 a fabric delivery man at work in Seoul, South Korea August 2017 If only all of life fell within the borders of our druthers. If only gardening did our taxes and reading fiction took out the trash. I’d love to knit my kitchen clean and quilt my inbox empty. What if drinking coffee on my back porch mowed the grass and cleaned the chicken coop? My home would be a castle and I would be its queen. A reorganization of household responsibilities has bequeathed me two new projects. The first requires long stretches of time spent in tedious quiet and focus. The second includes shopping. Care to guess which is moving along more sweetly?
Work is the word I’m after: the work we do for money and the work we do because we’re human. We work to earn and work to live. We work to care for neighbors who can’t, as well as those who won’t. Human decency demands it and every religion teaches it: work as privilege and requirement, to be done cheerfully and regarded gratefully. Whatever work today brings, I wish you joy and patience in it.
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Beloved: Years ago, a friend and I were talking about our parents’ aversion to buying anything new and she said, my dad has used at least $200 worth of duct tape to hold together a $25 part on his lawn mower. It still makes me laugh and at the same time hope some measure of his thrift might persist in this single-use economy of ours.
Given the Holy Spirit’s presence and activity, of course church can evolve inside our own lifetimes. We only need to be willing to change with it. And if just one way of being church should die in our own life time, let it be our need to have the moral high ground all the time. Think of all the time and energy that would be freed up -- time to seek the holy mystery, as Father Richard says. Along with energy to befriend ourselves and one another, to plant a garden and breathe in the Spirit busy in the soil. Best of all, time to do nothing and know not a drop of time is wasted, letting ourselves be loved by the Lover of the universe.
I pray this magnificent, beautiful, not so very hot day finds you joyful in to whatever you put heart and head and hands. I love you. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette
Larger pests roam outside the garden fence, gnawing what they can reach with their snouts. I have decided to buy something the mowing man called deer sticks, two foot tall spikes stuck in the ground. On top is a plastic box that emits a sweet corn smell. When the deer’s nose gets close she gets a little zap, just enough to make that area unattractive thereafter. My idea is to protect my berries and beans and compromise by letting them free-range in my front flower beds.
Absolutely nothing slows down the summer more than gardening. How many days since I dropped those bean seeds in? Are they on track to blossom as the package promised? The answer is yes, but it seems like growth should happen faster. I am wise to the absurdity of having an opinion on how seeds ought to work. That it happens at all is the miracle. Light, water, dirt . . . magic – the seed becomes the food and flowers! One tiny cucumber seed can make a thousand more at least – abundance in my backyard for the price of a pack of seeds! Nothing grounds me more than digging, weeding, staking, pruning . . . even trying to outsmart the freeloading animals. Nowhere else do I stay so in the moment. I don’t miss my phone or fret about that list of undone duties. It is a hobby with the benefits of spiritual practice: contemplation before an open window onto God doing God’s business. I pray this beautiful day offers you some view to God doing what God does among us here and now. We’ve so much for which to be grateful. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette
I survey the damage and think unkind thoughts toward certain of God’s creatures, then turn to this morning’s reading from Father Gregory Boyle, known as “G” to those he serves: We are our healthiest when we are most situated in awe, and our least healthy when we engage in judgment. Judgment creates the distance that moves us away from each other. Judgment keeps us in the competitive game and is always self-aggrandizing. Standing at the margins with the broken reminds us not of our own superiority but of our own brokenness. . . . The embrace of our own suffering helps us to land on a spiritual intimacy with ourselves and others. For if we don’t welcome our wounds, we will be tempted to despise the wounded. A raccoon can shimmy headfirst down a twenty-foot deck post in utter darkness. With his back legs he dangles from a wire to drink sugar water from a feeder clutched like a beer bottle in his tiny fists. The gymnastics needed to remove the feeder from the wire to smash it on the deck floor are equally impressive. While all that raccoon awesomeness doesn’t make me like them any better, it does prompt a wisp of self-awareness. I’ve chosen a house in the woods and a style of hospitality that might qualify as xenophobic. After all, I only welcome those whose ways contribute to the particular house in the woods vibe I’m after. So, hummingbirds and lightning bugs are welcome. So are frogs, turtles and turkeys. Deer can come so long as they only eat in the woods or stand stately on my lawn. Snakes are not invited but will not be turned away, as snakes are never noisy, messy, or destructive. Besides, snakes lend a certain edginess to the vibe. Raccoons and chipmunks are entirely unwelcome for reasons heretofore described. Chipmunks are simply raccoons in miniature. Foxes and hawks attack my chickens, so they aren’t received, nor skunks and most opossums, though a mother opossum with a backpack full of babies once crossed my yard and I smiled at the awesome engineering. Mosquitos, deer ticks, stink bugs, tomato hornworms, and a host of other insects too numerous to name fill my list of undesirables. They just don’t work for me. While he might not preclude the exercise, Father G did not have my relationship to woodland creatures in mind in writing his devotion. He’s inviting me to hear Jesus’ call to love and be loved among my human neighbors, especially those we think need what we already have: the poor, the refugee, the mentally ill. He invites me to lay down the false security of walls that protect nothing really, nothing but the pretense of our own superiority. We are just as broken. We are just as wounded. And we have a world to gain by mustering the awe necessary to cross the oh-so-shallow riverbed that separates brothers and sisters too long kept apart by fear. Please do pray for those who suffer right now from the abuse of separation, each of us doing what we can to love the ones whose paths we cross. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette * raccoon photo credit: Patrick Elting, Fort Worth, Texas nationalgeographic.com *For those of you asking for the partial list of companies currently profiteering from the building and maintenance of the migrant detention camps that I mentioned on Sunday, you can find it here: https://wearyourvoicemag.com/news-politics/companies-profit-migrants-detention?fbclid=IwAR0xrJhnStzx1xzgRCTPEOa3g3blzq08GvJ3f9z_a9xJv3_gKcq5iJ-w_us |
I write a Tuesday morning devotional to members and friends of UBC. It is also posted here.
Enjoy! Pastor Annette Copyright
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