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Historia’s House–at Play in the Fields of the Lord

Historia’s House–at Play in the Fields of the Lord

Last updated on: October 21, 2016 at 6:30 am by Cynthia Dagnal-Myron

Historia’s House–at Play in the Fields of the Lord 2016-10-20T18:02:36-07:00 Cynthia Dagnal-Myron

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Those figs were metaphors for the sweet life I would find only when I found my way back Home at last...

Those figs were metaphors for the sweet life I would find only when I learned to listen to and lean on her Lord…

I’m losing myself.

At the font, that Vigil evening, they washed away all the really bad stuff. But little stubborn chards of the old me are falling away now. The Lord is trying to chisel them off and set a new me free.

It hurts sometimes. And it gets very scary.

Understandable, though. I’ve been that old me for almost 65 years. Driven by a whole different set of wants and needs. Lord, I wanted so many things. And got almost every one. And had to maintain it all. Protect it all.

Prestige—bylines, books. TV and radio appearances. Red carpet walking. Name dropping, name recognition. Big bad adventures—emphasis on the “bad” more often than not.

Love, lovers. Heady stuff. Then, finally, family stuff. The house, the kid, the cars, seeming to have it all. By most American standards, I have done well. By some African American standards, I have done better than “well.” Far better than my parents ever dreamt. Too much better, my grandparents would say.

They lived hand to mouth. Mississippi share croppers who eventually bought their land and made it pay at least enough to feed their family.

I remember pining for penny candy during one long hot summer vacation. My grandmother, Historia, snatched a ripe fig off a tree, handed it to me and said, “Here’s your candy, girl.”

It was delicious.

And her fried chicken–oh, how I grieved for the hen whose neck was wrung right before my horrified eyes—beat The Colonel’s by a few country miles. So did everything she made on that old wood stove. In that old Grapes of Wrath shack that scared me so badly the first time we drove down from Chicago to stay with our Mississippi kin folk.

I ran from them as fast and as far as my city girl dreams would carry me. And yet, I never forgot one particular conversation I had with Historia as she was slopping those big old nasty hogs of hers.

“Don’t you ever wish you lived at least close to a city?” I asked her.

She shrugged and told me there wasn’t anything the city could teach her that the farm hadn’t. Somehow caring for the animals and tending the crops had shown her how the world worked.

I knew that was true, even then. She had time to contemplate, as she shucked peas. To ruminate, as she hand washed laundry in that big old tin tub. The sky, the earth, the animals, everything talked to her. And she listened lovingly.

So I also knew, even as I flew through my 20s writing for Rolling Stone, the Chicago Sun Times, three publishers, “doing me” at a thousand miles per hour, that something was not quite right. I lived on Tums and Pepto-Bismol. Sleep, when it came, did not refresh or replenish.

But I didn’t have time to figure out what “right” was. I couldn’t hear anything over my own ego.

God intervened a few times. Spectacular wrecks, sent to slow me down. Shake me up. But I looked the other way. And drove right back into the fast lane again.

I made it Home okay, in the end. And as the holy water trickled through my hair and I said, “I do” to Father John earlier this year, I smiled and thought of Historia. Who had always had Faith. And waited, and leaned, entirely upon the Lord.

I am learning what that’s like as the pieces of the old me fall away. Or are taken away. It amazes me how many doors have been deliberately closed, so that I can see the new ones waiting.

When God taketh away, it’s for a reason. The point is to be patient about it. But right now, nothing fits. I don’t like my old clothes. I’ve let my hair go gray, thrown the makeup away.

The things I used do to fill my time, the things I thought I had to do, they don’t work anymore, either. Yes, writing, my refuge since I first picked up a nub of a pencil and scribbled something on the back of an envelope as a wee one, still makes me happy.

But I’m starting to be quieter. To have less to say. To care less about saying anything. To need less of everything and to love what little I have. Like Historia loved her little farm.

The Lord does not want me to disappear yet. I tried, and He shoved me back out into the world again. Gave me Patheos and other new forums to praise Him with.

But last week, He showed me a poem by Mary Lou Kownacki that began like this:

“I read about a woman
Who chose cleaning
As her path
To enlightenment.

Rather than beads,
A toilet brush and broom,
From door to door
And train station, too,
Like a servant
Who had been given an example.”

I thought of Historia and her wash tub. And how once, in the thick of my second career, as an assistant principal disciplining troubled children in a troubled school in a troubled district, all the adults had dreamt of quitting education to stand by the doors at Walmart rolling carts at shoppers all day.

Doing something seemingly mindless that turned out to be deeply profound. Offering a smile and a nod, in the nick of time, for a harried mother or lonely elder.

Introduced to stewardship opportunities at church, I finally got to do that. Every Sunday I greet parishioners and guests, holding the doors open for them. Looking deeply into their eyes and hearts and saying the first real “Hello” some have heard for a long time.

And God smiles back through their eyes to let me know He sees the new me already. I can’t wait to meet her.

I bet she looks a lot like Historia. Who is up there getting that last laugh, finally. Those figs were metaphors for the sweet life I would find only when I learned to listen to and lean on her Lord. I get it now.

But I had to lose myself first. Carry and die on a whole lot of crosses. That “example” the poem speaks of? I had both Him and Historia.

Halleluyah.

Photo credit: calafellvalo, Flickr, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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