Front Yard Gardening

It's been a good spring, because it's been spring this spring.

The last four or five years, late March and early April have been inordinately warm.  Temperatures in the high seventies, sometimes kissing eighty.  The soil has heated early, and in response I've gotten my garden going early.

This year, though, it has felt as it once regularly felt.  The air still has a wet chill about it most mornings.  The vaunted April showers have come, and the wild admixture of fescue and chickweed, bugleweed and clover and creeping Charlie that comprise my front "lawn" are fat with green growth.

And so the work of the garden has begun.  The asparagus are rising, sweet and tender and tasty, particularly snapped and eaten right there by their plot.  The overwintered garlic looks robust, although I'm a solid month from digging for the bulbs.  The beets were planted into a four by eight section in the week before Easter, and potatoes went into their half barrels.  The blueberries are beginning to flower, as is one of the two little apple trees I put in two years ago.  I spade-turned and reseeded the sidewalk-adjacent patch of sunflowers from seed I'd saved last year.

I've added another 64 square feet of raised bed space for this season, which brings me to just under three hundred square feet of bed space.  That's right at the edge of what I can manage without spending every waking moment in my yard...not that I'd mind that, particularly.  All of that takes place in my front yard, right out there with the sidewalk and the street.

We Americans tend towards backyard gardening, bustling away in compartmentalized isolation, but I prefer gardening out front, for two reasons.

First and most practically, it's where the sun is.  Our back yard is blessed with dozens of trees, which means light falls only sparsely on the small section of moss and grass between the patio and the woods.  It'd make for a terrible garden, because there's no point in trying to grow things if you don't give them light.  It's also low and prone to getting more than a little swampy, as it's where...absent the storm drains...a stream would naturally flow.  That treed area produces a lovely harvest of fallen leaves for the compost pile, and makes for a great location for said compost, but otherwise, its function is as a place to sit and relax while the dog romps about.

You grow in the light.

Second, it's more public.  More social.  It's friendlier.  As an introvert, this might seem like a peculiar thing to take pleasure in, but I do.  When I'm out planting or weeding or harvesting, I see my neighbors.  There they are, walking by, with their dogs or with tiny people in strollers.  I say hello.  Sometimes, they stop and chat for a bit, or ask about what's coming up this year.  Often, they'll share what they're growing, or talk about how they'd like to start a garden themselves.  I get to know faces and voices.

Yesterday, as I was harvesting asparagus, a little family I've talked with several times before meandered by on their regular early evening constitutional.  We chatted, and they asked what I was doing, and then I offered them newly sprouted spears from the wet earth.

"So sweet," he said.  "Really tender," said she.  It was a lovely little moment.

Growing out where it can be seen makes a difference.  It shifts and shapes our expectations of how we connect with both neighbor and creation.  We grow in the light, after all.

Disconfirming Information

For the past month, he'd been there, every morning, limping out to meet me with his cane in hand.

His house had been notable on my morning walk with the dog.  The semi-cluttered yard.  The primer-painted 1960s pickup truck.  The large no-trespassing sign, and the chain-locked back yard, and the overgrown gutters.

A month ago, he'd stopped me and asked for help as I'd walked by.   I said sure, let's talk.

Visiting his house, and listening to his story, he was a complex mess.  The house itself was a warren of debris, with a basement so packed with old electronics, car parts, and junk as to be functionally impassible.  His mind was equally cluttered, as he spun tales of thieves and constant burglaries, legal troubles and lawyers who were out to get him, and elderly neighbors embedding malware on his computer.   He needed legal help, and help selling the vast agglomeration of junk in his home, or so he said.   He was sick!  Everyone was stealing from him!   He was abused!

His anger seethed and snarled, a dog tearing at its tail, superheated by the Archimedean mirrors of his isolation.

And as that isolation was perhaps the dominant cause, I listened.   I stayed, and I came by day after day, and offered what help I could.  I offered to review legal documents with a former contract-officer's eye...but that need seemed to disappear the moment I mentioned it.  There were no documents.  I offered to follow up on a letter...but no, no, he didn't need that, not now.   I offered to clear out several vanloads of stuff, but no, no, he was going to sell it, it was worth something, he knew it.

What he did want was for me to go with him to the mass media and the French Embassy with evidence of the plots against him.  I politely demurred.

I did manage to get up on his roof and clean out his gutters, which was desperately needed, and read through one letter from the court for him.  He'd also asked me to contact a few local churches so that he could get free legal aid, while simultaneously telling me he'd been helped...by Mormons, and by some evangelicals...but that all of them had tried to steal his stuff.

About six days ago, as he told...again...the story of how he managed to escape the clutches of a local social service agency that contacted him to offer free mental health support, I demurred.  "Are you sure they were trying to entrap you," I asked.  There was confusion.  "What do you mean?"  "Is it possible they were just trying to help you," I suggested, as gently as possible.

"NO," he said, taken aback.   "It is the way I say it is.  You have to believe it is the way I say it is."  I had stepped on the mine.  A long rant followed.

And now the house is silent as I pass.   On the outside, at least.

Nothing, but nothing, drives us so quickly to madness as the unwillingness to engage with disconfirming information about ourselves.

Underground Heaven

Yesterday, as I sat and chatted informally with the two souls who showed up for a Biblically-based Advent mission study following worship, conversation drifted a bit.   The intent had been to do a formal mission study...you know...with whiteboards and a structured conversation about how we can translate vision into action, just like I'd discussed face to face with the session of the church last week.  And with the lay pastor during our weekly meeting.  And in the email newsletter.  And in the bulletin.  But I neglected to account for the one o'clock start of the Redskins game.  When I returned to the parlor following a conversation, everyone had left.  So it goes.  One of the pitfalls of really not caring about sports, I suppose.

Given that you can't have a mission study if most of the church ain't there, our chatting wandered elsewhere.  A central element of the conversation I had with those who joined me was the future of my own ministry.  I'm in a bit of a fuddler.  On the one hand, I'm pretty much done where I am.  If there's a future for this church, I both can't discern it and am not part of it.  On the other, prospects for finding a call anywhere in the immediate vicinity are marginal at best.  And if I want to live with my family, which I do, well, I need to stay here.

So what we talked about was a resurfacing of a thread that has moved frequently across my thinking over the years.  I look at the structures of the church...and particularly the physical structures...and I see stuff that is for the most part unnecessary.  Big buildings and big staffs and large parking lots might be the goal of most pastors, but for me, they feel like a distraction.  I've watched over the last several years as good souls in my congregation have poured energy and thought and resources into our great honking edifice, and wished those energies could have been directed elsewhere.  To service.  To evangelism.

To my eyes, most of the real meat of faith comes in small groups, gathered with the purpose of worshipping simply, sharing a meal, supporting one another, and talking openly about the Gospel. Such things do not require a building.  Just homes and living rooms and tables at the local pub.

But...what about those moments in life when we need a temple?   What about the hatching/matching/dispatching?  Need to get married?  A beach or a mountainside or your back yard will do.   Need to be baptized?  The Potomac isn't that far away.   Remembering a lost loved one?  The funeral home or graveside works fine.

What about service?  Last time I checked, the world does not lack for places where a group of Christians can make themselves useful.

Over the week, I've nosed around online writings about house churches.  One thing that struck me was how ferociously house and cell churches have flourished in places where Christianity is restricted.  Like, say, China.  There, the word for such intimate micro-churches is 地下天國.  Which, if your Chinese is as nonexistent as mine, means "Underground Heaven."  

I like that.  So gently subversive. 

The Naked Community

So the other day, I found myself wondering what my little suburb of Annandale would look like if it were naked. Not stripped of clothing, mind you. That would be very unpastorly of me, and I'm also afraid my own contribution to that collective event would be rather unsettling. But rather, what it would look like if the two great powers that define and "clothe" our culture simply weren't there when we woke up one morning.

The powers in question: mammon and the sword. The sword is coercive power, and it is wielded by the state to undergird the legal frameworks of our society. Mammon is symbolic power. It drives the market, and is itself dependent on the power of the sword to establish and enforce the value of currency.

So our bedside radio chirps to life at 6:45 am one spring morning, and we hear it breathlessly announce that there is no longer any law enforcement. There are no longer any laws. No traffic cops. No courts. Nothing. Not only that, all currency is no longer valid. Our plastic is just plastic with random data encoded into a magnetic strip. Our cash is just paper with some trippy pictures on it. It all simply ceased to be meaningful or accepted.

Far fetched? Sure. A bit silly? Undoubtedly. But still interesting.

What would your community look like on the day of that announcement? The answer to that question, I think, is an interesting measure of just how healthy a society is. If the first word that pops into your head is "looting," followed by the word "pillage" and the phrase "everything on fire," then perhaps the place you are is not healthy. If you immediately think of staging a raid on your local Best Buy, then perhaps the you that you are is not healthy.

If, on the other hand, a society could just dispense with those things without batting an eye, then I think it would be in a rather different moral position. Would we still do what we do to fill our days? Would our relationships within our communities remain the same? Would our patterns of consumption be changed? For most social groups, the answer is yes. The changes would be huge. But the closer we get to modeling the Way that Jesus taught, the less impact this thought exercise would have. I can't imagine it having any meaningful impact within an Amish community, for instance.

How we react when we are truly, really, totally free is a good measure of where we stand relative to the Kingdom.