Meanwhile as Simon and I were making plans for a place of worship that would support and deepen our identity as a worshipping congregation, a congregation with a distinctive identity as people who worshipped nothing less or other than God, Jan was in her element, making a neighborhood out of our nonneighborhood neighborhood.
It surprised us both when we moved into our home and began to hold services of Christian worship in our basement that our neighbors were not our neighbors. We weren’t used to this. We were used to neighborhood, families living in houses next to one another who were, well, neighbors, not just “the people next door from Ohio.” Jan grew up in Alabama, a Southern culture in which neighbors not only knew one another’s names but the names of their uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents along with the stories that went with them. I grew up in a small Western town where if you didn’t know people personally you at least knew about them. There is little anonymity in a small town. This is not always a good thing. But it is probably preferable to this cultivated isolationism that we were experiencing in our suburban nonneighborhood.
She didn’t have a strategy. She didn’t have a “business plan,” or a “vision statement.” She just went about being what she always has been, a neighbor, a friend. She was a pastor’s wife, but there was no job description that went with that identity. Our complementary vocations were different in that way. I had a role that was recognizable as pastor: I led worship and preached on Sunday, I visited the sick and distraught, I administered the affairs of the congregation, I prayed with and for people. I wrote books about getting the truth revealed in Jesus and the scriptures embodied in our ordinary days. She mingled in the neighborhood, got to know the mothers of the children our three children played with, had coffee with the alcoholic woman three doors down, picked up on the Georgia accent of another, and made common cause with her, having to live with “these Yankees.”
If there is a single word that catches the relational complexity of who Jan is and what she does, it would be hospitality. But it is hospitality that goes far beyond making up beds and preparing meals. Inhospitality is in the air these days. If hospitality is not to be secularized into “the hospitality industry” or privatized into “having the Smiths over for dinner,” it requires intentionality, imagination, and context. In Jan’s case, the context is a worshipping congregation. It is not Lone Ranger work.
We were facing this in a more personal and vocational way as we were starting out in this new congregation in the decade of the sixties. Jan, in particular, was noticing that inhospitality is epidemic in America. There are a lot of displaced persons in our American society. It is hard to be a woman in America today. It is hard to care for creation, its resources and its beauties, when we are immersed in a culture of consumption. It is hard to take time to be personal, leisurely, relational with another when there are so many impersonal time-saving technological shortcuts at hand. It is hard to cook a nutritious meal and gather children and spouse and friends around a table in conversation and blessing when there are so many easier and quicker ways to get fed. There is a lot of hate in the air and strangers who are suspicious of one another. There is a lot of rude, even rapacious, treatment of the creation—air and water, soil and forests—that is our home. The conditions are not propitious for hospitality. No wonder we have turned it over to hotels and restaurants and reduced it to what we do in our homes at our convenience.
Strong prophetic voices were in the air those days. Jan made sure we were there to hear them in person every time we had the chance. Martin Luther King Jr.: having grown up in Alabama, Jan was particularly sensitive to matters of race. Betty Friedan: in the company now of a lot of women who didn’t want to do “women’s work,” Jan was listening to feminist voices with new ears. Wendell Berry: his novels and poems and essays deepened her already considerable commitments to growing food and caring for the actual ground, the place in creation where she was placed.
Hospitality had always been in her blood and bones. But until then, as she was working out the implications of it vocationally, she had not been aware of how inhospitable our society had become. She called my attention to organizations being formed to do something about it: fair housing, advocacy of racial equality, conservation efforts, war on hunger, women’s rights, you name it, and began to contextualize these concerns in this congregation, this place of worship.
It is not difficult to account for the epidemic of inhospitality that we find ourselves facing. The increase of mobility with a consequent loss of place and tradition, the rapid proliferation of technology that replaces personal interrelations with machines and computers, the increasingly frenetic pace of life that leaves little margin for intimacy. But where do you start?
Jan planted a garden. There was very little landscaping on the half-acre lot on which we were living, and she wanted flowers. She asked me to dig up a plot of ground for a flower garden. I rented a Rototiller, and it was done. Bordering the back of our property line, our neighbor Mike, a lumbering, gruff hulk of a man who never smiled, had a huge garden. One day while Jan was working in her garden, he came over and introduced himself. When he learned that she was planting flowers, in mock and shocked disapproval, he said “I grow food.” He offered to help Jan make the shift from what he considered the frivolous work of growing flowers to the serious cultivation of food. He also introduced her to something she had never heard of: organic gardening. Mike was a chemist, employed at the Edgewood Arsenal, a center for developing chemical warfare. He knew a lot about chemicals. And however they were being used in Vietnam at the time and on the manicured lawns in our neighborhood, Mike wasn’t going to have anything to do with them in his garden. He taught Jan how to have a healthy, chemically free garden—organic. The garden grew in size and health year after year for the twenty-eight more years that we lived there. The children pitched in, worked the garden, weeded and picked potato bugs, harvested and canned. All of us learned a lot about nutrition and were soon eating a wide variety of vegetables including okra and kohlrabi.
One day after he had launched her into growing food, she looked out of her kitchen and saw him doing something in her garden. Later she went out to find out what it was. He had “planted” plastic flowers for her—an uncharacteristic touch of aesthetic tenderness.
Mike and his wife, Alma, were considerably older than we were and childless. Our children by this time were referring to Mike as farmer McGregor. One day Jan told him of his new name. He had never heard of farmer McGregor. Jan bought him a copy of the book The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Still unsmiling, he seemed to like being in the story.
Jan’s garden was both a fact and a metaphor. In fact, it provided us with a focal practice for reflecting on the strategic importance of growing and preparing and serving food in a way that honored and gave dignity to the creation and connected us to the entire living creation, both human and material. As a metaphor, it spilled over into the congregation. Together we began to understand all meals, and everything that went into the making of meals, as Eucharistic. The Holy Eucharist is a meal—the body and blood of Jesus, prepared and served to God’s people as they assemble at the Lord’s table. The ultimate act of hospitality, the matrix of all hospitality. Everything and everyone is interconnected in an organic way: birds and fish, soil and air, black and white, gay and straight, rich and poor, male and female; and all the meals we eat at home—breakfast, lunch, supper—are derivative in some deep and powerful sense from the Lord’s Supper.
When we realized that all meals have a Eucharistic shape, all the motifs of worship began to get worked into the meals we ate in common around our tables in our homes and beyond.
Is it possible to live in this increasingly inhospitable world in a hospitable way? Is it possible to do something focused and intentional about what is wrong in our society without turning the wrongdoers into the enemy? Gathering friends and family to the table for a meal is our most frequent act of hospitality. Coming to the table where Christ is the host is hospitality at its most complete, receiving the Christ and the entire creation and community of Christ in thanksgiving. When we leave that table, any table, we are blessed, predisposed to engage in a hospitable life.
Jan is a quiet person. Quiet but not timid. She planted a garden. Not an abstract cause. Local, relational, immediate, hands-in-the-soil act. She arranged for church suppers that made connections between local eating practices and the implications for world hunger. She was part of the local Fair Housing Committee working with Realtors and builders on behalf of minorities and the poor.
And she began listening more deeply and attentively to the women who didn’t want to be defined by “women’s work.” Feminism was in the air. Many women in the congregation and neighborhood were trying to find an identity that wasn’t imposed on them by marriage or what society was expecting of them. Jan was aware and interested in this. The details of her own vocation were getting filled in. She was now naming it, at least among ourselves, Eucharistic hospitality. She was acquiring an imagination to bring to these women who had not yet been given vocations.
This happened more and more frequently, women hungry for hospitable conversation, being listened to, not harangued, being understood, not enlisted in a cause. When they asked for advice, she demurred. “Why don’t we just be friends, maybe meet regularly together, get to know one another, and feel free to talk about what we are learning or wondering about in this life of faith that Jesus has joined us in? Why don’t we just agree to be faith friends?”
I don’t think I have ever known anyone in whom the life of hospitality is so integrated in everything she is and does and is carried off without calling attention to who she is and what she is doing. It often took me by a kind of surprise that she wasn’t self-conscious about what she was doing. This is just who she was. This is what she did when she didn’t know what she was doing. But it seemed to me that she was becoming the hospitality center of both neighborhood and congregation.
Where did this come from? It didn’t take us long to find that there had been years of preparation for it: her parents; like their daughter, neither was self-conscious about their faith or witness to Jesus. Their Christian faith had been thoroughly integrated into their lives. Her father was a Presbyterian elder; her mother played the piano for the Sunday school. Or maybe it was the other way around, their lives had been so thoroughly integrated into the Christian faith. There was something seamless about the way they lived that gave authenticity to who they were.
After we had been married for a few years, I began thinking of (and inwardly naming) her father as Atticus, the southern lawyer played by Gregory Peck in the movie To Kill a Mockingbird. He even looked like Gregory Peck—tall, a full head of silvery hair, handsome profile. There was an unassertive, quiet dignity about the way he went about life that I always associated with what I thought of as the quintessential southern gentleman. He was relaxed both in his body and place.
Not that the circumstances of his life had been at all easy. He entered the work force at the height of the Depression. He had to drop out of law school but managed to get a job with the U.S. Fidelity and Guaranty Company as an insurance adjuster and married Dorothy. After twenty-three years in Alabama they returned to Baltimore to the home office of the company. They brought Jan with them (her older brother and sister had left home by then). They lived in a modest row house facing Chinquapin Park with its oak trees and creek. In that house Jan’s father and mother cared for his ninety-year-old father, raised two preschool grandchildren after the divorce of their parents, and cultivated azaleas and roses.
Those azaleas and roses were a witness to the way they lived—the cultivation of extraordinary beauty in very ordinary circumstances in which they practiced a welcoming hospitality to everyone in their family. When I was in their company, I experienced a kind of deep serenity in a way of life that seemed capable of absorbing whatever came into wholeness, naturalness. I thought of it as a kind of Wordsworthian gracious acceptance of whatever came their way, everything fitting without forcing, without questioning. I was still new in the Presbyterian way. Was I also experiencing something quintessentially Presbyterian?
That was the home I entered on a Thursday evening in February 1958 to ask for permission and a blessing to marry Jan. I rang the doorbell. Jan’s father opened the door, surprised to see me. “Jan isn’t here. She is at choir practice.”
“Yes, I know she’s not here. That is why I’m here.”
“Well, come in and sit down.” We sat side by side on the sofa. I didn’t know how to do this. He made small talk. Then a silence. And then, “Tell me why you’re here, Eugene.”
“I…well…what I wanted to…I mean…well, I mean, it’s this way, I…”
He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Eugene, you don’t have to go through with this. Let’s have a cup of coffee.”
He rescued me. An act of hospitality. I never did have to ask him. Over coffee we were able to have an easy conversation in which he gave both permission and blessing. No interrogation. No conditions. “Welcome to the family.”
If Jan had to give a name to what she was doing, it would probably be something on the order of “hanging around this intersection between heaven and earth and seeing what there is to be done.” But she would never have described it as “church work.” She participated in the church’s life and sang in the choir, but she wasn’t much interested in women’s circles and such. It never occurred to her to think of “pastor’s wife” as “assistant pastor.” Her vocation, while not as easily recognized by others or defined to others as mine, was nevertheless distinctive and not to be confused with any of the stereotypes that are still too common. She came across a sentence written by Alan Jones, dean of the Cathedral of San Francisco, copied it out and taped it on the inside of the door of her spice cabinet as her job description: “To live no tight, neat role is truly sacrificial, it is also truly creative because it leaves us open and free (dare we say) like God himself.”
Twenty years or so after these hospitality instincts and skills in Jan had matured and been noticed, we had both of us been asked to speak to a group at Laity Lodge in Texas. Her assignment was to give a talk on hospitality. After she made her presentation, someone asked, “Do you have any pearls of wisdom that you can give us for raising our children?”
Her answer: “Have a family meal every evening.”
That seemed a little abrupt so she elaborated by telling of a women’s retreat she had led a few years before. Her subject was, as it was here in Texas, hospitality. But she had decided to be as specific and down-to-earth as she could. No generalities, no big goals like taking in strangers or working in a soup kitchen for the homeless, but just zero in on one manageable task: gather the family for the evening meal. Every evening.
“I know that it might be difficult, but it should be possible to get everyone away from the TV in their rooms with their microwaved meal on a TV tray to eat together. A time to gather the events of the day into conversation, to enter into the mutuality of passing and receiving, of stories, potatoes, carrots, and pork chops. Share food and conversation with one another. Listen to one another. Receive a blessing.”
She got uneasy when she received no response. Hoping for some interaction, she asked, “How many of you have an evening meal with your family?” There were thirty-eight women. Not one of them raised a hand.
“I came home and told Eugene. I was depressed for three weeks.”
And then this to the person at Laity Lodge who had asked for a pearl: “There are no ‘pearls’ out there that you can use—no scripture verses to hand out, advice to guide, prayers to tap into. As we live and give witness to Jesus to our children and whoever else, we are handing out seeds, not pearls, and seeds need soil in which to germinate. A meal is soil just like that. It provides a daily relational context in which everything you say and don’t say, feel or don’t feel, God’s Word and snatches of gossip, gets assimilated along with the food and becomes you, but not you by yourself—you and your words and acts embedded in acts of love and need, acceptance and doubt. Nothing is abstract or in general when you are eating a meal together. You realize, don’t you, that Jesus didn’t drop pearls around Galilee for people as clues to find their way to God or their neighbors. He ate meals with them. And you can do what Jesus did. Every evening take and receive the life of Jesus around your table.”
When, in 1991, they heard that Jan and I would soon be leaving our congregation, Bill and Yolanda returned to see us and say their good-byes. They had been charter members of Christ Our King Church. Bill was an engineer. He had headed up our first capital-funds campaign that financed the building of our sanctuary. Yolanda had organized and taught our preschool. They had invested a lot in the church. Five years earlier they had retired and moved to a village on the New Jersey coast. Now we were talking in our living room. It had been the children’s nursery when they had first worshipped with us in our basement. We reminisced about what we had done together for twenty-four years.
As they were getting ready to leave, Bill said, “Eugene, you were a pretty good pastor, but Jan—you were an absolutely incredible pastor’s wife.”
A nice tribute. Pastors’ wives get used to being invisible, or taken for granted, or sidelined from considerations of appreciation. It was nice for Jan to hear. And I didn’t mind coming in second.