Biography
The Rev. Dr. Heather Murray Elkins is Associate Professor of Worship and Liturgical Studies at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Heather is a minister in the United Methodist church and has served as a local pastor, a university chaplain, an academic dean, and a truck stop chaplain in her almost thirty years of ministry.  [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

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          and 30 Good Minutes.

"The Life of a Spoon" 
In its beginning and to its end, human life requires feeding. Somebody had to feed us or we wouldn't be here. To be spoon fed is a sign of vulnerability; we are either too young or too infirm to feed ourselves, and yet it is also a revelation of relationship. You know, to stretch out a spoon is to extend a table of hospitality in God’s name and for Christ’s sake. Now, this spoon work requires remembering how we’ve been fed and blessing the hands that have fed us. Memorial and thanksgiving form the centerpiece of sacramental fellowship. We help, however, in setting the table. And we need reminders of how to say grace.

I have a spoon. It’s not my baby spoon. God knows where that’s gone after a lifetime of moving. I hope it’s still in circulation in some Good Will universe. What I do have is a silver Korean spoon. My father brought it home from the war. It came with a set of chop sticks, but they vanished somewhere along the trail of our family’s endless migrations from house to house, east to west and back again

He never told us why he brought home a set of silverware. It seemed odd for a war memorial. He got medals, but we never saw them. He did show us, his three daughters, a picture of two children, a girl of seven and her brother who was younger. He told us about finding these children, or how they found him. The U.S. and the South Korean forces were being forced south of Seoul. He was with the Army Corps of Engineers and their job was to build roads for the retreating officers and equipment and to stand between to slow the Chinese advance.

The children found him at a stream, shaving. They were dirty, starving. He offered the girl part of his rations, a comb and a piece of soap. He thought he’s seen the last of them. She returned, her brother in hand, and they were washed, combed, and smiling. He let them stay, fed them, taught them a little English, and learned a little Korean. He wrote home about adopting them and sent us the picture. He tried to keep them with his unit when they had to retreat further south, but was ordered to leave them behind. He paid a family to feed them. He lost the children but kept the story and the silverware.

I grow up wondering about these missing members of our family tree. I study their picture and finger the spoon. When the chopsticks are lost, I hide the spoon in the box of things I keep under the bed, whatever that bed is I’m in. The picture and the spoon get imprinted on my synapses, deepening the connections over the years.

I start digging for the story of the spoon when I find myself as the academic dean of a seminary that sent the first Methodist missionary Henry Appenzeller to Korea. We establish a faculty exchange program between Drew and Ewha Womans’ University in South Korea. Its first president was Alice, Henry’s daughter. I stare at the spoon on the shelf in my office and after five years think it’s time to follow it home. I need to know the rest of the story.

I travel to South Korea to teach at Ewha for a semester. Two weeks after I arrive, 9/11 explodes the world as we know it. All the systems of communication, the phone, the e-mail, the airlines go down.

It takes two weeks to get the phones to work again and my first call is my husband. He’s coming to Korea as soon as the airports open and he’s bringing my father. They arrive one week after airports have reopened. They arrive on the day we declare war on terrorism and bombing begins in Afghanistan. I know why my husband’s on the first plane. I don’t know why my father’s come. He’s frail, a veteran of World War II and Korea. He’s eighty three years old now. When I ask him why, he simply says that he wants to see a people who’d been “to hell and back again” before he dies.

We go to the Monument for Peace that overlooks the DMZ, a place where a war of half a century is still being waged. He stands and looks at the Bridge of Freedom in silence. I finally ask him to explain the spoon. He answers me without taking his eyes off the Bridge, “A spoon. It’s the weapon of a Christian."

From the Gospel of John: When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than thee?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” A second time he said to him, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he has said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And said to him, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.”

You see, that’s the secret. This is the weapon of a Christian.

I learned another secret about spoons at my mother's mother's table. At the age of a hundred and six, she’d moved from feeding to being fed. I’ve framed her final lesson in my memory. My older sister's kitchen is filled with the noisy sounds and the wonderful smells of a multi-generational thanksgiving dinner. My oldest sister had inherited our grandmother’s cooking skills; I inherited the ability to boil water. So, I did as I was told: feed Grandma. You know, long after other tastes have departed, the sense of bitter and sweet remains, so Grandma gets to eat desert first. I spoon feed her ice cream, my attention elsewhere, until she stops the spoon. She’s blind so she traces the spoon up to my fingers, and then, and then she kisses my hand.

It’s a simple gesture of gratitude. It’s a profound sacramental insight. To kiss the hand that feeds you is Eucharistein, thanksgiving. That’s the gesture of a Christian.

Interview with Heather Murray Elkins

Delle Chatman: Heather, I am so touched by so many of the stories that you told inside this five minute presentation and I’m really, really moved by the part that war and conflict play as a backdrop for these experiences that your father had. What do you think there is about the test of war that makes gratitude rise to the surface?

Heather Elkins: When I learned from my grandmother about blessing the hand instead of biting the hand. That’s, I think, the difference. Abraham Heschel once said, “If you have only one prayer to pray, it is sufficient to say thank you.” This failure to say thank you, this understanding that we are all, all gifted—we own nothing but what we have been given—I think if that’s absent then this terrible hostility and hunger about needing to grab, to take, to defend, to divide, it’s difficult to resist.

Lydia Talbot: Heather, this beautiful spoon. As you say, it grows traditionally in Korea from the time of birth to later years. Your metaphor using this spoon to convey the gift of sacred hospitality is compelling. But you say we need help setting the table and how to say grace. What did you mean?

Heather Elkins: The Gallup Poll, if you check it, every twenty years measures Americans’ use of prayer in public places. In the last twenty years, a forty percent decline in one particular form of prayer. Do you know what that is?

Hosts: Saying grace?

Heather Elkins: Saying grace. So we don’t practice it either at home or in the same way in public. And when we don’t practice the simple thing of blessing the food that keeps us alive—and the reasons for why we are not doing that so much is a huge question—but if we don’t do that then when we come to the business of thanking God sacramentally we have an absence of the common place habit. We do not know how to say thank you. We do not know how to say grace. Now, I think some of that’s because families don’t eat together the way they used to.

Lydia Talbot: I love your description of your father’s words that the spoon is the “weapon of the Christian.” But what do you think that implies about the greed and gluttony that define our culture?

Heather Elkins: I think the idea that we have to feed ourselves is a terrible heresy because if we think we have to feed ourselves then we will become the consuming culture that ends up feeding on itself and the whole world. It’s a terrible, terrible hunger that won’t go away.

That spoon had a life beyond the moment when I learned that it’s a secret weapon of a Christian. I carried it to a very small Methodist church that’s in the very tip of South Korea, right on the border. And because I’d learned this incredible lesson I said I was going to come. They were having a thanksgiving service. It, of course, was all in Korean and I was going to be translated. I wanted the people in that church to bring their spoons. I’d learned that Koreans tend to live a whole life around their own silverware. You know, very, very connected. So I said please, to the pastor, ask them to bring spoons. He said, “Why?” I said, “Tell them they’ll find out after the sermon or in the sermon.” And I was simply going to tell them the lesson of my father and what having spoons and saying grace is about. That’s the heart of our sacrament of Holy Communion.

So I preached. There were only about 140 people, a small church as Korean churches go, but they all brought their spoons. Young, old, everybody. And after the sermon I asked them if they were willing to use their spoon to feed even the enemy, that was basically less than ten miles away. They were to bring that spoon up, put it in a basket, the pastor would lift it up and pray for those spoons that they would work the work of Christ. And then they would take their spoon back because if that road ever opens between the north and the south, it will go through that little village. So I wanted them to be armed with spoons. They all came up. There was a young mother, she had a baby on her shoulder and she put her spoon in. She thought for a moment and then she took the baby’s bottle and put it in the basket and then later explained through a translator she wanted her baby to be fed that way.

Lydia Talbot: Heather, our time is almost up but in a second tell us the title of your upcoming book in which the spoon is featured.

Heather Elkins: Ah! That’s “It’s the Holy Life of Human Things.”

Lydia Talbot: Wonderful.

Heather Elkins: Thank you so much.