August and the Beach on the Tannery Brook in Woodstock
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August is a wonderful time to be in Woodstock. The sun shines brighter. The breezes are unbelievable. Music is everywhere. And, finally, there is that August moon.
Woodstock is mystical and magical and a little bit too good to be true all year round but August is special.
People put on their swimsuits, grab some snacks, and head down Tannery Brook Road to the stream. We don’t need many more directions than that. If it’s your first visit, you’ll know you’re there when you get there..
As you go down Tannery Brook, you’ll cross over the Brook at Hillside Terrace.
Keep going. This isn’t the bridge you’re looking for.
Your next landmark is Streamside Terrace – on your left. It’s a fully armed street: Homeowners have put up “No Parking Signs” they got at Houst. They’ve posted them on their street by the road. Keep going past this street.
Next is the second bridge to cross Tannery Brook Road. You’re almost there! Cross over the bridge. If you turn left after crossing the bridge, you’ll be on Millstream. Going to the right will put you on Ohayo Mountain Road.
Just across the bridge, Tannery Brook dead ends at this intersection. This is the place! Town signs are all along the road: “NO PARKING”. As far as I can tell, nobody, absolutely nobody, pays any attention to them. Everyone is stricken with temporary blindness or something.
It’s crowded here. The swimsuits are all the latest styles. They get smaller every summer.
People jump around in the water, then sit on the little sandy beach. Children play. Teenagers play. Adults play. Parents play.
There is an absence of watches, timepieces, calendars and interest in the things we’re supposed to do.
There is maybe a boom box or two. Maybe even a guitar.
Everyone loves hanging around the stream and the sand with one another – old and new friends.
But, on Wednesdays and Thursdays, not everyone wears a swimsuit. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, some of the people are in street clothes minus their shoes.
They don’t have swimsuits. But they do have a little time to play in the water before the food pantry opens.
After playing in the stream a few minutes before the pantry opens, they get out of the water, put their shoes back on, and head for the food pantry line.
When they begin to put on their shoes and head for the food pantry line, they remind us of the reality of August:
September is coming soon.
Labor Day comes the first Monday. The Magical August Moon is gone and we are all wearing our winter boots – forgetting the summer’s magic we found in August.
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Food and Healing: Communion
Why are you talking about having no bread? – Mark 8:17
“You shouldn’t feed this kind of food to these people. If they are hungry enough, they’ll eat anything.”
There’s a hunger beyond food that’s expressed in food. And, that’s why feeding is always a kind of miracle.
Food helps the sick and injured when the cook’s intention is incorporated in the “broth”.
Delicious food can be one of the last experiences of physical joy for the dying.
Food and healing go together because when you feed others with integrity, you help them heal.
Sharing food in the food pantry is a sacrament.
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The food pantry was in the basement of a church right off the village green.
And, I hadn’t even darkened the door in a church in over thirty years; not as a congregant, not as a guest. The closest I came to the inside of a church or syagogue was a graveside burial service for an older relative in a military cemetery outside Culpepper, Virginia. I also attended a Jewish wedding in a hotel in Baltimore.
When I became a pantry volunteer, I found myself in the local interfaith community, a stranger in a foreign land. Right away I noticed that, intermixed with the need for peanut butter, shoppers showed a strong spiritual need for connection, acceptance. This was the hunger beyond food. The closest many shoppers ever got to a church or synagogue service was the pantry line in the basement of the building.
A food pantry is another way to have a religious service. Sharing food is the prayer. Food distribution in the pantry is a spiritual experience.
When things really get going, pantry volunteers regularly distribute thousands of pounds of cereal, beans, soup, grapes, lettuce, carrots, and squash, bread, cheese, eggs.
A liturgy is hidden in how we process the shoppers through the barn, the hallway, and the pantry room. The pantry offers Communion to a group of people in the middle of a spiritual journey.
In the beginning, I didn’t see this. Then, I began to get glimmers. I saw things in people’s faces – I didn’t know what. I couldn’t explain it. But I recognized it. I saw an expression, and had an “aha” moment.
This Communion doesn’t require much. Shoppers and volunteers simply sign in at the food pantry door. People came from all different places spiritually and religiously: agnostics, atheists, B’Hais, Buddhists, Christians, Confucians, Jains, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Russian Orthodox, Shintos, Sikhs, Zoroastrians.
Early on, I saw something in a person’s face but didn’t know what. I couldn’t pinpoint, describe or explain what I saw.
The man who lost what he believed was the last job of his life…
The old woman with her toddler grandson who chose his own apple at every pantry visit…
The senior wearing a baseball cap with “Korean War Veteran” embroidered on the front…
They came through the line and took what they needed for the week: tomatoes, a bag of salad mix, squash, onions, potatoes. They received what they chose with no strings attached. Our nation’s abundance stocked the pantry.
Volunteers distribute food unconditionally to everyone who shops, without exceptions. Hungry people pour through the basement weekly and leave, their arms loaded. Some of them get almost more fresh produce and Bread Alone bread than they can carry.
And, if they can’t carry it, Richard, Robert, Jamie, and Little Mikey (the entire Allen family) help.
This family has a mission. They help get supper from the pantry into people’s cars and on its way to their homes.
Each week I opened the pantry when I unlocked the outside door with a key. The locked building also housed a beautiful sanctuary. As volunteers, we were allowed in the portion of the hallway where the pantry and storeroom were located.
Each turn of the key reminded me that a church with no one in it is just a building.
We encountered faith in the pantry outside the church sanctuary on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. With little or no religious doctrine, these weekly encounters were as freeform and varied as a faith can be because the State of New York insisted on secular food pantries. I felt our pantry represented civic religion – belief in things without including God. Everyone going through the pantry had a different doctrine.
It was all okay.
The whole thing reminded me of the birthplace of Lyndon B. Johnson at the memorial built in his honor in Johnson City, Texas. After spending time at the memorial, I realized I visited a deeply religious and spiritual place…but it was civic.
There’s room for civic religious beliefs in the pantry. After all, worship can happen in the most varied placees: inside a jail cell, a cemetery, on Facebook, at a family table, a roadside shrine, a person praying on a rug at high noon in a parking lot somewhere, a mountainside, a stream, a hospital room, a monastery.
All it takes is for someone to be alert to what’s happening.
For me, every shopper and volunteer has meaning and is cherished. Each and every one is of profound value. It doesn’t matter whether or not anyone else sees them as successful or beautiful or useful even. Success, beauty, and usefulness doesn’t impact anyone’s worth. Everyone in the pantry is worthy.
That’s what matters.
Looking back on my time in the food pantry, no one else saw any similarity between Communion and the food pantry.
Church members never noticed the most popular service in that building each week fed the hungry at the food pantry in the basement.
And, I didn’t either in the beginning.
Later, when I recognized the face of God, I got it.
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Did this quotation interest you? Is it a compellling message for you? If so, maybe you would like to listen to the YouTube interview with Salvador Altimarana-Segura.
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