New York part 2, and Sebal

Dear blog,

The Sunday of orientation week, we were sent to be commissioned at various churches in the New York/New Jersey area.

What's commissioning? Not being very hip on institutional church lingo myself, I didn't really know until recently, but I'll fill you in. The church effectively endorses you for mission, recognizing you as following God's call and pledging to support you on your journey. You answer a few standard questions about your Christian duty, the congregation says a prayer over you, and that's commissioning. Now a church home has your back.

This summer I've been commissioned by two churches: Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian, with whom I grew up, and Patterson Community Church, who graciously commissioned four of us YAVs last Sunday.

It's a very old church. Much of the Rockland County area, which encompasses Stony Point Center, and Putnam County, in which Patterson is located, are very old indeed. I was half expecting the Headless Horseman to come galloping across a stone overpass, or at the very least the something spooky haunting one of the dark, run-down colonial homes we passed in the woody neighborhoods.

We arrived at the church very early, before services were to begin, and wiled away the time making coffee in the fellowship building and peeking into its thrift shop.

A real-life storm cellar! Or a place to store turnips.

This way to the thrift store.

I was tickled to be here. Check out the room-within-a-room! It probably served as an interior schoolhouse.

Patterson Church, being old, was a essentially a one-room chapel. I very much enjoyed sitting in this space for a time, because if you're me, New English stuff is totally rad.

Bruce, to the right with the beard, is a member of the congregation and was our kind chauffeur for the day. 

Patterson Church is Presbyterian; one-room, painted white and with a steeple. Not far to its right was a Methodist church, presumably also one-room, built in red brick and with a steeple.

In between was a graveyard. You know what you get when you combine New England, old churches, and graveyeards? Really old graves. Told you this place was totally rad. Naturally, I took the opportunity to tromp around in there after the service ended.

The Really Old Graveyard did not disappoint in its transcendental power to make you feel totally whacked-out about your position in life. I mean that in a good way, though. You start to wonder where all of these people are now (aside, of course, from under your feet). You start to wonder where you are going, and where the world will be going after you have gone. Perhaps these people are still here. Perhaps one of them is your neighbor. Perhaps one of them is the President. Perhaps we have all been here, and we are still here, and we will be here again in the future, until the sun bursts, and even beyond. But then again, maybe the human species won't last that long? I think in part it depends on us.

But that's a huge digression, and I was talking about graves.

In the Legend of Zelda, a series of video games close to my heart, you often venture into graveyards whose headstones can be pushed aside to reveal deep holes leading to secret crypts. Many of the graves in the churchyard looked like this; simple stone markers, low to the ground, that I wanted to pull away to see if secret treasure was buried beneath, or maybe a rabbit hole to explore. Erosion made some the headstones very difficult to read; others had collapsed completely onto themselves, effectively erasing any remembrance of who might be buried there. Several headstones were moldy and mossy.

Others were hugely weedy, like this person's grave, which appeared to be fertile ground for a massive tequila plant.

What headstones I could read were formulaic in their descriptions. "So-and-so something something, aged 78 'yrs, born 1804, died 1882" and so on. I have not been in many graveyards, but this was perhaps the first in which the dates were so distant. Many of the people there had died very young; others, surprisingly old for the times. One young man had died in 1812. Perhaps he was a casualty of war? Other, more recent graves reached into the early 1900s.

Farther out into the graveyard were obelisks and much larger blocks of stone, which I assumed marked the resting places of the wealthier deceased. One obelisk had engravings at all four sides of its base; one for a man's first wife, another for the second, and another for the third, who appeared to have outlived him. Olden times, am I right?. Your spouse dies, you marry someone else, they catch the pox, you marry someone else... Man, what if you died and then they buried your husband and all the rest of his wives on top of you? Talk about awkward.

Earlier humans placed rocks over the burial location to keep the dead or their spirits from crawling back out, presumably to bother everybody else still around. I wonder then what the significance of an obelisk might be? As I tiptoed through the tombstones last Sunday, I thought about pillars and towers as an embodiment of prayer, as if burying someone under an obelisk is a last-ditch effort to channel their soul straight to heaven.

Kind of a depressing thought. As if we have to rely on a stone carved the right way to serve as a jumping point to God, a last gasp in death.

But what I really want to talk about is Sebal.

You all know Paul Revere, right? Rode through the colonies at midnight, woke all the gun-toting farmers, "the British are coming", etc.? Okay, forget that guy. Apparently there was more than one American who saddled up a horse at night to warn the colonists about incoming soldiers, and Sebal Ludington, at sixteen, was one of them - she rode from 9:00 pm until dawn on a cold rainy night with only a long stick for defense to warn the local men of the Continental Army about a British raid in Danbury. Riding twice as long a distance and at more than half of Revere's age, Sebal is, in short, a True American Heroine. Hearing the tale from Bruce only an hour or so prior, I was pleasantly surprised to find her grave in the churchyard, rightly decorated with little flags.

We went afterwards to the farm owned by the pastor of Patterson Presbyterian; also an exciting trip, because I had not been to a proper farm since perhaps ever, and it's totally rad by itself that your pastor is also a farmer.

It was an exciting community facility, providing fresh vegetables and eggs and the like to the locals. I felt a bit refreshed, like this is how it should be, you know? Stewarding the land properly, buying food from people who know how to grow it and how to appreciate it. Food that actually tastes like food, like the sun and the flowers. Not that I'm one to talk, being a marshmallow who gets her milk from the supermarket and bananas from Chile or wherever. But it was still reassuring.

Nice large sinks for washing produce.

There was a whole pen for what Bruce told us were teenage chickens. I made helpful "bok-bok-bok, peep-peep" noises at them, which I'm sure they appreciated.

The farm even kept bees for honey. Can you see them?

We soon left the farm for a post-commissioning lunch at one of the congregant's homes, but not before each of us YAVs were offered a lovely whole tomato to eat. Nothing like biting into an organic tomato like an apple, albeit after dusting it off with my only nice dress.

I'm signing off for now, but the work week approaches. Hope to be back with you soon,
Caro