Biography
The Rev. Barbara Crafton is an Episcopal priest and writer from New York City. She was rector of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in the heart of Manhattan’s theater district and currently heads the Geranium Farm, a virtual and actual center for the promotion of spiritual growth. Barbara publishes daily online meditations read by thousands worldwide. She’s an actress, director and producer, who has worked for many years in combining the lively arts and the life of faith. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"The Spirit is in the Ordinary Things" 
I’m not sure there are any ordinary things. The older I get the more holy the world seems to be, and not just the “church things,” not just the obviously holy things, but everything. I baked bread yesterday. I mixed it up and put the yeast in and then went away and left it and the little animals—or are they plants?—or whatever yeast is. While I left it, it swelled up and the bread grew. It got to be round and beautiful. When I looked at it I remembered that Jesus preached about yeast. He said that we were yeast, that we are in the world and we make the world productive and beautiful just by being who we are.

When you bake the bread, the yeast dies. But it leaves sort of a place around where it was and that’s why the bread is big and beautiful. I pulled it out of the oven and there were the four beautiful loaves of brown bread. Another week’s worth of bread for us. And I remembered the life of the little plant. Or is it an animal? I remembered Jesus’ sermon. I remembered the first bread that I ever learned to make.

My first attempt at bread came out like hockey pucks. It wasn’t successful. I didn’t let the yeast rise well enough, I guess. Did something wrong. Flat and tough. My father was kind enough to say that it was the best bread we had ever had. My bread has gotten better over the years, over the decades since those first hockey pucks. Now they are large and beautiful. It’s just bread. You slice it and you make toast out of it and it’s gone. But it’s a sign of so much more than just bread.

Everything is so much more than it seems. I was driving the other day and the leaves are just starting to turn, out where we are. And they were so beautiful. I looked at it and I saw how beautiful the whole thing was. There was something that made me feel sort of sad about it. I’m not as young as I used to be. I’ve seen lots of falls. Some more beautiful than others and we wait to see how beautiful this one will be. There is something poignant about all that beauty. It’s the leaves saying, “Hello!” before they die, turn brown and fall to the ground. And then that’s the end of them. But they have this moment of beauty, this moment of brilliant life. They’re just leaves and they’re going to be brown and then they’re going to turn to dirt—compost, natural compost—and that will be another season. So ordinary and yet there is nothing ordinary about it at all.

The older I get the more I think that everything is really holy, that maybe there is no such thing as sacred and secular, but maybe it’s all sacred. This really isn’t a speech about separation of church and state, it’s more about God having infused everything with light, energy and power; more about my being a part of that light and energy and power, no matter how powerless or weak I may feel on a given day.

I hope that you will see something ordinary today with new eyes, something ordinary as the amazing thing it is. I hope that it makes you think that the world is full of energy and beauty and power and that it brings you closer to God, because I want for you the same thing I want for myself.

Interview with Barbara Crafton

Delle Chatman: Barbara, let’s continue with your thoughts about awareness, about God’s presence. You know, one of the things I thought of when you brought up bread, of course, I thought of communion. I’ve often thought that it was pure genius of the Lord to choose bread and wine as substances to be remembered by and to infuse with his presence because he had to know people are going to be eating bread and drinking wine forever! Isn’t that something?

Barbara Crafton: Yes. Ordinary stuff but so beautiful. There is nothing more beautiful than a loaf of bread. And nothing more beautiful than wine and the way the light shines through it.

Lydia Talbot: Barbara, your amazing antennae for sensibility and awareness. Doesn’t that require, though, a particular kind of religious sensibility, a receptivity, an openness to see what you see?

Crafton: I know people who don’t believe in God at all and who have just a thunderous sense of something—maybe they wouldn’t call holiness—when they confront nature or a new baby or an animal. And they wouldn’t say that was really about God at all. To me it is. To me the Creation just speaks of the Creator. This isn’t really about intelligent design, either. It’s more about life having meaning, the world having meaning, and the world being beautiful.

Talbot: How is it beautiful in a different way now that you’re wearing a pacemaker, now that you’re suffering from a cardiac disease?

Crafton: Well, none of us are getting out of here alive!

Talbot: Life is not a dress rehearsal. You know the line.

Chatman: Nobody will get out of here alive. Amen to that!

Crafton: I guess maybe my life might be shorter than I would like, although it’s going to be as long as I can make it. Having my pacemaker has made me much more careful about my health, about exercising, and about eating. I take so many pills you don’t want to know! It’s ridiculous. So I don’t really know, but then again none of us know that we might walk out of here today and get hit by a truck. So knowing that you don’t know how long you have just makes you think: however long I have, today is today and I’m never going to have it again.

Chatman: And I’m going to make it count.

Crafton: Absolutely.

Chatman: I’m absolutely going to make it count. Building on the question that Lydia just asked you, I get the feeling that it isn’t so much a sense of religious awareness that’s required to have this sort of ultra reality. Isn’t it a devotion to love? Isn’t it a devotion to seeing God’s love expressed through the minutia of life, whether it’s a fall season or it’s a loaf of bread or it’s a cat or it’s a child’s smile? I mean just to really look at life, expecting there to be love shining back at you from it.

Crafton: Yes. If we say we look in the Bible and that God has created things.

Chatman: And didn’t have to, right?

Crafton: Because he was fine just the way things were! Then when God created things he looked at the person he’s created and he said, “Oh, it’s not good for her to be alone. Let’s have more.” It seems to me that God made everything there is out of love. And if love really is energy—and in a way it is, he creates out of matter and energy—well, then, everything is sort of alive, even the earth and rocks.

Talbot: Now the earth and rocks are in the beautiful garden that you love and tend to, the Geranium Farm.

Crafton: The rocks are in there! A year and a half ago, a guy came with a dump truck and he dumped a whole a pallet of rocks, which must have weighed a ton, in our driveway. They sat there for two years while we talked about building a wall with them. We just started building a garden wall with it and it is so much fun. The rocks are so ancient.

Talbot: And the inspiration your garden must be for your online website, Geranium Farm. I love that.

Crafton: Everybody wants to know if the Geranium Farm—which is where I live and is also my online ministry—is really a farm and they think about cows and chickens and stuff. But, no, it’s just our house.

Talbot: But about the garden. Now, Barbara, there is a pathos in your eyes and your voice when you speak about the garden. And it’s a different kind of pathos than when I last saw you right after 9/11 and you were in the trenches working at St. Clement Church. In the “hood,” as you say.

Crafton: Oh, that was shock.

Talbot: But what is that pathos now when you think about gardening?

Crafton: You know, it’s life. Putting your hands in the dirt and putting seeds in. I just love to plant seeds, even more than planting plants.

Chatman: Because you can see something come up from the little, tiny seeds.

Crafton: They come up from the beginning and they are fed by just what’s there: the earth and the old scraps of last year’s leaves and last year’s breakfasts that have become compost nourishing the soil and the sun and the water. And this little seed has everything in it to be what it needs to be in that little, tiny seed. Lavender seeds. I love lavender. I have lots of lavender on the farm. Lavender seeds are so small you can’t pick one up, they are so tiny. They contain every little thing that they need to become a lavender plant that smells so glorious. I just can’t stand it! I just, more and more, hardly ever want to be anywhere else but in the garden. I travel so much. In the summertime I try not to travel at all so I can stay home.

Talbot: And this is a huge transition for you Barbara. I mean from being a priest at St. Clements in New York City.

Chatman: I’m wondering now. We talked about gardens and we can talk about baking bread as points of intersection for people with the Divine. But there are folks that ain’t got no garden, ok?

Crafton: And are never going to bake a loaf of bread!

Chatman: And are never going to bake a loaf of bread. I wonder where can we send them for a shortcut into this kind of intimacy. I mean, my grandmother was a domestic for most of her life which meant she cleaned and she washed and she took care of babies. I know for a fact that she found the Divine in the chore, in the task. I bet you my grandmother could find God in a dirty diaper, ok, because she was that attuned to his invitation to be an arbiter of love no matter what your activity is.

Crafton: If you want to see God, you will see God everywhere. It’s, in a way I’m thinking, maybe a decision really. What do you want to see? Nothing? Or do you want to see the world infused with holiness? In the city I remember one time we had a lunch program. You handed out a bag lunch to 150 people and they would line up on the steps of St. Paul’s Chapel. And there were 150 lunches but more than 150 people would come. So, you know, when the lunches were gone that was bad for 160 and 165. So we would hand them out. One time, we got to 150 and he got his lunch and he turned to 151 and he gave him half. And he had nothing. He was standing in front of a church for an hour in the cold to get a bag with a sandwich in it. So I think you sure don’t need a garden to see God, because that was just a Godly moment. And I don’t know what the religious persuasion of those two guys were or if they even had one, but they had certainly been beaten down by life. It was not a beautiful setting, we were in the noise and the dirt. But sometimes I think it’s in the people you also see.

Talbot: And, of course, we can think figuratively. A garden can be a metaphor for that place of connectedness or intimacy for individuals. Goethe says despite the distances that we may feel with others, the fact that we have someone in our lives with whom we can think and feel, that makes this life an inhabitable garden.

Crafton: God set Adam and Eve in a garden.

Talbot: What you’re talking about, Barbara, reminds me of the Vietnamese spiritualist, Thich Nhat Hanh, who said every moment of every day is a precious jewel. It seems to me that’s how you are experiencing every moment of every day.

Crafton: That’s how I want to experience it.

Chatman: That’s how it is.

Talbot: The seeds that you plant in your garden. Tell me about the seeds that you’ve planted in the farm of your own daughters and granddaughters.

Crafton: Oh, my goodness! Well...

Chatman: How can you do your grandkids in a minute?

Crafton: Well, they are something! One of them is going to have a birthday soon and I don’t know what she wants for her birthday but I think I’m going to get her a light in the shape of a guitar that’s made out of neon because she likes to play the guitar. The older one is an amazing girl. They’re both amazing. I look at them and I see their mother in them and it’s the same kind of feeling I have about the autumn leaves. I look at that and it makes me so happy but it also makes me a little sad. Time has passed. Life is so short and I didn’t know it was short when I was young because you don’t know. And now here they are, young women, and if I live I’ll be a “great” grandmother.

Talbot: You are a wonderful woman and friend to us. Thank you so much, Barbara Crafton.

Crafton: It’s great to be here.

Chatman: Thank you, Barbara.