Easter and beyond

March 28, 2008

Hope Town is unfolding into a home town. Journey lies on the mooring we’ve rented for a month, far enough from the two bar/restaurants that party until midnight, but never any later than that. We’ve sampled three of five restaurants, are regulars at Hope Town Coffee that roasts its own beans that yield flavors that put Starbucks to shame. We have discovered walks for many moods, including a two mile or so beach walk that offers firm sand close to the surf line with just enough give to make walking delightful

St. James Methodist Church – rectangular, white stucco, low roofed, small steeple topped by a cross – perches on the sand dune that rises from Back Street. We enjoy its electric, but good quality carillon that offers familiar hymns over the harbor at noon and six each day. The other church building in the settlement is a Church of God that seems in good repair but inactive, and Catholics celebrate mass in a tiny park near the post office dock, standing or using the few benches arranged as pews. An itinerant priest celebrated mass mid-afternoon the first Sunday we were here.

Susan and Dennis, our friends from Minneapolis, who spent a week with us on Journey, M. and I opted for the six a.m. Easter sunrise service at St. James with some trepidation. A couple of Sundays ago, a glimpse through the side windows before the start of the nine-thirty family service revealed a teenage boy preparing an electric drum set. We decided to celebrate God’s generosity outside of the community that day.

It poured rain and blew hard Easter eve as we set alarms for the first time since rising early for crossing the Gulf Stream. It was warm, cloudy, dark, wet and still when we putted ashore, climbed the ladder on the dock and walked the short block-and-a-half from the government pier to the church and entered as the organ began playing “Christ Our Lord Has Risen Today.”

A slender, elderly man wearing the only tie in the sanctuary presided with an opening prayer, followed by Hymns and a beautiful reading by an Englishman of the King James’s version of John’s telling of Mary Magdalene visiting the tomb. Before the offering the congregation was asked to introduce ourselves and perhaps two thirds of the 25 or so attending were visitors. We were invited for refreshments served on the patio that lies directly behind the altar on the East side of the building overlooking the Atlantic.

The sermon was the good news of the resurrection and its promise of eternal life – a traditional, literal, and deeply felt message – from the preacher, Vernon, whom we later learned was a layman and whose wife was seriously ill and had taken a turn for the worse on Saturday.

We sang the closing hymn, but the organist seemed to keep missing several phrases. It became clear why Vernon kept going over to the organ before each hymn and leaning over it. We thought he was talking to the organist. Not so, he was turning on and off the digital recording that played the traditional hymns so beautifully, except missed a byte or two during the last.

He had said earlier, that St. James services always offer surprises, but when its quirks become frustrating, he is calmed by a fellow parishioner who says: “but we function.” They certainly do in warmth and hospitality. We gathered after the service on their patio, on the top of the dune, on the east side of the church and watched dawn break and broke our fast with cakes, brownies, muffins, coffee and deviled eggs, the likes of which I haven’t had since a church picnic in New Jersey thirty years ago.

M. and I returned to St. James the next Sunday to attend its 11:00 o’clock service and there witnessed the struggle we all face to understand and reach across our diversity. The layman, Vernon, who presided at Easter Sunrise greeted us and the rest of the congregation of all white, mostly elderly, winter and full time residents of the Cay well-dressed in summer casual, who nodded, smiled and said good morning when eyes met. A choir of eight voices that for all appearances you would think would be a bit croaky, was surprisingly good. The organist, a dedicated volunteer commuted each Sunday from nearby Man-O-War Cay, played her last service as she, like several others, would soon be returning to Canada or the United States.

I looked around for a clergyman and wondered if Vernon would again preside, when from the nave, a large black man in a black suit and shirt and white clerical collar processed. We had heard that St. James had recently installed a new pastor.

A disconnect was evident from the outset. His English was strongly accented by his native language, Haitian Creole. His accent combined with hearing loss among most of us made much of what he said hard to follow. He announced the first hymn, the choir director gently noted the choir would sing first. He announced the Psalm, but it was unclear what the order of response should be. Two verses of struggle and he suggested that one side should read one verse, the other side the other, but it never quite worked, and his Psalter seemed to be a different version than the Psalter in the Methodist Hymnal. There was some confusion about who would be reading what lesson. He seemed to be knocked off his game. His warm open face invited response and the congregation gave very little.

He warmed in his sermon, was easier to understand and allowed us all the doubt of Thomas and the hope of “I believe, help my unbelief.” A good Easter message, the closing hymn, benediction, and then the comment from a parishioner to us on the way out that some of the “older” people were having difficulty understanding him.

Vernon, the lay leader at St. James, runs Vernon’s Grocery and we got to chatting with him a week later. The new pastor serves three congregations, two of them on Great Abaco and predominately black. He is on trial until the fall and parishioners are struggling most of all with the language. He is a warm and good man, but, Vernon said, his greatest challenge will be with the black churches. “Black Bahamians don’t think Haitians are very smart.”

What hope is there for us to reach across cultures, conventions and biases that close us to one another? Is not that what Easter is? St. James’s story will need to unfold.

Susan and Dennis left last Sunday. It was a great week. We anchored one night off of Lynyard Cay, south of here a few miles. There was too much surge at the reef nearby to snorkel. Another day we did a day sail from Hope Town to Great Guana Cay, anchored for lunch and returned, bracketing high tide by two and a half hours on either side. The entrance to Hope Town Harbor has five feet at normal low, and we think we now have a five hour window to get in and out.

Our week was also filled with story telling and marathon games of Bananagrams and Shanghai Rummy and enjoying Dennis’s wit, for example, an exchange as he was rummaging through his duffle bag on the pilot berth:

Susan: “What are you looking for?
Dennis: “If I told you every time I was looking for something, I’d be talking non stop!”

Ed and Nancy on Troubadour came into Hopetown and joined us for dinner at the Abaco Inn to celebrate our 44th anniversary on March 29th. The Inn sends a van to Hope Town to drive guests to its perch on a dune on the southern end of the Elbow Cay Island where big surf comes into the beach. It is a spectacular view and sound to accompany dinner with these good new friends.

April 6, 2008

Last Wednesday, Ed and Nancy crewed with us on Journey as she entered her first race. The Hope Town Sailing Club holds cruisers races, invites all, handicaps the boats for their sluggishness and all the stuff they carry and has a party after the race. We headed out, monitored the assigned VHF channel, the wind increased and stayed steady at about 20 Knots, the cut off point for racing. It was cancelled, so we sailed a couple of hours north, dropped the hook, had lunch and returned, tacking a good deal, and realized how incredibly much work racing would be for folks of our ilk. Ed is a good sailor and continued Charlie P’s lessons begun last summer in Nova Scotia on sail trim.

Linda and Don, fellow boaters, are spending their seventh winter in Hope Town and Don invited me to a weekly writer’s workshop held at the sailing club that I sat in on last Thursday. Perhaps 20 people were there, mostly women, and none of us kids. I was the only newcomer, and the convener, Mary, had people introduce themselves: professional writers, retired lawyer, cruisers, an artist, people who make Hope Town their winter quarters, people who have time to work at writing.

We sat in a circle, shuttered windows opened around us to let the soft tropical air into the room, and those who wished offered their work to invite criticism, all of it gentle and positive. The works weren’t completed assignments, they were the personal, often heart felt efforts to capture something memorable, important, whether travelogue, poem, memoir, essay. It was like a fellowship on steroids. Good souls reading a memoir of sailing adventure long ago with a now deceased spouse, a passionate critique of a child’s home schooling curriculum, and an extraordinary essay of a recollection of a friendship of two elderly women from diverse cultures and upbringings that began on bedpans when they were roommates in a rehab hospital. I hope to go back.

Today, we are once again laced into a berth at Mangoes Marina in Marsh Harbor getting our batteries charged, water tanks filled, clothes washed, larder loaded and awaiting the arrival this afternoon of John and Margaret who will spend four days with us. We’ll sail back to Hope Town this afternoon to be on the cooler mooring and in the beauty of that harbor for sunset and the lighting of the light.