Chapter Eleven
TEA RESOLUTIONS
Chai Tea
Chai tea comes from the Indian subcontinent where “chai” is simply the generic term for “tea” in Hindi. Chai is black tea brewed with selected spices and milk. My friend Susan and I made this delicious tea in her cabin on a cold January morning and vowed we would try to make it every day. Consider increasing or decreasing the amount of cinnamon and cardamom depending on your taste.
- 1½ cups water
- ¾-inch stick cinnamon
- 7 cardamom pods
- 7 whole cloves
- ⅔ cup milk
- 6 teaspoons sugar
- 3 teaspoons unperfumed loose black tea
Put water into a saucepan. Add cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves. Bring to a boil. Cover, turn heat to low, and simmer for 10 minutes. Add milk and sugar. Bring to a simmer again. Add tea leaves, then cover and turn off the heat. Strain tea into 2 cups and serve immediately.
TEA CAN BE A simple means by which we all can make new resolutions. In the few minutes it takes to steep a proper cup of tea, we can rediscover how easily and beautifully everything can be transformed. Water, the simplest form of liquid designed to hydrate us, takes on a complicated fullness of life. The water turns dark as the aroma from the wilting leaves awakens the spirit. The hot elixir isn’t meant to be chugged. Its steamy perfection calls and awakens our gentleness and patience. It asks us to believe in the possibility that as we consume a thousand cups, we may be transformed like the water before us. The steamy beverage invites a moment of silence to consider the beauty of change and wonder. The time for steeping is time offered to us to think about where we are, where we would like to be, and how we might possibly make it. I have used the time waiting for the water to boil or for the water to turn a golden brown imagining how I could lose weight, get on a plane to Africa, or turn into a good cook and make something wonderful for my family.
As I drank a homemade chai on a freezing morning, I welcomed my New Year thoughts. In the twenty minutes it took me to make this cup, I thought about the hospice in Gaborone, Botswana, where my family and I traveled to serve people living with HIV/AIDS. One morning we arrived at nine thirty and there were about nine people in respite care sitting under a porch in the bright Kalahari sun. They had been talking about treatments and health issues, but as we sat down, the social worker said to the group, “It’s tea time.”
Just like that, all the conversation about what medicines and treatments they needed to keep them alive was laid aside as tea was set out for everyone. Social workers and nurses on the front lines of the global AIDS crisis stopped midmorning to take tea. It was a lesson in how to achieve peace in the fight for justice. I drank that tea with a new resolve to live like this: fighting for justice and living in peace. The teatime that morning helped me see the differences in the blue shades of a sky and notice the nest suddenly visible in the tree we had walked by many times on our visits to the hospice. This tonic is a medicine that can start the morning for tea drinkers’, thankful for life itself and wondering how to live more deeply in all the moments we have been given. That is how tea can transform us and can be at the heart of resolutions.
The tradition of making New Year’s resolutions is more than four thousand years old.18 Year-end is a perfect time to reflect back and set goals for the future. I haven’t set very many New Year’s resolutions apart from my continual resolution to lose five pounds and exercise more. We resolve to make amends or change, not just on January 1 or on Ash Wednesday but when we feel like we need to do something different. Resolutions are decisions either to do something or to refrain from doing something. Resolutions seem like a natural way to try to live a better life. Making resolutions is easy-peasy. The problem is in keeping them.
Over the past twenty years I’ve discovered the importance of community in keeping resolutions. One small example is that in my own resolve to practice yoga, I’ve learned that it helps to have a friend to sign up with, a class to go to, and children who are patient when dinner is late. Anyone seeking to make a change or walking the road of recovery knows the importance of community to hold them up and hold them accountable. We need each other because the role the community plays in the nature and implementation of resolutions is huge.
But beyond community helping foster individual resolutions, we need to affirm communal resolutions. These help hold the community accountable and keep us on the same path. As the community thrives, our individual lives thrive. Common resolutions foster the common good, which affects us all. One communal resolution is to live out our faith together. We promise to be there for one another in good and bad times, and we promise we’ll hold each other up and hold each other accountable. When we are together, the sum is greater than its parts. Common resolutions should be at the heart of our resolutions since they are the key to living in gratitude with meaning in our lives. At Thistle Farms, these communal resolutions are formed purposefully and organically. Every week we read together one of the twenty-four spiritual principles we are trying to live by, and all of us vow to help each other follow those practices. We take a resolution to never shut the door on any one individual, and so we all work toward a plan for helping a woman come home, even if she has relapsed on prostituting or drugs.
Our community gathers twice a year to make our communal resolutions. We sit for a whole day and think through what we can do better and how we can move together to grow the company. This is not strategic planning; it is a recommitment to work together to resolve all the forces that would tear apart the women who work there if they were alone. Living in visions of hospitality almost two thousand years old is at the heart of our resolve to open a café. This café will be a perfect example of living in our Christian ideals of allowing individuals to live in their resolutions.
Recently a new resident came empty-handed to Magdalene directly from an out-of-state prison. She came in with a head full of resolutions and the means to carry out none. She resolved to live a life of recovery, regain custody of her children, restore her health, further her education, and get a job. The gap between her ability and her desires looked as wide as the Grand Canyon. But she came into a community with common goals and purpose that could help her make some headway. The way it began to unfold was remarkable. She told me that when she arrived, her new roommate gave her clothes, shampoo, new underwear, and towels. She said she had never been treated with such kindness. I was tempted to say “Your roommate had received all of those things from others, and so she just gave you what was given to her.” But as soon as the thought popped into my head, I knew that is just what we all do. We think we give to others what was ours in the first place, when truly it was given to us and we just share it. Whether it’s a towel, a prayer, or a common resolution, we are called to love the world, so we all have to keep changing to love it better. We need a community of faith with a common resolve that believes love will help us live out our dearest resolutions for the sake of the world.
Opening the café is our top communal resolution, and it draws our community closer together. Even though a hammer has not yet hit a nail, you can feel the strength in the community to see this through. It keeps us all moving forward. As much as we don’t want to give up on our personal resolutions, we also don’t want to let down all the folks who are pouring their hearts into the project. This resolution is calling a community to live and act out their faith in ways that would never be possible alone. The resolution to create the café has a chance at coming to fruition because it is a communal effort. When I imagined the space a year ago, I thought it was a simple idea just to serve tea. After all, people have been serving tea in teahouses for a thousand years. There are countless beautiful stories about teahouses opening in old spaces. No one wrote about being bogged down in permits and the size of the drainage filter in the back room. It is hard to bring resolutions to life. Having community working together makes possible what might be impossible alone.
One of my favorite stories about tea and resolutions comes from the novel The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. It describes the early years of Ernest Hemingway in Paris. Hemingway resolved to try to write just one true sentence a day and he ordered his life around that desire. He moved to France, rented an office that was the size of a closet, and made himself sit for hours at his typewriter and write a sentence that reflected the truth of his heart. When he got too cold to work, he would walk to a café and have a cup of tea.
The other important part of resolutions is to make a small step and see how far it carries you. Resolutions are not magical thoughts that happen to us. Resolutions involve a willingness to do the work to make the change possible. For us the first step in this new year was, come hell or high water, to start demolition. Almost always for people to begin a resolution, we have to clear space in ourselves and in this world to bring new life to bear. So, early on a Saturday morning, a group came and picked up sledgehammers and took down walls that needed to go. The dust was so thick in the room we couldn’t take pictures or even talk to each other. The thick drywall dust fog was a sign of how it’s hard to see, in the first steps of living our resolutions, where we are heading. But the first step is surely a promise that we may get there. The six women—Arleatha, Christy, Jennifer, Terry, Anika, and Ronza—who will start training as baristas and tea servers have been hired and are now on board at Thistle Farms. These pioneers of the café will serve tea and love to a whole community. They represent the reality of the dream. Collectively they are the embodiment of how an idea can change a life. Individually they are a testament to how we can never forget the healing power of love in our lives. We had imagined raising money building a beautiful café; now here is the band of noble women comprising the first team. None has ever worked at a tea shop. They’ve spent more than twenty-five years in jail and prison combined. More than sixty years if you add in their time on the streets. They’ve been sexually abused and addicted, but they demonstrate outrageous courage as they venture together on an expedition to an unknown land. All the brokenness the women have known somehow has not thwarted their ability to trust. They are throwing themselves into barista training. They’ll learn to serve tea and run a café. It will be a long and glorious journey, I am sure.
One of the women doing the training says she lived under a tree before she came into the community. One day she ran after a car down the middle of the road because she recognized the person driving. It was Regina, one of the first graduates of Magdalene who directs our outreach efforts. The woman flagged Regina down, joined our community, and says she never looked back. When I see her, I see a woman of great strength who made a resolution. She is an inspiration as she takes care of her children and grandchildren after decades on the streets. Her story reminds us we are all capable of making resolutions that can dramatically change our lives and the lives of all those we touch.
Just as we had a plan and were moving forward, I was completely thrown off course. That can happen with resolutions. I was sipping a lemon ginger tea on the porch on a Saturday evening, thinking about what to preach the next morning, when I received a call from my brother-in-law. The wave of grief following the news that my sister, Katie Stevens Garrett, had died, crashed over me.
The universal reaction to that first wave of grief takes us under. It’s like moving from quietly walking by a creek and admiring the water to suddenly being completely lost at sea in deep and unknown waters. It comes in a low and sometimes silent wail that we carry within us whether we know it or not. You can see it on a face like a shroud and you can feel it in the air as if it’s electric. It’s the first signal that you are adrift in an ocean of pain. The hope is to cling to other survivors, keep an eye on the distant shore, and try to trust you will find your way back to solid ground.
Katie died from an aortic aneurism. Until that day, she had been a healthy, happy fifty-six-year-old woman. She was just getting to know her sweet new grandbaby twins. With only one child at home, she was beginning to feel the freedom that comes from being an empty nester. The family gathered at my home to plan her funeral, say good-bye to her body, and figure out what this meant for her kids and husband, who has been disabled for over ten years. Forty members of our family, including my two other sisters and brother, sat around my living room to piece together the whole story, not just of the death but of her life. The teapot whistled on the stove as stories rose from the pictures scattered across the table. We could hear her voice and feel her love, which could never be doused by death, no matter how quickly her death had swept in on us. When I gave Katie’s eulogy, it felt like a small way to honor her and help keep her deepest resolutions alive. I said:
Katie was born on Independence Day and took that birthday to heart as she grew up with a beautifully independent spirit that always rooted for the underdog. She was a clear and willing debater for the causes of civil rights and equality. Fiercely competitive in board games and cards, she taught her four younger siblings early on that if she looked at your cards, it’s not cheating; it is your fault you didn’t hold the cards close to your chest. She was precise about language, another sign of her intelligence and wit. She was invited to join Mensa, didn’t have to go to the movies since she could read a book in about the same time, and she loved sciences. Her crowning achievement in her life was easily the gift of her three beautiful and smart daughters. She was a senior chemist that appreciated the precision of a lab and environmental issues. She was beautiful and didn’t have a vain bone in her whole body. She would give you the shirt off her back without a thought.
She helped Thistle Farms filter the water for the products, secured a donation from her lab of a dozen tables, and taught us how to calibrate our still to make essential oils. Watching her work in front of the machine all day was an insight into how changing things incrementally makes a big change in the quality of the oils. She reminded me that God was in the details. The image of my sister, the scientist, standing before that machine, a tool of healing and justice, is a symbol that when we do small things, big dreams can come true. She helped us distill all kinds of herbs so that we could make healing oils for people all over the country. She believed that when you distill it all down, we are blessed in our joys and sorrows and riches and in our poverty.
Death doesn’t take away our resolve, even if we find ourselves adrift in a sea of grief that washes us in unexpected tears in random parking lots or with a cup of chamomile clutched to our chest. It can renew our desire to live in our resolutions as we make our way back to the safety of the shores. When people we love die, it reminds us that how we live is so important. When we grieve, we see pretty clearly from the vantage point of a wide-open sea that what we do now lives beyond us in our death.
Katie’s untimely death leaves me with more resolve to live in the ideals of love all the days of my life. Resolutions are a gift to us and to all those we love who will live beyond us. The saints inspire and give us the courage to live in our best resolutions. How we live will be how we die. If we live in love, we will die in love. So in this season of resolutions, I toast alone in the bleak midwinter to live better, in gratitude, in the days I am given. To resolve to tell the next generation about the loving way the people who came before them tried to live their lives. May all those we grieve be our inspiration to live deep in the truth that love can change the world and heal broken hearts.