Afternoon Tea by Alexander M. Rossi

January 12, 2008

Last week my sister-in-law had two of my friends and me for lunch. It had been arranged before Christmas, a flurry of emails having saved and secured the date, but as I set out on that dour January morning, it seemed to me that the timing of our little gathering was exquisitely providential. My mood was as heavy as the dark clouds piling in from the west; tears seemed even more imminent than raindrops and the headache that had been brewing with the approaching weather front was raging so violently I could hardly see straight. I pulled into her driveway with something like a sigh of relief and hauled myself out of the car, grateful only that I hadn’t gotten a speeding ticket on my way there as I had two days previously en route to meet two other friends for lunch…

Edie still had her Christmas wreath on the door—fresh and yet fragrant it was too lovely to take down. I gazed at it rather mournfully, luxuriating a bit in my post-holiday blues. But before I had a chance to knock the door swung open, and there stood Edie, smiling in her radiantly gentle way, and beyond her, Ashley and Debra, waiting to receive me with hugs and smiles of their own. Is there any medicine on earth so potent as the embrace of a friend?

I forgot my headache. I dismissed my Janu-weary mood, for what place had it in this little sanctuary of beauty and warmth? The 1920’s bungalow was aglow with candlelight, and soft French music lilted through the rooms. A collective gasp went up at the sight of our table, for a more daintily feminine array cannot be imagined. There were place cards (with appropriately deco script), and the damask cloth was laid with every possible accouterment for a ladies’ tea: antique china, vintage silver, a tiered cake plate boasting everything from homemade scones to macaroons and melt-in-your-mouth truffles. On the sideboard stood enticing decanters of chilled lemonade, with crystal goblets at the ready. And everywhere I cast my eye, it seemed, were sweet little bottles and vases of pink and white spray roses. Pretty as a Valentine; proper as an English tea room.

Edie brought out the soup course while I poured the tea, and then we fell to the feast of fellowship with as much relish as that with which we polished off the roasted red pepper soup, and the mushroom and pine nut quiche that followed. Our conversation took a delightfully meandering course, as it only can in the hands of like-minded ladies. We discussed everything from organic gardening to vacuum cleaners, touching on politics, homeschooling and needlepoint, each in their turn.

But over all our talk, it seemed, a shining mantle was cast, a high vision of beauty’s worth that infused every subject with a strange sort of lowly nobility. Time and again we came back to one of the tenets of our homemaker’s hearts: the value and validity of loveliness. The power of beauty, in its simplest and purest sense, to speak audibly of the presence of Jesus Christ in our lives. Beauty is of Him, from Him, for Him. Beauty has a language that transcends even the finest words, that soars above our sweetest experiences in this life and whispers to our souls of what heaven will be.

Debra and Ashley are painters, artists in both life and craft. It has been beautiful for me to watch the former inspire and instruct the latter, pouring herself out, as it were, to the enrichment of a friend’s creative world. As a homeschooling mother of three, Debra could easily justify the forestallment of her own artistic desires. But instead, she’s set an example for the three of us childless women not to deny the significance of our own unique and God-given talents, even in the whirl of a houseful of teenagers. Creativity is a hidden spring, feeding the deep wells of our personalities. And when that spring is tended, unclogged and running true, cups of cold water in His name abound. We give of ourselves, because there is something there to give.

Ashley has approached the discipline of oils with courage and joy (almost she makes me want to paint…not quite. I’m not that brave!). I love to go into her house and see a new work in progress lying on the dining room table, or to catch that light that comes into her eyes when she’s describing some technique that Debra’s entrusted to her. Ashley doesn’t want to have her works in the Met, or even make a living off her paintbrush. She wants beautiful things of her own making on the walls of her home; she wants to give gifts that are indeed a portion of herself. When one considers that her whole life is a gift, that being around her is one of the most energizing occupations I can think of, it appears that the hours spent mixing paints and poring over a canvas are a perfectly natural and even necessary replenishment for her.

Into the midst of all our high talk that afternoon, Ashley slipped an analogy she’d heard in a sermon that caught my fancy in a compelling way. She gave us a picture of our callings: Some of us are tiny watercolor brushes, with only a few strands, intended for the most delicate of detail work. And the range goes all the way up to those big industrial paint rollers that can cover a whole wall in minutes. If you asked a watercolor brush to coat the side of a building it would be a disaster that ended in despair. And a paint roller would wreak havoc upon a little violet in a cut glass vase. Is the paint roller more important, more valid, because it covers a greater area with speed and efficiency? Is a Winsor & Newton more extraordinary merely because it is able to capture the rare beauties of life that might otherwise have been trodden underfoot? We all know the answer—in our heads. Both have their place and their job to do. And it’s a job that is certainly never going to get done by looking around at the other brushes nearby and comparing oneself to their bristle size and handle length. Or their subject matter, for that. And just as an artist will rifle through many brushes in the creation of one painting, we will doubtless find that the Master Painter will bring varying sizes of implements to bear upon the living landscapes we’re all creating, day in and day out.

And, if you happen to be a watercolor brush, don’t be mistaken in thinking that you cannot have a far-reaching impact in this world for beauty and truth. In a recent (and umpteenth!) viewing of the movie Miss Potter, I was struck by something she said regarding her own art: “I’m not very good at landscapes,” with a somewhat regretful glance over a sweep of Lake District loveliness. But Beatrix Potter was good at animals. And charming little stories that revealed their dignity to untold numbers of children the world over. She did not set out to write the best-selling children’s books of all time, or to almost single-handedly save the Lake District. She was just brave enough to be good at what she was good at. And there’s not a one of us alive who should not be grateful to her for it.

In like manner, Edie was merely living in her gifts that day. Hospitality, gentleness and grace; the touch of an artist upon her table and the rooms of her home. She gave of herself in that little luncheon for four, and created an environment for edification to flourish. It took time and great care, and a painterly attention to detail. (And if she wasn’t the immaculately tidy housekeeper I know her to be, I’d say she was still washing dishes!) She refreshed us from a source both deep and true, and I feel safe in assuming that she was refreshed in the process. This is beauty’s seal and signature: a mutual joy and a glory to God.

Renée Zellweger as "Miss Potter", Phoenix Pictures, 2006

originally published on YLCF

Ezra, Gustave Dore'

And Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads and worshiped the LORD with their faces to the ground.

Nehemiah 8:6

I was a Christian, and I was a dancer. A ballerina, as I liked to avow with all the solemnity of seventeen. Studying classical ballet three and four days out of the week, showing up early to stretch before class, wrestling against all the opposing forces of aching muscles and tight tendons to add a fraction of a degree to my arabesque or half an inch of height to my grande jete’.  I loved it, and I worked hard, both of which I owe almost exclusively to the much greater fact of a superlatively excellent teacher. She drew me out of the back corner of regional ballet school indifference and she scraped grimly away at an acquired layer of sloppiness and mimicking conformity, down to the very bones of my so-called technique. We spent untold class time spread out on the floor with anatomy books and I was made to perform all manner of ridiculous maneuvers in order to find and feel the muscles we were talking about. I danced for months without any shoes at all, and marched across the floor, en pointe, holding chairs over my head. She would call for sixty-four changement at a time and then call for them again, and drill me on the names of the famed “Eight Positions ” as I assumed them in rapid succession.

In short, she taught me how to dance.  She set something free within me; something longing for expression, but something equally desirous–even dependent upon–the limitations of form and structure that make classical ballet the art form that it is. I loved it more than ever; the more that was required of me–the more I experienced the essential freedom of the form–the more lovely it became. The restlessness and joy and angst and elation of youth found voice and wing in that simple studio, all alone, under the eye of a fiercely loving taskmaster. And I was happy. And I read in the Bible about ‘doing all things as unto the Lord’, and I was happier still.

But I had no idea what it meant, that majestic little verse and the worlds of possibility it suggested. I had never gotten my mind and heart around the concept of art as worship.

Never, that is, until the day we began working on our piece  for the recital. There were three of us at that first rehearsal: my sister and another friend and myself. We were stretching out, whispering and giggling, and speculating inwardly, if not outwardly, about the diaphanous costumes the occasion would doubtless require. (It didn’t, by the way–plain white tunics and single silk flowers softening harsh little buns turned out to be the order of the day. And nothing could have been more perfect or appropriate to accompany Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze, though not-too-distant memories of Nutcracker performances and pink net made it hard for me to see it that way at first! ) We were talking–but suddenly our voices dropped and we looked around us a little awkwardly. Where was our teacher? She had been there a moment before, watching us stretch or cuing up the CD player. We hadn’t even noticed when she’d left, and it was odd that she’d disappear so soon upon the start of the rehearsal, being the stickler for time that she was.

I looked around the open studio, beyond the marley floor which delineated our classroom, past the piano and chairs and shelves of music. And I saw her–in a heap in a back, dark corner of the studio. She was on her knees and her face was to the ground. And she was praying.

At first I was frightened–had something terrible happened, or had she just learned of some disaster that had catapulted her into such a desperate, un-self-conscious attitude of prayer?

But as the mists of my dullness gradually cleared, the truth broke with a light that pierces to this day: she was praying for inspiration, for the choreography and for the execution of it. She was entreating the favor of God upon this endeavor and imploring His ability to procure it. She had the spiritual vision to see that this was not just a workshop recital for families and friends at a little performing arts school–it was a chance to honor the God of the universe. To love God with the heart, soul, mind and strength. To create something beautiful out of love for Him and to lift it up as an offering of praise.

That moment changed everything for me, in the way that small, seemingly trifling moments often do. All my loves–writing, music, dancing, homemaking, gardening–have since been charged with the influence of it. And not only by the ‘glory’ side of the equation–by the appeal, as well, if not more so.  I have in that memory of my beloved and respected teacher, face down before the God she adored, an image of the creative process that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. Creativity is a giving, an offering to others and a glory to the Creator-God. But it is also a receiving. And the courage to create and not valuate our offering by the market standards of the world is, I believe, a gift in itself, and one to be sought most earnestly by the likes of such frail co-creators as we humans prove ourselves to be.

I used to love to tell my ballet students and piano students what we all probably know and already admire about Bach, namely, that he ever signed his scores and compositions with the letters S.D.G. at the end: Soli Deo Gloria. But of equal insight to me is the way that he opened them: J.J. Jesu Juva.

Jesus, help.

Jesus, help me to make something beautiful for You. In this poem. In this bit of earth. In this story. In this cake or loaf of bread or painting or song. Not only can I not do it truly, essentially, without You. I can’t do it for You without You.

The very acknowledgment is an act of worship, and I see the humility of the ‘great ones’ in this practice. Madeleine L’Engle (one of my mentors!!) underscores that writing–or any art form–is an act of faith. Not a blind fumbling in the dark but a reaching towards what we know is there. She loved to image artists as midwives, assisting in the birth of some bright gleam from heaven upon our world. I smile at the thought of C.S. Lewis by his study fire, musing patiently over the mysteries of God to the good of us all. And I read, with, O, what joy, of Sheldon Vanauken praying “daily, almost hourly, that God would speak through [his] two typing fingers” as he fulfilled his vocation to write A Severe Mercy.

Jan Karon speaks of it. The thoughtful and talented folks over at The Rabbit Room are always writing about it. It’s a beautiful thing, this holy desperation, and liberating in the extreme. God is not going to magically make me write like Elizabeth Goudge just because I ask Him to. But He is going to enable me to write from the burden of love He has laid upon me, to the end that He desires–which is more desirable than all to me. And the desire and the desiring draw me irresistibly into the heart of Love itself.

It’s one of the lovely paradoxes of this pilgrims’ way: we pour out our hearts in worship and find them filled in the very act. We stumble under our weakness, our grasping at words and colors and notes, and just when we think we’ve fallen we find the grip of a mighty embrace lifting us with wings like eagles’. We imagine we know the end of our art–where our ambitions lie–and we make our plans accordingly, only to discover we’re being propelled merrily along in some kind of crazy empowered helplessness towards a dream we’d likely have laughed at in our saner moments.

I found myself toward the end of last year under a big writing deadline, the enormity of which I had no idea until I had assumed it. To say that I spent most of November with my head down upon my desk asking God for help would not be too far off the mark. (I wish I could say that I spent as much time thanking Him for it when it came…) I have never felt so out of my league and over my head. And, as I told Philip, the joy of it was an almost incandescent thing. I wished that I could always live with such intensity, such dependence upon God and awareness of His help. Exhausting as it was, it was one of the shining seasons of my life.

It was a glimpse, I think, small but lucid, of the great antiphonal exchange of prayers and praises, giving  and receiving, with which art greets worship and worship quickens art. A snatch of the music of the spheres.

A hint of what it’s going to mean to love God face to face. I think there’s only one thing I’m going to be able to do then:

…And they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.

Revelation 7:11, 12

Paradise, from Dante, Gustave Dore'

Twelfth Night, 2007

January 6, 2007

Last night was a chapter out of fairyland; a sojourn into a vanished realm that exists only in stories and songs—and in the very lively imagination of crazy people like Philip and me. I’m sitting here in my den this January afternoon with a pot of fragrant Winter Garden tea and an even more fragrant clementine, my Advent wreath lighted for the last time against the deepening sunset outside and a Mozart quintet on the record player, trying to convince myself that this sweet Christmas holiday was more than a dream. And no part of it seemed more dream-like than the Twelfth Night Revel we held here last night…

I don’t think I’ve ever been so blue about the holidays drawing to close as I was this year. Every moment was so precious that I literally watched them pass with a sigh and even a few tears. And when Philip went back to work on Tuesday and I was confronted with a quiet house and a mountain of laundry and a good-sized hill of dead greenery, it was all I could not to crawl back in bed and pull the covers over my head. It’s the price I pay for all my Christmas sentiment, I am well aware, and worth all its sweet pain. But something had to be done. And to my melancholy mind there appeared but one option: we had to throw a party.

The Twelfth Night Cake

So we invited our friends to a Twelfth Night Revel. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for ages, but with it falling on Friday this year—coupled with the desperate need I had for festivity—it seemed the very moment in time for such a frolic. So Philip got the bonfire ready and put out the chairs in a wide arc around it, and I decorated our big copper lanterns with wired-on greenery and doled out food assignments with each RSVP. I set up tables for the pots of chili and the platters of cornbread and the bowls of salad that were coming and spread them with branches of pine and big, ferny sprigs of cedar, interjected by tall glass hurricanes with white tapers. The front hall was cleared for dancing, and the chandelier was woven with a wreath of ivy and strung with bright crepe paper, red and green, that extended in winding ribbons to the four corners of the room. I made an enormous pan of Mexican cornbread and a pot of my favorite ‘White Christmas chili’ and took the remaining cookies I had made out of the freezer.

And all through the preparations the day of the party I listened to the thunder rumble and watched the rain falling outside—a veritable monsoon—and fielded phone calls from anxious friends.

“Are we still on for tonight?”
“Who would have thought we’d have such weather in January?”
“Well, we could always eat in the house…”

I laughed and soothed and projected the weather as best I could. But not, I confess, with an untroubled heart. It just seemed like our whole beautiful holiday would end on a flat note if our bonfire was rained out. Not to mention the fact that I had no back-up plan for seating the hungry hordes that would soon be descending upon us. And so I prayed roughly a dozen or so of those desperate little pleading requests: “Oh, Lord! I know that there are a million-and-one other things tremendously more important in the scheme of the world than whether it rains on our party or not—but oh, please, please let it clear up!”

Twelfth Night, 2008

There was nothing else to be done but continue with the preparations and hope for the best. The forecast was quite dour; the heavy-laden clouds that kept rolling in from the west were too disheartening to look at. It poured on Philip all the way home from the office. But at five-thirty a miracle occurred. I don’t hesitate in the least to call it a miracle, albeit a small one, for in it I heard the Lord say ‘I love you’ just as clearly as if it had been an audible voice. (And is it not those little personal miracles that show us—perhaps best of all—His great and lovely tenderness?) A glint of gold appeared in the west, piercing the leaden mantle with arrows of light. In a matter of moments the whole sky was suffused with a glory of saffron and apricot, crowning the tops of the trees in splendor and brimming the pasture below with a light-filled mist. I dropped my dishcloth and stood out the window, perfectly transfixed. My heart was filled with praise, for not only had God allowed the weather to clear up, He had done it in the most beautiful way imaginable. Every drop on every branch was a living gem, sparkling and flashing as if for joy. Birdsongs sweetened the already vernal air and Philip and I wandered about in the yard, laughing at how gorgeous it suddenly all was. I thought of the words to a song we’ve sung much this Christmas, All hayle to the days:

December is seene appareled in greene, and January fresh as May
Comes dancing along with a cup and a song to drive the cold winter away.

As twilight fell the world only became more glamorous: the mist rolled up along the terraces in the pasture and crept over the lawn, and stars winked out in the velvet overhead.

“I feel like we’re in Merry Olde England!” I cried to Philip.
“Or Ireland!” he supplied.
“Or Scotland!” I exulted.

The Cake, 2008

It was certainly all magical enough, and only more so when all our friends began arriving with shouts of ‘Happy New Year!’ and the bonfire began leaping heavenward and the children started running to and fro in the darkness, heaping my withered holly branches and dried pine garlands onto the blaze. When we gathered for the blessing, I couldn’t help subjecting our guests to a brief—and, to me, at least—an undeniably fitting little reading:

Christmas hath made an end,
Well-a-day! well-a-day!
Which was my dearest friend,
More is the pity!
For with an heavy heart
Must I from thee depart,
To follow plow and cart
All the year after!

It grieves me to the heart,
Well-a-day! well-a-day!
From my friend to depart,
More is the pity!
Christmas, I fear ’tis thee
That thus forsaketh me:
Yet for one hour, I see,
Will I be merry.

Singing to one who couldn't make it, 2008

There certainly was great merry-making around the fire that night. Sparklers for the children and bottle rockets and Roman candles for the boys and men. Old English games like ‘Christmas Candle’ and ‘Snapdragon’ that Philip and I dug out of an old book. Mirth and good cheer as Christmas trees were added to the blaze sending the flames a good forty feet into the air. After seconds and thirds of dinner had been dispensed with, my friend Rachel and I gathered all of the little girls for a special procession of the wassail and the Twelfth Night cake—which had been duly prepared with the traditional bean, pea and clove planted somewhere in its spiced depths, the discovery of which would determine the king, queen and knave, respectively, for the evening. We rehearsed our wassailing song quietly in the shadows of the great walnut tree and lit green sparklers on the cake before making our solemn way across the backyard down to the fire.

Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green!
And here we come a-wand’ring so fair to be seen!
Love and joy come to you and to you your wassail too,
And God bless you and send you a happy new year!
And God send you a happy new year!

The cake was presented amid a spontaneous burst of applause and was duly sliced and distributed by the girls to the eager guests, each desirous of their status in the hierarchy of the night. My mother’s dear friend, Wendy, was the knave, I plucked the pea from my piece of cake with an air of queenly triumph, and the king obviously swallowed his bean unnoticed and will henceforth go uncrowned. (We’ll just say it was Philip…)

There were Twelfth Night carols and Epiphany songs after that, and the inevitable Twelve Days of Christmas. And we closed on the rousing note of The Gloucestershire Wassail, each time I thought we were done another guest calling out another verse:

“The butler verse!”
“The maid verse!”
“Verse one, again!”

The Bonfire, 2008

When all but a set’s worth (and those acquainted with Scottish or English country dancing will know what that implies) had taken their leave with many a hopeful word for ‘next year’, Philip and his brother polished off the bottle rockets while my sister-in-law and I looked on from a safe distance and savored the fun we’d already had and the enchantments abroad in earth and sky. A clear golden moon had risen early upon our festivities, out of a vaporous fog that cloaked the trees and made its light a mysterious thing. There was the closeness of the dew and the bewitchery of woodsmoke in the air. We looked up through the moonlit trees overhead and commented on how the drops that still clung to their bare limbs looked like stars all tangled in the branches. But only fitting on a night so fraught with faeirie…

Coffee and wassail and cookies in the house after that for the hearty and hale that had stayed for the dancing. Postie’s Jig and Corn Rigs and Frost and Snow were executed with commendable good spirit, despite—or, perhaps, because of—the fact that for the first time ever we had more gentlemen than ladies and a couple of un-named guys had to cross the set and dance as girls! The candles wavered in their sconces as we romped by and the crepe paper fluttered overhead. And when we were all too tired to dance anymore, we flopped on the floor, the stairs, the remaining seats, and smiled sleepily at one another.

But despite my weariness, when we said goodbye and closed the door for the last time, I turned to Philip with a look of elation. My Christmas was complete; my holiday wrapped up like a present from God in one last lovely memory. We had said a worthy farewell to the dearest season of the year, toasted its memory with our laughter and songs.

And it’s only forty-six more weeks till I can start decking my halls again!

Looking forward to next year, 2010

originally published at YLCF, January 2007

and here’s one last little song for good measure…

The King

Happy 12th Night, Dear Ones!