Cinnamon Roll Communion
On the rituals that shape our lives and the women who make it happen.
The weekly ritual - holy communion at Grandma's house after 10 o'clock Mass on Sunday.
She'd be standing at the window over the kitchen sink not doing dishes but simply watching for our station wagon to stroll towards her block. When she saw us, she’d smile her half-smile and wave a little before busying herself with the details of hospitality.
Grandpa was always finishing the polka show at full volume on the old-timey radio that sat at the desk just as we walked in. If he didn't turn it off fast enough Grandma gently chided him while pouring the coffee into the Corelle ware cups.
In summer, it was cold Tang or lemonade. In winter, homemade hot chocolate and sometimes hot Tang, which we never drank anywhere else and which we laugh about now.
Always, it was cinnamon rolls or coffee cake or banana bread or zucchini bread. And cookies for dessert. Or were they appetizers? Maybe both.
Every now and then, we'd get a full breakfast - eggs, sausage or bacon, potatoes, toast with homemade jam. Not sure I ever knew what prompted the full-breakfast treatment, but I'm guessing now it was when Grandma wanted a longer visit.
But on a typical Sunday, Grandma, Mom and Dad would drink coffee and catch up on the week's affairs, ours and that of others in the small town we shared. We kids would listen in while pouring over the Sunday comics, interrupting the adult conversation when Calvin and Hobbes or The Far Side were just too good not to share.
Grandpa always sat in a chair in the corner of the kitchen, just set back from the table. He read the paper and rubbed his aching knees and to counterbalance the comical interruptions the kids provided, he’d have an interjection now and then about goddamned Republicans or the goddamned dandelions depending on the season.
The gold and crystal clock on the hutch would chime noon and we'd start to wrap up, one of us helping Grandma with the dishes, another sweeping the floor, another putting the leftover goodies into aluminum Christmas cookie tins and tucking them away in the sweets drawer.
That’s right, my Grandma needed a whole drawer dedicated to her cookies - a cookie jar alone wouldn’t cut it. There was a whole section of the deep freeze downstairs dedicated to cookies as well. A genius move for a woman who didn’t drive and who thrived on social interaction: get them to come to you.
These visits to Grandma are so solidly etched in my memory that sometimes, when I’m having trouble falling asleep, I’ll take myself on a virtual tour of those mornings in my mind. The sound the pedestrian doors on garage made when we opened the door off the driveway to enter the house, the warm morning sun pouring through the laundry/sewing room window where we put our coats down, the smell of the sweet rolls set out on the round dining table, the warm hug and the sparkle in Grandma’s eye as we said hello. The way I felt in my body when I was there: warm, safe, seen and loved. I also felt purposeful - we knew Grandma appreciated those visits and not JUST because she needed someone to eat the cookies that were piling up.
What formed me more, I wonder, these visits to Grandma's house or the church service that took place beforehand? I suppose I took it for granted that they went together and perhaps that's why I was never unmotivated to get to church on Sunday.
And the whole truth is that these two Sunday obligations reinforced each other. As the somewhat intimidating principal at my daughter’s first school put it when we sheepishly asked permission to take her out of school so she could go see an all-girl rock band perform in a rare day-time show: “There are many different ways to learn.” Yes. Communion at church and communion at Grandmas formed me - who I know myself to be, what I know the world to be like, what God is like.
My late friend Fr. Louie often preached around Mother’s Day on how his whole image of God changed when he visited Peru and learned about the Andean shepherds: woman, often elders, who not only herded the livestock but who led the rituals that honor the earth, the animals, the flowers. These grandmothers who lovingly watch over and mind the flock - and who also make the brilliantly woven clothes the animals wear as a practical measure to keep track of them. Women who add beauty and flavor to the most mundane of circumstances - the daily rituals of life.
What is God, if not a loving presence who allow us to roam about, sends us out into the world with warm scarves and a tin of cookies, and who is always ready to celebrate us lavishly when we come back around? Whose door is always open? Whose table is filled with food to sustain and treats to delight in when we return?
Today, I sit in anticipation of one post-pandemic ritual: attending the livestream of a funeral. This one is for my mentor and friend, Wendy Wright, a scholar of family spirituality whose family spent four months living in community with 16 college students during a semester abroad in the Dominican Republic. The formation of that semester wasn’t just in the global worldview shifts that occurred, but also in the up-close-and-personal look at family life that wasn’t my own.
Wendy’s book, Seasons of a Family’s Life, has accompanied me through my 18 years (and counting!) of parenting and has been my solace in these days of mourning. In it she writes, “Rituals are the pathways we tread to mark both the social and cosmic order of things.”
One ritual that Wendy and her partner Roger had instilled in their classrooms was the Ignatian tradition of reflection - we have experiences, but we learn from and enrich our experiences when we reflect on them. I saw them reflect with their kids, then aged 14 and 12, in the same way they reflected with us college kids in the classroom. They cited us young ones in their own learnings - a profound notion to me then, that students can be teachers, that parents can learn from their children.
Today, in honor Wendy’s rich and meaningful life, I feel tremendous gratitude for being her friend and student, for her scholarship. Wendy opened my eyes to the beauty of the domestic church and it’s numerous ministers: the women who throw the parties, make the scrapbooks, frost the cupcakes, sew the costumes, swaddle the infants, knit the winter scarves, piece together the quilts, frame the photographs, address and stamp the greeting cards, harvest the garden produce, tend to the frail and ill, cook up the potluck dish, organize the clean-up committees, contribute to the funeral luncheons, sing the songs, invite us to dance, write the poetry and anecdotes, and yes, butter the cinnamon rolls.
What rituals do you remember from your childhood that marked the “social and cosmic order of things”?
How do you experience those today? Or what can you create in your own life as a way of making order out of things?
Who ministers to you in your domestic life? How do you minister to others in your domestic life?