The Great Toaster Race

Gloria Dei Vivens Homo. The glory of God is the human being fully alive. So spoke my college English professor; so spoke St. Irenaeus, long ago (4^th century!) bishop in southern France.  

Last week in my “Care of Souls” class, we were asked what it meant to be a human fully alive. The responses unfortunately did what often happens in seminary classrooms. Voices slipped into attempting to respond to the question with more philosophical questions; others looked to negate or avoid the question through some language loophole. But my heart yearned for someone to speak truth to a question that felt so real and vital to me. What does it mean to be fully alive?

I didn’t speak in class that day. But if I would have, this was my answer:

When I worked for YouthWorks! in Red Lake, MN, every Tuesday morning was my turn at breakfast duty. This meant that at 6am, a random assortment of high schoolers would shuffle into the kitchen to prepare breakfast (at my instruction) for eighty people. Tuesday, however, was not your typical “just throw out those giant store brand cereal bags and some milk” mornings. Tuesday was magic. Tuesday was messy. Tuesday was marvelous. Tuesday was…..waffle day. 

On a time and money budget, however, we could not afford a fleet of Belgium waffle irons. Instead, our Tuesday morning mission was to take knockoff Eggo frozen discs and toast hundreds of them. At my first Tuesday, I was ready with every toaster of that pre-school kitchen ready to go. One hour and many blown circuits later, we served generic cereal, milk, and frowns to our diners. 

Yet out of the circuit ashes that morning rose an idea: the great toaster race.

One week later, to prep for my fresh recruits of sleepy-eyed adolescents, I leaped off the half-filled air mattress. Dashing through the pre-school halls, I placed toasters throughout the whole building. Youth were split into teams; some monitored the toasters, while others were carrier pigeons equipped with tin foil to keep freshly toasted waffles insulated for their journey to the warm kitchen ovens. 

The great toaster race, a wild human invention, is the best image I can offer for a human community that lived into joy and spontaneity and shared meals and service and wildly fun worship and storytelling. That is my picture of a summer where my humanity was fully alive.

At school, I am enrolled in five classes. So often I voice or hear about the feeling of tiredness from these days of occasional lecture and evening reading. How strange that I claim “tiredness” here, while at Red Lake we worked crazy long days and I loved every second of it. Every morning started with a leap off the deflated mattress, as I was hungry for that day’s toaster race creative adventures. I am convinced that the human being fully alive only happens in communities of love, in places where purpose and mission are clear, in homes where playfulness and care for the self and other come first. 

The great toaster race was psychotic. Imagine telling a high school sophomore at 6am after the night was just spent sleeping on a tile classroom floor that she or he is going to run the halls with toasted waffles wrapped in tin foil. Madness. Maybe this is the idea behind the statement that the only people to change the world are the ones crazy enough to think they can. We need a little loco in our normal. We needed the great toaster race.  

Places like camp or YouthWorks trips are not an escape from the “real world”—they are perhaps the most real world, the most fully alive world, where humans can be their best selves and live courageously together. They are places where even frozen waffles become banquet feasts.

Farewell, B

When I woke up on the floor of the laundry room after my cardiac arrest, there were lots of things to feel. I felt a slight burn from the strange tube in my right arm. I felt the straps holding my legs to the stretcher on the floor. I felt confusion about the obnoxious mask over my face.

But I also felt something else—cold, wet, irregular—on my feet. I raised my head a bit to see our dog, Bailey, who was perched at the base of the stretcher, happily licking my toes.

That room was a frenzy of emotion—an aunt crying, paramedics organizing a plan, my dad negotiating with them and also talking to me. I had no idea what was happening, only that something major had developed in my health and that it was life-flight serious.

In the chaos, one creature treated me like he always did. One creature was incredibly, hilariously calm in that charged space. Bailey, with the nub of his tail wagging, licked away at my bare feet. He must have been so thrilled that, for the first time, a human did not pull away from his desire to bathe them.

Our family said goodbye to Bailey this week, a beloved husky dog who only moved fast to chase UPS trucks and who greeted every visitor’s car with a happy pee on the tires.

Dogs and cats so quickly transform from young children to adult size. They become constants in the ever-evolving life of a human child. Through adolescence and young adulthood, Bailey’s affection and friendship was a rock through high school breakups and strikeout-heavy baseball games and graduation parties and cardiac arrests.

In pastoral care classes, we are taught that when called into situations of major grief, it is best to simply sit in silent presence with another. Maybe we learn this from our dogs. Maybe that can be the hardest part of losing a canine family member—the one who always would be present with you through whatever is the one missing.

I will always remember Bailey’s bare feet kisses that morning. I hope heaven is a place where all living things can communicate. I’ll tell him thank you. And then I’ll wash his feet, too.