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Dear Dolly Mama,
I am in charge of my extended family’s Thanksgiving celebration. Half of them wear masks; the other half don’t. Half of them want the stuffing with celery; half of them want the stuffing without the celery. One year I just made all of the stuffing with celery, the way I liked it, and put the stuffing in two separate bowls and said one was with and the other without. No one noticed.
Another year, I collected all the leftover bread from our church’s monthly agape meal, which passes for communion in our church. I collected it monthly. Some people bring rye, others bring whole wheat, others bring cranberry walnut, some bring tacos. Some even bring Munchkins donut holes. That year people declared the stuffing marvelous and had no idea they were eating donuts. I found it a very biblical process.
This year, especially since it’s an election year and half of our family is always in a particularly bad mood every fourth year, I am thinking of throwing a picnic. Everybody brings their own food, stuffing, and celery. We eat outside so the masked and the unmasked don’t go bananas on each other. We look at the sky at some point and say, thank you we have survived a pandemic. We pray a little prayer for those who didn’t. Some of us give thanks that the President survived the virus; others don’t. We go home to our own TVs and watch whatever football season is left to play by that time.
Am I a failure as a matriarch? Or a success?
Dear Matriarch of Thanksgivings, Past and Future,
You are a genius. You know how to make the fragments whole. You know how to be tricky. You know how to take care of yourself. What else do you need? Maybe less family and more being your own family? You’ve heard people talk about how we have our blood family and our chosen family? We do. Choose yourself and your beloveds, blood or not, as your family and have your own thanksgiving. I’ve heard it’s a new holiday, just out looking for a picnic date.
The Dolly Mama
Dear Dolly,
I went to a friend’s church and they started the service with a “Land Acknowledgement.” It was in Greenwich Village, near the Minetta Brook and Washington Square Park, where I live but never attend church.
The minister started the service like this:
“We stand on the unceded land of the Lenape People. We are not the first people on this land nor will be be the last. We remember and honor the Lenape people whom we displaced and deported from their homes.”
I was oddly moved. I felt like I had done my confession before the confession. I felt I was pre-confessional. I felt like I was being replaced, displaced, and placed all at the same time. I could almost hear a drum beat in my heartbeat, a sense of connection with old rhythms, sadly gone but not really. I’ve sometime had that sense in the trickle of the Minnetta Brook’s fountain at the law school but never thought of it as a religious sensibility, just the comfort of a trickling brook.
Am I just a politically correct liberal or someone longing for a past?
Dear Confessional,
You are all the things you think you are. You are someone who really wants to belong to her land. You don’t want to fake belong to your land. You are aggrieved by your participation in the deportation of the first people on the land where you lived. You want to confess your sin. You want to repent your sin. You want to remember it. You want advanced placement in the curriculum of life. You are also politically correct, as in right. Not everything about liberals is phony. Some stuff is real, if clumsy, like most church is.
The Dolly Mama
Who is the Dolly Mama?
The Dolly Mama is a spiritual version of Dear Abby. Her intention is to combine the irreverence of Dolly Parton with the surrender and non-attachment beloved by Buddhists. She wants to let go of what can’t be fixed – in either self or others – and fix what can by applying the balm of humor.
She is a spiritual handyperson, a soul mechanic, a repairer of broken appliances. Every now and then the combination of letting go and hanging on achieves sufficient balance for an improvement in spiritual posture, stronger spine, and personal peace. The Dolly Mama is not her day job. By day, she works as an ordained United Church of Christ and American Baptist pastor of a regular, if edgy, congregation.