Miss Frouida Baker

“And now, a solo from Miss Frouida Baker.” I heard these words almost every week when I was seminarian assistant at St. Helen’s Anglican Church in Vancouver, British Columbia. I worked there for a full year, from the fall of 1971 through the summer of 1972. The Rector was the Rev. Canon J. Whinfield Robinson, a wonderful evangelical low churchman. He wore no vestments—just cassock, surplice, and stole; he was never called “Father”; people did not make the sign of the cross in the church and visitors who crossed themselves were corrected by the sidesmen (ushers). Canon Robinson influenced me greatly, and was always good to me. I learned a great deal from him, and remained in contact with him until he died on January 12, 1997, probably close to ninety years old.

It is the custom in many Anglican churches worldwide not only to have services on Sunday morning, but also to have Evensong on Sunday evening. There would be different lessons and a different sermon from what one had experienced in the morning. And many people came to both services. And so it was at St. Helen’s.

In St. Helen’s choir was an elderly single woman (many would say “old maid”) named Frouida Baker. She was always there, and very often, mostly in the evening I think, she sang a solo at some point in the service. Canon Robinson always introduced it with the same words: “And now, a solo from Miss Frouida Baker.” She was not a gifted singer. As I recall, her soprano voice was kind of warbly.

It has been 45 years since those days. Miss Baker is long gone from this world, as is Canon Robinson. But now that I am 69 and no longer 24, I look back on that year as one of those magic times in one’s life. I have known a few people over the decades who had no family. They either had never married or had been widowed; there were no children or siblings left alive; their parents were long gone and their cousins, if any, were also either departed or there had been no contact since childhood. I suspect that Miss Frouida Baker was one of these.

But she was the quintessential old maid who sang in her church choir week after week after week for years, probably without much reward, notice, or thanks. I can’t say that I ever talked to her even though I was in church with her just about every Sunday for a year. And I have no memory of what she looked like.

But somehow I have never forgotten her, and now that nearly half a century has gone by, I recognize her priceless gift. She made an unremarkable offering of song willingly without expectation of reward, notice, or thanks. She praised and served God humbly and dependably with what she had. She blessed and taught and changed me ever so subtly but powerfully and permanently. If only I could be so humble and so faithful.

Update, July 4, 2018: Intrigued by my memory of Frouida Baker, I looked her up on the internet and was gratified to find a little information about her. She was born in 1907 and died in 1997. She wrote and self-published a book in 1989 called An Airwoman Overseas, which appears to be unorderable. Her burial place is on Saltspring Island in British Columbia, apparently where such family as she had is also buried.

Meditation While Raking Leaves

In July 1945 a very short item by C.S. Lewis called “Meditation in a Toolshed” appeared in print. In it he relates a lesson about discerning truth that came to him while seeing a beam of sunlight come through the roof in his toolshed. Similarly, as I was raking leaves a day or two ago, a lesson came to me about the Christian life.

In October 2001 I spent a week at a clergy refreshment and formation conference. At one point the leader encouraged the forty or so of us to come up with a “BHAG” (pronounced bee-hag)—a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” for our lives. She said that a BHAG was something that would take at least ten years to achieve, and had no guarantee of ever being achieved.

At the closing gathering we all sat in a circle, and she asked if anyone would be willing to share whatever BHAG he or she had come up with. There was probably a full minute of silence, so I decided to go first. I raised my hand, got the go-ahead, and said, “I’d like to be included in a future edition of Lesser Feasts and Fasts.” (This is a listing of saints in the calendar of the Episcopal Church.)

There was a pregnant silence for about two seconds, and then the entire group erupted into the loudest, most spontaneous, most feverishly uncontrolled group laughter I’ve ever heard: people doubled over in their seats, slapped their thighs, and guffawed. Tears came down some faces. It went on for about a minute.

Well, I intended it to be funny and to break the ice, and that certainly worked. When the laughter died down and the tears were wiped away, others began to share their BHAGs.

But here’s a secret: I meant it. Not that I be recognized and celebrated by future generations as a saint—that’s not what I wanted. But I do want to become truly saintly. Really, for everyone it is the only “BHAG” to have.

One of my favorite blogs is called “The Catholic Gentleman”, written by a fellow named Sam Guzman, a husband and father in Wisconsin. The tagline for his blog is “Be a Man, Be a Saint”. He’s nailed it. This vision, this goal certainly goes way against the grain in today’s culture, but the culture is spectacularly wrong. Being a man and being a saint is the only purpose of a man’s life. Saint Paul puts it this way: “For me to live is Christ” (Philippians 1:21) and “I press on to take h old of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me” (Philippians 3:12). This is what I want. Indeed, there is nothing else worth wanting—to become the man Christ calls and empowers me to be. To be a man of virtue: to be honorable, dedicated to truth, loving to small and great, chaste, patient, humble, strong, peaceful, courageous… all the virtues. The word “virtue” comes from the Latin word vir, which mean “man”. To be a true man means to be virtuous; to fail in virtue is to fail in manhood.

So what does this have to do with raking leaves? The week of Thanksgiving is the time when most of the leaves have fallen and my yard is littered with them. So it’s time to rake them up. They go into a long pile at the street-edge of the front yard, and a truck will come through the neighborhood once a week to suck them up. I could use a leaf-blower, but so far I have resisted. I still use a leaf rake—a rather small one, actually. It’s much better exercise, uses no power, and it’s quiet except for the persistent sound of the scrape of the rake against the earth. And my heavy breathing once I get going. Raking leaves is hard work.

This year I did the chore over a two day period: first one side, and then the other, moving the leaves from the back yard (where nearly all the leaves fall) through the side gates to the front yard and the strip adjacent to the street. You begin with a few leaves, but it doesn’t take long to build up to a pile, and the more you rake, the bigger the pile becomes. A half hour into the task, and just to make a little progress you have to move the entire pile.

As I was raking, it occurred to me that the spiritual life is like this. The farther you go, the harder it gets. You can see the clear ground behind you, but ahead is the daunting, leaf-covered yard and a lot to move just to make the least progress. The inner voices say, “Take a break; you’ve worked hard enough for now.” And, “Feel that pain in your shoulders, thighs, and lower back as you turn and twist and heave the pile forward; that’s gonna really hurt tomorrow. Better stop now.” And, “You don’t need to finish today. Just leave the pile and come back another time.” And, “Your neighbors will think you’re either too stupid or too poor to buy a leaf blower. They’ll think you’re old fashioned or don’t know any better. That young guy across the street with a leaf blower is obviously smarter and more efficient than you are.” Or even, “Wow, look at that 69-year-old man go! He doesn’t look a day over 65!” And, “You can leave that part of the yard unraked; it’s really not too bad and it’ll be easier and faster to let it go.” These messages are persistent and repetitive, appearing ever more and more sensible and attractive.

But as soon as I connected leaf raking with a dedication to growing in sanctity, I committed to finishing the job in one day. No giving up, even for a short time except to breathe deeply for a moment and swallow a little water. Across the back yard, through the narrow gate, and across the front yard. I recognized that the inner messages of discouragement, urgings to slow down or rest, or about what others may be thinking were the same messages that come whenever I try to become more and more obedient to God and his call to rely on his grace. Maybe the ever-increasing difficulty is a sign of progress—but really, it’s not progress but persistence that is important; I don’t think anyone can ever tell if he is making “progress”.

As I age, I become more and more aware of my grievous sins, my psychological and emotional burdens and failures, and how far short I am of life’s real BHAG. I can talk and preach the message of grace and mercy and God’s love and promises, but it is still hard for me to internalize it. It’s all grace, but that doesn’t in the least mean that there is no hard work to be done; on the contrary, the greater the dedication to “be a man, be a saint”, the harder it is. This is how God works. Any commitment to another takes work, and the commitment to God most of all, for there the stakes are highest and the reward the richest. “One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. All of us who are mature should take such a view of things” (Philippians 3:13-15).

It took nearly three hours, but when it was done, there was a good-sized pile of leaves along the street-side of the front yard. But tomorrow, more leaves will fall. “Let us live up to what we have attained” (Philippians 3:16).

Coincidences

I like coincidences. They make life interesting because they are completely unexpected, serendipitous occurrences in one’s day. I’ve experienced a few that I remember years later, and still shake my head with wonder as I remember them.

Once I was buying dog food at a local tack and feed shop, and noticed a mother and young daughter in the store. I put the forty pound sack of dog food in the car and went on to my next errand—shopping at the Trader Joe’s about four miles away. As I was wheeling my cart through the store, the same mother and daughter came in.

Back in the late 1990s I was trying to find a scarce book. A book dealer I knew suggested that a contact a man in Tuscon, Arizona, who had made an authorized reprint of the book. I made the contact, and have enjoyed a friendship with that individual for over twenty years. Shortly after the book dealer’s recommendation, I was visiting a print museum in Carson City, and spent a little time talking with the owner. He mentioned that he knew a printer who still used the old-fashioned methods and machinery. I was amazed when it dawned on me that he was referring to the same person in Tuscon.

Two or three months ago I was at the post office in town and noted a car in front of me with a personalized license plate. An hour or so later, when I was driving out of the parking lot at the local Walmart, I found myself behind the same car. Well, that’s not too much of a coincidence since this is a small town. But back in 2012 when I was living in Orange County, California, I headed out to visit a friend. In front of me on the freeway was a car with an interesting and clever personalized license plate. I went on to visit my friend twenty miles away, spent an hour with him, then drove back home. As I turned off the freeway to the surface street that led to my home, I saw that I had pulled up behind the same car with its clever license plate. Orange County has a population of several million people and its freeways are almost always crowded with a million cars.

After I moved out of Orange County, there was one teenager I regretted not saying good-bye to; I was just too busy with many things under deadlines to take the time to do everything I wanted. Two years later I came back to visit friends and they suggested that we go to a movie at a local mall. I remembered that it was that teenager’s birthday. We went to the mall, and, in this same county with its millions of inhabitants, I saw the teenager. We had a very welcome meeting and a satisfying closure.

Back in 1980, while I sat in an easy chair I was watching my two-year-old son sitting on the carpet in the living room looking through the sliding glass door that led to the patio outside. It was pouring rain, and I remember being impressed with his rapt attention as he stared outside. Thirty years later, long after he had moved out, he came home for a visit. Once again I was sitting in that same easy chair; again it was pouring rain, and he stood in the very same place where he had sat as a toddler, looking outside with the same rapt attention.

A year or two ago, after a number of years without contact, I emailed a friend of mine who is a fan of the science fiction books I’ve written. We were glad to be back in communication, and after exchanging some pleasantries, we discovered that the small town where I moved after I retired was his home town, the small town where he had grown up in the 1950s. He was now living in New York and I was living more than 2,000 miles from where I was living when I wrote the books. And in another coincidence, the name of the town where he lives now is the same as the town where he grew up. He came to visit me, and the house where he was a child still exists.

Any of these coincidences could have been missed had something been slightly different. Ten seconds either way, or being in a different room, or holding off on an email, and the coincidence would either never have happened, or would have been unrecognized  if it did happen. Sometimes I wonder how many near misses we may have in our lives. Maybe none of these coincidences is of any significance other than to inspire wonder—but then wonder is a terrific part of life.

Surrounded by Wonder

Eleven years ago today I began this blog with a post about finding invincible beauty and joy in the midst of emptiness and discouragement:

johnonefive.blogspot.com/2006/10/little-bit-of-green.html

In some ways, that’s been the theme of this blog all along; its title “JohnOneFive” is a reference to the fifth verse of the first chapter of John’s Gospel, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” After well over a hundred posts since then, even I am somewhat surprised at how many of them present this theme.

And this one will too. It’s been more than two years since I last posted, and I think that now a lot of attention has turned from blogs to Facebook and other social media. But there are still a lot of blogs, and I hope to continue this one now more regularly. Many things have changed in my life in the past few years, more than I ever thought they would or could, and probably fewer people will read this blog than used to, but maybe it’ll be good for me to get back to blogging anyway. I have a backlog of lots of ideas, and it’ll be good to write them up.

Well. Surrounded by Wonder. I now have a daughter. She’ll turn two in December. She lives in a house with several walls of books. She’s had books of her own just about since she was born, and she loves them. First we read them to her, then she learned to read them on her own, and recently she’s read to others. They’re mostly pictures, of course, but she knows the alphabet and can pick out a few words, and can identify probably over a hundred illustrations like clouds, lampposts, turtles, lions, and balloons.

Watching her sit and read a few days ago, I thought about how many hundreds of excellent books there are in the house that she’ll be able to read in a few years. They are there now, and she even takes them off the shelves on almost a daily basis, and has learned to take care of them. But of course right now they are inaccessible to her—no more than marks on a page.

And then I thought how the whole world must be like that to everyone. Electricity was around before Benjamin Franklin began the process of harnessing it, but no one knew about it except to watch lightning. Only in the past century or so have we begun to understand the nature of atoms, molecules, and the wonders of quantum mechanics, though everything is made of atoms. Mystery has always been all around us, unknown and unrecognized; the Unified Theory is still a theory, tantalizing us with mysteries yet unknown. The more we learn, the more mysteries become evident.

This is all obvious to inquiring minds, and nothing very profound. But maybe it’s a good place to restart a blog after a two-year hiatus.

“Many things greater than these lie hidden, for we have seen but few of his works” (Sirach 43:32)