Why I Will Mow In May

Spring has sprung, and that means that the ground cover in my front yard is suddenly growing again. Grasses and chickweed, bugleweed and clover and dandelions, a wild heteroculture suddenly surging upward in a riot of green and ten thousand tiny flowers. That means that it’s mowing season again. 

Some folks don’t like mowing, viewing it as an onerous and pointless chore. But I’ve always liked it. As a teen, I looked forward to mowing the yard, because it was utterly satisfying. Sure, it needs to happen pretty much every week, but it’s one of those things that you do that has a definite result. It’s not abstract, not uncertain. It’s not a Zoom to develop a plan to create a task force to consider writing an overture to the General Assembly, as much as that warms the Presbyterian heart.

You do it, and it’s done. Like a made bed, or a sink emptied of dishes, it's as satisfying as a contented sigh.  

There's been a pushback against mowing lately, one of those earnest "well-actually" Newthinks that pop and meme about in our addled collective subconscious.  

Mowing is bad.  Don't mow.  Don't mow for the whole month of May!  No Mow May!  Let the pollinators pollinate!  Let the grass grow, man!  Let your freak flag fly!  It's habitat, too, bro, cultivate habitat, for our little crawly friends.

Which it certainly is.  Ever take a long walk through a field of tall grass at the height of summer?  Though I grew up in the urban megaplexes of DC and London and Nairobi, I remember doing that.  One particular afternoon hangs in memory, a hike near the rural Virginia home of a family friend when I was thirteen.  I remember how alive that meadow was, the slow windblown eddies across the surface of it, how the waving grass leapt and whirred with hundreds of grasshoppers.   I remember the brightness of the sun, and how alive everything felt.  I remember the tickle of the grass against my arms, against my bare legs.  

And after we got back, I remember not just the tickle, but the ticks.  The dozen-plus ticks I found clambering on my legs, on my back, in my socks, in my shorts, and squirming their way with thirsty intent towards my tender regions.  Even thinking about that now makes me itchy.  

Tall grass is habitat, without question.

That said, I'm no fan of the synthetic, lifeless monoculture of the American suburban lawn.  It's false life, with all the uncanny valley wrongness of astroturf or a reanimated relative.  It's why my own lawn is speckled with flowers and variety, all of which is evidenced here on this page.  But if you don't mow, you and your children and your dogs and neighborhood chipmunks will suffer.

Because mowing is not merely aesthetic. It serves a purpose.  That purpose, for me, goes well beyond reducing bloodsucking parasite populations.  

I am a gardener.  In my yard, mowing serves my compost piles, which I rely on to hyper-locally produce the earth that fills my nearly 300 square feet of raised beds.  For them, mowing is absolutely vital.

Back in the Fall, every single leaf that fell from the thirty plus trees that shade my back yard went into a pile, because, well, it’s compost. Six months worth of coffee grounds and filters, every peeled carrot shaving and bit of onion skin for half a year, all of it has been blended into that giant pile of dead leaves. It’s easy to look at that brown mound in winter and see nothing. It seems inert, lifeless, just a lump of matter. Which it is, right up until the moment you feed it with mowed greens in the Spring.

Because mowing a lawn is an act of harvest.  It's profoundly and directly useful, and I look forward to it as I look forward to collecting up fallen leaves in November.

All those lush green May clippings are rich with nitrogen, which is a veritable feast for the millions of teensy tinesy little microbes that have been sitting patiently among the leaves in one of the five by eight fenced compost piles in my backyard. Dump a couple of bags of cut ground cover onto the pile, give it a good oxygenating pitchin’ with a pitchfork, and the little microbiome of that pile comes to life. It’s no longer a pile of cold leaves, but teeming with life and the promise of life.

I go out, and I turn it on a wet day, and the pile smells good.  Not of rot and death, but sweet and alive.  It's warm, too, radiating heat as the energies of hundreds of millions of organisms thrive in the cuttings from my efforts.  Steam rises from it, filled with the scent of rich organic earth being birthed.  

My mowing last May is feeding my growing beans and tomatoes, my squash and my potatoes.  It will fill my table this summer.  The excess will go to the Little Free Produce stand of my church, joining with the outputs of other gardeners to feed those who have need.  That cycle of life and generous intent repeats, year by year, tied to the ebb and flow of life and the seasons.

So I will mow this May.  It isn't a drab and dismal duty.  It isn't a mindless, pointless ritual serving the cold demands of a soulless suburban deity.  

It's participating in the joyous bounty of creation.

Falling Apart

It was that sort of evening.  I was planning on getting to bed at a Ben-Franklin-approved healthy-wealthy-and-wise hour.  I'd read until fatigue took me, and turned in as the rest of the family still puttered about the house.  It was nice and neat and just so, an evening that followed the natural order of household evenings.

But just as I reached REM sleep, our dog started having another seizure and fell down the stairs.  Which we were trying to deal with, when my older son announced that he was starting to feel lousy, and lo and behold, he was running a pretty substantial fever.  Ack, we went, running around as our orderly expectations came apart.

From order to chaos, in less than ten minutes.

Existence, or so we are told, bends towards disintegration.  Chaos is, we hear, the very state and nature of the universe.  Order degrades, and all descends to entropy.  Things fall apart, as the recently deceased Chinua Achebe reminded us.  The universe is slowly, surely, declining, as columnist Michael Gerson wrote in a particularly reflective recent op-ed.

These things are true, and feel ever the more true as the years progress.  Few things remind you more of the gradual degeneration of being from order to disorder than your arrival at midlife, as your body aches and sags and creaksaround.

Yet in the face of that, there's the reality of life.   Not my own life, but life itself, as we can observe it.  Life seems to drive fiercely and intentionally in the opposite direction.  Life moves from complexity to complexity, growing ever deeper and more sophisticated as it grows and evolves and adapts.  From random bitlets of protein to cells to multicellular organisms to social organisms, from the flail-around-till-a-mutation-sticks adaptive spamming of evolution to the intentionality of sentience, life shows a peculiar trend towards more and more elegant systems, as it tacks hard through the waters and winds of chaos.

Life moves, as it moves, against the flow of the second law of thermodynamics, in ways that appear to be non-random.  It is being, standing in relation to being, seeking cohesion and order and continuity and memory.  And knowledge.  And will.  And personhood.

It is possible, I suppose, to consider sentient life as an anomaly, just a swirling eddy in the great current of entropy.

Or it could be something more.  Something that must be part of the system, and that arises from the great completeness of all being.

From purpose.   Or so it feels, even after those times when things have fallen apart.

#Nolivesmatter

The hashtag is out there, circulating among my #hashtag-hip progressive friends, as our culture struggles with the lingering poison of centuries of class/race conflation.

#blacklivesmatter, it goes.

Of course they do, I want to say.  But, dammit, my mind insists on deconstructing it, slicing that hashtag up, analyzing it.

The one that stabs at me: "matter."  What makes a life matter?

What gives it importance?  What gives it meaning?  What gives a life...as the word "matter" implies...substance?

And as much as I want to say, yes, of course, all lives matter...the reality is that this is not true in our society.  I cannot affirm that as a real thing.

All lives have the potential to matter, of course.  Every self-aware being is capable of creating and engaging with meaning.  And as a Jesus-follower, I hold that meaning exists, deeper than our subjectivity and our cultural values.

As a person of faith, I understand my purpose.  I know what gives my life substance and worth.

But within the value set established by a society, we can also not matter at all.

In a culture that lacks any purpose but profit, what does "mattering" mean for any of us?

It certainly can't have been easy for Eric Garner to think that his life mattered.  What, from the value set of our culture, would have given him a sense of worth as a person?  He'd had a job, but work is hard to come by.  He's been arrested, multiple times, for the picayune, meaningless, should-offend any-card-carrying-libertarian crime of selling individual "untaxed" cigarettes.

Meaning, he purchased a pack of cigarettes, on which had been levied an intentionally punitive and hefty tax, which Garner would have paid.    Then, he broke it out and sold the individual cigarettes for fifty cents.  Making a little money on the side, off of a legal product, legally purchased, his own property, all taxes paid.  A "loosie," as they call it.  Fifty cents.  A quarter here, a quarter there, nothing more than pocket change.

Is this a respected vocation?  Hardly.  Was he a "producer?"  No.  Was he thriving and prospering?  No.  Was he a celebrity, or wealthy, or influential?  No.

Was his life, in any way, valued by our culture?  No.  He was unimportant.  Unimportant enough that he could inform the people who were killing him that they were killing him.  He could ask them to stop killing him, politely and repeatedly, with no cursing or profanity.   He could say "please."  He may as well have not been talking at all, an inanimate object.  Eric Garner was nothing more than a broken window, useless, to be swept up and carted away.

His life did not matter.  A life, worth less than fifty cents, less than a pack of gum, less than a twenty ounce store-brand soda.

Nor, quite frankly, do most of us really feel like our lives matter in this society.  Ours is a culture that tramples the weak and the poor, despises them, demonizes them.  If we get sick, thems the breaks.  If we lose our jobs, we are lazy.  If the stress breaks our minds, then we are dangerous.  We matter only in so far as we have the ability to consume.  Once we do not, we are...unprofitable.  Meaningless.  Worthless.  It is that anxiety, the fear, that drives us.

My leftist friends, lost in the pointlessly divisive semiotics of academe, do not quite realize how much purchase such a death has.  How much it points to how our culture commodifies all of us.  How much it illuminates how we all scrabble against the cold soulless face of mammon, anxious in our poverty, anxious in our wealth, anxious because we know we are disposable.

#blacklivesmatter?  No.  Not against the central governing value set of our society, in which color is still a visually convenient proxy for class.  #poorlivesmatter?  No, of course they don't.

To the Creator of the Universe, sure.  To families and friends, yes.  But to this culture?  No.

None of our lives matter.

The Church That Doesn't Teach

A front page piece in the Washington Post last week highlighted Wesley Theological Seminary, where I spent seven years snagging my Masters of Divinity, and where I'm currently trundling towards a Doctorate.

It's a fine institution, and being there deeply enriched both my understanding of the Christian journey but also my faith.

The article, though, was about the transition of seminaries away from being places to train pastors.  The individuals interviewed for this story were getting their degrees in theology, but had absolutely no intention of using them for full-time pastoral ministry.

This trend goes deep, as the article noted that while 90% of seminary attendees a generation ago intended to lead a congregation, only forty one percent have that as their goal today.   Instead, their stated intent was to have seminary be the place that strengthened their faith, so that they could better apply it in their day-to-day lives.

From experience, I know that seminary does this.  I understand why people would seek it out.

But what struck me was this:

Isn't that what the church is for?

I mean, really.  Maybe it's just me with my teaching elder hat on, but how is it that local congregations aren't meeting this need?   That's kind of the point of what we do when we gather as disciples.

Oh, sure, there are other things that church does...worship and service and fellowship.  But if you come into encounter with a faith community that leaves you with no idea how to apply faith in the day-to-day, what use is it?

The article places much of the blame for this on the tendency of the institutional church to focus on structure and politics, turf wars, and arguing over the modern theological equivalents of iotas or how many angels dance on the head of a pin.

That may be so.   And I understand, as the part-time pastor of a small community, that there are limitations to what one can do.  But our gatherings do need to both model and teach what it means to be a follower of Jesus, no matter what our vocation or calling.

Feels like a baseline, to me, at least.

Product and Service

I'm typing this on an iMac, which is unsurprising, because my house is littered with Apple products.

The wife and I both have iPhone 4s.  That's 4s, plural, not Four - Esses, which we probably won't get.  My Four is the fourth iPhone I've owned, as the first two met untimely demises at my clumsy hands, and the last one got handed down to my son.

The boys both have old nanos, which see intermittent use.  One has a Touch, which is his camera and primary portable gaming platform.  The other has that repurposed, de-simmed iPhone 3GS, which is serving the same function.  To replace our recently flamed-out first-gen Intel Macbook Pro, we acquired an Air, which is a lovely piece of kit.  Oh, and my wife has a 3G iPad, first gen.

If you've invested in Apple over the years, our family has done our part to insure that your investment yielded handsome returns.

The legacy of Steve Jobs is, without question, those exceptionally well-designed products.  His legendary precision and unrelenting focus on product excellence was what made him such a competent CEO.  The bottom line, if you are making something to sell in the marketplace, is to make that product as well-designed and constructed as possible.   That was always Job's focus, which meant that he had absolutely no tolerance for mediocrity.  He was an absolutely legendary perfectionist, and had an unerring sense of what makes for a solid product.

That, frankly, is what guarantees the profitability of a corporation.  If you focus on making an excellent product, and price it fairly, you will succeed.  If you focus on profit above all else, you will become distracted from that primary goal.  You will start making Chevy Vegas, and you will fail.

In that, Jobs knew and lived out what it takes to be successful in business.

But in the thickets of hagiography for this profoundly accomplished entrepreneur and businessman, I hazard to ask:  is that what matters?

Jobs created great, innovative, well-designed products.  But do they make the world a better place?  I remember what it was to be alive in the pre-iMac era, and a time when Apple was not my preferred provider of quality electronic devices.

Honestly?  It makes no difference.  What has been created is ethically neutral.

Sure, I can use that iPhone to open up new lines of communication with a deaf shut-in, or help a lost stranger find his way.  But that same tech allows that guy down the street to video-sext with his lover while "working late" in his upstairs office while his wife sits alone in their bedroom, or your 15 year old daughter to send NSFW pictures to her manipulative 18 year old boyfriend.   Sure, I can use my Air or my iMac to blog about justice and grace, or to drop a supportive comment on the Facebook page of someone in need of prayer or kindness.  But I could also use them to spew anonymous hatred as the stalker-troll on some other human being's online presence.

The world is shinier and faster and more elegant.  But better?  To speak true, it does not feel so.

As I consider Jobs' life, I wonder at the meaningfulness of a life driven by perfectionism.   Having worked in the field of philanthropy for a while myself, I know that unlike many leaders in industry, Jobs had no interest in charity.  It simply didn't process.  He had no time for it.  He was far too busy and far too focused on product.  Unlike Bill Gates, who has poured his wealth into fighting diseases, or Warren Buffett, who has used the fruits of his business acumen to support Gates in that effort, or countless other leaders in the business sector, Jobs did not use his wealth...or the wealth of Apple...towards any end other than the improvement of Apple products.

Though the products are desirable, and exceptionally well crafted, they are just that.  Products.

And I wonder...is perfectionism what makes for a worthy existence?

And I wonder...is creating profitable and elegantly-designed products what merits a "that'll do, pig, that'll do" at the completion of this life?

I respect Jobs ferocity of purpose, and his creativity, and his intelligence, and his showmanship.  There was much to admire in his life.  I'm just not sure I'd want to live it.

Death and Traffic

This morning, after the usual hurly burly of prepping kids to truck off to their respective Saturday activities, the big guy and I rolled the Prius onto the exit ramp leading onto the Beltway.  We were, as always, late, and as that Road of Despair rose into view, it was clear that things were not well.

The ramp and long access lane were clear, but the Beltway itself was locked up solid, a metal mass of bumper to bumper carbon-positive crawling.  I was about to mutter something unpastorly under my breath when I noticed the emergency vehicles, two fire engines and two ambulances, just a half click ahead.  The road was blocked, but our approach to the entrance was clear, and there would be no traffic once we got on the highway.

Which would have been cause for celebration, were it not for the fact that it was clearly a bad, bad accident.  We moved carefully by.

There were two cars.   Once was a silver Honda Civic, with no apparent damage.  Perhaps the first person on the scene.  The second was a Nissan Sentra, late 90s vintage.   It appeared to have gone into the retaining wall head first, and at considerable speed.  Around the  driver's side of the Sentra was a cluster of EMTs and firefighters.  They were talking amongst themselves, and some were looking into the vehicle.  They did not seem hurried.

As we passed, I saw that slumped on the steering wheel of the Sentra was a older man.  He was not moving.

I wondered, for I only glanced for an instant, if my mind had created that image, molding the folds of an airbag and a seat into a feared and expected shape.

"What did you see," I said to my son, who had looked longer.

"I saw a man with his head resting on the wheel, Dad.  He wasn't moving."

"That's because he was dead," I said, because it was clearly so.

After that, we talked, as a father should to his child when they first see death.  We talked about the man, and whether he might have had a family, and whether it was better if he did or he didn't.  We talked about dying, and what it's like to watch someone die.  We talked about how important it is to remember those who have passed, how important it is for the living to both mourn and to celebrate the lives that are forever a part of both us and Creation. 

There are times it is both hard and good to be the dad.

Creating Life

"When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long time concerning the manner in which I should employ it. Although I possessed the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare a frame for the reception of it, with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour. I doubted at first whether I should attempt the creation of a being like myself, or one of simpler organisation..." (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Chapter 4)

We crossed an interesting boundary as a species this last week.

For the first time in human history, we managed to create a living organism, more or less from scratch. It was of rather "simpler organisation" than the tormented being created by Dr. Frankenstein, just a straight up single-celled critter. Yeah, true, it wasn't even an original design, its genome having been copied carefully from an existing microbe. And folks have done sorta kinda similar stuff before. And we did, a la Mary Shelley's monster, cobble it together out of parts of previously living things.

Whichever way, its an impressive event. The simple living creature created in the lab of geneticists Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith is unique among earthly life forms. The genetic material within it is entirely synthetic, intentionally assembled by humankind. It can reproduce. It is alive, yet does not come from a living parent.

The ramifications of this remain clouded. Venter and others see it through rose colored glasses, as a way to create organisms that will produce medicines and biofuels. Others see it as an ominous harbinger of new and terrible bioweapons, or inadvertent pandemics brought about as we fiddle with things that we don't really fully understand. Our advances in genetics have posed something of a challenge for ethicists, as our ability to manipulate the building blocks of life has outpaced our development and maturity as a species.

Theologically, this is something of a conundrum, too. Forming beings from earth-stuff and bringing them to life is...well...typically the business of the Maker. Yet here, without question, is a feat that constitutes the formation of a living thing, even if that thing is a very rudimentary knockoff. And if it "completely changes" the way we understand life, as Dr. Venter suggested in an article in the Washington Post, is this necessarily a good thing? Where will that lead us?

Things do get curiouser and curiouser.

The Dread Pastor Roberts

Over the last month, I've instituted something new in both the email newsletter and the worship bulletin of my little church. That new thing is fairly simple: a worship headcount. It's a pretty straightforward thing, really, and is a way of illustrating a bit of data that is easy to miss in the gracious intimacy of our little fellowship.

That bit o' empirical reality is this: after six years of a group of diligent and hardworking folks working together to revitalize a dying suburban church, we're not at the point where we're self sustaining. Yes, membership has grown. Worship attendance has doubled. Our giving has nearly tripled. But after all that time, we're still not a self-supporting congregation. We're still significantly reliant on the small endowment of the church, and that endowment has taking a brutal beating over the last year.

Unless something shifts dramatically in the near term future and the trend-lines run in a different direction, we'll run smack up against an inescapable reality: we can't support the institutional structures of our church. Our building isn't quite the money pit it was a few years ago, thanks to some major repair projects and maintenance. But it's too big for us. Our staffing level--and by that I mean me--is too costly for the community to maintain without the endowment, even if my salary is 10% less than Presbytery minimum and slightly below what the average Metro bus driver makes.

If we really stretched it out, we could go for a few more years. We could spend down to zero and then walk away. But that's just not an acceptable option. We've got to be aware of the realities that we face, and we've got to respond to them mindfully.

I really, really like my church. The fellowship is great, and the praise team rocks, and our Bible studies are both fun and places of spiritual growth. But I feel increasingly like I'm compelled to become the Dread Pastor Roberts, who at the end of every Sunday says to his congregation,

"Wonderful worship! I really felt the Spirit moving here today! That comment in Bible study was really insightful! Keep up the good work, and I'll most likely kill you in the morning."

I understand that can be quite the motivator.

Drink His Blood and Live Forever

Me and the missus watched Twilight last night, despite the fact that neither one of us is currently a bookish 15 year old girl.

It was generally well done, with solid acting and only the occasional drift into mawkish hyperemotive teen goonyness. That piano scene really did hurt a little bit to watch. Backlighting! Moodiness! Schmaltzy Keyboard Stylings!

And the high-speed scampering effect...well...it somehow failed to convey a realistic sense of superhuman power. More a sense of "being zipped along waggling your legs while suspended in the air," and not even in the cool Hong Kong chop-socky wirefighting way. I kept thinking about that hysterically funny chase scene from Kung Fu Hustle, which didn't exactly lend itself to the seriousness of the moment.

Outside of it's conflation of the restraint of vampiric hunger with the restraint of sexual desire, the film offered up yet another opportunity to muse on the whole concept of immortality. What strikes me most whenever I watch these films is what a stunted view of what it means to live forever.

What baffles me is the temptation that invariably surfaces in these films, that "golly-wouldn't-it-be-cool-to-be-immortal" sub-thread that weaves it's way through films about the children of the night. That desire for power over life and death...and, by extension, power over others...has created a peculiar subculture within the already peculiar goth community. There are folks whose fascination with the idea of vampirism has extended into actually practicing it. Besides being eccentric and more than a widdle biddy bit on the pretentious side, it's also kinda narsty. Yeah, I know, as a good liberal I should be totally fine with folks cutting one another and drinking each other's blood. Free to eat you and me, and all that. But for some reason, it strikes me as willfully and unnecessarily dysfunctional. Ah well.

It also seems strangely unnecessary.

We all do live forever, at least if you take Christian faith as the ground for your understanding of being. The nature of that eternity depends entirely on how we live...but eternal existence is an inescapable part of the way Christians view ourselves.

Whenever I watch movies like Twilight, and the peculiar promise of temporal immortality that they dangle in front of us, I find myself thinking...why would that be even vaguely tempting? We've already got something better than that.