My column in The Melbourne Anglican June edition
Monday, June 9, 2014 at 11:34PM I could live quite contentedly without coffee, alcohol and chocolate. Tea, however, is a different matter.
I was born in the nation that drinks the most tea on earth, I went to boarding school in the middle of tea plantations; it just went from there. From spicy chai at street stalls in India to my own ceramic teapot, I always feel better with a cup of tea in my hand.
One 16th century definition of a sacrament is a ‘visible sign of an invisible grace’. Thanks to the words of a recent Leunig cartoon*, I can now think of my teapot in sacramental terms.
In his Soliloquy for Strange Times, Leunig writes:
The leaders may not know what they’re doing – but I do.
I’m making tea. Tea for two!
One cup for the happy me and one cup for the sadder worried self.
We’ll keep each other company: this cup, this pot, this tea – and these parts of me.
Many things don’t work or make sense these days – but the teapot does
It takes in. It holds. It makes. It pours forth.
Like the teapot, prayer holds together ‘the happy me’ and ‘the sadder, worried self’. Not only for myself, but also for the whole world – every situation, joyful or grim or plain dire that I am aware of and those I never will be: I am able to offer these fragments of burning concern to God in the humble receptacle of my prayer.
‘God, bless Syria, and the Ukraine, the girls abducted in Nigeria and oh, the refugees in detention and our leaders who appear so soulless and my friend who is bereaved and the other one crippled by depression and my colleagues who are under so much pressure and that person I have fallen out with and my kids and my church community and Indigenous communities that I know so little about but where things are so tough, and, and…’
All these gabbled, ignorant but well-meant prayers are poured into the humble teapot of my caring for the world and held up, poured into to the immense heart of God.
Then there is the daily joy – the vivid red of the leaves climbing over my back verandah, the crispness of early morning in autumn when the sun is shining, the rain against my window, good conversations with my family, being held by my husband, a walk, an absorbing novel, the clink of a lemony gin and tonic at the end of a gruelling day. And my ever-present insecurities and fretting and expecting the worst: into the teapot of prayer they all go.
It takes in. And then it holds, it makes, it pours forth. It holds all my grief, neuroses, happiness, despair and concern and makes – it melds them, somehow, into something gifted from God, some growing of my heart, some perception I had lacked. It pours forth – a slightly more graced living in the world than I would have managed without it.
* Published in The Age Saturday 3 May 2014
This piece was published in the June edition of The Melbourne Anglican
Reader Comments (1)
Your reflection, with its use of the Leunig poem, mirrors the four actions of the Eucharist Clare - take, bless, break, give. To me, you have made meditative prayer and its metaphor the tea into a sacramental action with its " takes in, holds, it makes, it pours forth." Your writing has such a deep artery of theological truth hidden beneath its skin.