Dark Chocolate at Midnight
Dark Chocolate at Midnight
Sara Billups
On Trials as the Food of Faith
No one knows exactly when, but the house was built a long time ago with borrowed things from even older buildings. Maybe in the teens, maybe the twenties. Old for Seattle. It was constructed with mismatched windows and salvaged doors. Someone brought in used theater carpet with popcorn stains and laid it in the living room, so plush it made an imprint where you stepped. Flour sacks lined the walls in the stairway instead of insulation. A mason visiting from Scotland exploded a big stone in the back to build the fireplace.
Found under the plaster in a kitchen wall when we tore it to the studs: A 1958 newspaper with an ad for “fancy” whole fryers, a sports page (it was close, but Yakima beat Selma in baseball), and a Billy Graham column.
“We who are Christians should have hearts full of praise all the time,” Graham writes to different people in a different era. The Cold War, not coronavirus. Eisenhower, not Trump. Billy, before Franklin.
Three daughters lived up the narrow flight of stairs in the room where we now sleep. They drew a woman’s face, a very good likeness of their mother, and wrote a message: “Big snowstorm, 1935, 5 feet” on the wall that has since been plastered over.
The first recorded owner, Agnes, was known to be small and tough. She dug part of the basement out with two hands and a shovel to keep canned preserves and jams from fruit grown in the yard. During the summer we moved in, the July before the pandemic, we learned about Agnes from a neighbor who’d known her. In August, we began to tend the fruit trees in the tiny orchard she planted decades ago. The first year was fallow. Milly fruit, a few dozen apples from the grated tree for sauce.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe writes about bearing fruit in How to Live on Christ. Best known for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the antislavery novel that electrified abolitionists, Stowe was a public theologian in her own right, fighting for many social and political causes of her day.
“How does the branch bear fruit?” she asks. “It simply abides in the vine, in silent and undisturbed union, and blossoms and fruit appear as spontaneous growth.”
A coffee plant on the porch has grown from a seedling to a tree taller than your average person. After several years with no fruit, the tree finally started fruiting during the pandemic, when it exploded with red coffee cherries. Every summer, I pick the cherries and dry them on the windowsill, peeling the dried-out flesh to uncover the bean. In coffee speak, it’s called natural processing to dry seed in its fruit.
A friend of my husband, a Nicaraguan coffee farmer, feeds his coffee plants sugar after each harvest. He says the trees are exhausted, like after giving birth. The well-watered coffee plant, after the work, needs sugar.
“Trials are the food of faith,” we read in Streams in the Desert, Lettie Cowman’s devotional from 1925, the same year the house was built. In the Christian life, fruit of our own spirit ripens, slow or fast, by staying near to God’s spirit. After a difficult labor, there may be a flood of water and blood. Maybe a little sugar.
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The long seasons of the pandemic often did not coincide with real seasons. Labor Day was short and brutal, the still-long light ironic and twisting. The windows were open, even into the cold months, bringing smells of wisteria, then lavender, then burned leaves into the house.
In the presence of whatever grief you may have experienced during the pandemic—anticipatory grief, complicated grief, cumulative grief, or the blinding heat of grief after someone you love left the earth—were there hidden moments of release?
The lean of the grafted apple tree, good for pressing your back against with a book. The small drapey limb over the neck when you carry a sleeping child from the car to their bed. A second pot of coffee. In my life, a call towards presence has been heightened during the pandemic. The color is more saturated, the volume a little louder.
In my 20s, with college friends, I used to make paper boats with hidden messages. Someone would write about a broken heart on printer paper, then fold it into a boat. We’d write a confession, maybe a prayer. Something you wanted to let go of, or a secret you had to tell someone—you told it to the boat and set it free down the stream.
We would meet at night by the White River, set the boats on fire by the shore, and scoot them forward in the water until they would catch a light current. Sometimes, the flame didn’t keep, the water-logged paper sinking. But usually a thin line of paper boats would burn and cinder until they were out of sight, moving from Indiana towards Kentucky.
Who could have known that two decades later, we would lose people we knew in those years to a virus called SARS-CoV-2. It would have felt apocalyptic. It is better, of course, that we had no idea what was coming for any of us.
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God really made something out of nothing. The world in Genesis was tahom. Chaos waters. Creation was good, tov, because God made it so.
There are two lists you can make to capture the last years of the pandemic. First, make a chaos list. The tahom. Take out a pen and a piece of paper and write what you braced through, worried over, grinned and bore, and overindulged in the first years of the pandemic. Maybe it’s the many hours your warm hands held a cold screen, or you ate a bottomless bowl of peanut-butter-ball kid cereal. Broken relationships over politics, the state of the American church. Maybe it is that you laid down on the bed and could not get up for a long time. Sometimes, you just want to be horizontal.
Second, write a list of what is beautiful, which is really just a list of what is true. The tov. Tearing into a hot baguette. The humming buzz of a field of lightning bugs. The crowning head of a baby. Pull apart twine and there are more small but good strands. List the fruit. Pick apart an orange and there are tear-shaped pockets of juice that burst together into something tart-sweet.
In his memoir Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner says, “We are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves, and I believe that to love ourselves means to extend to those various selves that we have been along the way the same degree of compassion and concern that we would extend to anyone else.” This self, your pandemic self, is a portrait of who you are in a specific season. Show extraordinary kindness to yourself as an act of service to others, and make room for who you are becoming.
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Take your chaos list and your beauty list, fold them into a paper boat, and set them on a body of water at night. Set them on fire and watch them float and spark, the chaos and goodness together.
Under the water, there is something quiet and still. Dark, but not scary dark. Dark like a wedge of chocolate at midnight. Good work can come from this kind of darkness, because it is moving somewhere. The winter solstice trumps the summer solstice because we have evidence that longer light will stretch out ahead.
Whether you are wounded and weary, terrified and depleted. Whether you are checked out, disconnected, lonely or afflicted. Whether you are rolling down the slope of grief and it is gaining momentum. If you are in love, feeling the first weeks or months of maddening obsession. If you are full of faith and you pray, but you might be hovering off the ground a little. In the depth or the height, you are alive.
You are created and create. If you have eyes to see and ears to hear, if you are moving through the world with the gift of your senses, that itself is a miracle. The God who made sound and color is the same God who got us this far.
All feeling, emotion, and experience are a declaration: We made it this far. Crawling or running, we did. Such desperate fear, limitation, freedom, health, or overwhelming goodness happens when we are alive. Even if the headlines never get better. Even if we shout, march, and write our senator, and still cry out for change. In the waiting, we have made it this far. We are here, in this moment, and there is a blank page. You have done it. You let it all go for a change.
Sara Billups
Author & Writer
Sara is the author of the forthcoming book Orphaned Believers. Read her Bitter Scroll
Photography by Anders Schonneman