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.