My Father’s Ice Cream Ministry

Welcome to meeting, Friends. On this day we remember and give thanks for the presence of ice cream in our lives. Catholics believe in transubstantiation, that when the priest offers the Eucharistic prayer, the bread and wine change in substance to become the actual body and blood of Christ. While I appreciate the poetry of that, we Hoosier Quakers know the Ineffable Beauty of the Divine Presence is found in ice cream.

My mother’s family were Roman Catholics from Belgium and so every Sunday morning we went to Mass at St. Mary’s Queen of Peace in Danville. My father, though, hailed from ice cream people. My mother’s family gifted us with faith, but my father’s father, sensing his end was near, passed on the family ice cream maker in 1962, hand built of Eastern white pine by the White Mountain Freezer Company of Nashua, New Hampshire, a company founded in 1853.

My father, being of the ice cream faith, stayed home from Catholic Mass and on hot summer Sundays, would go down to the basement, to the shelves underneath the stairs, and retrieve our ice cream freezer. He would carry it outside to the picnic table underneath the trees in the back yard, then would go back inside to mix together what he called “the Nectar of the Gods,” at which time he would discover we had no whipping cream, so would get in the car and drive across town to Johnston’s IGA.

The IGA was across Main Street from the Catholic Church, so when I would come out of church and see his car in the IGA parking lot, I knew it would be an ice cream Sunday, and, in the words of George Fox, “my heart did leap for joy.”

My father, not unlike a Catholic priest, would prepare the altar with the same exacting standards when it came time for worship, placing the wooden bucket in the center of the picnic table, with the rock salt at his left hand, a tea pitcher full of water at his right hand, several bags of ice in a tub at his feet, and a neatly folded towel with which to drape over the freezer when we were done cranking and it was time for the ice cream to set up.

The sacrament would begin with my father carrying the ice cream mix from the house, like a priest bearing the Eucharist. He would center the metal cylinder in the wooden bucket, fill the bucket with ice, sprinkling in the salt at the halfway point, then again when it was full, then pouring water into the bucket. We cranked according to our age, the youngest and therefore weakest, would start, when the crank was easiest to turn, then it would progress to the next oldest in line, ending with my father, who would take over when the crank would barely turn. When we weren’t cranking, we were watching, and counting the revolutions of the crank.

My father believed in steady cranking, in turning the handle at a consistent rate, and not bursts of speed, which he said caused the ice cream to harden unevenly. Slow and steady wins the race, he would say, coaching us from the sidelines, a swirl of cigarette smoke circling his head. He smoked Kent cigarettes back in those days, which he claimed were good for his health. He lived to be 86 years old, a year longer than my mother, who exercised and ate salads and didn’t smoke. I’m not sure what to make of that, except to think it was God’s reward for my father’s years of faithful ice cream ministry.

While my mother’s Catholic church required membership to participate in the sacraments, my father’s ice cream church believed the table of the Lord should be open to everyone. When neighborhood children would smell the vanilla, they would descend upon our house, begging for a turn at the crank, and a scoop of ice cream. I remember this one boy who lived up the street from us, whose mother had died and whose father was so bereft he sent the boy to live with relatives, and even though they were his family, he felt more at home with us, so was always present on Ice Cream Sundays, taking his turn at the crank. Of course, when religion is involved, controversy sometimes rears its ugly head and one autumn, when my older brother was charged with hosing out the wooden bucket and putting it away, he hid it in the bushes instead, where it rotted away over the winter. He had just joined a fundamentalist church and consequently was intolerant of all religions except his own. I believed then, and believe even now, that it was a calculated attack on our ice cream religion.

The next spring came, and my father went to retrieve the ice cream freezer under the basement steps, discovered it missing, so went in search of it, eventually finding it under the bushes, rotted away. Like Rachel in the book of Jeremiah, he sat by his ice cream maker and wept. That was in early April, and his birthday was April 21^st, so that year my mother went to Baker’s Hardware and bought him an electric ice cream maker, a pale imitation of the White Mountain Eastern White Pine hand-cranked ice cream freezer handmade in New Hampshire. It had a plastic tub, which we knew was heretical, and could be made by a single person, so didn’t require community participation. Nor did it require a picnic table. It sat in the kitchen sink, plugged into an outlet, spinning away, cold and impersonal. If you wonder why I don’t like fundamentalism, this is why. It destroys everything that is good and beautiful and holy.

It was, through the mercies of ice cream, that I first learned of community, of knowing and being known. Do you remember the story in the gospel of Luke when Jesus is resurrected and appears as a stranger to several of his disciples, who are walking from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus? They are despondent, these disciples, and Jesus asks why. Not recognizing him, they explain that a man they had deeply admired, a brave and decent man they had hoped would redeem Israel, had been murdered by the misguided followers of a loathsome and vile emperor. What is it they say about the more things change…?

Jesus, unrecognized by his disciples, walked with them into Emmaus, and accepted their invitation to share a meal. When Jesus broke and blessed the bread, the Bible says, “their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.” Or so we thought the Bible said. But through recent archeological and textual discoveries, we now know Jesus did not break and bless bread. That is a misinterpretation the Church is reluctant to acknowledge given it theological and ecclesial investment in bread and wine. The actual text reads as follows, “when Jesus turned the ice cream crank, their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.” This is the power of ice cream.

And it does have power, doesn’t it? The day after I first met Joan, we went for a bicycle ride from the old part of Plainfield out to Sugar Grove Meetinghouse, where we sat on the side porch and talked about our families. She told me her father had died when she was just a child, which broke my heart. I think that’s when I first began to love her. Then she told me she had a boyfriend, and that was when I first began to woo her in earnest. I knew there was no better way to prove your love to someone than to give them ice cream, so that evening, I walked her to the Dairy Queen and bought her ice cream. The following month, I asked her to marry me, and she said no, so I bought her more ice cream, and kept buying her ice cream, until she said yes, and we will be married 41 years tomorrow. It all started with ice cream. People ask, “What’s the secret to a happy marriage?” Start with ice cream, I tell them. Two children, two grandchildren, with two more on the way. All because of ice cream.

You can imagine my delight when I became your pastor 26 years ago and learned we had an Ice Cream Sunday, that once a year, at the start of summer, we would walk together to Emmaus, and God would be with us in the cranking of the freezer.

I thought this ice cream memory was my own, that no one remembered it quite as fondly as I remembered it, until a few years ago, when the boy who had been sent to live with relatives after his mother died, phoned me out of the blue. I hadn’t seen him in over forty years. He was depressed and contemplating suicide and needed to talk, so we talked about when we were children, and as we talked, he brightened, and said, “My favorite memory is making ice cream at your house. Nothing ever felt more like family to me.”

When you’re a lonely boy whose mother has died and whose father has left, and you feel so alone, and your annual moment of bliss and belonging is found in the cranking of ice cream, you don’t forget that. My childhood friend certainly never forgot. Forty years later, he still remembered.

Tomorrow, we can eat broccoli, but today is for ice cream. Today is for community. Today is for recognizing the goodness of God and the incalculable treasure of friendship and belonging. I am glad you are here today. I am glad that even as we share ice cream, we will also share belonging, we will know and be known, which, after all, are the finest gifts of all.

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Philip Gulley is the author of and the popular Harmony series and Unlearning God: How Unbelieving Helped Me Believe.

Discover my books, stories, and more by visiting Books by Philip Gulley

Contact Philip directly at philiphgulley@gmail.com

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