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.

The Gardener

As my schedule has become more flexible over the last six months, I've found myself spending more time in our garden.   We occupy the suburban standard quarter-acre, with a sunny and well-lit front yard and a treed and fenced back yard.  Neither saw particularly much attention over the first decade or so that we've owned the house.  With little kids and full-time jobs and grad school, just getting out and mowing was about as much care as I could provide.  Our back yard barely even needed that, as the frantic scramblings of our hyperkinetic dog obliterated what had once been a lush yard.  It reached a point where the yard looked more like a dirt lot, or a heavily used elementary school soccer field at the end of a long season.

There's a bit more breathing room in life now, and I began the season by working and reseeding our back yard.   Given some attention and watering, the grass is back.   But with the growing of grass, I found myself wanting to get more dirt under my nails.  So I have.  I've been able get out into the garden and do more than run a thrumming four-stroke mulching mower through a cloud of recently released cis-3-Hexenal.   With so much potential for growth, it seems silly to be using that time to just grow plants that don't bear fruit.

So over the course of the last month, a splotch of browning neglected elephant grass in front of our house has disappeared, and in its place has appeared the first growth of a strawberry patch.   A pair of planters in our back yard that were mostly used for growing a miscellany of weeds have also found themselves suddenly sprouting strawberries.   A blackberry and a troika of blueberry bush plantings now sit near a sun-drenched front wall of our home.  In the next month, the odds are good that a pair of dwarf apple trees will rise next to the two lovely dogwoods in the front of our house.

The dirt and the weeding and the digging is a welcome change from the omnipresent screen-time and car-errand-schlepping that can otherwise fill my day.  I like the feeling of it, frankly.  It changes the focus of life, and brings a deeper awareness of the natural cycles around me.   You feel a drought more when you're trying to get life to rise from the earth.  The rain feels more welcome.   Adding that to my pattern of living feels like it deepens my connection with the living world around me.

And that is welcome thing.