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mindfulness – Salvaged Faith

Manipulate or appreciate?

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Henri Nouwen writes:

It is impressive to see how prayer opens one’s eyes to nature.  Prayer makes men [and women, I’d add] contemplative and attentive.  In place of manipulating, he who prays stands receptive before the world. He no longer grabs but caresses, he no longer bites, but kisses, he no longer examines but admires…. Instead of an obstacle, it becomes a way… (from Thomas Merton: Contemplative Critic)

I have spent almost every morning of my renewal leave praying outside.  The squirrels are chattering.  The birds squawking and cirping.  A starling is eating dead leaves off of a dying tree, while a cardinal sits on my garden post, and a squinny is digging a hold in the landscaping. It has been noisy out here on the porch.  And busy.  There is always something to watch and hear.

And I do feel more deeply appreciative of what I am discovering.  The cardinals are new.  I hadn’t seen them before this morning.  The orange and magenta and purple in the butterfly garden are just now coming into full bloom and I can imagine how striking that space will be in a few years as the plants naturalize and spread.

But there has been some manipulation going on as well in my back yard.  Some battles I am choosing to fight.  Putting in the garden, for one. Clearing out the weeds.  Being intentional about what to keep and what to change.

In my organic ministry course, we have talked a lot about paying attention to what the land is telling us.  What does it need?  What grows best there? We can fight against nature all we want, but the land will keep fighting back.  Or, we will strip the land of every good nutrient as we force it to produce what we want, in an efficient manner, every year.

Success looks like a good harvest. Abundant production. With little regard to what we have sacrificed in our manipulations.

My manipulated vegetable garden isn’t producing much this year.  The rabbits have eaten all the green beans. The peas never came up.  It has not been warm enough for the peppers and they aren’t growing as abundantly as I would hope, nor are they putting on flowers to bear fruit.  The raspberries we planted last year blossomed, but I think the birds ate all the berries. Only the tomatoes appear to be on the verge of production and “success.”

But these past few weeks have helped me to appreciate what I have. The tiny garden is feeding our wildlife at least. While I might find the intrusion frustrating, it is also fun to watch the joy my cats take in watching the birds and squirrels. I’m also learning lessons in the process that I can apply next year: the need for better protection, starting my seeds earlier, cultivating a healthier and less sandy soil for growth by adding compost and nutrients. Those lessons are also success.

And I wonder how the time spent paying attention in this season will impact  how I pay attention in the church and community.

How often do we manipulate our people and programs in order to produce the results our conference or denomination or the latest church growth book has suggested?  How often do we use cookie cutter approaches that might bear fruit in the short term, but have no long term understanding of what will keep the church soil healthy and vibrant? Do we appreciate who our people are?  Do we spend time getting to know them before we start to shape them?  Do we allow what they say to use to alter our plans for ministry? What is the community teaching us? What are our children teaching us?  What are the interruptions and oopses and failures teaching us?

Maybe there is a middle ground between manipulation and appreciation. A place where we really pay attention to what is happening in our churches and communities and we explore the places we can make some intentional changes that will honor what is there and create the conditions for healthy and flourishing life… now and in the future.

Alternatives to Herbicide

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I always through there were two options when it came to weeds.

1) you could spray chemicals all over them and hope they die… or use more natural chemical reactions like vinegar and hot water to cause them to wither.

2) you could get out there with a hoe, like my deda (grandpa) always did, and take them out by hand.

This year, I’m taking a course on organic ministry at a farm near Norwalk.  We spend roughly half the day in conversation and reflection, have some personal retreat time, and do some work in the gardens themselves.

So far, the thing I have learned that has stuck with me the most is that there are other options when it comes to weeds.

Weeds thrive, you see, because the soil conditions promote their growth.  And the weeds themselves tell you what the soil needs in order to be more healthy OR what type of plans you should be planting there instead.

Stinging nettle can indicate that the soil is acidic… so maybe you want to plant hydrangeas or blueberries there.  Or, you could work to improve the soil conditions by adding dolomitic limestone and making the soil more neutral.

Chicory or mustard weeds are a sign that the ground is hard and too compacted. You can break up the soil by planting sweet clover that will help break up the soil and replenish nitrogen.  Brassica crops (like broccoli and cabbages) also will flourish under these conditions.

The list goes on and on.

I was spending time with a group of clergy colleagues this week and we were talking about difficult people in our churches.  People who take up a lot of time or who talk too much in meetings, or are always complaining about something.  We all have them in our churches, and if we are honest with ourselves, sometimes WE are that person.

Our tendency is to see these people as weeds.  We wish they weren’t there. We’d like to pull them up by their roots or change them.

But what if, instead, we stopped and asked what were the conditions that allowed their behaviors to flourish?

What if someone talks too much in a meeting because we haven’t created space for other voices to be heard?

What if someone is constantly complaining because there is something else going on in their life and it is a sign of a pastoral care need?

What if that person who always takes up too much of our time is a sign of our lack of good, healthy boundaries?

And what if instead of focusing so much of our worry on the weeds, we instead worked to strength and plant things that we want to flourish in that space?

What if we shifted the meeting format to have more small group conversation time?

What if we made a policy to only accept a complaint if there was a constructive response along with it, or a commitment to volunteer to be part of the change?

What if we nurtured a community of care with trained lay folks who helped with congregational care instead of trying to do it all on our own.

All of a sudden, our lives are not consumed with stamping out weeds, but with promoting growth and health and vitality in our gardens and in our churches.