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 (4th 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.
