A loving vine-dresser

Today we read together the Common Prayer for June 27 and were awed by words so appropriate to our present circumstances.

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We would like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet, it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability – and that it may take a very long time. Above all, trust in the slow work of God, our loving vine-dresser.”  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Today is a  last-day-before-your-life-changes day. Tomorrow our teenage granddaughter arrives to make her home with us until whatever time she is ready to launch into the world. She has one year of high school left. Her life is full of change and unknowns. So is ours.

We are excited and a little nervous. So is she. We have talked a lot about what this could look like, but do we really know? No. What we do know is that she wants to be with us. We love her and she loves us even if I can’t listen to her music that vibrates my ribs and stuns my ears. Yeah. I used to, but those days are gone along with some of my hearing. Give me a little Mozart adagio and I’m happy. There are a lot of details to look forward to. Like Dr. Who episodes and driver’s education and a part-time job and new paint for her room. My only stipulation was – sorry, not black. It’s too hard to cover if you want to change it some day.

This isn’t what we imagined for this stage of life. But isn’t that often how things turn out or don’t turn out? And don’t we wonder if only we could skip the hard parts and fast forward to the place where outcomes are certain and wouldn’t that be just be so sweet? We believe there will be sweetness in ways we don’t know. That in adding to our family – we are doing exactly what God has in mind for us. And for her. And that his work in our lives is a long, slow process. At least that’s how it’s been for me.

Longing for wholeness

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Bumble bee visiting a giant zinnia

     Today while I was in the backyard admiring the zinnias once again, I caught this bumble bee visiting one of the blossoms. I’m certain their season is nearly over, as fall is here. We almost turned on the furnace this morning. I know these gentle, bumbling pollinators are becoming less common as their environments become increasingly toxic. It was odd to come across a woman from the tenth century who teaches us more about caring for God's creation.

     Hildegard of Bingen’s (1098-1179) term for the grace of God inherent in all living things was viriditas, or greenness … Hildegard’s holistic approach to God and humanity is relevant today, particularly to those longing for wholeness and healing for all of creation.

She wrote, “we shall awaken from our dullness and rise vigorously toward justice. If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its endangerment with passion.”

Resource: Common Prayer by Claiborne, Wilson-Hartgrove, & Okoro.

Corn for our seeds

     In today’s Common Prayer – February 22 – we read this prayer:

“Lord God, extend our faith so that even when we fail to see the fruit of our planted seeds, we may have the assurance that every inch of soil overturned will lead to a harvest some day.”

     Last summer our organic farmer friends gave Anita bag of seed corn that was a year old. Joe and Becca said plant however much you want, we can’t risk low germination from old sweet corn seeds. They also generously gave her space for six 100 foot rows. It has always been her dream to grow enough sweet corn for eating delicious golden kernels all winter. The thing is, you might have a good harvest off the ten to twelve corn plants you put in your small urban garden, but that’s still only three ears per corn plant? Three dozen ears altogether? Unless you have room for a lot, it’s a waste of time and space. So the possibilities of corn through the roof had her hungry-eyed.

     This is what happened. We had so much corn we could have begun a factory farm of feeder hogs. We raved over the sweet, tender ears, we ate them like chainsaws – sawdust flying, protective goggles over our eyes.

     It had reproduced itself five hundred fold with wild energy. We ended up freezing 46 quarts and giving away at least 20 dozen ears. For the first harvest we picked three or four wheel barrels full and pushed it up to the yard where we set up a little canning factory. Anita picked, Denis shucked, I cut the kernels off the cob, and together we heated it to boiling point on a camping stove and then put it all in zip lock bags. Tato, the dog ate cobs as he could and all the leftover greens and cobs were dumped over the fence to the chickens and pigs. And that was just the first picking. It’s almost March and we still have plenty of corn to eat.

     thought a lot about that harvest and everything that had to coalesce under sunny days and warm nights to make it so darn good. This rarely happens in life. Sometimes. But rarely. You invest and invest and once in a blue moon you get to see where that seed went and what it did. The prayer above is mostly how it is. Maybe years later you get a facebook message thanking you for all the pizza you served the youth group and how they’ll never forget listening to Purple Rain and thinking about Ferris Buellers Day Off in your living room. We need to keep stumbling down the row year after year because you never know when the corn will come home. But even if it doesn’t, we are assured by God that he grows a great harvest that will overflow all our wheel barrels and burst our freezers. 

Anita and I picked the first load.

 

Denis did the shucking while I began cutting it off the cobs.

Anita took a turn with the knife while I began blanching the corn.

The Chickens feasted on all the leftovers.

   

We made a huge pot of corn chowder on the camp stove in the yard and ate it with Joe & Becca and all the interns. All fresh - even the milk came out of the Jersey cow that morning.