TENDING MY OWN GARDEN

We moved the office to the third floor in our house, a large beautiful space, with ceilings almost nine feet tall, hardwood floors, windows on three sides and a great view of the large fir two houses down, where often a lone cardinal sits in the morning, singing for his mate.  It doesn’t have heat, but except when it stays close to zero, I keep pretty warm with a stocking cap, warm socks and a small space heater.

It also has my stereo, which I bought when I was in college in the early seventies, and the records that I’ve whittled down over the last three moves.  I started a spiritual discipline of listening to the entire side of a record before putting another on, and not just doing my own “greatest hits”: picking one song from one record, then one from another, and so on.  (I still make an exception for David Allen Coe’s version of “You Never Even Call Me by My Name”, which ought to be sung at the top of the 9^th inning at baseball games, the whole crowd standing on their chairs!).

I’ve discovered, or rediscovered some real delights, including “Blessed” by Simon and Garfunkel.  The last stanza goes like this:

Blessed are the stained glass, window pane glass.
Blessed is the church service makes me nervous
Blessed are the penny rookers, Cheap hookers, Groovy lookers.
O Lord, Why have you forsaken me?
I have tended my own garden
Much too long.

I’m going to have to look up what a “penny rooker” is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the older, righteous son of the Prodigal Son story. 

Does this song make me nervous?  Yes.  On one hand, I want church services, including the ones I lead, to make people nervous, in the sense of challenging us to grow out of our preconceptions and hidebound pieties and get messy with love in the world.  I don’t, of course, want to get rid of the comforting part of worshipping together; I just want to get rid of the comfortable part.  When we get comfortable in any group—political, spiritual, even family—it’s too tempting to take things for granted, and overlook the new blessing that may be erupting.  When we get too comfortable in a group called together by the Spirit, we risk turning God into a little pet we call to sit in our lap.  And worse, brag about to our friends.  My God is fierce: fierce in consolation, fierce in justice, fierce in compassion, fierce in hope.

(Preacher’s note: this won’t be the sermon on Sunday, so you should still come!)

 
I also hate to confess that I get nervous about blessing rookers, hookers and lookers.  I don’t like what human trafficking and sex trade has done to our neighborhood.  But then I realize that’s what Jesus did, blessing the poor, the landless, the hungry, the persecuted.  And he ate—all the time—with prostitutes, traitors, lepers and the like. So, yeah, OK.

And as to being forsaken—well it is the season of forsakenness, in so many ways.

It’s the last two lines that really make me nervous.  I like tending my own garden.  I like being the one in charge of my life.  I have all kinds of evidence to show how great a mess I make of my life when I try to run my life, by myself, without accountability and support from God, and without accountability and support from a community.  I bristle against having to surrender my will to another, even when I know that no marriage, no relation with children, no community, no country, no world is possible without us surrendering—in trust, not by force—one to another.  I know that, but on a daily basis …

I think I know best what’s best for me.  No, I know I know what’s best for me.

But when I slow down and listen, I know that’s stupid. (Ooh, I said “stupid”!) I teach a community gardening class at Hans Christian Andersen United Elementary School in south Minneapolis.  I co-teach it with Jon Iverson, a middle school science teacher, and we try to teach it in the truest community sense: that all plants need a community—for pollination, nitrogen fixation, soil regeneration and so on. And any community garden needs a relationship of trust, even love, between the humans who work in it, and the plants, water, sun, air, soil and bacteria who really do all the great work.  Not to mention the Creator.

In our office, I have secreted on the top shelf of the bookcase that holds my records some blessed seeds from last year’s harvest.  Their fruits blessed our tongues and tummies, and their flowers blessed our eyes and our breathing.  I’ve tried to be more organized about labeling which seeds are which, and this year, I think I know to a certain extent about half of them. I also know, to a more certain extent that little plants will soon pop out of our ground to bless us unexpectedly.  The pumpkins we still have in our house came from plants we did not plant.  Tomatillos will burst forth in hundreds in our community garden plot, even though we haven’t seeded there for six years.  And I hope we will find gifts that we don’t even expect coming forth, as I hope that in the garden of my spirit, gifts will burst forth without my doing, and with my rejoicing.

Be justice. Be beauty.  Be blessing

Patrick

I have two newly published poems you can access on line: one is about head trauma I had as an infant, in the Winter 2013 issue at: http://www.themeadowlandreview.com/

There’s also a poem about the tragedy of our immigration system in issue 85 of Painted Bride Quarterly at: http://pbq.drexel.edu/pbq/archives/3563