David and Leann Augsburger are two semi-retired people who co-lead a home base church (Peace Mennonite Church, Claremont, California) and volunteer to welcome, care and connect people in the San Gabriel valley.

This week we keep coming back to conversations about:

1. Abide With Me, Elizabeth Strout, 2006. Sometimes Leann comes home from book club and drops a book in David’s lap. “We must talk about this one when you’ve read it.” Rarely is it so multifaceted—a problematic pastor and people with problems, death and grief, moral choice and criminal acts, good faith and bad faith, secrets and risk, Bonhoeffer and bumbling simplicity, compassion, love, and fear all woven into an everyday story of a New England parish. Eleven years this book has waited on our book shelf for us to be surprised and stirred by its depths for rich conversation.

2. Church Conflicts. An assignment to write about pastors and apology (many pastors look constantly apologetic but have never given one), and frequent encounters with church conflicts where a genuine apology would have brought healing but no one knows how to make one, combine to set us talking of “giving sincere regrets.” It is so hard to say, “I was wrong, I erred, I am sorry, I regret what I did, I handled this wrong, I will not do it again, I will make amends by . . . “ It seems like a sign of weakness when it is actually the evidence of great strength. “If God said, ‘I’m giving you a choice, forgive or die,’ a lot people would go ahead and order their coffin,” says Sue Monk Kidd  in The Secret Life of Bees. (p. 277) It’s true about apologies, too.

3. “The First White President” a deeply troubling article in the Sept 8 issue of The Atlantic, by Prize winning author and columnist Ta Nehisi Coates is an essay taken from his new book, We Were Eight Years in Power. No matter your political bent, Coates writes for humanity (we have recommended two of his previous books on this blog) and this article has the ring of uncomfortable truth about one administration’s need to obliterate the legacy of its predecessor and the meaning of such erasing of all that was written. If you are offended by his sharp critique, check the color of your skin, as I did, before moving on.

4. Juchitan and Oaxaca, cities where our daughter Deb lived doing field work in graduate studies and still has a community of friends were impacted by an 8.1 magnitude quake, Coral Gables and Sarasota where we have extended family visited by Irma, Houston where colleagues from Fuller Theological Seminary connect us to Harvey, California is the state most hit by the removal of DACA on a whim. The list of disasters is long. Suffering moves into the foreground from our larger field of shared human pain. And we live near a massive  geological fault line, we cannot forget. “Hold people, not things, close,” we remind ourselves.

5. Yeast Waffles. Waffles,  served the original Belgian way with yeast fragrance billowing from the row of irons for our Peace Mennonite Church fellowship dinner. Everyone else brought toppings: Louisiana Fried Chicken, maple syrup, blueberries, whipped cream, and vanilla ice cream, for example, and we talked of things important as we waited for the next set of crunchy golden disks to come hot from the irons. Earlier we had read Deuteronomy 26: 1-11 about the feast  by the altar that includes the stranger—everyone shares the first fruits that have just been given and then returned as God’s gift. (Belgian Yeast Waffles: Dissolve 1 T. yeast in 2 c. warm milk. Add 4 beaten egg yolks and 1 tsp. vanilla. Whisk together and add 2 ½ c. flour, ½ tsp. salt, 1 T. sugar, then  ½ c. melted butter. Fold in 4 stiffly beaten egg whites. Let rise in warm place until double.)

6. Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War. We have begun watching this PBS miniseries and it is devastating. Incredible that what we have tried so hard to forget and this story is being told to us so unforgettably. I was in Saigon in 1970 with Eastern Board Missionaries and came back committed to speaking every fourth message on the Mennonite Hour radio show on peace and the war we were waging. So this is unbelievably painful, truthful and much more.