us isolated and lost. The healing offered to us by tea and the cups that hold it is as unique as the sicknesses and burdens we bear.

One story we received after the tea party embodies much of what our hopes for healing in the café look like. This woman didn’t own any china or teacups, but she wanted to make a donation to the Thistle Stop Café. She went off to buy a cup at the kind of shop that would have something she could afford. The first cup she saw was beautiful and within her budget. At the counter, she shared the story behind her purchase with the store owner. “But it doesn’t have a handle,” he protested. “Are you sure you still want it?” “Yes,” she said; “it is beautiful.” She then explained that she left the shop grasping her new purchase firmly. She wondered why the china cup was made the way it was. The handle-less cup became a symbol for her to recognize how a beautiful difference can draw us in. We are made in the Potter’s hands, just like teacups, and none is exactly the same as another. To take the comparison just a step further, every person on earth has a genetic code that shares the same alphabet; we all have commonalities that make us like a beautiful set of vastly different teacups. We each have unique desires and hopes, but we share a common need for healing and nourishment.

Another story shared was an example of the joy that rises from the ashes of grief and how a cup can hold them both. A dear friend had lost her mother. She asked another friend to take a tiny bouquet of red roses in her mother’s special china teacup to church the next Sunday, so that worshippers could enjoy the beautiful funeral flowers during the service. Walking toward the church, the friend slipped on the ice and the cup shattered. She searched for a substitute, found the closest match she could at a nearby store, and planned to tell the grieving daughter after the service.

When the daughter sat down to worship, she noticed it was someone else’s cup holding the roses. The friend was forced to come clean about the switch. They laughed as the daughter listened to her friend explain her duplicitous efforts. The women decided the best place for the cup was at the Thistle Stop Café, because the women of Magdalene know that good things—like laughter and love—can come out of brokenness. Sometimes the brokenness itself allows us to let go of what we would hold on to forever if given the choice. If her mother’s cup had never broken, she may never have been able to let the precious cup go so that a whole community could hear her story and she could find a glimpse of healing.

The most tender cup of healing I received over the course of collecting cups came from my sister. After my mother died in 1997, my sister was given Mom’s thistle pattern tea set. The set was sadly depleted by decades of use and consisted only of several plates, the top to the sugar bowl, the creamer, and one single teacup and saucer. My sister placed the pieces on the shelf of her kitchen where we paid tribute to it with sweet compliments when we were at her house visiting. After we announced that we wanted to collect cups, my sister wrapped the very last teacup and saucer that my mom left and said that she thought Mom would want it to be in the café. I never would have dreamed of asking my sister for that cup, but it is a great gift to the healing hope that we want emanating from that space.

It is so sad to let go of relics of those we love, but doing so breathes new life into their memories and stories. There was nothing pretentious about the tea party in Greenwich and the ten other tea parties given in honor of the café. All the gatherings did was make us want to start a movement of flash tea parties, where communities anywhere and anytime can gather and share stories and cups and feel that we were getting fortified by the love and tea. The first tea party in Greenwich was a huge gift to us at Thistle Farms. We love the notion that tea can be generous. It can be so generous that cups multiply before your eyes as people come to share a sip of hope.

We should pour tea out for each other like prayers for healing and comfort. We should share our stories and celebrate lives well lived. We should toast with tea and not let life pass us by. All the stories of tea and all the healing present give me the energy I need to keep going, whether my throat feels scratchy or not. I want to serve tea to as many people as possible and drink until it is gone. I pray that we get another thousand teacups and stories so that we are sated in a healing tea party that holds people we never even knew but get to share a cup with.

As a thousand people gathered in our last fundraiser for the café, a woman I met the night before lingered in my mind. Two days ago, this twenty-five-year-old arrived on the doorstep of Magdalene off a Greyhound bus. She had been in prison for eighteen months. She said she had been writing Magdalene for a year from inside the prison walls in Arkansas, hoping to find her way home. She looked like a stray, and I wondered if Magdalene could ever become her home or if she could ever find her voice. The previous night was the rehearsal for the annual fundraising event for Thistle Farms and her first outing. We were all gathered and singing “I Shall Be Released.” She sang with her arms open wide and head thrown back that she “sees her light come shining.” I take in another warm taste and pray the night to go well so we can keep it all going.

At the end of the event, I learned about the newest volunteer to sign on to the café. James Worsham is a designer who specializes in taking teacups and combining them with found objects and old wood to create sculptures. It was a divine gift that one of the few teacup designers in the world had come our way. He could take all the beautiful healing stories in the cups and create pieces of art that would make their light shine for others. When we offer our stories, the right people are there to write the next chapter.

Peggy’s Story for the Café

Having admired the Magdalene and Thistle Farms programs for years, I decided to get involved in 2012 when I heard that a café was in the works. I had spent several decades working with women in recovery from eating disorders, and I felt called to share my experience and hope with others. At the time, I thought the Thistle Stop Café might be a place where I could be of service to others, but what I would soon find out is that I had come home. While touring the proposed café building with my husband, I was inspired by Becca’s vision of what could grow out of the space. I mentioned that I was a photographer, and Becca said, “Well, I just got out of a café meeting, and the only position we really need is a photographer.” It felt like it was meant to be—a small sign to me. Little did I know, but my photography skills would also qualify me to paint walls, wash dishes, serve tea, listen to stories, laugh, and give many, many hugs.

The spiritual principles that guide the Magdalene programs have infused every step of my journey with the café. My first project was photographing the teacups donated from all over the world. I was struck by how such a small gesture—one person sending in a single teacup—created hope and energy. These cups were signs that there was a large family of support from across the world lending their prayers. From this first photography project, I witnessed how small changes can make a big difference, and I see this principle at work throughout the café—from how a smile from across the counter can turn a day around or how the life of a woman can be made better by a customer’s choice to use the products made by the Magdalene women. There is a story in every cup, and I am grateful to be a small part of the healing transformations that take place in the cafe every day. I know that love heals.

—Peggy Napier

One of the best gifts tea offers is its constant presence day in and day out. It is there during high-stress days and still shows up the next morning when it’s all a memory. It is healing to have a daily presence that is there winter or summer, rain or shine, joy or grief. Our bodies long for healing teas like a deer longs for water. We hunger for a time and space that can’t be sated by pills or words. We must create and till our interior garden. Tea can water that space and cultivate a rich plot of spirit. There is so much to be grateful for about tea. It is there when our throats are scratchy in the early morning hours, and we worry over health. Tea holds us up when we are shaky and gives us a constant presence to nurture our interior lives. Tea brings communities and volunteers together and offers a viable way for people to enter a community. Tea is the healing gift that can lift our spirits faster than it takes a kettle to come to a boil.