Fire, deer camp, and learning to swim
On this bonus episode of Glimpses of Grace, Brandon, Meg and Stuart explore the theme of fire, both in recent liturgical texts and personal significance. They discuss destruction, purification, redemption and comfort, house fires, learning to swim and whether buck urine “really brings ’em in.”
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
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Transcript
Meg
Welcome everybody to reflections. I’m Meg, and I’m here with Stuart and Brandon, and this is our time where we talk about what we are going through in the weeks and the months since we last met, and our time to reflect on what’s up in our world. As part of our glimpses of grace podcast,
Brandon
We talked a lot about presence last time. Light, epiphany, season, what the season kind of holds, and the richness of the texts that we’ve been dealing with.
Stuart
Yeah, looking toward lent about three weeks away, I think.
Meg
Yeah.
Brandon
Something like, yeah, yeah.
Stuart
Ash. Ash Wednesday is March the fifth, so we have this window of time. Get your sins in now, Meg.
Meg
I’ve already started. One of the things that I’ve noticed, though, from sitting and the pew the past two Sundays, is this notion of fire that’s come up repeatedly. So I thought this could be an interesting time to dive into our concepts of fire, how we use fire, how, as in this time of uncomfortability and discord, fire might be coming up for us, because it’s just something that keeps coming up for me, but it’s something that last week, Brandon, you talked about how fire draws us in, as you know, we were exploring and connecting Malachi speech of God’s refining fire to the steady embers of our own faith and this deep knowing of the Spirit within us.
Brandon
Yeah, it was weird last week. I was really wrestling with the text. I was like, I had no idea where I wanted to go, but I couldn’t get away from the image of embers, yeah? And I just, I was like, you know, that’s, that’s obviously a sign that I need to lean into this. And somehow it just somehow pulled all those texts together. And I really like the that set of texts for the presentation is just like now some of my favorite like the just the way they work together and compliment one another,
Stuart
Yeah. And then I tried to build off of what you did that week with that text from Isaiah with the yeah of carrying the live coal with the tongs and putting it on on the lips.
Meg
So I don’t really, so I throw this out as a person who’s like, I’m not sure where this needs to go, but it’s come up for me, right? Like it’s, it’s something that I have meditated on for the past two weeks. So how do we unpack that concept of fire more, because they both hit me very powerfully, like both of you, did a beautiful job of giving me something to walk away with and think about for the rest of my week. And then I started thinking about fires like, all the ways we use it like, and all the and all the ways it can bring us together and but also what it does for us individually, in those spaces where fire might bring us together.
Brandon
Well, let me pose this question then, because when you were just saying that, I was thinking about the movement of a flame, right? And so what, that’s what draws me to fire, you know, the movement, we can kind of go more into that, and like movement of the Spirit and such in just a moment. But like now, I’m just sort of curious what draws you to fire?
Stuart
Well, I mean, for me, so I think there’s something very primal, of course, about fire. I think about it from, you know, a Jungian point of view, really. I mean, it’s an archetypal elemental force. I think the earliest memory I have of it, hearing you say that makes me think so. When I was a child, I was never good at hunting, but I grew up in a very hunting culture, so after the first of November, we would spend a lot of time at our at our deer camp. I never wanted to go out into the woods and hunt. I wanted to sit by the fire. So my
Brandon
just out of curiosity, to unpack that, what is deer camp?
Stuart
Deer, OH!, we should totally do one! We should do. We we should say,
I have been to deer camp. I just want to explain it
Meg
so you’ve put buck urine on your shoes.
Stuart
I hope the answer is yes to that.
Meg
because that’s, that’s how you draw them in.
Brandon
That is true.
Stuart
It’s the same. I know this is a thing, so, I mean, it’s primal, right? Yeah, we would go and we would kind of move out there, yeah. So, I mean, my dad would stay there for days, and he would, he would get dressed from there and go to work and come back, and you would get up early in the morning. We had people who cooked, and so they were, you know, a cook house, and all of our buildings were like tin shacks. I mean, we, we lived in these tin shacks. And people would bring camp. Birds and everything. And they would camp out for like two weeks, and they would go hunt each day. And so I would stay there as much as I could, but I wanted to stay by the fire. My role was to keep the fire. I was a little Hestia, like guarding the fire. And so I would get up in the morning to go back to so some of the fire had made it through the night. I would uncover those, you know, smoldering embers. I would go find windows, yeah, and that was what I did. And then I would, I would stay by it all day. I would stay bad. I would put logs on it, and then at night, we would always make it bigger, so we would add more to it at night. And then, you know, we would all come, we would go eat, then we would all sit around the fire. And I loved it. I loved it. Could not care less about the actual like, hunting of deer, yeah, but I mean, and I think there’s a lot of work that’s been done on telling stories, you know, community, building connections, all of that, and how Fire is such a powerful force. And actually, like, fostering that on a deeper heart level.
Brandon
What about you? Meg, what draws you to fire?
Meg
Smell.
Stuart
Oh, yeah.
Brandon
Yeah?
Meg
The smell the wood smoke, like, when, and I think I’ve touched on this before when we’ve talked, but that is where, that is my sensory place of, like, going to my place of comfort. So, like, immediately I stop in my tracks, like, if I’m driving or and not truly stopping my tracks, but it creates a pause in my world. Of, like, where am I, what am I doing? Am I aligned with my purpose? I don’t know why it’s always been that way. I there’s not a place I can tap into from my childhood or anything like that, but the smell of wood starting to smolder and to the point that when we, you know, we go camping as a family. Did not grow up doing that, but I love doing that with my kids, and I really relish like it’s still being stuck, like in my clothes and in my hair, like that reminder of slowing down, centering. Because for me, it it’s so much about tapping into this cellular place of like survival, bringing people together, the psychological healing that I think can happen from just watching fire, which leads back to your like, watching the flame. Yeah, I think all of those things are really gifts and building it and watching it and being around it.
Brandon
So scent, yeah, scent is so tied to memory. So there’s no, there’s no specific memory for you with fire.
Meg
It’s just a very comforting… from the time that I was little, like walking, walking into homes, or like homes, it like at a deer camp, or like homes that don’t get occupied very much. It might have a wood burning fireplace that smell just makes me feel so safe.
Brandon
Yeah, hmm. And I kind of have a deep now that you’re saying this. I don’t have this fear now, but as a child, I have such a fear of fire. You know, so terrified of the house burning down. And what would happen? How would I get out? I think it’s also tied to the house sort of near us burned down as a kid. But, yeah, that’s interesting, that fire makes you feel safe.
Meg
What’s funny is we had this conversation. Last night in our house because one of our children locked their bedroom door. And so Mike’s conversation was, Don’t lock your bedroom door at night. If there’s a fire, I need to be able to get to you. And they were like, I’m fine, I’m safe. Like, why? Why does it matter? Which I mean, in their world makes total sense. Like, okay, like, I’m, why would I have to be worried? But that was his go to, there’s a fire. I was like, Oh, I didn’t think about that.
Stuart
It’s also a sound. Like, I love the crackle. Like, there’s a, there’s a very distinct sound, you know, and the and the visual, like being there at night, and not just there, but like, I mean, like at other points in my life, like being around a bonfire and throwing on a new log, and all of the little orange sparks swirl up. Like there’s something about that that’s, yeah,
Meg
well, there’s work to it, and it’s humbling. I think about trying to start a fire. I’m not the best. Yeah, I’m not the best, and it’s a wonderful exercise. And my own ego of like, okay, I can do this. When to stack the put the logs in this teepee shape, and I’m going to put all the kindling underneath, and. It’s gonna go and then it doesn’t, no, or it starts,
Stuart
it starts, and then it doesn’t, yeah. It is such a primal thing. When, when I was a kid, my grandparents had a, like, a wood burning stove, and I loved that, like I do, like having a house with some type of a fireplace to be able to see it. But it is, I mean, so I’m, I mean, so I’m thinking in my mind, like, like, so the like, the four of them, earth, air, wind and fire. Are we drawn to certain ones of them? Or are we drawn to certain ones of them at certain points in our lives? Like, do we go, but like between them? Or is there something about because I think the two like, you know, when you sent a note about saying that we were going to, you know, talk about fire, I thought about those four, earth air, wind and fire, or earth, air, fire and water. And I think the ones I feel closest to are earth and fire. Like I don’t feel close to air,
Brandon
Interesting.
Stuart
Like there’s something about fire that’s very clear and earth. Like I love being in mountains.
Brandon
I certainly feel like I float between all four of them. I think. I don’t feel particularly tied to one or the other.
Meg
Air doesn’t enter my thinking.
Brandon
What does air?
Meg
Air doesn’t enter into…
Brandon
Oh, it does. For me, that’s so strange. I tie in fact, I think in that, that piece that you shared with me, I feel like there was something about and maybe, maybe I’m missing it. But imagination being tied to air. So that’s interesting.
Stuart
But see, for me, it would be fire. I mean, like sitting around the fire and actually having time to wonder, like, I mean, it’s just, it’s, it’s fascinating to see what we associate with them. You know?
Meg
For me, it’s earth. Earth is tied to creativity for me. But I think that’s also my attachment to gardening.
Stuart
And water, like, I do love water. I like to be near water, like, you know, I walk down to this, I mean, to the lake those days. I like to be near water. But I don’t, I guess I don’t associate with water. It probably had something. So here’s a word. So when I was two, this probably has, like, something to do with it. My grandfather thought that all children could innately swim. No one. He had never actually known that anyone actually had to be taught…
Brandon
When we’re saying child like, how old?
Stuart
I was two.
Brandon
Okay, that’s a little old.
Stuart
And he threw me. He threw me into my aunt’s pool. And the story is they looked over and I was just sitting. I was sitting on the bottom of the pool of like, like three. I sunk. I mean, I’m dense, so I just sunk. I sunk to the bottom of the pool. And they looked and, of course, they just, I mean, someone, I don’t know who this person was, who, and said
Brandon
“Somebody has to go down and get him.”
Stuart
Yes, someone must bring him up from the depths. So they brought me up and…
Meg
“Make him tend the fire.”
Stuart
And the story was that my grandfather just said, “well, I thought they knew how to swim.” hmm.
Meg
Was that just a thing in the 80s? Because I remember getting thrown into a lake.
Stuart
Oh, so see,!
Meg
I got thrown into a lake. It was like, “Figure… figure out how to get back.”
Stuart
Oh!
Brandon
Oh, wow.
Stuart
Oh my gosh.
Meg
I was older. It’s probably five.
Stuart
Oh my gosh.
Brandon
I had swim lessons.
Stuart
This is back when you still live like out on the West Coast.
Meg
Can everyone guess how old we all are? Two of us were thrown in bodies of water and told to figure it out.
Stuart
But I do love that image that you brought up in. I was so glad that you brought it up in your sermon around those embers.
Brandon
Well, I think what really like brought it together for me was like, I how I kind of go into God is very present in where we are in the moment. You know that we experience a living God, and I think those embers and that, that life, that sort of is still in, or was, or, you know, it’s kind of like it kind of with your sermon today at the funeral, like, transcends time. You know, it’s like, okay, are the embers? Are we in the past? Are we in the present? Are we in the future? Like, is it going to be fire again? It was fire. Currently. So there’s just something there that I think is really fascinating to think about.
Meg
Well, it’s really comforting Hearing you say that in this space, even though I did pay attention last Sunday, it’s one of those in the world that we navigate on a daily basis right now to know that I personally am trying to lean in to this place of faith that I haven’t quite figured out yet, right, like I have my foundation, but I’m being called to go towards something deeper, and to know that as much as that may ebb and flow for all of us, I think about our kids, who are on pilgrims with us, who just went to Happening, my own son who is about to go to New Beginnings, like as we go through this path. Of…
Brandon
these are, these are retreats, yes, at our diocese.
Stuart
Like as much as we go through this journey, as we build upon our faith that the embers are always there, like it’s not an external thing, it’s an internal thing that continue to stoke the fire of our curiosity, our peace, our comfort, like all of that to know that that’s Always to consider it that way as someone who gets the luxury of receiving, like, what you guys take all week to contemplate and tease out of these texts, is a really great thing to walk away with in this moment. Like, to be like, Oh, okay, as I lean into this, it’s all those embers are still there in a different way.
Brandon
And to lean into like the refiners fire, right? Like refinement is an ongoing process in our faith,
Meg
yes,
Stuart
yeah,
Brandon
we’re never, we’re never truly formed, you know, like, but
Stuart
how, like, I’m sitting here thinking how counter cultural that that is, or how much that that challenges so many assumptions, like, we don’t. We don’t want to think about the things in our lives that need to be burned off or purged.
Brandon
No, it’s uncomfortable.
Stuart
It’s it’s it really, I mean, so much of you know the cultural assumption is accumulate, and with our practice piece, so much of it really does start, but with, you know, awareness and then a burning away, you know. And that’s as as one of my, you know, teacher says “that’s a that’s a really hard sell.”
Meg
Well, but what if we flip the script a little bit in this, because we all live it this the culture of like, accumulation must have the next cool thing. What if it is about burning away to acquire more of who I am?
Brandon
Oh, absolutely.
Meg
Like, what if that becomes the,
Stuart
I think so,
Meg
the ultimate commodity, I’m not sure if that’s the right way to say it.
Stuart
like, I mean, I’m thinking back. So the summer after my freshman year of undergrad, I worked at the paper mill where my dad had worked. So it was the only summer, really, from college, that I came back to my parents house. I mean, from there on, I was out and just did strange stuff, and I came back that year. So the next summer, if this tells you anything, I went from working at the paper mill to doing research on the reproductive habits of goldfish. That’s what I did the second summer.
Meg
Checks out.
Brandon
Yeah.
Stuart
First summer, I worked at a paper mill, and while I was home that summer, my oldest childhood friend, his house burned. So my dad was a firefighter in our little, small town. So my dad gets up. I mean, we were, we were used to this as kids, right? The you know, alarms would go off. My dad would jump up, go, run, hop on the fire truck, go, and he would come back. And I didn’t know that it was Brian’s house. I just knew that he woke me up like at one in the morning, and he came back around four, and he came to the door and he woke me up and he said it was actually Brian’s house. So I jumped up and hopped in my car and drove over, and they had all gone, and I pull up and their house was still burning, like it was just it had gotten down to the point and they were sitting in lawn chairs. So we sat in lawn chairs around so I’m thinking about what it was like to sit around a campfire as a child in the same lawn chairs that we sat around their house like watching their house burn. And we all just sat there underneath, you know, pecan trees, and watched everything that we had known as children burn. But then there was this curious thing. So then we went and we started, like, digging into it, finding things that didn’t burn. So there was this random little teacup, random stuff. So you find these things that made it, that didn’t burn, and then they rebuilt their house and, you know, their life, you know, hit, hit that really hard spot. But so there are these moments, I think, where we have these certain images around engagement with fire, whether it’s smell or sound, or these memories that are so deeply and even things that we use deeply burned, burned in us.
Meg
The moments in our life that are the hard stop where It really is the house that we have built for ourselves burning down.
Stuart
Right?
Meg
And maybe nobody else knows it,
Stuart
maybe nobody else knows it,
Meg
but, but it hits, but it hits that way, on a deep level, that everything’s kind of gone and we’re having to rebuild,
Stuart
R ight?
Brandon
But sometimes it’s necessary, you know,
Meg
Yeah, absolutely.
Stuart
Sometimes it’s necessary, yeah. And even the phrases that we use, like hearing you say that, like when something when something hurts, we’ll say that burns. You know, there’s something in us that knows the deep truth that
Meg
makes me think
Brandon
that we’re being refined.
Stuart
We are! Like it or not.
Meg
Or how much it put her it pushes there’s my grandmother. You say, “Oh, that burns me up.” It’s like, where does that anger come from? Where is it pushing you to be? What’s the real source of that?
Brandon
Again, movement.
Stuart
There you go, yeah. I mean, it is, it is a very hypnotic thing to sit and watch a fire, but to watch it dance, and it does dance. So this might make no sense at all. So like hearing you say, that makes me think around earth. So it like the, you know, Judeo-christian worldview, humans come from earth. In the Arab worldview, to put it in that sense, the djinn come from fire. So you have this other, you know, category of being whose essence is not the ground, is not earth, but is fire. And I’ve always been intrigued by that, to say, like, how do we understand, you know, and it was always like the stories with them, or, you know, you can’t catch them. They’re not solid. In that sense. They’re, they are. They’re always moving, they’re always moving. And they burn through you. They burn through, you know, illusions.
Meg
Say that again, that’s good. They burn through you.
Stuart
They Yeah, they burn through you, and they burn through illusions. And it terrifies us. It terrifies us because we want to think that things are solid, permanent, all of those things,
Brandon
Yeah, like, what are those illusions in our lives that are that needs to be burned away?
Stuart
Oh, I’m gonna have to have a drink to talk about that. But it is. It’s just true, though. And think about where we are right now. I mean, just sitting at lunch with someone and hearing and like, constantly throughout the day, like people feel pinched and they feel like nothing, nothing is stable. Nothing is grounded, you know, and they and we crave something that is more solid. At least, we think we do. At least on our first impulse is to crave something that’s more solid.
Brandon
It’s more comfortable.
Stuart
It’s more comfortable.
Meg
And yet, we’ve just spent all this time talking about the comfortability and the healing and the, the presence of gathering around us with something that is constantly moving.
Brandon
I love, I like that image. I feel I get comfort in that. I know that’s not true for everybody, but,
Stuart
What do you think about, like, go back to the to the texts, you know, and the pillar of fire, you know, that was guiding. I mean, there’s so many images from stories around movement, and what people needed, what they really needed, not what they wanted, but what they really needed. And there’s so so much of that, I just love it, I mean, and I do, like you said, I do pay attention to patterns. And, you know, when images come back again and again, then I think there’s, there’s something to that. A lot to that.
Brandon
Yeah. So thank you for having those things come up and to like and to bring that to conversation today.
Stuart
And I think about even, you know, the candles, like the way we use them. And there’s so so many of those parts.
Meg
Well, and for me, I wrote it in my notes from Sunday. It made me think of as we head into this Lenten season and Easter, like the great vigil, like, the great watch, like, and that fire,
Stuart
Oh, which I love that fire. And I love doing it indoors. I mean, there’s something great about doing it outdoors too. But doing it indoors is great, you know. And a little a little scary, like I did singe all the hair off my left arm one year, which, you know, but lent should leave a mark, right? I mean, you know, Holy Week should leave mark. So, yeah, it’s interesting. So what are we going to do next?
Meg
I don’t know. I was just thinking, oh, when you said that, I was like, I light a candle every night, as I say my prayers. We have a new kitten. Oh yeah. Most of his whiskers have been singed off. He’s very intrigued by the movement of the fire. So I get to carry this with me all week. Is it light my candles. I don’t know. Next, I don’t know. We’ll see what comes up. Absolutely it’s the exciting thing about something will come up, how it all gets interconnected as we pay attention,
Stuart
Well, and I’ll be curious now to look at the text in the next few weeks.
Brandon
Joseph and his brothers is coming up. That’s, that’s good stuff,
Stuart
Yeah. Oh my gosh. I mean, I think my life is bad sometimes. No one beat me up and threw me in a well.
Brandon
Nope.
Stuart
Yet…
Meg
Threw us in bodies of water.
Brandon
There’s still time.
Stuart
But they did throw us in bodies of water. Let’s see what happens. I swear, No children were harmed in the, you know, recording of this podcast
Meg
No.
Stuart
Well, thanks for this.
Meg
Thank you all. And thank you everybody for joining us. As we’ve reflected on the past couple weeks, we’ll see where the next few take us.
Stuart
We will. It’ll be good.
Brandon
Yep.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai