Ordinary Time

Welcome to mid-July, a little past midsummer and not yet into late summer, when the first hints of autumn reduce the lushness of the season. The gardens are full now. What was once only possibility has become leaf, blossom, fruit, and shade. Yet even in this abundance, the quiet work of waiting continues. The season, along with the Gospel readings from last Sunday and this Sunday, invites me to think about the mystery of seeds. We place them into the earth with hopeful hands, but then there is little left for us to do.

Whatever and wherever your garden is—may it be alive with the rhythms of God's earth: planting and waiting, tending and trusting, harvesting (or letting what is fallow remain fallow).

Foreseen in Joy

I love to garden.  When I put my hands in the soil, it’s a spiritual practice. For me, Mother Earth is more than a metaphor. Earth nurtures each seed that is sown and feeds them from her dark, peat-laced womb.  Wendell Berry connects the soul of soil in his deeply spiritual poem about planting:

Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day
Vision held open in the dark. . . .
This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems, 18

“Foreseen in joy”—these words tease me at odd times, but especially in spring when the bulbs and seeds I planted years before begin to once more appear and I am delighted, as I would be when greeting an old friend: “The blue woodland hyacinths!  I put them in when I first was learning to garden, and now they are back again.” Sometimes.  Sometimes the things I plant don’t come back or are mowed over or just die after sprouting.  It’s all part of the intricate and often fickle-seeming organic process involved when dealing with a living creation.  Life’s rhythm. Planting is a transformational act, an act of expectation (when things grow) and acceptance (when things don’t grow).  

That's how I want to live my life—seeing all that I plant as an act of joy, accepting what doesn’t grow as part of the cycle. I want to step into the vision that’s larger than what I can see, and echoing Berry’s poem, I want to dwell in the rhythm of work, rest, and harvest. 

Hope is the energy that drives me to sow seeds.  I believe the “soil has a soul.”Each morning when I wake up to see what earth and air have conspired to bring forth, I stand with my mouth open and my arms wide, astonished in the new life the Holy has brought forth.  

Hope is the energy that compels me to sow seeds. It is the "vision held open in the dark," when the garden appears barren and the future feels meager. Hope acknowledges that God's vision is infinitely larger than my own.

God's creation is like a seed. Planting seeds is an act of using our imagination, intelligence, labor, and love to cultivate life. Embedded in that process is the call to relinquish control, trusting that while we prepare the soil and sow the seed, God brings manages the harvest.

--Berry, Wendell. "Sabbath Poem X (1979)." This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems, Counterpoint, 2013, p. 15.