In Defense of the Humble Footnote

Yesterday, after a several week long push, I finished a draft manuscript I've been working on for the last several years.  It's bubbled along beneath the surface of other projects, going through one unreadable iteration after another, and I've scrapped and reworked it at least twice. 

Fear Not, Little Flock is a book of encouragement and exhortation, meant to offer up a little bit of steel for the spines of small congregations.  There are plenty of Jesus MegaCenters out there, and having an alternative where life together functions on a human scale is a blessing.  It's due to my publisher in a month, so it'll be there well ahead of schedule, which is how I prefer to treat my editors.

I'll be writing more on the topic over the next little bit, I'm sure.  But what was on my mind, as I finished up, wasn't small churches.  

It was the humble footnote.  The manuscript has footnotes, and I don't know if they'll make it through the process of editing.  It seems unlikely.

This is a bummer, because I love footnotes.  

Footnotes...those little superscriptural markers that lead you to explanatory text or bibliographic information at the bottom of a page...are entirely out of style in the contemporary publishing industry.  The editorial herd has moved on.  First, it was endnotes, where that little number or an in-text citation had you flipping to the back of the book and futzing around to find the deets.  

Then, as was the case with my last two books, the new "style " was to not provide any superscriptural marker in the text at all, and to instead slap a chapter by chapter list of bibliographic references on the hindquarters of the book, with only page numbers to connect you to the actual reference.

I have no idea why this happened, but it's two steps backwards.  Endnotes are an inferior UI.  The "Tramp Stamp," or whatever the heck it's called when endnotes have no direct marker in the text?  That feels like it's just there for liability purposes, as it offers no meaningful opportunity for reader engagement at all.

Footnotes, particularly when coupled with a complete bibliography, immediately connect the reader with an informational metanarrative.  As you encounter resources or other writing that has informed your author, it's right there in front of you.  It's not "distraction."  It's openness of process, and immediately raises reader awareness of the textual foundations of a work.  It is, for author and reader alike, a superior way to convey information, by an order of magnitude.

But it can be more than that.  Footnotes are also a lovely place for an authorial aside.  You can share a related story or reflection.  You can snicker sotto voce in the wings at something in the main text, like you're Statler and your reader is Waldorf and the main text is Gonzo's latest failed routine.  Those marginalia add delight.

So why was this change made?  Why the shift in style?

Is it that we've lost the technical prowess in printing to manage doing footnotes?  Of course not.  Best I can tell, the change was made to save the costs of more complicated typesetting as the publishing industry has withered and retrenched and withered and retrenched again.  Mucking about with footnotes really does make the process of changing physical type more time consuming, and the additional labor required costs money.  It's collateral damage from industry decline, an inelegant adaptation rather than a step forward.

But with most publishing now fully digital, that logic no longer holds.  Physical typesetting has been supplanted, once again for cost saving purposes, yet still the style remains. 

It has become yet another way fad trumps function, an "advance" that makes life harder, and whose industry-driven logics have nothing to do with the author-reader connection, reader engagement and education, or the reason books exist.

Other than that, I have no problem with it.

On Congregational Demise

 

And here, talking against the winds, so to speak, I must enter, along with my lamentation, my objection. You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared to submit to correction by anybody who cares about community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community’s dying.

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, p. 274

Charn Sunrise

Low down and near the horizon hung a great, red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group. And on the earth, in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen. And all the temples, towers, palaces, pyramids, and bridges cast long, disastrous-looking shadows in the light of that withered sun. Once a great river had flowed through the city, but the water had long since vanished, and it was now only a wide ditch of grey dust.

"Look well on that which no eyes will ever see again," said the Queen. "Such was Charn, that great city, the city of the King of Kings, the wonder of the world, perhaps of all worlds. Does your uncle rule any city as great as this, boy?"

C.S. Lewis, THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW

How 'Bout Them Apples

On one recent afternoon, I was sitting in my kitchen puttering away on a nearly-finished manuscript.  Progress was being made, but the pleasant distraction of working by a big bay window looking out to the street can limit how much gets done.

I notice every passerby, as my peripheral vision catches every neighbor out walking their dogs, every salesperson wandering door to door.

What caught my eye that afternoon was a mother and daughter as they slowed down at the edge of my yard to notice one of my two apple trees.  

The taller, deep green Honeycrisp nearer to the house has yielded, in the past five years, exactly one perfect apple.  It doesn't flower much, and never quite seemed to recover from the trauma of having most of its branches torn off as a sapling.  That damage was done by a young buck deer scraping the velvet from new antlers, and I wasn't sure it would survive.  What few flowers it produces now are out of sequence with the other tree, and are the farthest thing from fruitful.  This year, it produced one withered apple, a sad little object no larger than the tip of a thumb.  

But then there's the dwarf Fuji I planted nearer to the sidewalk to crosspollinate with the Honeycrisp.  It's not as heavily leafed, and stumpier, but is nonetheless going like gangbusters year after year.  Even after I pruned away full third of the new apples back in the spring, the branches droop heavy with growing fruit.

It was the Fuji that the daughter noticed, and she excitedly pointed it out to her mother.  They stopped, and considered the tree.  The girl asked an question, and her mother answered her.  "Yes, that's an apple tree," I could see her say.  A huge smile spread across the girl's face, as her eyes danced across dozens of apples.  The sparkle in her eyes translated into excited little jumps, as she pointed and counted the apples with such energy that her little body needed to leap a bit.

It is possible, I realized, that she might not have seen an apple tree before.  There aren't any others in our neighborhood, not visibly in a front yard, at least.  Or perhaps she'd gone apple picking, but never ever seen an apple tree while simply out walking. 

Years ago, before those apple trees were planted, before I'd even begun my first tentative attempts at gardening, I'd often wonder at how it is that America's suburban neighborhoods are so devoid of fruit and harvest.  

Now, it's not just the sweetness of those apples that I enjoy, but the pleasure that others take in their existence.  

Bringing It Down Carefully

It's been a pleasant week up at my father-in-law's house in Western Maryland, one filled with reading and hikes and puttering about on the lake.  The weather has been hot by Western Maryland standards, enough that the minisplit AC that had to be put in a few years back was working overtime, with fans set up to distribute that one unit's cool air through the rest of the upstairs.

That heat has meant that I've been using the mornings to get things done outside, focused on whittling away at one task in particular.

About twenty yards up the heavily wooded rise behind the house, I'd been long eyeing a deceased hardwood tree.  It died perhaps five or six years ago, and stood about seventy feet in height.  It weren't jus' dead.  It was really and sincerely dead.  The wood around the base and most of the way up the tree was unrotted, hard, and had "cured on the vine," and for the last few years I've figured it would offer up about a weeks' worth of evening fires in the hearth.

My goal, for this trip: finally bring it down, buck it into rounds, and schlep those rounds down the hill to dry and cure.  I've done that with two other deceased trees on the property, and at that height, it's just about at the top end of what my modest 18" homeowner-grade electric chainsaw can manage.

After taking a few minutes to sharpen, oil, and adjust the chain, up the hill I went with axe and wedge and chainsaw.  Within five minutes I'd hewed out the directional undercut, and begun the back cut to bring it down.  Being a suburbanite, I don't get to do this often, so it's always done 1) in the most straightforward and traditional way and 2) with as much care as my scatterbrain allows.  I know my limitations, and my propensity to forget things, like fully securing the chain-oil plug so's it doesn't goop oil down my pants.  Not that I've ever done that.  Ahem.

Bringing down a tree requires one's full attention.

Vibecoding might be a thing these days, as we offload our cognitive tasks to AI.  But Vibefelling a tree?  That too easily turns into an existential error, the sort of mistake that costs you property damage, a limb, or a life.  

So I consider and then create the undercut mindfully.  Where's this going to go, exactly?  I want to set it down not just as far away from the house and parked cars as possible, but also where it'll do the least harm to the healthy trees around it.  It's worth careful consideration and reconsideration.

As I'm putting in the back cut, I slow down right at the end.  Were I an experienced arborist working with excellent equipment, this would be less necessary.  But when you're engaged in an unfamiliar, infrequent, and risky task, take your sweet time about it.  I've felled fewer than a half-dozen trees in my fifty seven years of life, so I watched the cut like a hawk.  Has it begun to fractionally expand, the barely noticeable beginning of that long final fall?  I want to be a few strides away as soon as that movement begins, in the event I've misjudged something and the trunk steps out, heading in an unplanned direction.

I cut and checked, cut and checked.  Finally, that movement began, the clean line of the backcut expanding at a barely discernible rate.  I pulled the chainsaw blade, and stepped back as the expansion increased.

It all went as planned, and down it came precisely where I'd intended, with a satisfying crackling followed by a deep ground-shaking whump.  The tree, life long gone from it, was now ready to be sectioned out, bucked into rounds and split for the fire in winter.

When we realize a thing needs to be brought down, it's best to do so with care.  If you rush in, full of blind confidence and bravado, you're likely to do more harm than good.

Strange Division

It’s been a while since I struggled to understand division. It was third grade, if I’m recalling correctly, when I’d come trudging home from Timberlane Elementary School with a backpack full of math worksheets requiring me to do exciting things like divide 567 by 32, rounding up to the tens place.

Once you knew your times tables, it wasn’t so hard, but it took a while to get there, bludgeoning my way through exercise after exercise until I finally got it.

I had a peculiarly similar experience a few months ago, as in my fifty-seventh year of life I finally realized I had no idea how the Dow Jones Industrial Average actually worked. I peruse the business news daily, and for years thought I had the basic principle down. The Dow, which is used to measure the economic health of a nation, is a number you get to by adding together the dollar value of common stock in thirty selected blue chip companies. That gives you the dividend/numerator. This, you divide by a divisor/denominator….in this case, 30…to get an average. Because, you know, that’s how averages work, or so I remember from later in elementary school. That measure of economic health has risen meteorically in my lifetime, going from 800 in 1969 to over 50,000 now. For a long time, I assumed the soaring DOW had to do with two factors: 1) that stocks were gaining value and 2) that the dollar was losing value through inflation.

But I was wrong.

That’s not how it works. Not at all. I was right about the dividend, but clueless about the divisor. When the DOW began, the divisor was the number of stocks in the average. But the folks who run the Dow have gradually adjusted that divisor downwards over the last 75 years, to create a narrative of “continuity.” So instead of dividing by thirty, which would give you an actual average, or by 1, as was the case in 1987, the year I graduated from high school, you now divide by point one six. 

Point one six.

And when you divide by a number that’s less than one, what happens? All of a sudden, you’re multiplying!

This, conveniently enough, gives us the story of endless growth. 

Growth, as any parent or gardener can tell you, is a fundamental part of life. That’s the core narrative of our economic culture, that things must always be more and be better and bigger and more powerful. It’s what we’re taught to revere, taught to value, and it’s the story that defines whether our lives have worth or our lives do not. It is the defining moral purpose of the culture that birthed us, and in which our identities are formed and shaped.

It’s fiercely seductive, and I’m not immune to the siren song of bright and shiny things.

But that story of ever rising power and wealth isn’t entirely true. What is the DJIA but Standard and Poors telling the tale of a government that prints more and more money, and businesses that print more and more stocks to absorb that new money into the portfolios of the privileged?

More notably, for those of us who follow Jesus, how much does Mammon's peculiarly self-serving mathematics shape how we live out our lives as disciples?

Who's Your Daddy

Once or twice every year, I rent a car for pleasure.  This last January, it was a huge Chevy Tahoe, which I used to blast my way through the snow that paralyzed the MidAtlantic for a few days.

The itch has been going again recently, that desire to try something different, to do the Obvious Midlife Crisis thing and rent something radically different from our trusty and perfectly practical Hondas for a few days.

It being the weekend of Father's Day, I settled in on a Beemer, a BMW 840i Coupe with XDrive.  It's a handsomely sleek broad-shouldered thing, the sort of vehicle one would expect to be driven by a gym-sculpted CryptoBro or the trust-fund offspring of an oligarch.  

A small church pastor behind the wheel?  It's a little anomalous, I'll admit. 

It's sleek and shiny, with fat tires and a modified exhaust that snorts and burbles in unabashedly juvenile ways.  More notably, the exhaust uncorks more power from BMW's excellent B58 three litre inline six, which sings in a rich pure tenor whenever you press the go pedal.  The part of me that's still twelve finds it delightful.

It is also, apparently, a provocation.

In my history of car rentals, there's a certain type of car...Camaros, Mustangs, and Dodge Challengers...that stirs a response in other vehicles of that species.  These are the cars with big potent engines, free-breathing vee-eights with burbling, snorting exhausts, the kinds of cars I drew in my notebook in math class when I was a sophomore in high school.

Muscle cars, in other words, the cars that flex and grunt and announce to the world on a Saturday night:  "I am stronger than you."  Get two of them together, it's like a pair of bull-elks in rut.  The strong instinct is to bellow and to butt heads.

To them, a glistening and modded BMW eight series is like dark red blood in the water.  

I can't remember a vehicle I've driven that has stirred more aggression responses.  The Escalade that kept roaring past me.  The Mustang GT that pulled in front and made several futile attempts to induce me to race.  The lowered and cat-backed eight year old Lexus that snarled past, the driver shouting "GOGOGOGOGO!"  The Dodge Charger that, passing me, just revved and revved and revved.  

It is, I suppose, just a facet of driving a big Beemer.  It's not just that it says, "I am stronger than you," but also that it whispers to the lesser muscle car owner: "And I am wealthier than you."  I'm not just displaying that I'm loud and fast.  I'm loud and fast and rich, which would make me the most annoying person on the road.

Not that I'm driving the car that way.  I'm using my turn signals (BMWs do have them).  I'm letting people merge in front of me, and generally not living into the stereotype.  I am, during the rental...er..."driving vigorously."  I may have been listening to Rammstein a little more than usual.  But never cutting people off, or tailgating.

Why do we enjoy power?  Is it from the desire to dominate or control, to prove oneself superior to others?

Or is it for the pleasure of competence and a finely made machine, of the sound and feel of a well tuned engine and the sweetness of a Southern summer Sunday night?

Mint and Lavender Tea

Every year, my little garden yields something new.

Last year, at my congregation's annual Gardenfest, I purchased some lavender.  There wasn't really any particular plan behind that purchase, other than that I saw some lavender and thought to myself, "Ooh.  That sounds nice to have."

I brought it home, where I replanted it in a large pot smack in the middle of my mint patch.  I'd received some donated mint many years ago, and it quickly did what mint does.  What had been a drab patch of elephant grass soon was eighty percent mint, and this was fine.  I made some potent juleps for a while, which were delicious and heady and oh so Southern, but also perhaps not the best habit to get into on the regular.  

What might I do instead?  I thought on it for a while, and came up with the idea of drying it for tea.  I would dehydrate and save those leaves, and from them would make for myself potfuls of mint tea come winter.

That was the idea, at least.  I promptly forgot about it until the mint had wholly died off in the late Fall.

But spring comes again, and as the mint renewed itself to the point of needing aggressive cutting back a month ago, I realized I might have another tea option.

The lavender had done surprisingly well for itself in the thick of the mint, the little purple blossoms popping up all throughout that fierce green sea of leaves.  Perhaps I should consider making mint and lavender tea, I thought.  That seemed like it might be a thing.  I looked it up, and indeed it was.

So one evening recently, as cool air returned following an unseasonable warmth, I stepped off my front porch to inspect that portion of my modest herb garden.  Was it brisk enough to justify tea?  That night, the answer was yes.

I plucked two lavender blossoms and a much larger handful of fresh mint leaves, which I then crushed using the very technical process of just squishin' 'em with my hands.  That fragrant mass made it's way into a finely-wrought metal straining basket, which popped neatly into a glass pot.  Water was boiled, and poured into the pot.  It steeped for a while, until the liquid within took on a light golden greenish hue.

I poured myself a mugful, and took a tentative sip.  

Strongly minty, with a hint of lavender, just as one might expect.  It had a satisfyingly fresh brightness to it, so after I finished my first mug, I poured myself another, and sat out on the porch in the crispness of early nightfall and sipped at it for a while.

I have, over the years, grown many things with varying degrees of success.  But this was the first time I'd had herbal tea from my own garden.  It was delightful.

Every year, it's a new blessing.

Work and the World

Some work, or so our culture tells us, is of less value than others.

There’s a lot of chatter about the relative value of work these days, particularly as large language models and generative pretrained transformers start taking over more and more of what used to be the jobs of recent college grads. Given agency, the most advanced models can handle almost any formerly white collar task. They can code better than we can code, which is one of the reasons why in 2026, tech companies like Amazon and Meta have so far shed nearly a hundred and fifty thousand jobs.

But it goes further. Agentic AI can work a project through to completion, it can create and manage customer interfaces online, it can manage your appointments, and it can do all of that and more if you pay the corporation that owns it a mere $100 a month.

These systems can also write and edit, create music in any genre and theme, and create images and videos and movies.

And people say, hey, why are we doing this? Shouldn’t we have them do the things we don’t like to do and that don’t pay well? According to that way of thinking, we want robots to clean our houses and mow our lawns and scrub our toilets and do our dishes, some say. Let them work in the warehouses and let them drive us around and let them deliver our packages and pizzas, let them plant and harvest the crops from our fields.

Just leave the important work to human beings, the meaningful and truly creative work, or so goes the chatter of the chattering classes.

Simply replace physical labor with humanoid machines, ones that would step into the joyless place of countless grim factory shift-workers and itinerant farm laborers, all of whom are little more than cogs in an industrial machine.

I watched with fascination recently as the algorithms tried to pitch me that very idea.

It was a livestream from a robotics company called Figure, in which a small team of androids worked sorting packages onto a conveyor belt. Every package had to be sorted and placed label-side-down onto the conveyor, which they did without blinking or talking or doing anything but that mindless task. Because we love our anthropomorphization, each had name tags, and “Frank” ran in the background for an entire day, stopping only to go charge up while “Gary” the robot took over. Those humanoid robots worked nonstop for one hundred and ninety one hours, handing nearly two hundred and forty thousand packages. Not a single complaint, not a bit of gossiping about their programmers, and not a single worry about health care if they tweaked a muscle in their back.

Why not automate all such tasks, the moving and sorting of objects from one place to another?

Surely there’s no particular gift or blessing that such a blindly simple action can express, no reason God would look on that kind of action and say that it was very good. I’m sure there are countless underpaid factory workers around the world who would concur that, given the option, they might prefer to spend their time doing something else.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that is always true. I mean, can we think of a time when we move things from place to place, that we sort and measure and prepare with hands and arms and backs, that might have positive moral weight?

I can.

I think of the souls from my little church filling community garden beds with dirt, and filling backpacks with food for kids. I think of the simple labor of stocking shelves with food for our Little Free Pantry. I think of the folks who assembled the playground that now memorializes a child of the church. I think of the care that keeps our facility hospitable to those we are hosting, like painting walls or repairing a broken lock? All of those actions, simple and physical and real, are part of God’s good work.

Any action, done with gracious purpose, is part of God’s work.  That our culture values meetings and accounting and finance more than harvesting and repairing, caring and making things?  It's just a mark of our fallen and sinful nature.

As we act and move and do things in the world, there is work that…for the well-being of our souls…we shouldn’t look down on, or set aside for our ease or convenience.

Seven Forms of the Small Church

Small churches can be wonderful, delightful, and a blessing to the world, but they're not all cut from the same cloth.  Precisely the opposite, in fact.  Unlike larger churches, which rely on replicable models and systems, little churches take forms unique to their particular local environment.  They're as unique as the fluttering variety of little finches that Darwin once marveled at as he toured the Galapagos.  Each is subtly but meaningfully different.

That said, there are notable similarities between teeny tiny Jesus gatherings, types of small church that share features with one another.   One of the best typologies I've come across in my years of serving and studying the small church was created by David R. Ray, a Congregationalist pastor, author, and scholar.  In his classic book The Indispensable Guide for Smaller Churches, Ray lays out seven different ways we can do small together.  

I've found it useful, because self-understanding is always useful, and I figure it's worth sharing.  Let's take a look at Ray's thinking about what forms little churches can take:

1) Semper Minor.  That's the motto emblazoned on the crest of a particular type of church, and it just means "Always Small."   As Ray describes it, these are the churches that have just always been the size they are, and they're completely copacetic with it.  They know who they are, and what they are is just fine.  They're not bothered by their size, and the comfort they feel in their own skin makes them tough, resilient, faithful, and effective.

2) The Remnant.  This church was once many times larger than it is now.  It tends older, and is often paired with a sanctuary or facility that it fits into the way your five year old feet fit into your mom or dad's shoes when you snuck into their room and tried them on.  They are lost in memories of what was, and wish they could bring back the day when those pews were filled and they moved powerfully in the world.   "Back in the day," they sigh, "things were better."

3)  The Startup.  Ray describes these gatherings as “Not Yet Large.” Sure, there are only twenty souls gathered, but they're only six months old.  They've been planted in a mushrooming ‘burb by a charismatic leader with a good plan to tap local energies.  They've got a strong online presence, often have connections to an existing ministry that understands evangelism, and all the trappings of a big church in microcosm.  They'll either blossom or wither on the vine, but growth is their goal and big is their aim.

4) Small on Purpose.  These are the Christian gatherings that Ray calls "intentionally small."   They're not unfriendly, but they have a very disciplined and particular way of life, with high thresholds for entry and a demanding set of commitments for continuing participation.  Monastic/Neomonastic communities and collectivist intentional communities where goods are shared inhabit this category.  They're authentic, intense, and by design they ain't for everyone.

5) Islas Etnicas.  These "ethnic islands" provide a home away from home for displaced people, and as immigrant, refugee, or expatriate gatherings, they offer a place of welcome and cultural familiarity.  They are particular blessings to Christians who are FOB (fresh off the boat), as they offer a safe place in which a new arrival can find their bearings.  Unlike most other forms of small congregation, they're not representative of the larger community in which they find themselves.

6) The Clan. These churches tend to form in rural areas, and have their pews filled by the extended bloodlines of one or two families who live nearby.  Although they can be perfectly friendly to folks visiting, and can do good work in the surrounding community, the only way you really become a member is through birth, marriage, or intimate relationship.  They're as robust as the families that comprise them.  Or as dysfunctional.  

7) The Schismatics.  These churches are defined by their constant state of conflict, driven by power-oriented leaders who prevent growth to maintain control.  Who are they in conflict with?  Their denominations.  The other side in the Culture Wars.  Anyone who crosses the pastor or his wife.  They can be strangely attractive to people who hunger for drama in their lives.  Ever see the Knives Out movie Wake Up Dead Man?  There are really churches like that one.  Well, maybe not quite that bad, but close.

Obviously, some of these categories are more inherently healthy of soul than others.  Schismatics are driven by the energies of conflict, and aren't generally healthy places to spend time.  Each of the others has a purpose, and some share paradoxical similarities.  A Remnant church can often be as separate from the life of the community around it as an Isla Etnica, for example.

If we are collectively sentient enough to shape the communities in which we live, I tend to think that we should work our little gatherings so's they have all the best features of Size 1 churches and Size 4 churches.   Combine a sense of Gospel purpose and integrating intent with a comfortable, confident resilience, and you've got quite a blessing.

If you're interested in more of David Ray's writing and thinking, definitely give his Indispensable Guide a look.

Attending a Crow Funeral

I heard them before I saw them.

Coming up the sidewalk towards my house, the sound of their cawing filled the morning air.    

Hearing them, I'd assumed the local murder was rousting a hawk or an owl, driving away the threat to their chicks and their territory.  But they weren't in flight.  There were a dozen of them, perched on the branches of a large poplar, or standing as dark smudges upon the light grey shingle of our roof. And all of them were shouting together, piercing the quiet after dawn with their percussive ruckus.

I peered into the trees, expecting to see the brown wings of a harried raptor.  But there was no evidence that my eyes could discern.  Just crows, yelling at the world and at one another.  I watched the trees for a few more moments, but my dog wanted to go into the house where treats awaited, and so we did, leaving the din behind.

I gave the boy his requisite treat, for he had been a good boy, then settled in to do some writing.  My phone rang shortly thereafter, an old friend calling to chat and talk about a visit.  It was still early, and the house was still asleep, and so I stepped out into the warming air of that summer morning to pace about the front yard and talk.

The crows were still there, although a little quieter now.  As I walked and talked, I paused for a moment.

There, on the ground by one of my four by four raised beds, was the corpse of a crow. 

It lay ragdolled in the grass, wings cupped around its head, as if in its last act it had hidden from the world in a tent of dark feathers.  I came closer.  There was no evident injury, not that I've got the eye to discern such a thing.  Peering down at the glossy black body, I saw that the flies and the ants had already found it.

I would need to dispose of it.  As I had that thought, the remaining crows gathered and flew overhead and to the east, singing their gutteral song of lament.

A few minutes later, when the call was done, I got a lavender-scented garbage bag and a garden spade.  Burying the crow in the back yard wouldn't have worked.  My curious dog is a remarkably able digger, and I didn't want us to be on the enemies list of the local murder.

I scooped up the remains as gently as I could, bagged them, and tied it tight.

Afterwards, I looked up crow mourning rituals.  

"Scientists believe," purred back the AI generated reply, "that this only looks like grief, but actually is just a learned response and adaptive behavior to avoid harm and assess danger."  Digging deeper, I found some of the research that led to that assessment, in which...in a test of the mechanisms of empathy...scientists captured a wild crow, restrained it, showed it images of dead crows, and then tranked it and ran a brain scan to look for signs of frontal lobe activity associated with grief.  

This, to explore another living creature's capacity for empathy?  Oy gevalt.  Maybe you should test your own understanding of "irony," Science.

Later that day, as I attended the celebration of life for a friend who'd been taken by cancer, I found myself coming back to those crows.  

Corvids are highly intelligent and social creatures.  They're aware of loss, aware of the absence of a member of their tribe, aware that death is an eventuality to be marked.  They're not homo sapiens sapiens, to be sure, but grief and the rituals of loss are not just a human thing.  They are part of what it is to be mortal and sentient.

Not just crows and humans, but dolphins and elephants and primates and every bright creature that realizes what it is, and has a flickering sense of its fleeting moment in the great flow of time.

We that live lament those who do so no longer.  We grieve their absence.  We miss the presence of those who have passed on, borne away by Death on great dark wings.

The Reflecting Pool Emergency

The area around the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall is one of the most hallowed public spaces in the United States.  It's a place of singular beauty, mirroring the stark presence of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, catching the light of the sky.  It's a short walk from memorials honoring America's war dead, like the Vietnam Memorial, where as a teen I was humbled to find that a soldier with my name died in Vietnam the day before I was born.

So when...with no discussion and no input...our president invoked emergency powers to declare it was going to paint it a light powderpuff blue?  I'd thought it was just going to be embarrassingly tacky, conferring all the dignity of a putt putt golf hazard in Ocean City.

But the cerulean he wanted first wasn't patriotic enough, and so what we got instead was a deep, dark blue, so blue it's almost black.

My second thought, having seen the images of the "New and Improved Pool," was that the color was far more elegant and way less tacky than I'd feared.   

"American Flag Blue" now covers every inch of the seven acre concrete rectangle of the pool, which is now being filled.  Millions of gallons of water will be poured into it to fill it, at a shallow depth of 18 to 30 inches.  It will look striking.  Very very dark, but striking.  From my own subjective aesthetic standpoint, I think it's going to be attractive.  

But that was my second thought.

My first thought was: Wow, that's going to get hot.

Very hot.

If you paint a surface a dark color, solar energy isn't reflected, but absorbed.  If you then cover that surface with a shallow layer of water, the combination is going to act as a heat sink.  It'd be like making a baby pool out of asphalt.  The water is shallow enough that it doesn't cool, but absorbs energy all the way down, and then continues to heat up.  That's the exact principle of any garden variety rooftop solar water heater.  

That, in effect, is what the Reflecting Pool has become.  A seven acre open-faced solar water heater.   

This will have two effects.  First, radiant heat will make the ambient temperature around the pool considerably higher, possibly as much as 10 to 20 degrees warmer on a hot day.  Second, at the height of summer that heated water will evaporate far, far faster than previously, shedding as much as an additional 100,000 gallons a day in evaporative loss.  On a day with still or modest breezes, that will supercharge the humidity right around the Pool, pushing the hyperlocal wet-bulb temperature to dangerous levels.

Meaning, simply, that on days exceeding 90 degrees, the human beings who spend considerable time around the Reflecting Pool and the nearby Memorials will be hotter, and it'll be so much more humid that the air won't take up more moisture.  Sweating won't cool them off, and shade won't help.

It's likely to mean more heat-related illness for anyone who spends any significant time around it on a hot summer day.  

Particularly on the Fourth of July.  Especially on the Fourth of July.  The Mall typically sees four hundred thousand visitors that day, folks who settle in and linger for hours to wait for fireworks.  On a typical Fourth, that won't be too big a deal, because temps usually are in the 80s.  People will just be a little more uncomfortable, and the pool will be like bathwater. 

But if the temperature is in the mid to upper 90s with clear skies, especially if that's been the case for several days?  You couldn't design a more effective heat-stroke hazard if you tried.

Here's hoping I'm very wrong.  And if not, that the Park Service and local hospitals are prepared, or that the 4th is unseasonably cool with high clouds.

Because what an absurd emergency that would be.

The Tiny Gospel Radio Hour

That first Sunday after my little church hunkered down to weather the COVID epidemic, we did worship differently.  We went online.  We'd not scaled up for professional level livestreaming, so what this frazzled and slightly overmatched pastor managed to pull off was the best I could manage at the time.

For a couple of months, I'd knit together bits and bobs of audio and video on an old repurposed gaming laptop, cobbling together something that was one part worship, and one part podcast.  

That effort needed a name, and so...as it was intended to serve my small congregation...I decided to call it The Tiny Gospel Radio Hour.   

Eventually, lay-folk with more innate talent for such things were able to gather what was needed for a better livestream, the pastor was relieved of that duty, and The Tiny Gospel Radio Hour name was set aside.

Still, it seemed like that name could serve another purpose.  Like there was more for it to do.

As I've gotten close to wrapping up work on a book about the blessings of life in little churches, the idea kept coming back to me.  "Do something with this," said a little voice, poking and nudging and as insistent as my dog when he really really wants to go outside and chase chipmunks.

What I don't want to do is just have me blabbering into a mic about all my bright small church ideas.  Not that my little church isn't a life-changing blessing, but ours is only one little light.

Out there in America, there are thousands upon thousands of small congregations. 

They ain't fancy.  They're fifty souls in a small suburban sanctuary, twenty five folks in a small town storefront, twelve souls in an old clapboard church in a valley, six folks singing together in the living room of a doublewide, three souls sitting in a bar and talking life and Jesus all the way through to closing time.

Some go back hundreds of years, and some just came into being.  These churches are human scale, intimate and personal and real, and every single one of those gatherings has a story.

So I figured, why not go looking for those stories?  Find the places where church folk are living on a human scale, where they love what they're doing and have found beloved community together, and let them tell the Good News of what that looks like?

I'd also like to share the wisdom of the human beings who've come to love the unique blessings of intimate communities, and who've chosen to spend their lives caring for and supporting them.

Take all those stories, make sure they're witnessed to and remembered, and share 'em with folks who might need a little dose of humble church courage and insight.

So I'm trying that, over on Substack.  Give a listen as you'd like.  Subscribe, and it'll come your way for free whenever I encounter something new to offer you.

And if you've got a story of Gospel goodness you'd like to share, or a little gathering that's been a blessing to you, let's talk.

Peace and Blessings,

David

When Fools Screw Around

During my sermon last week, I had an entertaining bit of call-and-response with my congregation.  As I noted the essential Goodness of God's work in creation, a congregant saucily responded that mosquitoes were a notable exception.  I agreed, of course, as I loathe skeeters.  Only rarely do I feel moved to show them mercy, and even then I'm only inclined to spare the harmless, pollinating males. Beyond the pleasure of serving a little church where sermons can include some dialogue, that exchange was a useful reminder that creation is both very good and often more than a little unforgiving.  

If we human beings are wise, we take every necessary step to ensure that we aren't sickened or devoured by life, particularly those forms of life that find us appetizing.   Only fools traipse through the world imagining it doesn't want to eat them.  

Where, for example, do we find the Goodness in something like the New World Screwworm?

Screwworms are only worms in their larval stage, after which they flit about as a brightly colored fly.  The males are harmless pollinators, like their mosquito brothers.  The ladies?  Females of the species Cochliomyia hominivorax, on the other hand, are the farthest thing from harmless.  When they lay their eggs, they seek out a living mammal.  They find a soft spot...a wound, a cut, an orifice.  The navels of newborns, the perineum, or the flesh near the eye?  Those areas are also particularly desirable.  There they lay hundreds of eggs.  Those eggs hatch into screwworms, which then bore their way deep into the meat of any mammal, rotating as they eat, literally screwing themselves inwards.  In the process, they inflict agonizing pain and considerable damage, to the point where a severe infestation can kill a host.

Generally speaking, those unfortunate hosts are wild animals or livestock or pets.  But sometimes?  Well, sometimes the Latin name of the species is all too accurate.  Literally interpreted, Cochliomyia hominivorax means SpiralFly ManEater.  It'll infest infants, it'll infest the elderly, it'll infest anything with warm blood, which we have.

Humans generally don't like getting slowly eaten alive, and in the last century, science and agriculture combined forces to eradicate the New World Screwworm from the United States.  Our approach took advantage of an amusingly ironic screwworm weakness: the female screwworm fly can only screw once, after which it retains the sperm of the male within itself to fertilize its eggs for the remainder of its life.   Knowing this, we bred sterile male screwworm flies by the hundreds of millions.  When they mated with females, the union resulted in no offspring...and the species collapsed.

To keep it suppressed, all we needed to do was to continue monitoring screwworm fly populations, both in the United States and...importantly...across the border to our South.  That, and because flies can fly, we needed to support our Mexican and Central American neighbors in their efforts to keep that parasite from recurring.

There was just such a screwworm resurgence in Central America in 2022 and 2023, which...not being led by complete morons at the time...America dedicated substantial resources to help defeat.

But in March of 2025, America's emergency international support for Central American and Mexican screwworm monitoring and suppression was eliminated.  That wasn't our problem, or so the DOGE Bros and their algorithms insisted.  Why send our Borrowed Dollars to foreigners?   Cut cut cut!  

Among all of those blindly applied cuts, this one stuck in my memory.  First, because it had a powerful element of writhing body horror.  And second, because it was so damnably and obviously shortsighted.  Golly, what might happen next?

The infestation in that region worsened, and by August of 2025, with the parasite spreading northward through Mexico, it was clear it was going to breach our southern border.  Flies can fly over walls, after all.

We've scrambled to ramp up sterile male fly dispersal in the US, with nearly four million released weekly along the border, and begun doing the same in Mexico.  Anticipating that boundary being breached, The USDA initiated emergency construction on a new sterile male screwworm production facility in August of 2025, but it's not going to be done until 2027.

Yesterday, the first case of screwworm infestation in sixty years was reported in Texas.    Back before they were eradicated, those flies could spread all the way up to the Canadian border in a hot year.

So that's where we are now.  Who could have predicted it?  Golly.

For a moment, though, let's return to the question of goodness in creation.  A screwfly is a horror, sure, but is it any more horrific than an industrial pig farm?  It's a mindless nothing, as incapable of malice as an earthquake or a forest fire.  It simply exists, and those mortal beings blessed by sentience can find ways to prevent it from doing harm.  In those efforts, and in the blessings of compassion and wisdom, we can find a hint of grace.

Unless, of course, we become so lost in the echo chambers of our ideology and egocentrism that we fail to see the good path before us.  

Good is Its Name

What the lectionary this last Sunday offered up, in all of its length, was Genesis 1 and the first three verses of Genesis 2.  This is the familiar "God made everything in six days, and on the seventh, he took a breather" story.  The rhythms and patterns of that scripture rise from ancient liturgy and worship, with cycles of repeated words that appear to have been intended to be chanted or recited or sung by priests in the temple.

This story clearly affirms that Creation…all that we see and perceive…is good. It is to be viewed not neutrally, or as inscrutable and dangerous, but as essentially positive. That is certainly true of our tiny delicate little living gem of a planet, but it is also the operating presumption about the entirety of existence as we are able to observe it, all forty-six-and-a-half billion light years in every direction.

Seven times in this ancient liturgical chant, we are told that in the midst of his work, God observes it, and sees that it is good, or that it is very good.

In Genesis, the Hebrew word for “good” is one you probably know.  You do, really you do, even if you weren't required to take Hebrew in seminary.   Seriously.  You can do this.  

Just complete the following two word statement:  "Mazel _____!"

Yeah, you know it.  Tov.

The word for good is tov, as in the familiar Jewish celebratory affirmation mazel tov, which means basically “good fortune.” “Good morning,” for example, is boker tov, which is always a pleasant thing to know when you're entering your wife's synagogue for morning services. 

God sees his creative work, in all of its abundance, and affirms that all of it is either tov or…if it is very good, tov me’od.

In prepping to preach on this, I went down an unanticipated linguistic rabbit hole, one I didn't subject my congregation to when I hit 'em with the sermon.  The focus of that sermon was on the nature of work, and how God values all work in ways our blighted and grasping economic assumptions do not.  Walloping folks with an excursus on a bit of peculiar Hebrew subtlety seemed a distraction.  

I'd always considered those recurring "and God saw that it was good" statements as adjectival in nature, affirming of the character of each stage of the work of creation.  

But tov is a word that serves many functions in Hebrew, and it can be both an adjective and a noun.   In the construction of the verses in Genesis, it's phrased like this: vayar Elohim ki tov, which means, literally, "and saw God that good."   Most English translations incorporate a logically assumed "it was" into that formulation, for obvious reasons.  But in the Hebrew, that isn't actually there.  

Which means, given the sentence construction, that it could be just as easily read as the nominative "And God saw that Goodness," or "And God saw that Abundant Goodness."  Tov could be a noun here.  It doesn't have to be, but there is sufficient linguistic ambiguity that it could be.

For some reason, this struck me as delightful, as a deepening of God's affirmation of Creation, as if Goodness and Great Goodness were so essential to the nature of God's work that it could be our name for it.  It isn't a question of the Lord saying, "Yup, that's some quality work I did there."  It's an ontological affirmation that Creation is fundamentally radiant with the sacred.

If only that was how we were able to perceive it and name it, not as a thing to be used and owned and controlled, but as Goodness itself.

Take a handful of warm sweet compost, filled with the richness of life and the promise of harvest.  The name of that is Goodness.  Look up to the first star in the night sky at dusk in the late spring, and in the cool breeze of the evening, name it all as Great Goodness.

Garlic Harvest

It was time to harvest the garlic.

Those winter-blasted shoots, which had endured the long winter of snowcrete and bitter frigidity, regreened and surged with the coming of spring.  But as May waned away, they were folding in on themselves, the long spears buckling and pointing earthward to where bulbs waited.  The plants were done.

I don't ever totally trust myself on the timing of that particular harvest, invisible as it is.  And so, even though the greens had told a very specific tale for a few weeks, I gave it a bit more time.  That, and I'd gently probe down into the soil around a few representative shoots, parting the earth with the gentleness of an archaeologist's brush.  Down, down, bit by bit, until fingertips met the swelling fatness of a fully formed bulb.  

Finally, finally, I was ready, and with a long trowel levered each bulb from the ground with great care.  Up they came, one by one, and as I carefully brushed the soil away, I could at last see the results of my planting.

Every year the garlic harvest is different, as individual cloves grow in unexpected ways.  This season, a significant minority of my fall planting had spawned free-standing satellite cloves, either around a primary bulb or as a blossom of unattached cloves.  The depth of the cold and the fierceness of the freeze might be the governing factor in that, but I can't say for sure.

No matter, because the harvest was successful and abundant, and I now again have garlic enough to last me the next twelve months, and more to spare.

That harvest now dangles in my carport, shaded from sun, protected from rain, and turning in the wind, where for three weeks it will dry and cure to perfection.

Swindlers and Pimps

In our societies men are paranoiacally ambitious, because paranoiac ambition is admired as a virtue, and successful climbers are adored as though they were gods. [...] What must be the day-dreams of people for whom the world’s most agile social climber and ablest bandit is the hero they most desire to hear about? 

Duces and Fuehrers will cease to plague the world only when the majority of its inhabitants regard such adventurers with the same disgust as they now bestow on swindlers and pimps. So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable. The proper attitude towards the ‘hero’ is not Carlyle’s, but Bacon’s. ‘He doth like the ape,’ wrote Bacon of the ambitious tyrant, ‘ he doth like the ape that, the higher he clymbes, the more he shewes his ars.’

Aldous Huxley, ENDS AND MEANS, p.50-51

Adapting Together

I’m not sure how many churches have Tibetan Buddhist Trader Joe’s Delivery Time as part of their Sunday ritual, but one of the spiritual gifts of little congregations is our idiosyncrasy. The small church can be delightfully, beautifully weird.

from a piece in The Presbyterian Outlook, highlighting the unique loveliness of my little congregation.

Organized Lying

"At no period of the world's history has organized lying been practiced so shamelessly or, thanks to modern technology, so efficiently or on so vast a scale as by the political and economic dictators of the present century.  Most of this organized lying takes the form of propaganda, inculcating hatred and vanity, and preparing men's minds for war.  The principal aim of the liars is the eradication of charitable feelings and behaviour in the sphere of international politics."

- Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, p. 7

He'd have loved social media.  /s

Wary in the World

It’s been a weird spring, and it’s hard to believe that the official start of summer is still a month away. The leaves are green and new. My gardens, filled with soft rising fronds of post-harvest asparagus and the splash of potato greens. My green beans are once again shouldering themselves up through the rich amended soil. And all around the neighborhood, scampering here and there, there is a fresh harvest of gray squirrels.

Squirrels, let it be said, are not my friends. At this time of year, they’re fond of digging up my gardens looking for the nuts that they assume I must have buried there for them. 

"Oh, you’ve turned that earth? Maybe you’ve hidden a nut under this green bean seedling. Let me dig it up to see! No? What about this one?"

At this time of year, the juvenile squirrels are out and about, just now down from the nests, noodling about in the grass. These little critters are cute as can be, but they’re also tiny little fools.  They're oblivious to the world even though their parents clearly haven’t gotten them a smartphone yet.

This last week, on one of my morning walks, two adolescent squirrels were noodling around at the base of an oak as my dog Norm and I walked towards them. Norm noticed their presence, but seemed a little befuddled, because the adolescent squirrels paid him no mind. 

They just sat there as we approached. Seven yards. Still sitting. Five yards. Still those squirrels didn’t seem to care. Three, and they weren’t moving. Norm was being a very good boy, and not lunging, because again, he was being a very good boy, but Lord have mercy, did he want to go get ‘em.

So at two yards out, I said, “go-git’em” and he surged forward, and both of those nonchalant little rodents suddenly realized three things. 1) the world is a scary place; 2) dogs have mouths full of big teeth, and 3) there’s a reason they live in trees. Up they scurried in a panic, Norm literally inches behind them.

Did he catch them? No, no he did not, because he was still attached to me. But as we passed that tree, I looked at the nattering, panicked squirrels now high above and muttered to myself, “Well. Did we learn a valuable lesson today?”

Young squirrels aren’t yet wary. They haven’t learned yet the way of the world around them, filled with dogs and cars, hawks and cats. Faced with something they don’t recognize, their instincts haven’t yet been honed by the perils of the world. 

Just because you’ve discovered Christ’s new path of life, it doesn’t mean you’re not as vulnerable as a kit. 

All those old hungers...lust and greed, hatred and bigotry, anxiety and paralyzing fear? Those are all waiting, prowling, lurking within you. There are still people who will hate you for no reason, or harm you to further their own desire for power. There are still blighted souls who will manipulate you and betray your trust.

All of that remains true, even though Jesus has shown us the way not to let that be true for us and our dealings with those around us.

Keep yourself disciplined, maintaining your focus and your commitment to the Way of Jesus, because complacency just makes you easy pickings for the brutes, hucksters and demagogues outside, and the stirrings of your own worst self within.

Bloomin' Onion

A couple of months ago, with the snow finally melted but spring still a distance away, I made a decision about planting in my garden.  It was, as those decisions often are, inspired by my providential forgetfulness.

One of the yellow onions I'd bought from Harris Teeter had been left unused for too long.  It wasn't rotting or foul or ready for the compost.  It was growing.  A five inch long shoot stuck out like a green spear from the non-rooted end, as despite a lack of water or soil, the life was still strong within it.

Maybe, I thought, that one needs to be planted.   I took a trowel, wandered outside, and plopped it into the soil of an unused corner of my four by eight garlic bed.  I watered it, then left it to its own devices.  

If it grew, it grew.  If it didn't, no harm, no foul.

As the weather has warmed, it's thriving.  I soon realized that atop the now two-foot long primary shoot and another secondary shoot, a scape had formed.  The scape looked remarkably like a wee little onionette sitting atop the shoot.That meant it was going to flower, and if it flowered, it was going to seed.  Or so I assumed, having only ever grown spring onions before.

A little Googling revealed that onions have, like many similar plants, a two year life cycle.  Year one, the energy pours into the root, which grows fat and tasty.  Year two, that energy-dense root pours all of the stored life into flowering bodies, which create the seeds that will continue the process.

Meaning, I might be able to get an entire bed worth of onions, if I seed-save it.  This seemed a lovely prospect, and so I've waited and watched as the scape has grown, the outer onionskin thinning, tiny little buds forming into what will be a lovely white chrysanthemum-esque blossom.

It's just bursting open now, and as a hundred little buds prepare to spread their petals, I'm eager to see how it progresses.

Remarkable, how much happens in the garden if you simply leave things to live as God intends.

Every No is One Step Closer to No

Yesterday was Tuesday, which meant it was task, shopping, and lunch day with Mom.

The tasks were multiple.  The bush by her front door needed trimming, as did the shrubs and trees around the path that leads from her screen porch to the back yard.  The screen porch also needed a good sweep. 

It was a beautiful day, blue skies and puffy clouds and still-crisp late spring morning air, so the work was a pleasure.  With three exceptions.  The boxwoods were thick with pollen, which my trimming cast in thick particulate clouds around me as I worked.   There were gnats by the thousands, blossomed out into the world with the first warmth and rain, pressing in like willful pollen around my eyes.  

And there was a door to door salesman, one of those aggressive young guys in company monogrammed t-shirts who ride through neighborhoods on their knockoff electric Segways.  I was in the zone getting stuff done, and had no desire to hear from him about how he was just there because he was doing work for a neighbor, and had a special deal to offer on internet/phone/roofing/tree work/gutters/windows.  He hummed around on his wheels, pausing briefly on the sidewalk in front of my Moms' house to fiddle with his tablet.  I put out as radiant an "I am a Man Working who does not Wish to be Disturbed" vibe as I could.  He moved along.

Once that was accomplished, it was time to head over to Safeway to get groceries for the next week.  Mom doesn't need all that much, but the walking involved in shopping has become too uncomfortable as the years have progressed, so I'm happy to oblige. 

The last couple of weeks, I've also picked up a few things for a dear old friend of Moms' from the neighborhood.  She lives alone like Mom does, and is in treatment for cancer, which makes life a bit more difficult.

Yesterday, we'd gotten some over the counter meds for her, and Mom and I dropped by her place to deliver them.  While Mom waited in the car, I walked them in and then chatted with her friend for a bit, because of course I would.  As I was preparing to leave, she said, "Hey, David, looks like there's a salesman at the door.  I don't want to talk to him.  Could you run him off?"

It was the same dude on wheels, of course, and as I headed over to the door, he wheeled over to the car where Mom was patiently waiting.  Great.

I went out, and he was mid-schpiel with Mom.  "Hey there," I said.  "We're not the homeowners here."

He continued with the pitch as if I hadn't spoken.  "We're not the homeowners," I repeated.  "We're dropping medicine off, and the homeowner has cancer and doesn't want to come to the door."

He looked at me from the perch of his machine, with bright and uncompromising eyes, behind which seemed to be a non-sentient process with only limited reply options.  There was no evident emotional response to "medicine" or "cancer."  

"Well, I can come back later, then."  

"No," I said, a little more emphatically.  "She has no interest in anything you're selling.  She does not want to come to the door."  

"I've helped seventy percent of your neighbors save money today," he continued, lying so brazenly it could get him a position in the current administration.

I ignored that, and shifted to a more sympathetic tack.  "Look, I know it's hard going door-to-door," I said, getting into the car.  "Did it myself for a while.  All those turndowns aren't easy."  Oy, that was a merciless job.

There was a faint hint of a reaction buried under the sales pitch, and it wasn't the relief that comes when the souls who are doing those godforsaken jobs realize I see them as human.  

It was defiance.  

The blunt algorithm that seemed to have control of this particular human fished for an automated retort.  "I'm good at what I do.  I'm a good salesman.  Every no is one step closer to yes.  Every no is one step closer to yes."  With that more-than-a-little-rapey sales mantra hanging in the air, he wheeled backward.

"I am not going to let you bring me down.  I am one step closer to yes."

And with that, he whirred away on his little machine wheels.

Lord have mercy on his soul.

The Cage of Asparagus

It wasn't the best harvest season for my little asparagus plot this year.

It's been five years since I put that rootstock into the soil of a four by six bed, and I've been tending and feeding it ever since.  The first two years I just let the bed run, tall sprawling ferns rising taller than I.  For the last three, I've taken the first month of growth, a modest yield of tasty spears to begin the spring growing season.

This year, the weather has wildly oscillated, and the asparagus got a little caught out.  Two weeks of summer-warm heat back in April started the spring growth cranking, but things suddenly shifted back to near freezing many nights.  The surge which began with the ferocity of an advancing phalanx petered out to near nothing, with yields significantly below the prior two years.  

After four weeks of harvesting a small handful a day, I decided to call it.  I didn't want to strain the roots, pushing those plants to the point where I was actually harming them with my picking.   Like all living things, asparagus officinalis needs rest, needs a time of Sabbath from the demands of production.  If you take and take and take and take, what you end up with a dead plot the next year.

There's a metaphor in there for our compulsive busyness, I think. 

So I let the ferns grow, and set about building a structure around the bed to support their growth.  I've done this in prior years, as I realized that those six foot plus ferns weren't exactly stable.  As they leaned to the south to catch the light of the sun, they'd flop down onto neighboring beds, or collapse during high wind events.

The structure is made entirely of the growth of my garden, as I take the dried stalks of last year's sunflowers, a roll of garden twine, and with a little snipping and securing, hey presto, I've got a structural cage for asparagus.  They're stablised, protected from the wind and errant lawnmowers.

I suppose the next step would be to add a movable protective cover, to shield those delicate ferns in the event we get significant hail.

As every gardener knows, it's important to have an awning for the cage of asparagus.

The Logic of Worldly Success

 

"The logic of worldly success rest on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men!  A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!"

Thomas Merton, Seven Storey Mountain, p. 362

Wordsmithing is not a Spiritual Gift

Continuing on from my prior meditations on the PCUSA's Proposed New Confession:

Having laid out the nature of God and our stubborn violation of the good in its first two sections, the third section tells the story of God's response.  It describes the point and purpose of Jesus, and the blessings of the Holy Spirit as it gathers and empowers those who are moved by the grace of the Gospel.

There are things, of course, that one can pick at and quibble with.  

Calling Jesus a "Palestinian Jew," for example, is comprehensible but peculiar.  Would any Judean of the first century have spoken of themselves in this way?  Would Jesus?  Generally speaking, the understanding of that region as uniformly "Palestine" is a historical imposition of imperialism, both Roman and British, which means it's got some wildly ironic resonances.  Colonizing history with ideological anachronisms isn't just a venial sin of right wing nationalist hagiographers, eh?

Or in the very next sentence, where we are told that "Jesus showed that the brutality of facts does not define the truth of God."  It's a very pretty sentence, but...huh.  "The Brutality of Facts?"  What exactly does that mean?   Is factuality a problem?  It sure is in our post-reality culture, where facts are whatever we say they are, and alternative facts are the wormed tongue of tyrannical systems.  "We will not allow Our Truth to be defined by Facts," sounds like the sort of thing one hears from a White House spokesperson these days.

Saying "the brutality of facts" seems far less sharp than "the facts of brutality," which creates a cleaner mirrored couplet with "the truth of God."  Assuming, of course, that this is what was meant.

I could keep going.  

But I won't.

Mostly, this is because as I engage with these latter two sections, I can feel the Dark Spirit of Wordsmithing rising within me.   Picking over language and legalistic quibbling are both bitter fruits of the Presbyterian compulsion to wordsmith, in which we imagine that we can build a semiotic tower to heaven if only we can workshop just the right words.  I succumb to the prideful, perfectionist, endlessly dissatisfied obsessions of that particular demon just as easily as any other Presbyterian.

And mostly?  Mostly these last two sections are lovely and thoughtful, gracious and faithful and hopeful.  Really solid work.

I would have no trouble integrating large sections of them into my little congregation's weekly Affirmation of Faith, where we read from the Confessions as a shared expression of what we hold together.

Once I've stopped worrying at it, that is.

Murderous Birds

In the cycle of liturgical readings this last week, we were again served up the story of the murder of Stephen by an enraged mob.

Lord have mercy, is it a violent, unpleasant scripture. We’d rather not see it, rather not have to deal with a brutal death, not on a Sunday morning.

It’s one of those texts one struggles to find a framing for, not because it’s hard finding some contemporary analogue from our fevered newsfeeds, but because there are just too many. Perhaps a failed assassination attempt might best reflect the blight of violence this week, I thought, assuming we hadn't forgotten about that already. 

I was fiddling about with several options, sitting at my kitchen table workspace working on the sermon, when a sound caught my attention.

It was a frantic chirruping, loud and relentless as an alarm, sounding from the bush just outside of my window. I glanced over, and I saw a big bull bluejay, six feet away from me, pecking intently at something on a branch. “What’s it eating,” I wondered, as the sounds of avian distress continued. It looked like a little strip of thin sliced chicken. Then I said, “Oh,” because attached to one end of the limp chickenslice, there was a single lifeless leg. And on the other end, a bald beaked big-eyed head. It was what was left of a chick. 

I realized that this was likely one of the offspring of the shy Carolina wrens who flit about in the leafy underbrush beneath that bush, and I was right in the mess of watching one-a-them old school 1970s nature documentaries that used to traumatize me when I was eight.  

Oh, my poor sensitive vegetarian eyes! 

The jay took its time, gulping down the strip, and then the head, and then all of the leg but one tiny pinkish claw, which it left draped over the branch.

Then it turned, and winged deeper into the foliage. It returned to view with a frantically struggling baby wren in its beak, bludgeoned it to death, and then…the cries of distress that had caught my attention now silenced…proceeded to tear it to bits and devour it, right there in front of me.

Ah, I thought. The nature of violence.

Because for all of our romantic suburban haute bourgeois daydreams of how lovely it all is, nature is at the same time pretty danged harsh. 

That jay does not care about the lives of those wrens. The wrens do not care about the caterpillars and spiders and beetles that they eat. The spider doesn’t care about the fly. None of them are aware of one another, or of the suffering that their predation inflicts. That violence is done without thought, without reflection, purely driven by the need to eat, the need for territory, the need to defend oneself. It’s unpleasant to watch, but it isn’t evil.

But we, we who are supposedly sentient beings? Why do we carry that with us? Why do we hold on to the inflicting of harm, we who are aware?

Stephen likely would have had something to say about that.