Hugh Hollowell

Trying to build a a better world.

Nostalgia for a different past

This essay published

I don’t know if you have spiritual practices that others don’t view as spiritual practices, but I do.

Like cutting the grass. Once I realized there is substantially no difference between walking the labyrinth and cutting the grass with my push mower, I came to see cutting the grass as a spiritual practice.

Another one I have is looking at my Facebook Memories. It is like a perpetual journal, where I can see what was on my mind on this day for each year for the 12 years I have been on that platform. And sometimes I cringe at what I said, and sometimes the urgency of my post is lost, and now it just seems inane, but always I end up with things to reflect on in my quest to find healing for myself.

And today, I was reflecting on the lost relationships I have, most especially with the people I grew up with. What led me to this was noticing someone with whom I had went to High School and who had once commented on something of mine from 10 years ago, but who was no longer my Facebook friend. And then I noticed he was Facebook friends with other people from my childhood that I didn’t know he knew (different circle of friends) and that made me reflect on A) How small the world of my childhood was and B) How shut out of that world I am now.

As a child, I had the curse of being the kid who read, and while that helped me substantially with trivia contests and ACT scores, it also made me dissatisfied with the small world in which I lived. It gave me a desire to see more of the world than the 30 acres on which we lived after inheriting it from my grandmother, and the small church with my grandfather’s name on the cornerstone as the chair of the building committee, and the sure thing job I could have had as a lineman for the Power company my cousin was the head of.

So, I left. In fact, I once overheard my mother describe me that way to a friend – Hugh was the one who left. I didn’t really have a plan, and it showed. I was a Marine for a while, and did all sorts of jobs from lineman to firefighter while I was a wandering scholar for a while, and I was a husband for a while until I wasn’t, and then I sold securities and a hunk of my soul at a chance at the brass ring, only to find it was bitter in my mouth and required copious amounts of alcohol to make it palatable to me.

But all of that happened because I was the one who left.

I could have stayed. I would have had a good paying job. I had a ready-made social circle, and a name that in that community meant a level of privilege I have never felt elsewhere. My world would have been smaller but more comfortable, and definitely easier.  I would most likely have married someone I had known for years and years, have bought a house not far from mom and dad, most likely have ended up on the best end of the Republican party (but maybe not, as my home county went for Obama and Hillary in the last two Presidential elections), and been an active member of the Methodist church of my childhood.

But none of that happened, because I was the one who left. I met, and knew, and loved people who were different than any of the people we knew growing up. I read books that wouldn’t have been permitted in the small library of my home town. I saw parts of the world that are a mystery to some of the people I grew up with, and I knew both plenty and want, and learned from both experiences. And because of all of that, I came to care about things that were not concerns of the world in which I was raised.

I am the product of Scots-Irish honor culture, and we tend to feel strongly about things. For some of us it is the rights of the unborn, and for others the rights of LGBT folk to marry those they love, and for yet others it is SEC football, but we all feel strongly all the same. And because I was the one who left, I learned to feel strongly about different things.

And because we all feel strongly, it often leads to feuds at worst and passive aggression at best, and it meant that I wasn’t a member of those circles any more. I will never again spend a crisp morning in a deer stand with people I have known my whole life, or have a job in the community that nurtured my family for more than 100 years, or be welcome – fully welcome – in the church of my childhood.

I like being me. But sometimes, like this morning, I wonder what it would have been like had I not left. Had I been content with where I was from, and decided to lean into being a member of that community. If I had 5 acres with a horse in the back lot and a workshop and a pick-up truck, if the only wine I had ever drank was Boone’s Farm, if going to Memphis was as far as I would travel most years, if I was just an active member of a church where my kinfolk were buried in the cemetery next door.

A friend once said she had nostalgia for a different past, and I think that is what came over me this morning – a nostalgia for a different past.

Five cookbooks I use all the time

This essay published

NB: On Saturdays I share five things around a theme. Maybe it will be five books I like, or five funny cat videos, or five Saturday morning cartoons I miss. 

I have more than 70 cookbooks in my house. I really don’t need that many – nobody needs that many, but I love them. To share a meal with others is the purest form of love I know, and all cookbooks are, then, is potential love – the plans for meals to share with people you love, like a battery of love just waiting to be tapped.

But I regularly only use about 10 of them, and five of them I use at least once a week. These are not the best cookbooks I own (however you would judge that) or even the most useful, but instead are the ones that best reflect the style of food I like, the way I like to cook, and the ones I use most often. I have links to them on Amazon for your convenience.*

More-With-Less: This is the book that made me Mennonite. Imagine a cookbook written in the 1970’s that emphasized reducing our meat and sugar consumption, that was concerned about the environmental impact of our diets, that promoted communal meals, that featured foods from around the world from myriad cultures, and that did all of that as a result of the author’s faith. The book you just imagined is this book.

How to Cook Everything: This was Mark Bittman’s first big hit, and is probably the single most used cookbook I use over the course of a year. While the title is hyperbolic, it does cover many, many recipes, but much more than that is the emphasis on the theory of why you do something, so that you not just learn how to make a cheese sauce, but you learn ways to change it (try adding a bit of chili powder, for example) and countless variations (leave out the cheese and you have white sauce, which is an excellent substitute for Cream of Something soup in any casserole, for example).

Everyone should have at least one “reference” cookbook, and while I have more than one, this is the one I use the most. I also like that he tries to create recipes for the home cook, and is more concerned with taste than being fancy. (If you can get the old 1998 edition, I much prefer it over the later revision, but either of them is excellent.)

New Complete Techniques: I love Jacques Pepin. I love his theories on eating together, I love his emphasis on fresh ingredients, and I love that his recipes just work. I probably use this one more than any other cookbook of his (I own 7, I think) because this is literally the encyclopedia on how to do anything in the kitchen. Wanna truss a chicken? Carve a ham? Make sausage? Cook Brains? It’s all here.

Mastering the Art of Southern Vegetables: Honestly, I have trouble with side dishes. I grew up in a Meat and Two sort of household, and this is really helpful to me as I try to get more creativity in my side dishes. As I try to introduce more vegetables and plant based foods in my diet, I have found myself turning to this book more and more. These are the tastes of my people, and I love the variety and fresh slants on old favorites.

The Southern Pantry Cookbook: I don’t really like “gimmick” cookbooks, but I love the premise of this one – building meals from staples in your pantry. With a focus on the busy home cook and the regional tastes I grew up with, it makes life easy and tasty. The food is good and has ample shortcuts – 30 minute red beans and rice for when you don’t have 4 hours to do it “right”, for example. We eat something out of this weekly.

No doubt you have your own favorite cookbooks – I would love to know about them, so please share them in the comments.

(If you liked this, you may also like these 5 things that make me a better cook.)

*I am a member of the Amazon affiliate program, so if you buy any of them, I get a small commission.

You need a website

This essay published

One advantage of being older is that you see ebbs and flows – you remember Friendster, MySpace, Twitter back when it was fun, and Google Reader.

Social media sites come and go. Websites come and go. It is popular to tell young folks that, before they post all their business online, to remember that the internet is forever.

But it isn’t. Not really.

I spent a few years in the middle of the last decade making websites for folks who wanted to maximize their appearance in search results. I can’t find any of those sites now. I can’t find any of the phrases I wrote, that I invested hours and hours of labor to craft. It is as if they never happened.

This is why you need a spot on the internet that you control.

And no, I don’t mean a Facebook page.

I know several activists who have been put in Facebook Jail – where they wrote content that offended someone, and as a result, were blocked from posting to Facebook for 30 days and in some cases, banned all together. In addition, multiple times this decade Facebook has changed its algorithms for how posts show up, especially posts from pages that represent businesses or organizations. Posts from pages like that get a fraction of the regular reach, in an attempt to get you to purchase ads to promote your page.

This, of course, privileges organizations that have the budget to do that, and not small nonprofits, activists, and bloggers.

The answer is the same as it has been for at least 30 years – you need your own website, and your own mailing list. Another day I will talk about your mailing list, but today, I want to focus on why you need a website.

You need your own website because you need a place where you control the images, the text, and most importantly, a place where you own the content.  All the hours you have spent writing Facebook posts, all the contacts you have made, all the emotional labor you have invested in that platform can disappear anytime they decide.

So you need your own website. This is your permanent home on the internet. It doesn’t mean that Facebook or snapchat or Instagram are bad – they aren’t, per se. They are just tools you use to point people to your permanent website. Tools change. But your website is your space. You have control over what it looks like, how minimal (or maximal) it is, and, for the most part, you can write whatever you want.

The other thing about having your own website is it is platform agnostic. Have you ever written something on Facebook, and wished you could have shared it with your friend who isn’t on Facebook? By writing it on your own website, you get a permalink, and anyone in the world can link to it and share it on any platform they want.

I know it’s easier to post directly to Facebook, but the price for that is that now you gave up control. One way I have combined the informality of Facebook with the permanency of my own site is what I call backposting. When I write something I think I want to keep and be able to share later, I cut and paste it to my blog on my website, thus preserving it and making it shareable, should I so desire.

So you need a website. The bad news is that it will cost you something – but the good news is that it is less than you spend right now for an Amazon Prime subscription.

You need a domain name, and a blog hosted using WordPress software.  You can do all that at a place like name.com for less than $50 for the year. I think it’s worth that to control your own space.

On Being Mennonite

This essay published

I have told the story before of my flirting with Buddhism in my 20’s (I loved Jesus, but needed to see other people), and how a Buddhist monk told me I was a shitty Buddhist, but that everything I was looking for in Buddhism could be found in Christianity. He introduced me to Thomas Merton, who introduced me to Dorothy Day, and then it was off to the races.

What I haven’t said is that Christianity seemed repugnant to me. I mean, I loved Merton and Day, but it was really obvious I couldn’t be Catholic. It was early days for my developing social conscience, but I couldn’t be part of a system that made sure I would never be led by women. I was really clear the Evangelicalism of my childhood held nothing for me. It was not interested in answering any of the questions I had, and their focus on the angry God who must be placated – the god who was pissed and took it out on his kid instead of on me – nauseated me.

But when I found the Mennonites, it was like coming home. As I said when I was credentialed for ministry, “It’s not so much that being Mennonite made sense to me, but rather it made sense of me.”

The other night in a meeting, I said that being a Mennonite was the last stop for me. That were I not able to be Mennonite, I couldn’t be Christian. I was on the way out the door when I found this place, and if I can’t be here, then I will keep on going.

There was a gasp in the room, a room filled with Mennonites.

Obviously, there is some hyperbole there, but the reasons I became Mennonite are still there for me:

  • The centrality of the example of Jesus.
  • The practice of peacemaking and non-coercion.
  • The idea that God is best experienced and scripture best understood in community.
  • The separation of church and state.
  • Choosing the words of Jesus (specifically the Sermon on the Mount and The Sermon on the Plain) as the “canon within the canon” (to use a Lutheran phrase) instead of Paul’s letter to the Romans.

There are other reasons, but those are the main ones that drew me in. And I recognize that some of those things can be found elsewhere. I know some Baptist folk who agree with all of that, but it isn’t because they are Baptist. And I know some Catholics who would agree with most of that, but it isn’t because they are Catholic. But all of those things are pretty baked into Mennonite life and theology.

And, I will be the first to say that like pretty much everyone else, Mennonites look better on paper than in reality. Some of the most coercive, passive-aggressive folk I have ever met were Mennonites. You can find Mennonite churches with US flags in them (although, thankfully, they are rare) and some Mennonites are so desperate for acceptance by the mainstream culture they have become Evangelical in their thinking.

But none of that matters to me, because we have an obligation, when examining a system, to see what it aspires to be, rather than what its current state is. And the paper version of what it means to be Mennonite is what I fell in love with, and converted to, and the way I now understand what it means to be Christian – or put another way, I’m not interested in being a Christian who doesn’t hold those values as central to their faith, or belonging to a community of faith where those things are not central.

A friend once said he was baptist, not Baptist, and that the lower-case b was important to him. I feel the same way – I am not Mennonite ™, but mennonite. It is sometimes hard for me to stay with Mennonite Church USA, and I know that there have been times it has been hard for them to stay with me. We may not always tarry together, and I don’t judge others for having already left.