St. Theresa of Avila and Trevor Hudson (on Souls, Gardens, and a Loving God)

I'm reading my way somewhat slowly through Majestic is Your Name: A 40-Day Journey in the Company of Theresa of Avila. I say somewhat slowly because I'm not doing it daily, and during the worst craziness of our move (and we're still unpacking) I missed a bunch of days. But I am over half-way through now, and I continue to find that my heart resonates with this great Carmelite teacher. (I've been realizing that I've always had a love for the Carmelites, but I'll save that insight for another post.)

Today's beautiful devotional included these words from St. Theresa, excerpted from her Life:

"When you enter into the spiritual life through the gateway of prayer, you would do well to see yourself as one who has set out to create a garden.

This garden is a place wherein our Lord wants to come and walk and to take pleasure...His Majesty wants to uproot the weeds and plant in this garden many fruitful and fragrant and blossoming plants. You may take it for granted that the Lord is already afoot, walking in His garden, if you have had any desire to seek him in prayer, for He always calls to us first and it is His voice we hear when we think it is our desire to pray.

If we want to be good gardeners of this new-sown soul, we must, with God's help, see to it that the good plantings are tended and grow -- and I am speaking now of the godly virtues. At very least, we must see that these good things are not neglected and die. Rather, we tend our souls carefully so that the first blossoms appear.

These are the spiritual "fragrances" that begin to rise from our lives -- the fragrances of faith, goodness, self-control, love, and the like. By them, many, many others are refreshed in spirit and attracted to the Lord...Then our Lord himself comes to walk in the midst of our garden. And it is all our joy to sense that He is there, taking pleasure in these lovely virtues."

I love this whole extended metaphor! (And quick side-note to poetic self, a slip of my neuropathied fingers made me realize that "soil" and "soul" are just one letter off.) I love the expression "fragrances of faith..." and that the purpose of the growing of good things is our lives is at least threefold: for our Lord's pleasure, for our own growth and joy, and for the refreshment of others that they may be drawn to the loving Lord and King we know.

I also love how the Lord, in his goodness, has this meditation dancing in my heart and mind today along with another meditation I've been contemplating for a few days, from Trevor Hudson's book Beyond Loneliness: The Gift of God's Friendship. I've been slowly working my way through the second chapter there, entitled "God's Passionate Longing for Friendship" in which he makes a couple of wonderful points. One is that God, of course, already has passionate and beautiful friendship within the triune Godhead. He did not create us because he *needed* friendship, but because he wanted it. He created us not out of need, but out of "the abundance of this divine relational life." He wants us to know that life, and so he invites us into it. And he takes the initiative to do this.

Where do we first see this? In the garden, the first garden, where we see the very first question in the Scriptures. The question is "where are you?" and God asks it of Adam and Eve when they hide from him after sinning because they are afraid.

I remember my daughter, when we read this story together when she was very little, asking me "why did God ask them that?" I think she was five or six at the time, and it already occurred to her very young mind that it seems like an odd question for the God of the universe to be asking. I remember her pointing out that God, being God, would know where they were. And it's true. He would also know why they were hiding. So why does he ask? As Hudson points out, he asks because

"even when we mess up, when we let ourselves down, when we fail to obey God, God does not reject us. Nor does God give up on us. Rather God comes looking for us. God continues to pursue our companionship. God knows the worst about us, but that knowledge does not prevent God from taking the initiative in reaching out to us. Here is the bottom line of God's good news: Nothing can ever extinguish the flame of God's passionate longing to be our friend."

Let's hear that last line again, and let's put it in bold: Nothing can ever extinguish the flame of God's passionate longing to be our friend. Can you hear that truth on this wintry Advent evening, during a season of life and love and light in the midst of darkness? God longs for us. And he longs to walk with us in the beautiful garden that together with him, we can create of our lives. He didn't have to go looking for Adam and Eve. But he did, because that is who he is, and has been, from all eternity. Jesus revealed God's heart to us even further when he gave us the picture of the Good Shepherd who went in pursuit of the one sheep who had wandered off from the fold.

Contemplate that amazing heart of God this Christmas. Contemplate that the loving heart that went to the cross has always, from the beginning of time, come looking for us when we are lost. That he does that for you, for me, and for every single person who ever lived. There is no one beyond the reach of that grace, no one he doesn't long to find and bring back into a close walk with him in a beautiful garden. When we know this with all our heart, it will shine forth from us in gospel beauty, refreshing others and attracting them to his heart. That's why we're here on earth, and for no other, deeper reason, I am coming to believe. We are here to learn to walk with him and to draw others into that loving walk.

Community Gardens (Our Little Patch of Green in the City)

Although this summer has been almost completely taken up with arts camp, we are involved in a few other things. For the second summer in a row, we're participating in the local Community Gardens project.

I love having a garden again. Having grown up with one (the big one my parents always planted in the backyard, and my own little garden space) I have spent the past nearly two decades yardless and so missing the chance to plant and grow things. We've got a good sized plot in a raised bed, and we're trying all sorts of things this year -- zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, broccoli, cauliflower, beets, basil, a few flowers (the sweet girl loves to sprinkle flowers in amongst the veggies, and I'm happy to oblige with easy growing zinnias and cosmos). We attempted carrots -- twice, from seeds -- but they didn't come up either time. We failed with carrots last year too and I thought perhaps it was because we sowed too late in the season. But this year we were well within planting time, and from everything I can tell, we should have been able to get in more than one planting. Still nada. Apparently we are not destined to grow carrots.

The terrible heat wave we recently went through (along with much of the rest of the country) pretty much wiped out our largest zucchini plant, but then it had flourished early, threatening to take over the whole bed, and has already given us several large, delicious squashes. So it has served its purpose. We need to dig out the drying plant soon which will leave room to try something else.

I'm so utterly thankful for this little garden plot. Though I have tried hard to adapt to my urban transplanting and to root out ingratitude wherever it tries to take over the garden plot of my heart, there is just something in my genetic makeup that has made almost fifteen years surrounded by asphalt really hard. I can get physically worn down by the constancy of pavement, tar, and traffic -- the sights, smells, and sounds can make me feel so weary. And I am realizing anew lately how physical weariness can feed into spiritual weariness -- our bodies, minds, and spirits are so connected.

So having a small patch of green and soil I can head to whenever I need to is a true blessing.

 The Garden glows
And 'gainst its walls the city's heart still beats.
And out from it each summer wind that blows
Carries some sweetness to the tired streets.

~Margarent Deland

Yes, and some sweetness to tired me. 

Birthday Celebration, Gardening and Gershwin

My dear husband celebrated his birthday on Friday. He took the day off, which gave us the morning together as a family before the sweet girl and I trundled off to homeschool group for the afternoon. Then dear friends took her home for the evening, and he and I actually went out to dinner. I'm still reeling from D. having a whole day off (can't remember the last time that's happened!) and the two of us going on a date (can't remember the last time we were able to do that either). It was a lovely day.

The rest of the weekend was lovely too in many ways, though I've been battling tiredness and a sinus headache.

We got our plot assignment in the community gardens. A cause for great excitement! We loved our gardening project last year and couldn't wait to get started again. We planted a few seedlings and also some seeds. Waiting to see what comes up...one of my favorite parts of gardening.

It was also a very Gershwin weekend. He's been one of my favorite composers since I was sixteen, and the sweet girl has grown up knowing and loving his music, but we've been learning more about him because he's our composer of the month in this final month of school.  We showed her the ballet from American in Paris (which she loved) and spent a good bit of this afternoon (when we weren't out gardening) listening to the New York Rhapsody.  No, not the Rhapsody in Blue, but a much less known Rhapsody Gershwin did later. It's sometimes called Rhapsody in Rivets. It sounds deliciously familiar -- so Gershwiny -- and yet new too. A great combination.

So many more blessings I could recount from the past few days...including some amazing God moments in our community. Oddly, following such a moving and gratitude filled few days, I am feeling a bit flat and not ready to face the new week...though I suspect that's got more to do with not feeling well than anything else.

At any rate, the new week is here, so onward I go!

Poetry Review: The Mouse of Amherst

I just posted a review of Elizabeth Spire's book The Mouse of Amherst. It's a charming tale told through the eyes of a little white mouse who lives in a hole in the wall in Emily Dickinson's room.

It's been an Emily Dickinson kind of month. With the sweet girl, I read the Emily Dickinson volume in the Poetry for Young People series. Late in the evenings, a bit at a time, I've been watching a video version of Julie Harris' one-woman play The Belle of Amherst, recorded sometime in the late 1970s, I think. It's a fascinating (somehow both funny and sad) portrait of the reclusive genius. I've also been meandering my way through a lovely book called Emily Dickinson's Gardens, as much about her flowers as it is about her life and poems, hence good springtime reading (though it actually cycles through all four seasons).

I'm hoping to pull together a unit study on Dickinson soon, as I keep getting ideas for supplemental activities and learning trails. Some of her poems definitely spoke to the sweet girl, who surprised me by choosing the poem "A Letter to a Bee" (the one that begins "Bee, I'm Expecting You...") for memorization. Not the easiest of Emily's poems to memorize, and yet she's done it and done it well. I think we'll definitely return to Dickinson again in the years to come!

Just Imagine It's a Garden...

When we left for church this Sunday morning, it was raining -- freezing rain. The skies were filled with lowering gray clouds, the hills misted with fog and we were running late. I slipped a bit as I hurried into the car, and made some sort of disgruntled noise. And then I just plain old grumbled: "It would be much easier to walk over here if this was still grass."

Remember we used to have a bit of grass there? But last summer, it got ripped up and paved over to make...sigh....more sidewalk. That's the sidewalk I found myself inadvertently skating on this a.m. I've been grumpy about it for such a long time, venting about it on an icy morning seemed all too easy.

The sweet girl told me I shouldn't complain. She said the people who paved the sidewalk must have needed to. I agreed I shouldn't complain but told her that I didn't think they'd really needed to. And then I sighed and said something about the gray day and the expanse of icy parking lot.

"Just imagine it's a garden, mommy," my seven year old said. (She knows me well!)

And you know what? It helped.

Loving the Beautiful Particulars

If anyone had ever asked me if I loved nature...all the wonderful things God has created...animals, plants, weather...I would have always told them yes.

I grew up with, and completely took for granted, a lovely yard in Virginia. We had terrific climbing trees, green grass that felt terrific on my bare toes, a gorgeous garden complete with a garden patch I was allowed to call my own from a very young age. We had rose bushes and a plum tree and at either end of the street where I lived there were grassy fields (we called them the "triangles" because of their approximate shapes) where the kids in the neighborhood could meet to play kickball or pick wildflowers or collect bugs. We had ditches with ivy-covered banks between which water flowed like a miniature stream, allowing us to race leaf boats. I had a sand pile and a swing set. Down the road from us were neighbors who had all sorts of lovely trees, including magnolias. Almost nothing is more beautiful than their large, creamy blossoms and shiny dark green leaves unless it's the feathery, powder-puff pink blossoms on the sweet-smelling mimosa trees, which also flourished in our neighborhood. A block or so away, we even had a patch of woods in which we could wander (sadly gone now).

I loved it all. But I never fully appreciated it until I didn't have it.

I've had other places of beauty besides that first neighborhood. I lived on two stunningly beautiful (though vastly different) college campuses, including one in the mountains of western North Carolina, truly one of the landscapes of my heart. In the first five years of our marriage, D. and I lived less than five minutes from a Pennsylvania national park that burst into incredible dogwood bloom every spring, a place where you would stumble upon fields of deer or quaint covered bridges when you turned a corner.

I didn't know I was going to grow up and be called to live in an urban setting. Cities, for all the fascination they hold, always felt like they sucked the life out of me if I was in them for too long. Too much concrete and glass and brick, too much rust and bustle. I didn't mind visiting cities, but I was certainly never going to live in one, and I would have said adamantly that I would never a raise a child in one if I had a choice.

And yet...here I am, here we are. In the post-industrial rust belt for almost twelve years, a tiny town of boarded up storefronts and too much traffic, completely yardless, my front "porch" a concrete step just a few inches above street level. Would I love to live somewhere else? You bet, except for the tiny little wrinkle that the Lord has apparently called us to be where we are for the time being and given us a love for this place and those who live here. If there was one other important thing I learned along with my love of all things green in God's world, it was that the very best place to be is the place where God calls you, no matter where it is.

So here I am, here we are. And guess what? In this remarkably dry and weary concrete land, I have found myself falling in deeper love, and in deeper ways, with the created world.

I think it's because we see so little of it, because I have to work so hard to find ways to share nature with my little girl. She has none of the beauties I took for granted when I was her age, no yard to run around in, no place to safely walk barefoot, no opportunity to just sit and stare for minutes (or hours) at bugs. Well, we do have those opportunities sometimes, but they come rarely and they have to be planned carefully, with visits to the yards of friends or nearby parks or the seminary lawn. I think what I am most wistful for is the deep sense of freedom and spontaneity that I had as a child, when I could simply wander outside (I can hear a squeak and the slim wooden frame of the back screen door slamming behind me as I write this) and toss myself down onto the grassy lawn with a good book. The sounds I took for granted were cricket chirps and cooing doves, not motorcycles and trucks. The smells I took for granted were sweet honeysuckle and pungent ivy, not exhaust fumes and the dumpster across the road.

So we've had to get creative. We've had to get passionate about learning as much as we can about every bit of nature within reach. We take nature walks here in our little city, picking wildflowers, crouching as near as we can to curbside gardens that don't belong to us, twining binoculars around our neck so we can peer at the birds nesting in the birdhouse in the yard of a nearby church. During the week hardly anyone is around those church grounds, so we sometimes sneak into their side yard for a few minutes and play. There's a long, cascading kind of willow tree there, a small one that blooms with beautiful white flowers in early spring, and the sweet girl calls it her "tree house." She hides beneath the branches while her Mom keeps a casual lookout for anyone who might be wanting to kick us off the property, trying to give her little girl a few minutes of the kind of quiet, green privacy she loved so when she was six.

And I am amazed at how much I'm learning. Do I still long to live in a place where I can these things for granted? Well, to be perfectly honest, yes. But having to work hard to find bits of nature means I value them all the more when I find them. I have learned the names of plants and trees and birds. I've never been particularly good at knowing specific names of things, so I've tried to get better. And as I learn them, I pass them on to the sweet girl. We're learning together to appreciate every bit of God's beautiful created world we can, from the ten sycamores across the road (whose buds we watch with such raw expectation every March) to the wonderful starlings that are nesting in the gap between the buildings across the street. Not to mention the tree sparrows that have their nest in the corner of our own building (we live over a warehouse) and the huge crow that struts his stuff on the roof across the way from time to time.

This past weekend we went to a nearby park for a picnic supper, something we try to do as often as possible in spring and summer. This was our first picnic of the year and it was a bit grey and chilly in the early evening, but still oh so beautiful. Robins were scattered on the grass in such vast numbers it was like they were having a Robin convention, or (more likely, I thought) deciding to field a few baseball teams. I counted 29 robins at one point on the baseball field, most of them congregating in the outfield.



And I was stunned by the surge of excitement and happiness I felt when a bright yellow blur tumbled by us, surfing the wind. I actually stood to my feet shrieking "it's a goldfinch! it's a goldfinch!" I was so thrilled to see that amazing bird I wanted to toss a handful of confetti or set off sparklers. D. had told us he'd seen one during his morning walk the other day, but neither the sweet girl or I had been able to add this particularly beautiful little bird to our spring list yet, and we were delighted to do so. He flew by twice (yes, it was definitely a he...we could tell by his colors and markings) finally alighting on the metal fence by the baseball field, and I simply stood on the other side of the fence, staring in awe.

Getting to know God's world in its particulars is a joy. It strikes me as somewhat ironic that it took almost a decade of lean years to get to me to the place where I began to passionately look and learn everything I could. Somewhere along the line I realized I had to stop majoring in wistfulness and get busy appreciating anything and everything alive and growing (or singing or flying!) that God put in my path. The beauties of green and growing things, the gorgeousness of the natural world, are never going to be something my daughter is going to be able to take for granted as I did. But that doesn't mean I can't teach her a deep gratitude for them, and a deep joy in discovering them wherever they are.

What a Difference...

the sun can make, especially in the way we see shadows.

100 Species Challenge #3: Lily of the Valley

I've been slow as a tortoise posting anything on the 100 Species Challenge we started last summer. I've taken a number of pictures of plants and flowers, and even identified some of them! but have been remiss about posting anything. Given my slowness and our urban environment, I still think it will likely take me several years to actually manage 100 postings, but I'm enjoying myself anyway! Don't be surprised to see a few more posts than usual this spring...

# 3 on our list is Lily of the Valley. I took this photo in the beautiful gardens at Old Economy last Thursday. The technical name for this particular variety is Convallaria majalis var. montana. The green tint on the bell-like flowers shows it's the US variety.

The sweet girl thought these needed water since they were drooping, but droop is part of their distinctiveness. Some people think they look like tear drops, and one legend says that they were formed by Eve's tears when she left the garden. I like that: wouldn't it be like God to turn even those tears into something beautiful?

Windowsill Gardening and the Nourishing Soil We Need

We've been growing several plants on the sweet girl's windowsill this spring. Right now she has a small plastic green house with impatiens (which frustrate her patience by their refusal to bloom!) and a pot with a lima bean plant which is flourishing.

We also have a medium sized pot with a grass plant. Yes, I said grass. Now the funny thing about this grass is that it was originally planted near the end of S' preschool year when she was four, so we've had it for two years. They uprooted a bit of grass and planted it in a plastic cup in her preschool classroom and she brought it home. We watered it faithfully for months and it grew pretty well, but the size of the cup limited how big it could get. Eventually, a few months ago, I realized belatedly that the poor grass plant was looking pretty peaked...pale leaves, drooping. The reason was obvious. Through the clear plastic of the cup, you could see the deep root structure which had become quite long and tangled up. The poor plant was reaching for deeper soil, deeper roots, but it had run out of space and richness.

So we transplanted the pale bit of grass this spring, right around Easter time. I know it was Easter because I borrowed the soil from the potted tulip plants we'd bought at church, in memory of D's grandparents. I wasn't sure how wise it was to borrow soil that had already been "used" and had other plant roots in it, but it was handy and the dirt still looked so rich and I hated to waste it. I also wasn't convinced that the grass plant would make it anyway, so figured we had nothing to lose.

Imagine our surprise when the plant immediately perked up and began to grow like gangbusters! It's doubled (maybe tripled?) its size, and become a gorgeous vibrant green. A few weeks ago it suddenly shot out a long, skinny shoot. Looked sort of weedy, but we let it keep going, curious, especially when it seemed to be launching another bit of grass at the end of the shoot. And then this week, much to the sweet girl's delight, the shoot BLOOMED! Tiny little white flowers, like slender stars, opening out from the shoot.

All of this makes me think about our spiritual lives. How often, I wonder, are we ready to deepen, ready to really push our roots deeper down so that we can grow, only to discover we don't have enough nourishing soil? Part of the richness of our daily disciplines is the way they help to break down/build up the soil that we need. We might think of our "daily grind" but it's a "grinding" that helps to take the stuff of our lives and works it into rich soil that helps us grow. Maybe it really isn't a coincidence that "human" and "humus" (the root word for "earth" or "soil") seem so closely related! We can't expect to make even a sudden spurt, much less sustain growth over a long time or manage to bloom, without being surrounded by the nourishing soil we need. Our roots need a real place to deepen, and our daily disciplines help God make that space and soil in our lives.