This afternoon, I will be baking the communion bread for church tomorrow. I’ll take a handful of ingredients into my humble hands and create a vessel that will be blessed, broken, shared, and given to others to remind them of Jesus’ life, death, burial, and resurrection.
I am no baker. I know nothing of the chemistry of bread making. But I do trust the hand-me-down recipe of generations of unleavened communion bread bakers who’ve gone before me and I trust in the person of Jesus who gave us this peculiar, mysterious way of remembering Him.
So I will take up my rolling pin and bake the bread, giving not one thought to the way the bread takes on its form and flavor. The bread is simply a vessel by which we remember our communion with Jesus.
A long time ago, I used to know what I was going to write about before I ever sat to write. Words were always bubbling up to the surface and my main job each morning was to simply sort them by category, form sentences in my head, and then type them out.
I was a well of spring water that had just been tapped and words flowed, endlessly for about seven years, until Wisdom covered the well with his hand of mercy and the words, although never stopped flowing, rarely made their way to the surface for others to drink. They simply seeped into the ground around me, nourishing it, providing water for my shallow roots that desired a depth the daily spilling out could never satisfy.
For seven years, I stood in what I imagined to be a fallow field. Words came while I managed a brewery and I reworked them, reformed them, and rewrote them to add context to theology papers. Words came and I took them to spiritual direction, holding them up to the Light in the presence of another. Words came while I prepared food for my meal delivery business and I filed them away with every recipe I worked and reworked. But mostly, words came like streams of water silently trickling down my face as I routinely drove a straight line out into the middle of nowhere looking for God, trying to hear God, and finding only silence.
Back in the fall, before I joined Thad in Texas, I imagined myself not as a neglected well covered up by the merciful hand of God, but as an untapped barrel of wine not yet ready to be poured. The image came during spiritual direction while practicing Visio Divina with a series of images depicting the life cycle of a vineyard. The session was over a zoom call and in all honesty, the images were hard to clearly make out over the screen, but my eyes were fixated on the wall of barrels, not because I knew what they were, but because I did not.
After a few long moments of gazing at the images, I said,
I’m drawn to that image in the corner. What is it, Kelly? I remember chuckling.
It’s a wine barrel, untapped. she said.
I sat quietly for a few more minutes before a lot of years of life came back to me like a book where you flip the pages all at the same time to tell the story. Except that in this book, I was the image moving as the pages flipped. Every page contained one still-life image of a day in my life. Each well-spring day contained an image. Each fallow-ground day contained an image. And every image, no matter the season of life was still.
My life in this book appeared to be a story of me just standing around, waiting…until you bent the spine and let the pages fly under the weight of a steady thumb. When all the days of my life were flung together in a rapid sequence, they worked together to tell the story of a fascinating, intentional movement towards growth, towards greater joy, towards more LIFE. The well-spring days flowed seamlessly into the fallow-ground days back into well-spring days, all the days working together, not one day wasted.
I remembered the untapped barrel image a few months ago as I was discerning how to wield one of my limited yeses.1 I carried that image around for weeks and weeks, inviting the Spirit to help me distinguish my voice, the one that sounded to me like the voice of Mary the mother of Jesus ( We need more wine and you have it within you!) and the voice of Jesus (Woman, it is not my time!).2 I knew I was an untapped barrel of wine but was the wine ready? Was it any good?
Had all the fallow-ground years actually produced something worthy of pouring, of blessing, of sharing, of sending out into the world as the evidence of my communion with God?
I know nothing of how to tend to a vineyard in every stage of her life. I am no winemaker.
I am simply a vessel for the wine I did not have a hand in making.3 And as I am poured out, I will give no thought to my body or her tannins or her age, I will remember my own communion, and give thanks for the fallow-ground years.
Glory be.
This limited number of yeses is new information for me. Left to myself, Lori has a whole lotta yeses. She’s a barefoot kid at Wells General Merchandise on a Saturday morning trying to stretch her $2.00 into 4 packs of Now & Later, 3 Cowtails, 2 Jolly Ranchers, and 1 pack of Big League Chew. (Lori is also sun-kissed, sweaty, and windblown from a ride in the back of her dad’s pickup truck.) Lori is a more is more person unless it pertains to stuff in her house or her capsule wardrobe.
No. I do not talk to Mary. But this is the accompanying image and verbiage that came to me as I talked to God about what I should do.
And you are too. Believe it. Even if you’re standing in fallow ground, barr
Your writing is a gift. Glory be. I am glad you are back and also I miss you.
Thank you for sharing. What beautiful images for your life. The Lord be very present as you tap those barrels.