Today the Church of the Holy Apostles celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the arrival of Mother Liz Maxwell in our midst - with cupcakes. Well, not only cupcakes: The church was festooned with balloons and paper hearts with fan letters to Liz from the parish's children. Father John Dinaro's sermon (mindful also of the Academy Awards tonight) started with a reference to the mother ship in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" which some movie critic had described as offering a vision of God, and ended (we were all thinking "no, he isn't going to... surely he's not..." but sort of knowing he would) with an allusion to Mother Liz. At the "shindig" which followed the Eucharist, a base baritone from the choir named Clifford sang "My Girl," accompanied by male and female "Cliffettes," and then there was contra dancing.
But it was the cupcakes which got me, perhaps because I had so disapproved of the idea. All of us had been enjoined to "bring a cupcake" which represented our relationship with Mother Liz, which I thought at once an invasion of privacy and a trivialization of it. But in fact the avalanche of cupcakes in different sizes and colors, three or four times what was needed to fill out the letters L I Z, became a perfect representation of a diverse and caring community, and how one of the gifts a priest like Liz brings to a community is to let all feed each other. (I'll see if someone took a picture and post it.) It wasn't quite loaves and fishes, but it's the kind of community practice which Samuel Wells, in God's Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics, rather provocatively argues can take the place of theology.
But it was the cupcakes which got me, perhaps because I had so disapproved of the idea. All of us had been enjoined to "bring a cupcake" which represented our relationship with Mother Liz, which I thought at once an invasion of privacy and a trivialization of it. But in fact the avalanche of cupcakes in different sizes and colors, three or four times what was needed to fill out the letters L I Z, became a perfect representation of a diverse and caring community, and how one of the gifts a priest like Liz brings to a community is to let all feed each other. (I'll see if someone took a picture and post it.) It wasn't quite loaves and fishes, but it's the kind of community practice which Samuel Wells, in God's Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics, rather provocatively argues can take the place of theology.
