Day Seven
Steve split us into small groups to read that morning’s scripture — the Parable of the Talents — but before we dug in, he said, “I want you to ask yourselves how is this parable a parable of resistance? Read it through that lens.”

But first, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Matthew 25:14-30 (pause and go read it, if you want to really play along), here’s a summary:

• A master provides each of his servants a different number of talents (a single talent is 20 years worth of wages) based on their abilities, and then leaves.
• The first servant invests the five talents he was given and doubles the amount, and the second servant, who was given two talents, does the same. But the third servant, who was given just one talent, buries it in the ground.
• When the master comes back, he praises the first two servants, but with the third servant, the master is angry. You should’ve invested it, he says, and then he gives the man’s single talent to the first servant and casts the unprofitable servant into the darkness. 

I’d always been taught that this parable was about using our God-given gifts in whatever measure we’ve been granted to do good in the world (an explanation I’d always founds trite because wasn’t using one’s gifts to do good a no-brainer?) But listening to the parable that morning I was struck with an entirely different meaning. In fact, it was so wildly different that when Pokie asked us what we thought it meant, I hesitated to share. 

“We’re brainstorming,” Pokie said. “There are no wrong ideas.”

“I don’t think the master is God,” I said. ” I think the master is a master. And the servant who buries his talent is refusing to participate in the master’s system. Perhaps by burying the talent, he’s opting for contentment instead of accumulation? Maybe contentment is an act of resistance?”

Turns out, my gut reaction wasn’t far from the mark. When Steve called the whole group back together, almost everyone had reached similar conclusions: that third servant was refusing to participate in a system of death by keeping the money out of circulation. 

“But can’t a parable have more than one meaning?” one guy asked.

“Of course,” Steve said. 

“So it can still be about using your gifts wisely?”

“Sure,” Steve said, “but that’s not what this parable is about. If you think this parable is a story about using your God-given gifts, then you’re taking it out of context and turning it into colonialist theology.” 

“Listen,” Steve explained, “If I read myself into the narrative, then as a white, cis-gendered man from the United States, I am the colonialist. I am the master. The Bible isn’t written for us” — he waved his arms to indicate our group and himself, and grinned — “at least not directly. Capitalism says that righteousness is the multiplication of talents. Apartheid was a Christian movement using exploitative labor to sanctify capitalism. Apartheid theology is slaveholder theology. We have to ask ourselves who are we reading the Bible with? When we talk about good stewardship, what is the system to which we are being stewards?”

Suddenly, a parable that had always seemed meaningless to me felt nothing short of revolutionary. It had power. 

This could get exciting, I thought.

***

At Langa, one of Cape Town’s informal settlements, we toured a museum that focused on the pass laws. During apartheid, Black people were forced to carry pass books with them at all times. Not having one could result in imprisonment, or worse. 

The museum was housed in a former courthouse: pass books had been issued in the front room, and in the second room Black people had been tried for pass book infractions.

In 1954, men and women gathered in Langa to protest the pass laws, and out of that gathering, the women’s movement was formed. Less than a year later, 20,000 women staged a march to protest the pass laws and meet with the Prime Minister. He wasn’t there when they arrived, though, so they left petitions with more than 100,000 signatures for him and then stood silently for thirty minutes, hands raised in an open-palmed salute.

***

From there we went to the District Six Museum which commemorated yet another community which had been razed during apartheid, the people forcibly removed to different neighborhoods according to the race they’d been assigned. 

photo of a museum photo

Before we went into the museum, we were met on the street by Reverend Rene August, a student and close friend of Desmund Tutu’s. While we waited for our tour, she told us the story of the District Six street signs.

When organizers had first planned to build a museum, they put out a request for memorabilia from District Six. Not long after, one of the organizers received an anonymous call. “I’m the one who gave the order for the bulldozers to begin destruction,” said man’s voice. “I have something to show you — I think you’ll want it for the museum — but I will not give you my name. I will pick you up to take you to see the items, but you can not see my face.” 

Even though this organizer had been jailed and tortured during apartheid, he allowed himself to be blindfolded and folded into a car. When they arrived at the location, the nameless man opened a garage door revealing dozens of street signs from District Six. He explained that after the first day of razing, he’d picked up one of the street signs and took it home with him, even though it was illegal. From then on, collecting the signs became an obsession. Now he was turning them over to the museum.

^{photo credit: Andrew Suderman}

On the museum floor was a large map of District Six as it had been before it was destroyed. When the museum first opened, people flooded into the building, immediately dropped to their knees, and began writing themselves into the map. After a few years, the museum put a second layer on top of the floor map to keep it protected. 

An elderly woman gave us a tour of the museum. She’d been a child when the forced removals had happened. One of the hardest things for her was losing her beloved doll. But then, just a few years back, some people began unearthing artifacts (illegally, I think) and uncovered her doll. Nearly 60 years after the demolitions, her doll was returned to her. “I feel complete now,” she said.

After the museum, Rene led us up the street to the original site of District Six.

It’s just a barren field now, “a scar to remind us of what happened here.” 

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (11.20.23), a fun kitchen hack, the quotidian (11.20.17), apple raisin bran muffins, candid crazy, lemony lentil goodness.

Day Six
We are fragment workers, Mzi said that morning in our last gathering in Jo’burg. Our leaders repeatedly referred to that term, coined by Willie James Jennings, and our job, they said, is to pick up the fragments of our world — the fragments of faith, of colonialism, and of commodity — and try to put them back together again.

In the center of the circle, Mzi had arranged a variety of common South African beverages on the mat: red wine, amasi, stoney (ginger beer), some sort of a fermented drink that is meant to be sipped from a gourd, and fruit juice. Two baskets were heaped with a wide variety of bread: short bread, multigrain bread, steamed bread, flatbread, etc.

^{photo credit: Isaac Witmer}

In Iziko’s communion liturgy that we read outloud, each bread and each drink stood for a different group of people — the flat bread for the people of Palestine, the saltines for the “salty” elderly ones, the rye bread for the laboring class, and so on — and then we all converged on the food and drink, sharing communion with whoever, and with more than one person, too. 

I chose amasi for my communion beverage. I knew that amasi is the South African term for clabber, the thickened sour milk that I use to culture my cheeses, so I wanted to see if it was similar to what I make in my own kitchen. I poured myself a small bit (because I’m not keen on thickened sour milk beverages) and whaddyknow, it tasted exactly like clabber.

(So if you’re a cheesemaker in South Africa, try using a quarter cup amasi per gallon of milk as your cheese culture.)

***

Something I was noticing…
I don’t like flowery language about ordinary things, and God-talk makes me feel queasy, but in South Africa, the roundabout way of speaking, the scriptural references, and the layers of meaning they attributed to simple things like names and histories felt rooted — poetic and true. I kept waiting for my impatience to bubble up, but it never did. Which made me wonder: why not? 

And then I began to wonder if the artifice I often rail against in the states is a byproduct of colonialism? As white United Statesians, our physical place in the world is rooted in exploitation. We have so much to protect, and so much to fear, so perhaps that explained why I so often got the feeling that what we said and did (particularly in Christian/Mennonite circles) smacked of pretention.

I don’t think oppressed people, or any particular group of people, have all the answers (we’re all just people), but I was beginning to notice that the Black South Africans seemed able to access the depths of humanity in ways that didn’t seem that easily accessible to us white people — or just me, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I was just windbagging, myself?

What I did know is that when the South Africans were guiding our group, I somehow felt less skeptical. More open, maybe? Perhaps because, without my BS detector constantly going off, I was better able to hear them?

It’s something I’m still mulling over.

***

That afternoon we hopped on a plane to Cape Town.

^{photo credit: Seth Myers}

I immediately noticed that the city felt more European than African. Parts of it were utterly gorgeous, with Spanish-style architecture and riotous flowers and greenery, but then right there, on the other side of the two-lane road, there’d be an encampment of unhoused people. (A week after we’d left, Steve posted on Instagram that hundreds of police were evicting one of the communities of unhoused people. “This city is sick,” Steve said. “It has no moral center.”)

“It’s not ‘loss’ here,” he told us that evening. “It’s a robbing. And a blessing that comes at the expense of another is not a blessing, it’s a curse.” 

the view from my single(!) en suite(!!) room at Schoenstatt

Welcome to Cape Town.

This same time, years previous: what I don’t do, fight poem, the quotidian (11.19.18), spiced applesauce cake with caramel glaze, in my kitchen: noon, sock curls.

I’m pushing the pause button on the South African ventures for a hot sec to tell you about yesterday, but first, I gotta backtrack…

For Father’s Day this year, my older son and daughter-in-law gave my husband two gifts: the first was to make his life easier — a thingy to haul around big sheets of plywood — and the second was to make his life harder: they wanted to pay his entrance fee to the Richmond marathon, if he’d agree to sign up. (They had actually wanted to sign him up without his knowing but I advised against that. “He needs to be in on a decision that big,” I said.) 

We can train together, they wheedled (the two of them had already signed up), and then they informed him that registration ended in two days so he had to make up his mind quickly. My husband said he’d think about it, and they were like, “Okay, cool. But you’re gonna say yes, right? So why don’t you just say yes now?” 

Remember this photo?

So he said yes, and my daughter-in-law smacked the laptop down in front of him so he could complete the signup. It looked like my husband would be running a marathon!

My husband found a treadmill on Facebook Marketplace (he hates running on roads) and stuck it in the garage, but it wasn’t until September, he began to get more serious. By the end of October he’d gone on a handful of longer, 12-15 mile runs (on roads, yes). 

But then two weeks before the race, he developed some sort of injury, we weren’t sure what it was. He knew he’d whacked his leg at work a couple weeks back, so perhaps all the running made that injury flare? His right shin was tender and swollen. Was it a shin splint? Something worse? It was too late to pull out of the race but he was struggling to walk and he wasn’t even done training. 

“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “We can go cheer on the kids. It’ll still be fun.”

“We’ll see,” he said, and he bought a compression sleeve and began wrapping and icing the leg.

Thursday morning this past week, I got fed up and, unbeknownst to my husband, I set up an appointment with a physical therapist. I wanted a professional to assess the leg: if he ran on it, would he be doing lasting damage? The therapist didn’t seem too worried about the leg which was reassuring; he was more concerned about whether or not my husband was inclined to push through pain, should it intensify.

That evening, my husband jogged from the chicken coop to the house. Thursday, he ran for a few minutes on the treadmill just to see how his leg felt (okay, he reported). Friday, we drove to Richmond and checked into our hotel. My younger daughter joined us — she came bearing pastries and homemade banana bread — and camped out on the floor.

Saturday morning, the city was chaos with bumper to bumper traffic. We found a spot in an almost-full parking garage, and then joined the stream of people heading to the starting line. My son and daughter-in-law met up with us. With just several minutes to go, the three of them squeezed through the fence into the mob.

While they waited, they peeled off their extra clothes and handed them to me, and then they were off.

Free clothes, anyone?

Eight-minutes later, we got alerts on our tracker apps that all three of them had crossed the 1-mile line, and I was like, Cool. I guess he’s running.

My older daughter joined us then, and we watched the starts of the half marathon and the 8K (there were 20+K runners total), before heading back to our car. While we were driving to the 12-mile checkpoint, we got another alert that they’d passed the 7-mile marker. Was he for real doing this?

We cheered as my son went by followed shortly by my daughter-in-law, and then when my husband came close, he slowed. “Do you have my food? I forgot to pack it.”

Good grief. Could the guy possibly be any more unprepared?

We swung by my older daughter’s friend’s house to use the bathroom, and then stopped at a coffee shop for breakfast, so by the time we got back on the road, our trackers said they were at the 18-mile mark. We decided to skip the 20-mile checkpoint and head straight to the finish. Parking was still tricky — we found a private (?) garage and decided to risk getting towed — and then attempted to join the masses piled below the finish line. It was too packed, though, so we went a little beyond that and perched on a fence along the exit corridor.

There was plenty to watch while we waited. The earlier runners (those running gods) looked amazingly cool and collected, but as time passed, the finishers looked increasingly battered — wobbling about, limping, clutching their glutes, etc. An ambulance inched through the crowd at one point, and we saw a person packed in ice go by in the back of a golf cart. 

My son finished at 4:00 hours, looking semi-stunned — “That is the hardest thing I have ever done” — and then my daughter-in-law breezed in at 4:09. “That was insane.”

My husband came in at 4:12. “You did it!” I screamed, completely losing my ever-loving shit. “YOU RAN A FREAKING MARATHON!!!” 

“Here, drink,” my daughter-in-law said, passing a partial bottle of whisky through the fence.

We milled around for an hour while the runners collected their hats and blankets, free pizza, and snacks.

my daughter-in-law’s sister ran the half and her brother ran the full — all five of them first-timers

“Was it fun?” I asked as we walked slowly, very slowly, back to the car.

“It was fun,” my husband said, kinda surprised. Amazingly, his leg had been fine the whole time. 

My husband hobbled around gingerly the rest of the day (“Now I know how you’ll be moving when you’re eighty-five,” I said), and every now and then we’d look at each other and shake our heads. “I can’t believe I did that,” he’d say. 

“Me neither,” I’d say. “You ran a freaking marathon.” 

And then we’d both laugh. 

What a Father’s Day gift.

This same time, years previous: seven fun things, three girlfriend recommendations, cheesetasting: round two, change, sourdough English muffins, the quotidian (11.17.14), official.