It would not do to not acknowledge and honor Sylvia Burney in my column this month, as her Service of Christian Burial will be here on Thursday, April 9th, after living to be 100 years old. Sylvia was 91 when I met her in 2017 and at that time, lived a fairly quiet life. It might go without saying that being born into the Church of England in the 1920s, she had known more priests than perhaps any of us will ever know. And yet, she was a dedicated parishioner, in the truest sense of the word. What I mean is, she saw the involvement in parish and her identity as Christian as being inseparable. Part of that integration was getting to know the priest and finding out how she could help. So though I might have been last in a great succession of pastors, I was invited many times to tea in her home.

I found her home to be a haven of tranquility, but not disconnected from the world at large. It is true that her life had the slower rhythms of previous generations; sitting in her living room, I got a sense of the sanity we as a society have sacrificed on the altar of digital conveniences. But she took the paper and read it every day.  She thought about the news and the country and the world. An iPad was on her end table. She kept a list of things in a small steno notebook to guide our conversation: questions she had about the parish,my life, or the world at large. Referring to it as she took I poured the tea, she had a very polite way of introducing topics. “Now Father, I just had a thought about this…,” or “What’s this I’ve heard about…”, or “What do you think is going to happen…” I would venture an answer and she would respond in such a way as to lead me to believe she had given these matters much forethought.

I believe she was employing a tea making principle she once instructed me in called “Warming the Pot.”  Tea time was done in the British way at Sylvia’s. Though not as stuffy as sometimes portrayed by Americans, it certainly is more involved than ripping open a packet and putting the bag in a mug of hot water. Water is boiled in a steel kettle, then before bags are steeped, a half-inch of boiling water goes into the cold ceramic pot and swirled around to heat it up.  That water is dumped in the sink, and the water which will be used to brew the tea is put in the pot, followed by two or more bags, a knit cozy is then placed over the pot, while the cups, saucers and biscuits are arranged on a tray with the pot to take to the sitting area.

Something in me knew to remember the phrase “warm the pot,” and the mental image of the care with which I saw Sylvia perform the step for the first time. I had a sense it was a useful analogy for many things in life. When we work with people on a task, it’s better to “warm the pot” first – to build trust and a shared vision. Similarly, if a change needs to be made somewhere, it’s going to be more effective if the “pot has been warmed” and consensus is achieved – the conditions are created so that the change isn’t a shock to the system. It’s a step that could be skipped over, of course. You can make tea without warming the pot, and you can get started working on something being entirely task oriented without paying attention to the relationships involved. But just as the tea stays warmer longer when we take the time to warm the pot, the work is more satisfying and successful when we cultivate trust and cooperation.

I’ve tried to do this in my pastoral work at Holy Family since learning it in Sylvia’s kitchen. We both know I’ve not been perfect with it, as a principle. But when I have had the presence of mind to “warm the pot,” I’ve never regretted it.