The Global Economy is Really Weird

Our global economy is such a peculiar thing, particularly now that it's been shaken by America's little excursion into Iran.  Here in the United States, we're grumbling about $4.00 gas at the pump, which is over a buck more than it was a month ago.  Is it worse than the oil shock of 2008?  It is not.  Is it worse than the 1973 Arab oil embargo?  Nope.  Back then, gas prices nearly tripled.  But it's unsettling.

Elsewhere in the world, across Asia in particular, it's not a question of inconvenience, but of actual shortage.  Emergency measures have been taken in dozens of countries impacted by the conflict, countries that don't have domestic stocks upon which they can rely.  There's the real risk that they'll have to stop manufacturing things in Vietnam and Korea and Singapore, driving up costs globally.  

There are other impacts on the global economy, ones that are even more peculiar.  

In particular, I've been struck by article after article ringing the alarm bells about fertilizer prices.  In order to keep industrial farm production chugging along, you need massive amounts of nitrogenous fertilizer, which is produced by the millions of tons using fossil fuels, natural gas in particular.   A significant proportion of that product then passes through the now notorious Straits of Hormuz, and that choke point is depriving farmers all around the world of something they've come to rely on.

It gets odder, though.  In most of those articles, one specific fertilizer is mentioned, over and over again.  The name of that substance:

Urea.

Yes, that urea.  It's exactly the same stuff that comes out of our bodies when we make-a-da-pee-pee.  It's in lesser concentrations when it flows out of us, of course, and not in a conveniently transportable granular form, thank God.  

If you take your very own urine, mix it with water at an eight-to-one ratio, and apply it to your garden, you'll have basically the same impact as spraying industrial urea on a crop.  It's not at the same purity levels, admittedly, and scaling it and stabilizing it for industrial farm use would require some effort.  Were we to do that, it would not be any more complex, ultimately, than using massive industrial plants to manufacture urea (using fossil fuels) and transport it across oceans (using fossil fuels).  

So in sum: an ill-conceived war in a far off place can prevent the machine of our complex global economy from producing and transporting a fertilizer, thus threatening crop yields across the planet.   And that fertilizer is a natural by-product of every human body.

Humans, as I will often note, are so weird.

In the Flesh

Every year, the group is different.

They stand just up the street, a cluster of teens, all of them awaiting the arrival of the big yellow bus that will take them to the nearby high school. I pass them on the other side of the street on my morning walk with the dog, every once in a while making sure to be out of the way when a teen comes hurtling down the street, having gotten out of the house at precisely the moment the bus passed it.

This year, it’s a group of four teenage girls that seems to have been selected by a casting director’s diversity and representation consultant. A Latina, an African immigrant, an Asian American, and a White girl, and they’re all lined up in a row, in precisely that order, morning after morning.

This would, were one to be making some slightly unsubtle teen film about the joys and blessings of our multiethnic melting-pot republic, be a perfect setup. Each of their lives and backgrounds, different, coming together and finding friendship and common humanity as they got to know one another. That’d be great, but that’s not the reality.

All year long when I’ve passed them, they’re always standing in what apparently is their assigned spot, each a perfect COVID era six feet away from the other, Latina first, two meters, then the African girl, then two meters, then the Asian girl, and two meters beyond that, the white girl sitting separate in the passenger seat of her dad’s idling car.

And never, not once all year long, have I seen any of them interacting with one another. Not once. 

 Every day I pass them, they’re all in The Position. Hands together, head down, thumbs typing or swiping.

The pastor in me wishes that some morning, the Apostle Paul could join me on my walk, and I could point to that foursome hermetically sealed away from one another, and ask: 

Paul? When you talk about the importance of not being in the flesh, how does that relate to what we’re seeing happen all around us? Could you break that down for me? This culture-wide discomfort around face to face connection, our seemingly inexorable separation from one another? How does that play out against what you taught about Spirit and flesh?

What does that have to say to us, in a time when we struggle with the realization that the society-wide experiment with inescapably present media is depriving us of an essential component of our humanity? How, I want to ask Paul, does that speak to the peculiar character of our distracted lives and disembodied attentions? When passing a group of teen girls doesn’t sound like the delightful chattering spring vibrance of a murmuration of starlings, but is day by day as silent as a sarcophagus?

Like the clinical psychologists who designed the software that drives the dark glass shards that consume our attention, we know that the reason we aren’t present is because of a weakness of the flesh, a vulnerability that can be hacked. When we can be shown exactly what our brains desire, all the time, without ceasing, why would we get to know or care about the person standing right next to us? Or, equally and to be fair to the teens, the person sitting right next to us on the couch every evening, as we both scroll mindlessly through nothing.

We cannot be compassionate or love our neighbor if we don’t even notice the human beings around us, if we’re oblivious to the place in which we are standing.

Resisting this, I think, is a necessary thing, if our every action and every deed of our body is to be a part of what Christ is working in the world.

Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Country

Are we at war?  Were we at war?  It's hard to tell.

News flows moment to moment, endlessly panicked, breathless, and reactive.  But if you step outside, and turn off your phone, there's not even the whiff of war.  America remains oblivious and untouched, except for a modest bump upwards in the price of gas.  There aren't shortages.  Sirens and alerts don't sound, and distant columns of smoke don't rise lazily upwards in the bright spring sky.

Nothing, nothing at all, is asked of us.  Not a thing.  

When republics go to war, citizens are generally expected to pitch in.  Grow a garden. Reduce your consumption, so the troops don't have to go without.  Be alert, at least.  But none of that is true.

Out in my garden, amongst my other garden flair...sleeping gnomes, umbrella-wielding Totoros, windmills, and the like...there's a sign from another time.  It's a bit of tin, upon which is printed a call to Garden for Victory, as so many Americans once did.  I do that, all the time, because it is, as the sign says, "thrifty and patriotic."   It's hard to be a patriot these days, because patriotism in a republic requires more than blind obedience.  Still, doing the right thing is doing the right thing.  

We are, for now, in the midst of our second war in less than five months.  We are overthrowing a monstrous regime,  but we're also not, and we're going to obliterate them, while letting them sell oil at huge profits to support their war effort, and we're killing and existentially threatening their leadership, while at the same time expecting them to negotiate.  

Given the gibbering incoherence of our addled leadership, a sentient citizen must come to their own conclusions.  Iran is, obviously, a war over oil, because the common-sense through-line between Venezuela and Iran is control over fossil fuel resources. 

And so, as I would if we were still a decent and honorable republic, I'm using less fuel, because that seems like the thing a citizen would do if they were patriotic.  It's what my grandparents did.

Yesterday, in the heat of a false summer, I did all of my necessary travelling on my scooter.  To church, and back, and then to celebrate a little one's birthday with some old friends.   The roads were full of traffic, heavy with Americans rushing about, as we always are, fat with SUVs and pickup trucks.  It was just an ordinary Sunday.

Because nothing, nothing at all, is asked of us, other than to keep spending money, not asking questions, and carrying on as if nothing is happening.

The Fruit of the Light

As the hours of sunlight spread like a slowly rising tide, green and growing things are waking up. The grass is waking, tufts stirring here and there in the yard after a long and surprisingly normal winter. The trees are all in bud, as are the scraggly blueberry bushes outside of my bedroom window.

It feels, some days, like spring is fully here. And other days, it most certainly does not, because March is a liar. “It’s summer,” March shouts to the world, “finally shorts weather!” And the next day, it’s winter again.

So even though the day for planting is nearly upon us, that temptation to put seeds in the ground must be resisted, because the only sure place to do that is indoors.

For the last few years, I’ve been using a converted section of shelving in my laundry room to start seeds. I lined the interior of the shelves with repurposed reflective insulation from an Amazon package, with access doors made of cardboard and attached with duct tape. For lights, I found the cheapest possible LED grow lamps on Amazon, and there you go. It worked. Mostly.

The problem, I discovered last year, was that the integrated timer on the grow lights metes out light only if the power is uninterrupted. If you lose power for ten seconds in a windstorm, the lights go off and then they stay off.

Which, if you forget to check on your seedlings for a couple of days? That’s not a good thing. Without light, there is no growth, or rather, no growth of anything but mold.

This isn’t exactly the optimal solution.

It’s easy to have those bunker places in our lives, where we hide away from the light and from the reality of our relationships with God and with other people. We feel safe there, secure from having to challenge ourselves, sheltered away from coming to terms with things that are undermining our integrity and our personhood.

But that sense of security is a false one.

We’re still clinging to an illusion about ourselves, one that doesn’t speak into the reality around us. If we have any interest at all in living as children of light, we need to be sure that our source of light is trustworthy and fosters the good growth that we need.

We have, these last few years, seen what the powers of this world do when they feel that nothing can hold them to account. They believe that there is no light, that everything but our own will to power is emptiness, that a person can do whatever they can get away with under the cover of the deadly shadow of moral entropy.

It’s easy, for example, to place our trust in lesser lights of the world, in wealth and power and social position. But Christian faith teaches that this just ain’t so.  

Those ersatz suns are less trustworthy than a no-name grow lamp.  

The light they cast isn’t light at all, but its own form of shadow. You can have all the gold in the world, all of the fame, and all of the influence, and all that means is that you live in an ever deeper world of shadow and shame and moral horror. That always, always, always comes to ruin. The probability that Andrew Mountbatten will read this is one in four point seven billion, but if he is, buddy, do you hear what I’m talking about?

The light of God’s justice is always present in the world, and it is the task of the disciple of Jesus to be sure that we are living in it.

Enduring Fury

I was turning ash from the fireplace into the soil of one of my raised beds when I was suddenly distracted by a ruckus.  A crow, one of the neighborhood murder, flew low and fast across the asphalt of the road, screeching with a clearly panicked harshness.  I've seen that particular crow around, an old bird with one missing tailfeather and a matching missing flight-feather on its right wing.  Gapfeather was not having a good day, because behind it, right in and tight, was a hawk.  It was fractionally larger than the crow, from size and coloration possibly a red-shouldered hawk, not that I would know that if I hadn't looked it up afterwards.

The raptor was laser-focused, with evident and violent intent.  Gapfeather was fleeing and crying out for help, diving into the denser underbrush under the tall trees on the other side of the street.  This was odd thing to see, because smaller hawks don't mess with crows, typically.  Crows are large and sharp of beak, after all.  If anything, the reverse is true, as the more-intelligent and social crows will gather in large numbers to mob, harass, and drive hawks away. 

The chase continued, the desperate crow retreating tactically, flying from branch to branch, trying to put tree trunk between itself and its pursuer, all the while shrieking out that high pitched caw for aid.  The hawk just kept coming.  Other crows began to gather, but weren't yet intervening, hopping around on the bony-finger branches of dead chestnut oaks and observing cautiously.

Finally, Old Gapfeather bolted back in the direction from which it came, the hawk right on its tail, as merciless as Javert.  I listened to the panicked corvid's screams fade into the distance.

Something must have happened between them, something that wasn't about hunter and hunted.  Perhaps, given the season, it was that the crow had attempted some high-risk egg stealing, and the hawk was enraged and had slaughter on its mind.  It would not relent or give quarter.  It had gone to war.

Which, of course, got me to musing on our own primate predilection for violent conflict.  What is the purpose of war?

If one is a pacifist, and radically committed to nonviolence, then war can have no good purpose.  There is no legitimate end that can be served by brute force and harm inflicted on another, as the means define the ends.

This is the clearest and most self-evident reading of the teachings of Jesus.  It is also wildly inconvenient for any society that is predominantly Christian, as nation-states that are morally averse to conflict have a tendency to be devoured by those with no compunctions about war.  That, in part, was why the early church in the Christianized Roman Empire struggled so mightily to justify Christian participation in martial endeavor.

Just War theory, which rose first from St. Augustine's writing, casts boundaries around war, and as refined over centuries attempts to ensure that peace is always the goal of war.  Meaning, not just but also integrated into the prosecution of war itself.  Making efforts to avoid killing noncombatants, showing mercy to those who have been rendered helpless, and...most importantly...acting from right intent.  War cannot be just if it is motivated by vengeance, greed, or hatred.

Then, of course, there is the idea that war has only one rule: victory.  The goal is nothing more and nothing less than the destruction of an opponent and/or the seizing of their lands and property, by any means necessary.   From this perspective, concepts like honor, decency, or mercy only weaken martial endeavor, as they place undue bounds around the capacity to project power.  The rules of engagement are that there are no rules.  Do whatever you must to win, period.

Across this moral continuum, humankind has struggled to find a way, still bound to primal subsentient conflicts over territory and resource, to mobbing intruders with black wing and beak, to turning sharp talon and blind rage against those who trespass against us.

Polite Society

I recently remedied an absence in my reading repertoire. There’s a terrifyingly large number of books out there, so even though there are stories and writers you know you should have engaged with, it’s nearly impossible to keep up.

So when I last journeyed to the library, and saw upon a shelf a copy of Jane Austen’s PERSUASION, I thought, I’ve never actually read an entire Jane Austen novel. Excerpts, sure. Adaptations? They’re inescapable. But I’ve never read one, cover to cover.

And so I did. It took a little while. When reading early 19th century literature, you have to adjust your brain a little bit. The patterns of thought and writing aren’t ours, with compound sentences that spin endlessly outwards like fractals generated from a Mandelbrot set. PERSUASION was Austen’s very last novel, written in her late thirties and published at the very end of 1817, six months after Austin’s death. I’d say “untimely death,” but before antibiotics and vaccines, dying before forty wasn’t even faintly unusual.

It’s a romance, unsurprisingly, one between the thoughtful but suppressed Anne Elliot and the dashing but frustrated Captain Wentworth, who she’d loved passionately but whose offer of marriage she’d spurned years before after being persuaded by her family that it wasn’t a socially advantageous match.

Two hundred years ago, things were really, really different if you were of the genteel class in Britain, because all that mattered was society. Meaning, ninety-seven percent of the life of the Elliot family seemed to be going to visit people, and having people visit them.  

I found myself thinking, Dear Lord, do none of these people have jobs? Which, being aristocratic, they mostly didn’t.

Polite society meant everything was about carefully managed appearances and relationships, about everyone knowing who you were and…equally importantly…who was connected to you. 

If someone had more social influence, you’d do anything you could to establish a connection with them. In practice, it meant that you were constantly spending every last second of your life worrying about how you were perceived. Even though every moment was compulsively socializing, you were also strangely, paradoxically alone. Your real thoughts, your deepest feelings and fears? None of that could be expressed. All of it was posturing and falseness and striving for advantage.

So, you know, nothing at all like the way we “socialize” now in the social media era. 

 As false as it was, at least in British polite society you actually got to spend time with people, face to face. The smothering heights of Austen/Bronte-era society ain’t got nuthin’ on our commodified, algorithmic, Skinner-box social hellscape, which is antithetical to genuine intimacy, meaning relationships where you can be completely, deeply, utterly yourself.

If the net result of a new social paradigm is relentless interaction coupled with deep and paralyzing levels of human loneliness, you know something is very, very wrong. 

Without real intimacy, all we will ever feel is utterly alone.

La Memoire Collective

Every once in a while, a book will stir a very specific memory.

It's not a common occurrence, even if you read relentlessly, but when it happens, it's a delight.  What I mean when I say this is simple:  you're in the middle of a story and carried along with the flow of it, when all of a sudden the author describes something you know.  It could be a particular type of car, or a very specific place you know personally.  All of a sudden, your story and the story being told intersect with one another, and you say, "Hey, I know that place!"

Like last year, in the opening chapters of an ultimately pretty mediocre fantasy/horror novel, the protagonist went on a date, and took his soon-to-be paramour to one of my favorite special-occasion restaurants in the DC area.  "Hey," I said, "they're going to L'Auberge!"

I'm deep into a re-read of Thomas Merton's spiritual memoir THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, which I last read thirty years ago.  I was in my late twenties, and in the fierce first throes of exploring my calling to ministry, and I remember finding Merton's journey of spiritual discovery profoundly resonant and delightfully written.

I'm in my late fifties now, and I find myself resonating to Merton just as deeply, but differently.   He wrote the book when he was in his early thirties, meaning it rises from a soul of roughly the same vintage as I was when I first encountered him.   

Now, his writing still delights, but I'm essentially encountering it anew.  Of course I am.  More years have passed between my first reading and now than I'd lived when I first read the book.  My recollection of it is like my memory of a place I might have visited for a few days three decades ago.  Meaning, a scattering of sense impressions and visual images, and very few specific memories.

On one particular page, the memory of that first reading came rushing back, along with a wash of other memories.  It was from Merton's description of the death of his father, and the subsequent funeral:

Tom got an obituary printed in the Times, and he saw to it that the funeral went off more or less decently: but it was still another one of those cremations.  This time it was at Golders Green.  The only difference was that the minister said more prayers, and the chapel looked a little more like a chapel, and Tom had got them to hide the coffin under a very beautiful shroud of silk from the Orient somewhere, China or Bali or India.

But in the end they took the shroud off and rolled the coffin through one of those sliding doors and then, in the sinister secrecy of the big, intricate crematory, out of our sight, the body was burned, and we went away.

When I was a boy of twelve, I lived fifty yards from where Merton's father was cremated.  

If you stood at our front door, and looked slightly to the left from the little semi-detached we were renting in London, you'd see the grounds of the Golders Green Crematorium cattycorner across Meadway Gate.  It was an elegant brick building, subtle towers and arches standing stark behind a brick wall on Hoop Lane, with memorial gardens tastefully nestled behind the main structure.  I'd pass it whenever I walked to the Tube, or was coming back from taking the double decker bus from St. John's Wood on days I had after school band practice at the American School in London.  I'd see the memorial gardens when I took the walking path to the Hampstead Heath extension, and the place always seemed beautiful in a sad sort of way.

"Hey," I'd said once and said again, "I know that place."

I recalled, thirty years ago, marvelling that Merton had spent a meaningful moment in a place that I knew intimately.   As a young man, it stirred memories of when I was a boy.  As a middle-aged man?  It was a peculiar metamnemonic moment, a memory of my own act of remembering, mingled with the remembered story of another soul.

Human memory is not like stored data, but ever in flux, shared in such gloriously imprecise and idiosyncratic ways, layered and relayered with feeling and image and meaning.  

Soil Season

Over the last few days, I've gotten my hands back into the soil.

It's early March, far too early to plant outside, but just the right time to begin replenishing the raised beds in my front yard.  Two of them...my four by four bee-feeding wildflower patch and my four by eight asparagus bed...won't need much help.  But the rest of them will need a bump of nutrient rich earth, hand-tilled, if they're going to continue to yield.  

That fresh soil amendment will come from one of my two large compost piles, specifically the one that I started with the leaf-fall the autumn before last.  That pile absorbed a 2024 summer's-worth of nitrogen-rich grass clippings, and twelve month's worth of coffee grounds and vegetable scraps.  Through the miracle of worm-tailings and a the devouring work of a complex microbiome, it's become a half-dozen heavy wheelbarrow loads of dark, complex soil.

I'll shovel it into my tippy old barrow at the pace of a load or two a day, usually when I realize I've been sitting on my behind too long, then push and drag that load up the little slope to the beds that rest in my light-filled front yard.  I'll dump it out, and shovel it in, and rake it level.  One or two beds at a time, over a week or two in March, and by the time the last frost date has passed, the garden will be ready.

This has happened for years now, because if I want there to be a modest harvest at our table in the summer and fall, it must happen now.

There are no guarantees as to what happens next.

It may be a season of wild abundance.  Or not.  It could be desperately, relentlessly dry.  It could be drowningly wet, as rain follows rain follows rain.  There is no way for me to know precisely how things will be, because that's too complex and chaotic a reality to project.  I can only do what I know will maximize the probability of my desired outcome, and leave the rest to Providence.

Now is the time the soil must be prepared, no matter what the year may bring.

Swept Away and Forgiven

One of the pesky things about being a Presbyterian pastor is that it ain't easy getting there.   Out in the wide world, all you've got to do is to slap the word "pastor" in front of your name.  Anyone can say they're a pastor.  "I don't need none a that highfalutin' bible schoolin', 'cause I got the Lord's anointing!"  There are no requirements besides charisma and confidence, and if you can find a flock fool enough to follow you, well, Lord help you all.  

But denominations have expectations.  Degrees and certifications, layered one atop the other, along with a byzantine committee-driven process that...for me, at least...absorbed nearly a decade of my life.  "Trial by process," I call it, and it certainly does weed folks out.  Including folks who burn with the fire of the Holy Spirit, unfortunately, but so it goes.

One of the collateral blessings of that whole mess was that I had to complete coursework in Biblical languages, in Ancient Hebrew and the Common Greek of the first century.  I know just enough to get myself into trouble, but when I encounter a particular scripture that chews at my soul, at least I know where to go.

I've been leading a class on Matthew over the last two months, and this week, we reached a text that I've always wrassled with.  It's Matthew 24:40-41, where Jesus lays out what will happen when the end of all things comes to pass.  Generally speaking, this is taken as a proof text for the Rapture, that peculiar fundamentalist doctrine that argues that when the going gets tough, the faithful will be miraculously rescued.  

"Then two men will be in the field," Jesus says.  "One is taken and one is left.  Two women will be grinding at the mill, one is taken and one is left.  Watch, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming."

I've generally taken this to be part of the larger teaching that fills most of Matthew 24.  Meaning, it's primarily a call to stay morally and spiritually prepared.  I mean, it straight up says that, right?  

But while reading it this time around, I found myself struck by something.  The operating assumption of folks who buy into the Rapture is that being "taken" is good, and being "left behind" is bad, right?  I mean, that's the entire schtick of those feverish novels and unwatchable movies.  It's always struck me as lazy, escapist theology, a theology that assumes the faithful don't have to take up their crosses and bear witness no matter what.  Still, it's got appeal.

But...why?  How do we know that's what Jesus meant?  What in the words of Jesus indicates whether staying or being taken is the desirable state of being?  There's an obvious binary here, with a positive outcome and a negative outcome contrasted, but which is the good and which is the bad?

I mean, I'm personally very conservative.  I am wary around change, because change isn't always for the better.  Like, for completely hypothetical example, when a republic becomes a dictatorship?  That's a bad change.  Or when a healthy part of your body breaks, or becomes cancerous?  That's a bad change.  There are variant meanings to saying something was taken and something was left.  "My child was taken" is not necessarily a better thing to say than "My child was left."

So which is it?

First, there's narrative context.  Jesus was a storyteller, and I think it's fair to say he was a good one.  Immediately prior to these verses in Matthew, Jesus reminds his listeners of the story of the Flood, in which oblivious human beings kept on about their lives until the waters swept them away.  Who remains after the flood?  Noah and his family and all the critters two by two.  Who goes?  Everyone who wasn't prepared.  

I mean, if you're showing one state of being as good and another state of being is bad, that primes the listener to grasp that staying warm and dry is a good thing, eh?  That being swept away is a bad thing, right?   I mean, this is Jesus here, people.  He knows how to tell a story.

But what of the Greek, one might ask?  Are there clues in the language Matthew used to indicate what the intent of Jesus may have been?  Of course, Jesus would have delivered this whole schpiel in Aramaic, but we don't have that.  Instead, we have the koine Greek used by the Gospel writers and by the Apostle Paul.  

The word used for "taken" is paralambanetai, and the word used for "left" is aphietai.  Neither is a cognate shared with English, and each has a variety of meanings depending on the context and usage.

Assuming those details don't pop to mind, it's generally efficacious to pop open a trusty old Strong's Concordance, and to consider every variant form of the word as it appears in Scripture.

Paralambano is used, in variant forms, fourteen additional times by Matthew.  It typically means to "take with," meaning that a person or object is brought along with another.  Like Joseph taking Mary with him to Egypt and back, that can be a positive thing in Matthew, but it can also be a negative thing.  When the devil twice took Jesus with him to tempt him in the high places, for example, that's the word used.  It's also the word used when an evil spirit one has driven out of one's soul takes seven more dark spirits and returns with a demonic posse to make your life even more horrific.  When the soldiers took Jesus into custody to be tortured?  That's the word Matthew uses.   

So "taken" is neutral and contextual, which doesn't help us much.

Aphiemi is the core form of the word meaning left, and in Matthean usage, it has other resonances.  In the Gospels and Epistles, the word does often mean to leave something unmoved, to depart from a thing or a place.  That's the use in a slight majority of the cases, and that can be positive or negative.  But there's another term that rises from that root, one that's nearly as common.  Nearly as often, variants of that word mean to "forgive."  When Jesus talks tells us to pray that God would forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors?  That's from the same root.  It can also mean to "suffer," but not in an "experience painfully" kind of way.  It's the more archaic meaning of suffer, meaning to accept as it is, to tolerate, to allow, or to endure.  Between "forgive" and to "accept," a majority of Matthean usage of the root concept rolls that way.  

It is probable, given my limited Greek, that I'm missing or overstating something here, doing the etymological equivalent of assigning numerological values to Hebrew words to come up with a "secret" meaning that the plain text doesn't support.  I'm willing to cede that it's likely.  

The narrative context, though, seems far clearer.

Somewhere, somehow, proponents of the Rapture may have gotten it exactly backwards.  

"One was swept away, and another was allowed to remain" really would put a different spin on things.

Alive in the Darkness

It was, all things considered, a surprisingly normal winter.  

Meaning, it was cold, consistently and sometimes intensely, and we got multiple rounds of frozen precipitation falling from the heavens.  This was what I remember as normal from my childhood, but it's not been the standard lately.

Snow fell, and sleet fell, and the wind bit into one's face, and there was never a question of the season.  Meaning, I wasn't doing much in the way of gardening.  Sure, I'd pop out to my raised beds to clip a little bit of rosemary or thyme for a recipe, but that hardly counts.  In the garden, nothing was growing.  The asparagus was tucked away deep beneath a blanket of leaf mulch, waiting for the spring.

Only the garlic poked up above ground, shoots like green tassels rising above the frozen earth.   I planted it in the fall, as I have for years now, and it dutifully grew right up until the temperature plummeted.  I'd read somewhere that garlic requires sustained cold for the heads to clove, and so that's been the routine.  Even after I realized that this is only true for hardneck varieties, which mine are very much not, I've continued that habit.  It's a reminder of warmer times, and as a promise of flavor in a season of meals yet to come.

Most of what I planted months ago did come up, but here and there, there were blank spots in the rows, where the clove I had gently nestled in the earth simply dissolved into the soil.  I got to thinking, you know, it'd be great to have a nice full complement of bulbs this year.

I still have garlic from late spring a year ago, sequestered in a breathable paper bag on a cool dark pantry shelf.  Surely, I thought from prior experience, there must be some of that I could plant.  They're softneck, and can be just as effectively planted in the early Spring, or so I've been lead to believe.  It might catch up between now and a May harvest.

Why not give it a whirl?

In the bag, about a third of my old garlic was visibly alive in the darkness.  With no light and no water and no earth to nourish them, shoots still pushed forth from the cloves, seeking even the tiniest hint of hope, drawing only from the resources within the garlic itself.  

"Well," I said.  "Look at you go."

I chose a few, separated out the most promising sprouting cloves, and took them out to the warming soil to grow.  Where life strives in the darkness, it's hard not to want to give it a little break now and then.

The Weight of the World

I’ve always consumed the news of the world, because knowing what’s going on has always seemed something that an informed citizen should be doing. How can you do your duty to a republic if you’re oblivious? You cannot.

Only there’s a cost.

Like, say, this last week, when across my consciousness came news about dolphins and porpoises. I’ve always loved cetaceans, because, I mean, who doesn’t? They’re remarkable, intelligent, social creatures, with brains as complex as ours. Human beings have always recognized their playfulness and their curiosity. They inhabit a similar place to us in the ocean, as an apex hunter, but there’s another similarity: they’ve got a problem with screens.

It’s not that they’re on their screens all day, because that’s harder without hands. It’s that our screens are in them. Liquid crystals, specifically, the tiny little electrically reactive elements used in dashboards and calculators. When those are disposed of, liquid crystal monomers don’t go away, and studies of deceased dolphins shows they’re building up in their muscles and fatty tissues, and are so small they’re crossing over cellular membranes into their brains, where…like nanoparticles of plastic…they just accumulate, because they can’t be digested or dissolved.

That’s been shown to mess with brain function, and hormonal function, and it’s a problem for large brained animals at the top of their food chain. 

Can you name another large brained mammal at the top of it’s food chain?

And I think, great. Another thing. Because Liquid Crystal Monomers might be a problem, but are they front of mind right now? The drums of war have deepened into the thunder of bombs. AI is angling to take every single job. There are rising seas and dying bees and sickened trees and Jeez Louise, how do you save such a world, a world that’s such a sprawling, relentless, irreducibly complex wreck?

It’s easier to stand at a remove, to just look at it from a critic’s distance and judge it, or to give up on it entirely.

Or to rush about madly, consumed by every new crisis, flitting and flailing from urgency to urgency and accomplishing nothing.

We must act, as moral agents, and yet at the same time acknowledge that all of it is larger than we can possibly influence.

It's a peculiar advantage of faith, I think, that allows us to act right where we are, as we know we must, trusting that the rest of it is out of our hands.