Tea is for Me!

Benedicamus Domino!

You may wonder why I have decided to write a post about tea. What on earth does tea have to do with living a eucharistic life? For me, tea is one of the defining signs of hospitality, and hospitality is the beginning of mercy, and mercy is the doorway to true and unselfish charity, which is the goal of a eucharistic existence.

Alright, so now that I have justified this entry, let me explain the justification. Whenever I am offered a cup of tea, I automatically feel at home. I feel as though I am someone's honoured guest. Even if tea-making is a common occurrence for my host, the fact that they have chosen to make it for me makes me feel as though they are taking time from their day to help me to feel comfortable.

Maybe it feels so special to me because I didn't grow up with it as a rule. Tea was not a common drink in our household. Instead, there was the ubiquitous and ever-present coffee, for which I never really cared that much. It's true that there is some coffee that I like, but I'm far too picky and require special blends like Jamaica Blue Mountain to satisfy me, so I tend to stay away from coffee as a rule.

How then did I discover tea? Well, the first time I really recall drinking tea was at my school. I had learned to boil a kettle during a life skills class. This was a class which showed blind and low-vision students how to do the little day-to-day tasks of everyday life safely and confidently. So, my teacher wanted me not to be afraid of hot water, so we boiled the kettle and made a cup of tea. I think I took sugar in it at the time, but then, I was nine or ten, so I think I put sugar on everything.

This was a simple cup of tea, but from the first sip, I felt as though I was entering a new world. You see, long before I ever tasted tea seriously, (I had certainly had the canned and bottled lemmon-laden product called iced tea in the past, but that doesn't count,) I read about people drinking tea in lots of books. So, from the day I first sipped this dark liquid, I decided that tea was my hot drink of choice.

Even so, I was not and have never been a tea-drinking fool, though as time goes on, it is becoming more evident that I can do it. It is in me to become a tea connaisseur, I think, though my true love affair really didn't begin until I tasted Earl Grey for the first time! I only tried it because it was the tea of choice for Captain Jean-luc Picard on Startrek, The Next Generation, but once I had it, I could never go back.

Here's the other thing I love about tea. It is meant to be sipped slowly and to be shared. With tea comes conversation, and conversation is one of the true joys of life. I have had some of my best conversations over cups of tea! It has been around for thousands of years, and has been a sacred drink in one way or another for all that time. People seen to equate tea with good will and fellow-feeling. Tea is about banding together in a crisis. It's about taking time from life to share a moment of true communion. It's about hospitality and healing, and of course, it's about being able to make that perfect cup for a friend or a loved one. Somehow, once you know how someone likes their tea and can brew it perfectly to taste, you feel a sense of joy that you are able to give them this little token of your esteem and affection, or well, I do anyway.

Deo Gratias