Voracious chipmunks devoured the seedlings, necessitating multiple replantings. Deer savaged the spreading vines. It was a horticultural debacle. I got a quarter of my usual yield.
This year, things are different. I moved our bird feeder out of the front lawn, reducing the attraction for rodents. I've been more diligent about applying deer spray.
Out front, it's a riot of sprawling fan leaves and questing vines. The most vigorous of my butternuts this season is, as it happens, not one that I planted at all. It's a volunteer, one that came up early in a four by four raised bed where I'd intended to grow okra. I didn't, at first, even know it was a butternut. I could tell it was a squash of some sort, but that thumb-high sprout could have been zucchini, or perhaps a cuke. Cucurbits...that's the common name for that family of plant...all kinda sorta look the same early in their development, at least to my amateur eye.
I thought about rooting it up, as I often will with volunteers. I Had A Plan, after all, one that involved okra and not butternut. But I had okra growing elsewhere. Given the failure of my squash crop last year, I was inclined to give it a chance. That, and if it turned out to be a butternut, it would have room to run, and butternut does the best when you let it sprawl out wild and free.
It was a butternut, and Lord, has it run.
It quickly leapt out of the bounds of the raised bed, as every single day the tendrils extended their reach.
Its goal, best I could tell, was the sun, as it pressed due East towards the dawn. The plant is now about thirteen feet long, the striving vines and sprawling leaves inscribing the shape of a beleafed comet onto the green of my yard. Along those abundant vines, the glorious yellow blossoms have drawn a host of bumblebees, who will often fall asleep deep inside of the flowers, cozily cupped and pollen-drunk.
From the female blossoms, with the help of the bees, a half-dozen squash have begun to form and fatten. More than my entire harvest last year.
From just one plant, that showed up unexpected and was given the freedom to use its gifts. This feels, as so much gardening does, flagrantly metaphorical.
There's a tendency amongst Professional Jesus People to assume that our task is to set agendas and establish plans and be all Leadershippy and stuff. We are the prophets and the vision-casters! We dream the dreams! We know the knowledge! Without the byzantine complexities known only to us professionals, poor hapless amateur Christians would wander around like little lost lambs in the great deep darkness.
This is a spiritually dangerous assumption. It's why we pastors overfunction. It's why we're so prone to getting anxious, exhausted, and overwhelmed, as we take the entire weight of our local universe onto our shoulders. It's why we can become megalomaniacs in microcosm, and get prone to doing things we oughtn't.
Our pastoral task, instead, is mostly to encourage, inspire, and occasionally give some gentle redirection. The vital and creative energies that keep our communities healthy extend far beyond our egos. They rest within the souls who choose to give their time freely and joyously to music and mission, to service and care, to teaching and reaching out.
The best measure of a healthy church, as some of my choir folk so perfectly put it while chatting before the service this last Sunday, is that people want to be there together, pursuing a commonly held joy.
The heart of a vital and free society, as Alex of Tocqueville famously put it, is "..the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires."
Without our fierce and joyous voluntarism, nothing good can stand.
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