My Church-Going Ritual
For the past twenty years I have gone to church every Saturday morning.
By church, I mean every Saturday while living in the Okanagan Valley I visited the Penticton Farmer’s Market.
I practised “a ritual and patterned behavior that is prescribed by or tied to a belief or custom, often with the intention of communicating with supernatural power,” which is the dictionary definition of the word.
The bounty of the Okanagan was indeed supernatural.
Penticton Farmer’s Market.
Every Saturday morning, I doffed my winery work clothes and treated myself to dressing up in my “Saturday” finest. Saturday was the only day of the week that I looked human. I often honoured my ritual by washing my hair and even putting on lipstick. I had a designated “market” hat, basket and cart.
I would go when I was perfectly happy and even if I was sick, hungover, had only one working foot, or was forty-one weeks’ pregnant. It was the first place I took my son after he was born and only four days old.
Rain or shine, I went to pay my respects at the multiple altars of my favourite local producers. Over those twenty years I intimately got to know who grew what, when it would be at the pinnacle of its season and who grew with the most “skill,” respect and deep knowledge of their land. I could navigate the market with my eyes closed. I knew my regular producers’ tables like a memorized topographical map.
Dana Ewart’s delicious “Grist Mill” baking at the Penticton market since 2005
My church was a tithing church. I would try to share equitably and spread my love buying something from everyone. I certainly spent at least one-tenth of my income every week at the market and my weekly haul would occupy every square inch my fridge. During the summer season I would only visit the grocery store for milk and toilet paper - the market was essentially my direct food source for six months a year.
Recently I relocated to Vancouver. I still, religiously, go to market every week, but now my “church” is on Sunday.
This week I ran into friends and, after we had caught up, I wished them “a happy Saturday and a great rest of the weekend.” Market day in my mind had always been Saturday and the beginning of my weekend. Now I quickly realized that it was Sunday.
It still feels strange to leave the house on a Sunday morning, most of the producers are still strangers and I am unfamiliar with their offerings.
I feel as if I am worshipping at a foreign altar.
Wanting to “believe,” I am deeply trusting of the quality of what I am buying. I have been the poster-girl for local, seasonal devotion for two decades. I am willing to pay the top dollar required by that ethos. However, I now no longer know who grows what well, who is “honest”, stands by their product with pride… I have been fooled, disappointed, and hustled by mushy or tasteless fruit. But, I faithfully return each week, willing to continue to get to know what is best, who is devout.
Worship, however, is not physical, rather it is a ritual, the custom, the doing of the thing.
I am getting to know a new congregation of producers and the community who reveres them. Sunday is once again a day of worship, a delicious communion and joyous provisioning.
