March 6, 2006

History

The New York Times runs daily little thingies to remind their readers about something in our past that happened on that particular day. Take today. “On March 6, 1857, in its Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court held that Scott, a slave, could not sue for his freedom in a federal court.”

As ashamed now as we must be about something like that, it’s a useful and stark reminder that the Supremes are anything but infallible, and that it’s a miracle whenever our revered system of checks and balances works at all, which it hasn’t much of late. Old Dred, in spite of what his mom thought and all the trouble she went to to raise him, never made it to personhood, I suppose. So the balance tipped over and just didn’t much apply to him, even if he did have such a keen name.

I’m always impressed when a young high school or college student tells me they plan to study American history or even, of all things, actually major in it. It doesn’t happen often, but I’m awfully glad when it does, and I want to hang our flag out front just like it was the Fourth of July.

These kids and all those Times readers — and you, of course — who bother to notice may be the only ones who won’t be surprised to know that the great pledge of “liberty and justice for all,” as majestic and hopeful as it sounds, hasn’t always been that easy to come by. For it’s realization is, after all, in the hands of mere mortals who are sometimes distracted by other interests.

March 4, 2006

Erratum

Much obliged to a colleague who’s a botanist and for some reason reads OoN. When finding stuff like I’m about to explain, he surely must shudder, but then he expeditiously and gently lets me know about it.

I’m sure you, as well, noticed that the flowers attributed to the yellowwood tree as reported here were actually those of the silktree (aka mimosa-tree, powderpuff-tree). What happened was that the page in my trusty Audubon where yellowwood’s data are recorded somehow, while my back was turned, got flipped over to the page where silktree’s data show up.

Careful researcher/plagiarist that I am, I copied the wrong page. So please read for yellowwood flowers instead, “one-inch long, pea-shaped, w/five white petals; fragrant; long-stalked; many, in drooping clusters about one foot long.”
It’ll be a while before our new yellowwood gets around to flowering, so we’ll just have to wait to see if even Audubon got it right.

March 3, 2006

Yellowwood

The front edge of spring in middle Tennessee almost makes a gardener out of me (read: probably never). Come a morning, CP, the Real Gardener, takes me out on “the tour” to welcome our year-round residents beginning to show in their myriad ways from their Big Sleep. The crocuses jump the gun where they’re not supposed to be. The Lenten roses never seem to miss the season’s opener. Tight, pre-burst buds are all over the place.

But the big winner this Lent is our new 12-foot yellowwood tree (Cladrastis lutea) planted on Ash Wednesday. It now stands in full view through one of our favorite icons — the kitchen sink window.

The yellowwood is native to Tennessee, was designated the State Bicentennial Tree (whenever that was), and remains one of the rarest trees in the eastern United States. It grows to about sixty feet with a trunk diameter of two. The bark is smooth and speckled gray, and the heartwood makes for a bright yellow dye. I can hardly wait for the flowers, said to bloom throughout the summer and to be more than one inch long with threadlike pink stamens whitish toward the base crowded in long-stalked ball-like clusters up to two inches wide. (I looked all this up, of course.)

Somehow, it seems trees as one of creations special beings ought to be exempt from such clinical talk. Their dimensions and the like are their own business. Just digging them up from some place where they seem perfectly pleased to be, loading them into a truck, jostling them around, then planting them elsewhere, seems an utter intrusion into something Nature may never had in mind. Furthermore, all those fancy nutrients added on must surely be something of a cultural shock.

But then, at its best, maybe it’s like an adopted child who must never need to wonder whether it was wanted. There’s always that.

March 2, 2006

Beloved

Lent 1B Mk 1.9-13

Ted Weddell, onetime warden of the College of Preachers, told of his being a visiting fireman on a college campus celebrating Religious Emphasis Week. In an evening fireside chat, a coed asked him to talk about the Holy Spirit. He answered,”Well, first of all, let’s get it straight that it wasn’t that blessed pigeon.”

He obviously had reference to our gospel for today recounting when the dove landed on Jesus at his baptism. The doves in our yard are anything but that friendly. They fight a lot, and to associate them with peace is, as Weddell implied, to stretch the image.

Perhaps not so when Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River. Imagine that picture. As Jesus comes up out of the water at the hands of his cousin John, the bird lands, and the voice speaks — “Thou art my beloved son; with thee I am well pleased.” (Think James Earl Jones or maybe the great film director John Huston.) Then the Spirit drove Jesus — not led him, but drove him — into the wilderness for forty days to savage not only with his vocation, but with old Screwtape itself. But that’s another story.

It’s God’s pleasuring with Jesus that attracts me. “Beloved son.” “Well pleased.” Whatever, but that God’s Spirit drove Jesus away to find himself, he was surely, in God’s eyes, still a work in progress. Son, beloved, pleased — but not finished. Incomplete, but not yet ready for the task ahead.

On the other hand, and perhaps this is where we come in, God has modeled here for all to see what he means by human being. This is the image of God we hear about, that we, indeed, are, ourselves. This is the Christ-in-us touted in the Baptismal Covenant. It’s almost as if God is a sculptor of sorts and stands back from his creation, admiring, pleased, smiling, laying down his mallet and chisel, walking around to get different, perhaps better perspectives. Yet, not completely finished with Jesus — nor neither now with us.

Our tradition confirms that to be human, to be imagined by God, is to be free to choose… to be free to choose to love, to create, to reason, to live in harmony with all of creation — the atmosphere, the spotted owl, the great redwoods, the wetlands, the wretched neighbors next door and the ingrates over in the middle east, the works — and with God. Lord, how many times have I beat this horse (metaphorically, of course!)? But I suspect I shall never tire, for it is so true. And then, to take it another step, there’s this:

There’s church. Church is not the Smithsonian Institute for the preservation of the Lambeth Quadrilateral which can take care of its ever-loving self. Church is not parchments vacuumed under glass. Church is not a place just for the warm and fuzzy confirmation of Aunty Sizzle’s nostalgia.

No. Church is a gathering of worldlings with all our warts and languages and biases and ethical stumblings, holy and spiritual to the core precisely because that’s the way God makes us. Church is all this humanity cobbled together with one mighty calling — to grab this spirit God gave us by the tail and, with God’s always inclusive grace, shape it, inform it, and build it into the human being God imagines. The church’s vocation is to make us human. God creates us and says, “These are my beloved children in whom I am well pleased,” and then stands back and smiles. Our vocation is to get on with becoming these loving, reasoning, creative, harmonious stumblers, these canonized Slobs that God has in mind, but maybe most of all to keep God smiling, maybe even laughing in surprise whenever — on our way to the wilderness — we get it right.

That’s all.

March 1, 2006

Transfer

Ash Wednesday 2006

Two friends of mine once sang as part of a vocal quartet at a midtown Manhattan church. They tell the story that after a “lovely, reverent, and rueful” Ash Wednesday service, a small group of them adjourned to the subway and their trek home. This is their story:

We were still charged and energized from the solemnity and sweetness of the service and stood around talking, waiting for the train to show up, when a rather wild, apparently homeless man came up to us pointing at the large ash crosses on our foreheads. We started gently to explain, but he clearly had his own agenda and was not satisfied with our answers.

As the train pulled in, we piled on. The semi-scary man kept haranguing us. As the open subway door kept bumping against him, he shouted, “Whose ashes are they? Which dead person’s?” And we kept repeating, “They’re not from a person! They’re from palms… and they mean…. ” But he kept on, “Palms don’t have ashes!! Who is on your heads?”

The door closed. The man stood there on the platform, shouting, as the train left the station. He was so sure that we were marked with human remains, as, of course, in a way, we are. It is Jesus on our heads. It is Jesus on our minds. We’re all marked somehow, carrying our wounds, our memories, the signs for which we stand, seen or unseen. It is such a deep connection. His voice continues, “Who is on your heads?”

Many passengers around us also had smudgy crosses on their foreheads. To break the mood, we smiled plaintively at each other as we swayed into the night. We made a rough joke that if anything happened to any one of us, the police would charge our priest. His fingerprints were all over the place.

New York is always interesting.