2020.04.19 Cupcake

I first met Cupcake fifteen years ago in a memoir writing class. Her first read-aloud memoir piece had us all laughing out loud. She wrote about walking along some street in Boston when construction workers called out to her, “Hey Cupcake!” This classic wolf whistle put a spring in her step. With superbly sarcastic wit, Cupcake riffed on the many possible meanings of that appellation. I’ve called her “Cupcake” ever since.

One of the early class assignments was to design a cover for our memoir-to-be. Cupcakes’s cover, as I recall, showed an empty chair, such as one that would be placed at a dining room table. The chair was an image that evoked her feelings of isolation and exclusion in her family of origin.  Cupcake had hoped and prayed that her mother would, one day, set a place for her at the family table at which there was a place set for everyone but her. The mystery of why such cruelty happened is not mine to know, but I do know that Cupcake today would make sure that everyone, even a stranger, would have a place at her table and in her heart. 

I once told Cupcake that there was always a place for her at the Holy Communion altar-table of God. Like clockwork, every March 25th on the anniversary of my ordination as an Episcopal priest, Cupcake sends me a card to honor my anniversary. That would be lovely enough, but she also always includes a check! Usually it’s for $35, but this year it was for $50—possibly a raise for my advanced age.

A retired Boston school teacher who lives alone with two small dogs who don’t talk back or bite, Cupcake has a robust sense of humor and a gigantic heart—not extroverted but authentically truth-bound, a quality of soul ironically common in people who have survived profound early wounding. A lover of detail, Cupcake will often mention the orange dress with the flared skirt I wore on my ordination day underneath my liturgical vestments—myself a flirtatious potential “cupcake” at heart.

I recently asked Cupcake why she remembered my ordination anniversary in such a consistent way. She wrote this:
Psalm 110 tells us "thou art a priest forever."  Celebrating your anniversary is a small statement of who you are to me - Episcopal priest, counselor, teacher and friend. When I missed a writing group one day, you called to see how I was. My dog had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and I asked you to pray that God would give me the grace to get through the situation. And you did and I did.
When I heard of my ex-husband’s death, you were the only person who asked how I was doing. No one else has ever even hinted of his significance in my life.
I remember your ordination because you are always priestly to me.
I remember your ordination because Maya Angelou exhorted us to "try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud." 
You are my rainbow. 
 

I felt undeserving of all that praise until I remembered the popcorn. I’d once commented on how much I love popcorn. The next thing I knew a large carton full of individual bags of popcorn arrived at my doorstep. Too much! But this is Cupcake, a hopeless gift giver, generous to the point of embarrassment. Her joy in giving quickly erased my discomfort in receiving, along with my shrinking from the gift of praise. Cupcake knows how to keep Easter going, no matter what.

If Cupcakes’s own Roman Catholic tradition permitted the ordination of women priests, she would be one if she so desired. But she needs no pope, or archbishop, or brother priest to formalize what God has already planted in her soul—a priest forever in God’s sight.

Thank you, Cupcake.

2012.09.19 Spinning Spider Spirit

I have just today observed, or should I say noticed, an astounding phenomenon.

Under my home altar there is a box, the cover of a computer paper box from Staples. In it are mementoes, small spiritual tchotchkes, all of significance to me and a few with universal symbolic meaning.

Here are a few of my favorite things: my first pair of brilliant red shiny party shoes, now dulled, the leather cracked; a tiny red plastic bull I took from some pep-you-up drink maybe even Red Bull—he represents the anger I buried from, say 4 to 34; a small glass dancing owl (my totem,) missing one jauntily flung leg, sitting in my maternal grandmother’s china teacup now filled with old award pins I earned for good memorization of holy texts and creeds in Presbyterian Sunday School; a two inch high tri-fold wooden triptych with Mary ever blessed in the centerfold flanked by two adoring angels; wooden statues of Don Quijote, one of my christs, and Sancho Panza, his acolyte and himself a christ, from a shop in a grand cathedral in Toledo, Spain in 1960; a postcard propped against the edge of my box painted by a monastic artist and picturing a woman, meant to be Mary giving birth to a baby, meant to be Jesus, and a hand, meant to be Joseph’s or Godde’s, cradling the small dark emerging head; my first tiny and meekly bristled hair brush; a photo in a miniscule frame: me at three and my mother at 25+ dressed alike in pinafores with wings, me scowling and mom smiling; a photo of dad in his National Guard uniform, so handsome and so sad he missed the war;  and a cross of Jesus fully alive—an obvious impossibility.

There’s more but you get the picture.

I saw what I thought was dust and thought, it’s time to dust! Under closer scrutiny the dust turned out to be a spider web. I followed its tracings and marveled at the miniature spider in its midst. ( I call all spiders Charlotte and imagine they speak in the dulcet tones of Julia Roberts.)  This Charlotte had practiced her spinning art and with the daintiest ingenuity had connected every single one of my sacred items each to each and all in one.  The web image riveted my attention on the glories of life itself.

I won’t be dusting my holy under-altar box or its contents any time soon.