From the First Presbyterian Faith Formation newsletter….
One of my favorite “how to teach” books begins with a question. It comes from Esme Raji Codell, and it goes something like this: How would you go about teaching if your only curriculum resource was a sack of potatoes?
OK so for math maybe you teach graphing and statistics to decide the best fast food french fry. Or the best condiment to put on the french fry (Old Bay Seasoning). Or, better yet, your class learns how to make french fries! Now we’re looking at measuring, time, and maybe science, and for sure first aid safety.
Art class could be making potato prints. Geography could be a study of the best places to grow the spud. Let’s learn and practice the different poetic forms using the potato as a subject (dare I say “muse?”): an acrostic, an ode, perhaps a sestina.
It is a creative exercise in practicing the concept: do more with less – a phrase we’ve been hearing a lot at First Presbyterian, paired with “this is not business as usual.” And I’m not suggesting we start planning church using potatoes, but doing more with less is something I think everyone who attends the church ought to consider.
“Do more with less,” usually slithers up around times when I’m learning that what I thought was going to happen, when I thought I understood the way something works, is no longer the case. It means letting go of what used to be. Stick around me for even 10 seconds, and you’ll learn that it is about as easy for me to do as it is a Michigan fan to wear red. I could make a profession out of lingering. However, the phrase is also a phrase filled with hope and questions. It’s an opportunity for a new story, a chance to see what else it is we can do.
Another another potato story –
When I was in graduate school, I read “A Quiet Grace,” by Jeanne Murray Walker, an essay about Alice Munroe’s stories. At the time Jeanne wrote the essay, she was a young mother pursuing her PhD in the margins of her day. Jeanne wants to write something grand (she will). Right now though, she has to peel the potatoes – a phrase she uses for the everydayness of life: diapers and bills and laundry and groceries. It is Alice Munroe’s writing that helps Jeanne see the grace and beauty in the daily, often mundane tasks.
My friend Jill – a poet living in Louisiana – has also read Jeanne’s essay, and in fact, part of our friendship was forged because of Jeanne’s writing as well as how she went about pursuing writing. I’ve known Jill since her daughter was 5, and mine were 5 and 3, and through the carpool pick-up line, the tween years, and now the teenage years, Jill and I have constantly cheered each other on using Jeanne as our inspiration. “If Jeanne Murray Walker can do it,” we say to each other, “so can we!”
Jill and I, we also want to write grand things. But we also know, and we always conclude our texts saying, “We gotta peel the potatoes.” This too, is inspiration, though a tad more gritty, because we are saying to each other: look for the grace – the quiet grace – in the daily: black, high top Converse toppled over one another in the entryway after a day’s work, the heft of the cast iron skillet and its clank on the stove, slicing fruit and vegetables for the next day’s lunch while you watch the sun outside scrape the sky orange and purple with its rays.
I’ve turned peeling the potatoes into a prayer. Everything I write is about the everyday, seemingly small moments of my life. Turning these moments into stories is my way of living out my faith in God; it is my way of saying, “Here is what You gave me. Here is what I did with it.”
And Jill is the Queen of peeling the potatoes. One semester she was stuck with an acute dose of writer’s block due to the tethering and tangling that occur when motherhood and writing and working play Ring Around the Rosy on your heart. Jill wrote a series of poems called, “The Professor Poems.” She took on the persona of a professor as she helped her daughter get ready for school every morning, as she prepped dinner, walked the dog, and graded papers:
The professor makes her daughter’s lunch
and shapes the sandwich with a knife, cuts a heart
from its center. Each day, she considers other shapes –
a flower, a face, a fish. Each day, her daughter opens
the brown bag and unwraps the heart
of ham and cheese. Bread knife in hand, the professor
imagines her daughter clutching the lunch
as she wades through hallways
where bullies may smell the innocence
and follow. The professor looks
to the lunch bag, its brown poker face hiding
the heart she now imagines
her daughter unwrapping and eating
in slow, deliberate bites.
Jill Reid – Missouri Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and if You want to read the story behind the Professor Poems, Jill’s “Persona and Poetry” is a must-read.
Jill, who is a professor, was able to create a character for herself so she could create some distance from the emotion of the events, while at the same time look very honestly and closely at them, and then create from there.
I write news stories about Christian Reformed churches for a magazine called The Banner. Sometimes I land a feature article, and I feel pretty awesome because here is a grand story! Here is what will put me on the map for in-depth and compassionate storytelling! Most of the time though, I get assigned 300-400 word stories reporting the who, what, where, when, how, and why. It is the small stories, however, that have a huge impact on me: a church planting a community garden in its city, another one with less than 50 members and an interim pastor for over a decade because they don’t have the financial stability to call a permanent one, who celebrated 150 years of existence with a small picnic. A grandmother who wanted her children to know Jesus and didn’t know where to start, so began with prayer, and soon she was leading studies to a house full of grown children and grandchildren and their friends.
It is not business as usual, but hasn’t it been that way for a while? The pandemic especially revealed much about humanity, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t pick up the pieces, but I do think it’s time to consider using those pieces in different, new, and redemptive ways. It’s time to stop saying what should be, to stop trying to cram ourselves into what used to be and consider what could be and what is. We are exhausted. We are grieving. We are frustrated. We have been wronged, and we have done wrong.
It is time to pick up the potato and the peeler, to stand at the sink, to begin scraping away the skin, to listen to the hush of it falling away and the thunk as it lands in the sink. It is time to hold what is crooked and misshapen in your hand, and to figure out a way to create something with what you’ve been given.
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