Tag Archives: sacred

Crib Cubby

Posted on by under Alone in Place, Guest

We used to play in the nursery at church several years after we were too old to be in the nursery. I don’t remember who “we” were, precisely. “Those kids at church,” I’m sure I called the others. The nursery had one wall devoted to crib cubbies – three rows of big cubby holes, each equipped with a thin mattress and a railed panel that slid like an overhead garage door down a curved track. With the door down, a baby could sleep safely during the service or after church a six-year-old and his unnamed playmates could feel like jailbirds or crewmembers of a pirate ship or puppies in kennels or ninjas hiding in the shadows from unsuspecting parents.

I remember the stillness of lying in my cubby with the door down, eyes closed, feeling cramped but cozy. Sometimes I snuck out of my cubby and stood for far longer than necessary in the nursery’s tiny one-stall bathroom, listening to the muffled sounds of my friends and pondering the distant hum of the air system. Even at that age I treasured the idea of layered privacy. I savored the chance in both the cubby and the bathroom to command my own small realm, my own enclosed space hidden inside the nursery, which was one of many rooms on the first floor of my three-floor church, which was one of many buildings on Meridian Street, which was one of many streets in Anderson, Indiana, in the United States, in North America, on Earth. My conception of the planet at the time derived from the globe my parents gave me in first grade (that globe stands on the filing cabinet behind me as I type this in my office). There are no lines on that globe for Indiana’s borders, no dot for Anderson. I knew I lived somewhere in that green patch south of Lake Michigan where nothing is labelled. And so I knew as sure as a six-year-old can that in the nursery cubby or the nursery bathroom I was layers and layers and layers away from visible to anyone anywhere.

They have long since remodeled that nursery and removed the wall of crib cubbies. The room now serves as a Sunday school classroom and is, from what I hear, devoid of small enclosed spaces. I presume the bathroom is still there, though I haven’t been in that room since my son outgrew the nursery years ago. But I have discovered in many other places the sensation I first photo-1429709535771-15665442d6b1found in that nursery. I feel that same coziness in my walk-in closet in the master bathroom in my house in Anderson; I’ve felt it in the upstairs half-bath of an apartment my wife and I once occupied in Grand Cayman, in several single-bed hotel rooms in London, in my windowless office (which I love) at Taylor University. I have relished the layers of architectural and conventional strata that encased me in those spaces, and more so as my daughter has become adept at operating door knobs. I have come to embrace, too, the lovely notions that our omnipresent God inhabits those spaces and shares them with me, and that at least part of the reason Christ instructed His followers to find a private space for prayer was that solitude is healthy and sacred.

My job as a professor and my standing as a husband and father require me to be in frequent contact with others. These are the roles and the people for which I’ve been made, and for which I am endlessly grateful. But I’m also learning to treasure as gifts my rare moments of seclusion and to accept that I need them. I cherish and protect those nested spaces where, for a few exquisite moments every now and then, I can lie in my crib cubby and lower the door.

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Walking with the kids - #2 - cropped“Crib Cubby” was written by Aaron J. Housholder. Aaron teaches writing and literature at Taylor University in Upland, IN. He lives in Anderson, IN with his wife Suahil and his kids Scottie and Alivia. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Relief Journal, Ruminate, Wyvern Lit, freeze frame fiction, River Teeth, and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @ProfAJH.

 

On mornings, intention, and getting still enough

Posted on by under Food & Place, Guest

I’m no purist. As soon as the temperature dips below 90—usually mid-October in this part of Texas—I start pouring eggnog into my coffee. This may be one of few truly habitual morning routines I have. By design, I resist routine in the mornings. I have never been the sort of person that wakes the same time, has the same breakfast, has the same commute. I don’t find this to be noble. I have tried with limited success to become that sort of disciplined person, anchored in morning ritual and liturgy of coffee cup and toast point and made bed. I manage for a few days, at most, and then the resolve slips away from me and I’m back to a disordered sense of morning duty, careening from grocer to writing to recycle bin to conference call.

But eggnog in the coffee cup, that point in October when it becomes justified, slows me down just enough. I catch myself getting still, hearing my breath, the way the brick of the apartment whistles when wind cuts across it, the feel of the cement beneath bare feet. I sit across from the windows that keep watch with the sunrise and pull out the notebook, forgotten too often during the late season of summer, where pen is set to craft recipe, reason out flavor, and I plan a menu for the week. I get still enough to be mindful, yet again, of Alexander Schmemann’s speculation that no matter how utilitarian we have managed to make everything else, food remains something sacred to us, something that cannot be pure utility. There is reverence in the wielded knife and the butchered lamb, a kind of sacrament of patience in the warm of the midday loaf set on the windowsill to rise.

unnamedEggnog in the coffee cup returns me to this practice of noticing, attending to the detailed work of craft. I am no hater of technology, no scorner of social media, but in the brevity of the early morning pause, the breviary of an ordinary life, I disconnect just long enough to be mindful. Mindfulness is an underrated virtue. It doesn’t boast a great deal of acclaim. But mindfulness keeps us observant of ourselves and of the spaces we inhabit, keeps us intentional and keeps us kind. When I pause long enough to be careful, I am reminded of the miracle that it is to live, to taste, to smell, to make. We are alchemists of invitation and acceptance in our kitchens. We present common sacrament upon our tables. We offer chairs as signs of worth. We prepare tables as icons of welcome.

All this from eggnog in the coffee cup. Just enough of a pause in the waking hour, when the sun first colors the skyline, to remember the good work of being present, being focused, being exactly where I am. This is a ritual I can return to, when all else about routine fails. Clasped coffee cup tinged with sweetness, this takes me back to the center, to the contentment of the very moment.

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Yancey.Headshot-5“On mornings, intention, and getting still enough” was written by Preston Yancey. Preston is an Anglican priest-in-training, an author, sometimes-painter, sometimes-baker, sometimes-scholar interested in Christian theology and the arts. He wrote Tables in the Wilderness, a book about God and silence, and lives with his wife, Hilary, in Waco, Texas.