St Thomas Sunday
Poem for April 16, 2004 by James E. Nelson
This poem was originally written as a metaphor for the strange life we were living at the time, although it has become one of my favorite poems. St. Thomas Sunday, on the Eastern Orthodox calendar, is the Sunday after Easter. The Gospel lection of Thomas doubting that Jesus is alive and then seeing him one week after the resurrection is also typically read on the same Sunday in Western churches. In the Slavic or Serbian churches (I'm not sure which) there is a tradition of eating the Easter picnic basket items on St. Thomas Sunday after worship at the grave of the member of the church or family who has died most recently.
In 1992 I was doing continuing education with an Orthodox priest and one of the requirements of the class was to regularly attend divine liturgy. Because of some odd circumstances, this congregation had liturgy on Saturday evening, making it possible for us to attend. We became friends with the congregation and were involved in a number of their activities. In the winter or early spring of 1992, Marion, a member at that church, died. Although we didn't actually go to his grave for a picnic on St. Thomas Sunday (he was buried in Pittsburgh), if tradition would have been followed, that's where the picnic would have been.
Kulich is a Slavic egg bread baked especially for Easter. Along with kulich and wine, other Easter basket staples are foods that point particularly to the promise of new life, such as eggs (preferably decorated), seeds, and nuts. Since the strict Orthodox refrain from meat all during lent, meat, especially sausages, is also a staple of the Easter basket. At the time I was making pemican, which is a Native American staple made of jerky, nuts, and dried fruit all compressed together into strips or sticks. Pemican has all of the classic Orthodox Easter ingredients (meat, nuts, fruit), and so I included it in our Easter Basket.
I was a Presbyterian pastor experiencing all of the Eastern Orthodox Easter traditions. It was a very odd blend of things and reminded me of the invitation to the Table "They shall come from east and west, from north and south, and sit at Table in the Kingdom of God." That invitation was the seed from which this poem was born.
ST THOMAS SUNDAY
I'm neither Slav nor Sioux
nor dead.
Yet here I lay barefoot
at Marion's grave
laughing and eating
kulich and pemican,
red eggs and wine. Rose
bushes above his head.
And at his feet
our basket lies empty.
What is this tapestry which swaddles
incongruity?
Up ‘til now a linen basket liner
but transformed into
a banquet cloth where all is spread:
East and West,
life and death,
travel rations,
festive bread.
What can gather these together?
What can bind me to this place?
That which journeyed, hell-bent, loosing
Marion for this Spring feast.
Copyright © 2004 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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