My Mother

I grew up in apple country.  My parents’ property was surrounded by a beautiful beech woods that became the next ripple out from the happy center of my world, and afforded many pleasantly spent hours of life for me.  The ripple beyond that woods was formed by thousands of acres of apple orchards covering the rolling hills in many directions, filling the entire region with blossomy springtimes and winding rides to anywhere between endless rows of heavily laden apple trees in the fall.

 Somewhere along the way, my parents began the tradition of purchasing a huge crate of apples from any one of the nearby orchards, taking it to an old family-owned cider press in one of Pennsylvania’s unremarkable little “ville’s”, and converting apples into a freezer-full of apple cider to be enjoyed throughout the next year.  Somewhere further along the way, this ritual was informally folded into our family Thanksgiving tradition, with any number of grandchildren showing up the morning of the cider making to be a part.

How often it happens that what has been a vague and unrecognized shadowy periphery in our life memories and our formation may in a moment of reflection come to the forefront of our awareness.  My life is full of such conversions, catalyzed by the passing of years, or the entry to a new phase of life experience, or the perspective acquired by distance over time. 

And so this small barely acknowledged annual ritual in the obscure Sassamansville of my past newly exists in my senses with the sharpness of dull November’s chill, the warming press of now grown nieces and nephews crowded into the small gift shop lined with its shelves of every kind of fruit butters, and pervading it all, the strong comforting fragrance of apples—apple juice, eighty gallons of it, as it pours from the burlap-wrapped layers under the hand-pulled press, apple steam as it rises from the gigantic cauldrons in the next room, cooking down to apple butter and permeating all the air inside and out, apple crushings as they are shaken from the burlap into carts for the local farms.

Last year or the year before, I suddenly saw the process for the very first time as an ancient work of mechanical genius, and found myself coincidentally standing in a doorway in the pressing room that opened to a dark vaulty space in which stood a massive behemoth of an iron furnace surrounded by randomly tumbled cords of firewood.  I could see glimmers and twinkles of flame through little cracks in the darkness, the gleam of a steady blaze in its deep interior, and I knew I had discovered the power center of this whole apple-fragrant fruits-of-the-earth marvel.

For a few years, I have been wanting to tell about my mother as I have told about my father.  My heart fills with warmth and is crowded with reasons for deepest admiration when I think of what I would say.  But just as the “gladness” and the “delight in the fear of the Lord” provided me the key to my father’s story, I just recently saw this furnace, this obscurity blazing placidly within obscurity, as the most fitting picture of the way I know my mother. And yes, that is exactly what I mean to say; she is a placid blaze, a peaceful, gentle force to be reckoned with.

How can any one of us describe our mothers?  For we know our mothers with our hearts far more than with our heads.  We know their scent and the feel of them, the nuances of love and shelter that are so deeply absorbed by our very cells and the very texture of our souls in ways that make words to them and about them bordering on the almost hollow one-dimensional.

This week we gather to celebrate the fact that she is turning eighty—yes, that is 80.  Even she can hardly believe it is true.  When we asked her what she would most enjoy, she requested a family campout in the woods behind the house, keeping the tradition that began the year before my father died in 2009.  She loves the outdoors as much today as she did as a girl, and she will bring some blankets from her closet, and the pillow from her bed, and will clear away the sticks and pebbles and take her sleep under the trees looking up at the stars, waking up covered with dew, right along with anyone else who is as content to do without tent or covering. 

My mother.  Her name is Naomi, “pleasant”.  How overwhelmingly fulfilled is her name through her life.

She, like my father, grew up on a farm, and like him, lived a simple life in simple times.  Even in such simple times, though, she definitely “married up”, into a family with a strongly developed sense of propriety and order in everything, from the tidy “mud room” where farm work transitioned into the immaculate house, to the silver and the china and the table linens, to the prim and respectful protocols of after-dinner conversation in the parlor.  She was an ardently sincere lover of God, but one who in all respects, in contrast to my father, was a free spirit, glowing with health and girlish dreams and brimming with energy, spontaneity, and vitality. 

 

Her home was not, evidently, a particularly happy one, but she lived her life almost entirely out of doors, as it was her responsibility to keep the cows from wandering into neighboring farmlands, which kept her out in the sun among the song birds and the sparkling grasses, settled for long hours on a rock or under a shade tree with her constant book-companions.  Her mother, despite the hard austerity of her rustic life, kept a library of old missionary and revival stories, classics, Sunday school readers, and novels; and my own mother’s avid love of books and of reading continues to this day. Her sisters recall an entirely different life, sewing and keeping house, of which my mother knew entirely nothing. But books were her window to the world, and when her father required her to quit school on the completion of the eighth grade to work full time on the farm, she complied without regret, knowing there would be all the more time to read.

She loved to sing, and this love brought my parents’ paths together, as my father was also a strong tenor in his church’s youth singing group.

And so at eighteen she became the happy, eager, filled-with-the-joy-of-life sweetheart of my father, and their courtship was as happy, pure, innocent, and uncomplicated as her clear blue eyes and sun-kissed radiance were untouched by intention or sophistication.  After their marriage on an August day on her twentieth birthday, they lived on a rental property on her sister and brother-in-law’s farm for their first few years of marriage until they had saved enough to purchase their first home just a few miles away, the very same home she sleeps in still. This is where my own story began, in a long and undulating stream of happy days.

My memories are clear of our summer days awaking and coming downstairs for breakfast, and finding my mother breezing through the side door with her second bushel of just-picked green beans or of peas or lima beans or corn, with the happiness of the morning’s freshness and accomplishments in her garden wafting around her like a sort of perfume.  She thrived on hard work, and had a garden large enough to feed our entire family for a year, as well as the many others who often shared our table.

Her love for our father was ever-present in our home, and the lilt in her voice, always, with the exclamation, “Daddy’s home!” were a window into the watchfulness of her eager heart as she stood over the stove of her overflowing kitchen at the end of her day, and then always the reunion that was such a part of their daily ritual that it is embedded in our memories as their children, a kiss and a long embrace in the middle of all the bubbling pots and tumble and jumble of her fruitful world.  Their happiness was a canopy over all the atmosphere of our home, and was unconsciously woven into all the cozy comfy reading corners and the singing and piano playing and card games, jacks, puzzles, board games, insect, rock, seashell and stamp and who-knows-what other collections, homework, art projects, blocks, something for all the ages of the children filling up all the spaces.

As I grew into an awakened social awareness, I realized the fact that we lived in a messy house, with old furniture, and my sisters and I undertook to compensate for the fact that our mother loved reading and the outdoors so much that she really didn’t have a lot of time left for cleaning. But to this day I would not choose to trade this mother for all the clean houses in the world.  How she loved being a mother, and somehow our very cells and the hidden places in our souls knew that deeply, and thrived on that love.  It was never so much her way to sit down and do something individually with us, yet her happy presence in the kitchen, in the garden, in the damp basement with her old wringer washing machine, in the yard hanging clothes, in the living room folding clothes, was the cloud of peace that wrapped its mist around us right along with her happy songs as she worked.

She qualified as a rugged individualist, perhaps only because she was so happily oblivious to much of the larger world and so wholeheartedly dedicated to all she understood to be true.  This included the scriptures as taught and suffered for by her Anabaptist forbears, and as well, all she could discover about healthy living.  She was a conscientious disciple of an itinerant physician building on a Swiss tradition, whose publications arrived regularly in our mail, and under his distant influence she cleansed our house of all medications and sugar, ground her own wheat, made her own bread (of which in our younger years we were allowed only one piece a day in favor of fruits and vegetables), churned her own butter and cheese, made certain we slept with the house wide open in the summer and partly open in the winter, as young children undressed us for our daily “air bath” and “sun bath”, fed us from the abundance of her organic garden, fasted us if we were sick, and gathered us all for our exercises which I now recognize as yoga before its time. There were seemingly unlimited baskets or buckets of cherries, plums, peaches, apples, whatever was in season along with the bounty of her garden. There were books in abundance, and under her zealous expectation we were all reading by the age of four or five.  No shoes! so our feet could have healthy contact with the earth.  And plenty of walks, hikes, picnics, and excursions.

My parents were a team in every way.  When, after being married for only a year, my father was elected by the bishops of their denomination to take a pastorate of the local church, my mother soundly resisted, with tears arguing that she did not want to be a pastor’s wife.  But in the end, she acquiesced, and in truth lived out a faith as sincere as could be imagined, with always an earnest questing heart.  Her pastor’s-wife activities extended to loving the pastor and ironing his shirts and making sure she and all her children wore shoes to church.  But her hunger for truth and knowledge of her Lord burned deep within her.

And thus she became the catalyst that launched my family into an entirely new direction.  To our horror the beautiful wetlands and creek property across the street from our house was sold and zoned for a trailer park. Thus began my mother’s own ministry to the sometimes troubled occupants who were now our neighbors.  Whether it was babysitting or sheltering a wife from a drunken husband or merely presiding as the peaceful presence over a house filled with neighborhood children, her kindness and imperturbability were genuine.  Eventually she began a weekly Bible class for any of the neighbor women who were interested, and dug into the scriptures in preparation for each week, with the intention of introducing each of the women to the reality of Jesus and His life lived in us.  It was toward the end of this series that she became more and more unsettled, looking for how to guide them into a church membership and realizing the scriptures did not mention her denomination anywhere nor even membership in a church. She was dissatisfied with the fact that everything up to this point in the study was based in the revelation of scripture, and yet she had come upon a point at which for her, revelation was absent.

So began a journey and a quest that eventually led my parents out of the denominational traditions they loved and cherished, in which they had been incubated and reared.  As I mentioned in my father’s story, this courageous venture led them into being misunderstood, maligned, and even shunned by most of the people they had grown up with.  But my mother’s constant dedication to searching the scriptures for the reclarification and refreshed understanding of all the will of God made her my father’s companion, help, and even goad in a way that redefined her personhood and all I knew her to be from then to this present time, a true Priscilla beside her Acquila. 

This season of awakening was the embarking on an era in which her sincerity became a blazing fire of obedience and costly devotion, and the glowing furnace of her life sustained an ever growing spiritual harvest, with unnumbered earnest conversations with any who would come, late night dialogues between my parents as they together sought to understand God’s intention in one point or another, an ever-full table, her growing family, and of course--though somewhere now in the background--her garden.

The righteous upheaval of these years led eventually to our family’s move to Kenya, where she was every bit a ready participant in the sale of our belongings, the reducing our goods to travel size, and living in a ten by ten tent with her family of seven, then in a house with cement floors and without a refrigerator or stove for the next three and a half years.  She laughed and studied and worked, and wept over the people and events of those years, but always emanating from her was that same constancy of glowing strength, steadily, unceasingly burning at the core of our household as her young ones made their way each day through school under her tutelage, and her older ones made our way into full young womanhood with unbroken love and affection for our parents and their God who was more and more fully ours.

 

I well remember her fortieth year, lived in a glory cloud with the announcement of a very planned pregnancy and a renewed glow of youth and anticipation that cast its light over us all. My sisters and I launched into sharing her vigorous regimen of daily fitness, diet, sunbathing, and long walks by the nearby eucalyptus-shaded river each day when the heat of the Kenyan sun was tempered with shadows and the scent of the water reached out to us from its rippling shade. This season of camaraderie with our mother and the shared transformation reflected in all of us with this infusion of love and life remains a unique and tender time in my memory.

Simultaneously, a growing correspondence entered our lives, with an eagerly alive community of young people back in our home state, all new believers and ardent and zealous like nothing we had ever known before.  The coals of my own heart long tended by the Spirit of the Lord were being stirred into flame by ardent believers I met on a long trek with my father and sister by train and foot into a remote region of Kenya, and was being further quickened by all of these letters pouring in from the US, filled with scripture and life, new salvations, fasting, prayer, and a spiritual hunger like none I had ever witnessed.  My mother carried the weight of the flow of correspondence, pouring herself into lengthy encouragement with the same faithfulness and vigor that she applied to all she set her hand to, as my father carried on the same dedication in his work among the Kenyans.

We returned to the States greeted by this community of young folks looking for spiritual parents, and my mother and father readily opened their home and their time, their dinner table and their hearts, and for the next decade and more poured themselves out night and day in teaching and counseling and feeding and housing a steady stream of seekers and finders from near and far, and from every kind of life experience.  My sisters and I went on with our own adventures of life; meanwhile the humble-jumble of our perpetually full house continued to offer shelter to the comings and goings of never-calculated numbers, and the mounds of dishes in my mother’s small kitchen filled and emptied times beyond counting as she ladled out abundant hearty nourishment and made time to sing her songs and read her bedtime stories to the young ones still left behind.  As this flock grew and moved on, she for years maintained contact with each one, with little notes and scriptures and words of practical support, carrying on with all her devotion to the scriptures and her great heart of love.

These years blur for me, as I was by now a mother to my own children, and my sisters and brother all had families of their own.  My visits home came just twice a year and were brimful, spread around to all the family.  But what a staunch mother's care burned in her for all her children and her grandchildren, with birthday cards, scriptures, and letters without fail even as the numbers grew.  Her equally unabated  determination burned on as she turned to teaching at home a young foster child with severe learning disabilities.  She took him in firm and compassionate hand, and walked him through the painful daily tedium of the classroom all the way through to his GED. There were seasons of teaching grandchildren as well, with very little pause for the freedom that many of her peers were finding at that stage of their lives.  But there was never a place in her for such thoughts, as filled with the sheer tenacity of her character and unquestioning commitment to whatever God brought into her life’s path, she pressed on with all that she had within her to give.

I had a dream during those blurry years that I remember clearly to this day, of a large auditorium packed with many hundreds of people.  As I looked over the huge mass of people, I saw a small figure under the spotlights on the stage, a figure dwarfed by the size of the stage and the massive auditorium, bent in such earnest intercession that she was unaware of everything but her petitions to the Father.  I strained to see, and saw that it was my mother, her face to the ground, oblivious to the fact that a huge wedding was beginning and the bride was coming down the aisle.

This, I knew, was a true picture of my mother. How many times had I come home from school and found her on her knees in the middle of all the laundry, or come downstairs for a glass of water late at night and found her with my father kneeling together in the midst of their day's unfinished labors, in earnest prayer.  How many times had I looked across the crowded room on a Sunday morning and seen tears on her face as she worshipped and poured out her heart in song.  Fasting was and continues to be a way of life for her, as she like a true shepherdess intercedes by name for each of her children, their spouses, her grandchildren, their spouses, and her great-grandchildren, as well as for the concerns of the little family of believers with whom she meets twice each week.

Her absence of self-awareness is such that if she were to read these words, she would not recognize herself.  Her daily and weekly path from kitchen to newspaper to garden to bread deliveries all around the city in her old Volkswagen, to her weekly Bible study with a former prostitute in a nearby city, to the bank, to the home group and the share meals she prepares for each week, to her desk where she corresponds with Bible students from all around the developing world, many of them Muslim, to her computer where she laughs at funny facebook posts and pictures of her grandchildren, to her simple table that she shares with the ever-questing foster son, to the jail or the courthouse or the neighborhood to help him out of trouble, to the grandchildren living hours in every direction, all this in the course of any day or any week is so artlessly lived as a vessel of Christ’s, just doing day by day what she has purposed to do as a faithful follower of the Lamb, that heaven and earth seamlessly comingle in the comings and goings, the wakings and sleepings, the losing and gaining, and all her path bears a scent of Christ.

Her simple, meek, undemonstrative, unremarkable, unimpressive, sturdy peasant-y bearing are but the stalwart iron wrapped around a blazing heat of devotion.  Only heaven will reveal the shifts and turns on earth that have come and have yet to come into being because of that blazing fire.  Only those who know her, and of those who know her, only those who truly see her, know the unquenchable force of that fire.  It is hidden deep within the heart of our home, deep in the dark vaulty spaces away from the outworkings of all that her life has produced.  Her truly quiet spirit—quiet as in a spirit entirely free of striving and frustration and self-promotion or coveting, the law of absolute kindness on her tongue, the unspoken refusal to think bitter or unforgiving thoughts, her utter contentment and trust in God, wrap her so entirely in a demeanor of peace and calm that one must stop and look, as Moses turned aside to the burning bush, to see the glimmer of the great, unrelenting blaze in her heart.

Knowing this as I do, why should there be any wonder in seeing her pick herself up from the loss of my father, with whom her heart and soul were more entwined than can be imagined by any but those who have known the deepest unity of lovers in joined cause for Christ, and sing with a quavering but unrelenting resolve all the holy words of faith that very Sunday following his death, line after line of truth and hope and eternal strength and purpose. Why should I wonder that on her eightieth birthday, at the end of a day spent in happy fellowship with her brothers and sisters, and then between her rows of pumpkins and beans in the sweet sunshine, when I suggested going to my father’s gravesite, she left it all to make our way there, stationed herself before the stone sharing both their names, and said simply, “Let’s sing”.  Why should I wonder that her last and greatest desire on her sixtieth wedding anniversary, her eightieth birthday, standing there in that green cemetery glade, was to sing, that on this day of questions and feeling her keenest loss, her soul so instinctively and easily turned upward in praise and simple trust.  Time stood still for both of us as the fire of her steadily blazing heart mingled with the glow of evening light all around us, and we sang hymn after hymn, not of loss, but of God’s faithfulness, goodness, and life eternal.

How that burning fire continues to move my own heart with inspiration and resolve.  The abundant, strong, verdant, bounteous fruitfulness of her spirit, her soul, and her labors stand in witness to me of the hidden ways of the meek Jesus, whose meek followers will outlast all else and inherit the earth. 

Never have I been more conscious of the sweet fragrance rising from her simple life than this week of her eightieth birthday.  As I look around at the world she fills, I see bounty on every hand.  I see her three gardens, many times larger than the largest garden I have ever attempted, and each one filled with overflowing green and fruitfulness. I see her many-roomed house, burgeoning with hospitality and labor, from each attic room all the way down to every basement room, porches, apartments, three-storied barn with its many rooms and sheds and workshops, her fields and springs and fruit trees and woods that have known many years of bonfire fellowships and the play of many decades of children,  all this a trust stewarded previously by my father but which she has taken on and carried forward with vigor and faithfulness.  I see the clarity of her thoughts, the living overflow of her heart filled with a continuously refreshed knowledge of the word of God.  Crowning all, I see the sixty-three beautiful fruitful lives she continually loves and blesses and carries in prayer, her posterity.  Sharing these days together, my own youth is renewed in the shadow of her continually renewed heart and bountiful life, a life described by the apostle:  “We also constantly thank God that when you received from us the word of God’s message, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe.”

 

And what a work it has performed. I cherish more than ever before this hidden blazing faith from which flows a sweeter-than-cider abundance beyond measure.  I want somehow to showcase this fragrance, this guilelessness, this utter humility and contentment in this hard world, this abundant fruit of the Spirit that truly rises from her as simple, unadorned kindness, goodness, faithfulness.  Her gentleness, love, joy, peace, patience rise together as a warm and oh-so-rare apple-sweet fragrance of the truth of our God.  

As I breathe it in, how it attests to my heart that He Is.

   

Oh that this eternal fire would so brightly ever burn in me!

Amen.