With Hands in the Soil

Out in my front yard, my garden is stirring after an erratic but wintery winter.

In the two eight by eight beds that flank my driveway, the green shoots of garlic that overwintered are getting perky again.  The asparagus has started to offer up its first tentative shoots, which means I've got about a month of early spring harvest ahead of me.

The budding seed potatoes that were starting to get out of hand in the darkness of a cupboard have found their way into half-barrels filled with compost and leaves.  Those taters were getting desperate, flailing out long dead-white tendrils that made their section of the cupboard look like something out of a John Carpenter film.

I've been clearing out all nine of my raised beds, pulling old weeds and removing excess leaf-fall.  With the beds prepped, I've brought wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of compost from my slightly disappointing compost yield for this year.  Even though that new earth isn't quite ready, it's still got plenty of wriggly waking worms mixed in, who'll help continue to break down the soil now that it's been mingled with the earth of the beds.

All of it means that I've got my hands in the dirt now, and it's a good feeling.  It is, rather literally, grounding.

I was down on my muddied knees weeding one of my four by four beds on a warm afternoon when a neighbor walked by.  This happens regularly, and it's a way for overly-introverted-me to be stirred to conversation with the souls who live nearby.  I'll hear their own stories of planting and soil, or tell them about something I'm excited to be growing.  It's part of what makes gardening such a pleasurable thing.

This neighbor was, as it happened, one who had recently yelled at me as I walked my dog past his property.  Twice.

Ah, thought I.  It's That Guy.

As he strode up the sidewalk, eyes forward, I suppose I could have ignored him.  Just kept my head down, busily paying attention to anything but the human being who was crossing in front of my property.

But the day was bright and lovely, and spring was in the air, and my hands were in the warm earth.  Gardening has me in the habit of offering gracious words to passers-by, and I was in no mood to be anything other than neighborly.  

"It's a beautiful day to be out in the world," I piped up, trowel in hand.

He looked over, a little startled.  "It really is a great day," he replied.  Not a hint of animosity in his voice, not even a whisper of the snarl that had last soured it.  He offered up a gentle smile of genuine pleasure at a shared and glorious afternoon.

"Enjoy your walk," I said.

"I will," he said, and continued on up the street.

It's good to get your hands in the earth.  It really is.

Hating the Samaritan

One of my congregants brought my attention to a statement yesterday by Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and CEO of Samaritan's Purse.  

Samaritan's Purse, if you don't know it, is an evangelical relief organization, one that does tremendous work to bring lifegiving support to places of crisis in the world.  They're competently run and remarkably bold in stepping into areas of crisis to provide food, medicine, and emergency support.  I have friends who have witnessed first hand the good work they're doing, particularly in Sudan and Haiti.

Workers for relief agencies work side-by-side in desperate conditions, even as they may come from different national and ideological backgrounds.  Those workers face violence, desperation, and privation, all to ensure the hungry are fed, the thirsty have water, and those wrenched from their homes by war or natural disaster are cared for.  

It's heroic work, and every effort counts.

Which makes Graham's statement about USAID utterly incomprehensible.  USAID was founded during the Cold War to use American soft power to push back against Soviet propaganda.  Like the Marshall Plan, the goal was to win the hearts and minds of the world by showing that we as a nation were noble, honorable, and generous.  It provides relief in precisely the areas where Samaritan's Purse operates.  And yet Franklin Graham said the following about it yesterday:

"USAID, under the control of the Democratic left, has been pushing LGBTQ, transgender, and other godless agendas to the world in the name of the United States of America. We the taxpayers have been paying for this to the tune of billions of dollars. Thank you Elon Musk for exposing this—and now President Donald J. Trump is bringing it to an end. I encourage the State Department to continue providing life-saving aid like food and medicine."

Is this true?

The first sentence has some truth to it, as do most well spun falsehoods.  A tiny fraction of the USAID budget has been used to support organizations that assert that Queer folks are human beings with rights.    But the second sentence does not follow from the first, and what it implies is false.  Yes, the USAID budget is in the billions, but those billions are spent on economic development, humanitarian assistance, and health initiatives.

Because faith-based initiatives are a major part of American identity, much of that money goes to support the efforts of Christian relief efforts.  The largest single recipient of USAID funding, at over $4 billion dollars, is Catholic Relief Services.  World Vision and Lutheran World Relief and the Presbyterian Church in East Africa have also been significant USAID partners, with total annual giving to Christian organizations in the billions of dollars.  USAID also buys billions of dollars of food for emergency relief from American farmers. 

Franklin Graham knows this.  He knows this because his own organization received $90,000,000 from USAID over the last four years.  Ninety million dollars.  Samaritan's Purse alone receives ten times as much USAID funding as all of the grants supporting Queer folk combined.  Watch this far right propaganda video listing every "offensive" grant they could find, and add up the amounts.  It's not even close.

Again, this is not meant to in any way denigrate Samaritan's Purse, which does excellent work.  They're worthy of support.  But Franklin Graham should know better.  I think, on some level, he does know better.  But when you've bent the knee to Powers and Principalities, and made your witness subordinate to a decadent worldly authority, you must parrot the lies that they tell.  And that dissonance makes you angrier and angrier, as you shout down the voice of grace in your own heart.

Perhaps the greatest irony in all of this is that Graham seems to have completely forgotten the point of an obscure story Jesus told.  Maybe you've heard of it?  The one about the Samaritan?  

That parable was about how we approach those who we consider our enemies, yet through the fruits of their actions show themselves to be our neighbors.  Samaritans were hated by Judeans, considered unfaithful and idolatrous and traitors to the faith.  Yet it was the good work of a Samaritan that Jesus honored, as a way of telling us who we are to love as much as we love ourselves. 

It's straight up, right there, front and center.  But Lord have mercy, we mortals are so good at missing the point.

Trunk or Treat

I've always enjoyed Halloween.  Ever since I was a tiny person, it's been a favorite holiday, because, well, it's great.  Your house gets decorated, pumpkins are carved.  You get to dress up in a costume!  There's candy!  Also Candy!  And CANDY!

But there's something else, something deeper, a value in All Hallows Eve that pushes back against a decay in our culture.  It was present in my first Halloween, back in 1975, when I donned a cheap plastic Casper mask and trundled out into our neighborhood.  I was six, but my last four October 31sts had been spent in Kenya, where celebrating that day ain't a thing.  So this was all new, this American festival, and it didn't disappoint.  As dusk fell, our street was filled with kids, and with adults, with the laughter of neighbors reacquainting.  Older children bustled about in little self-governing collectives, as the adult were off having drinks with other adults.

With Mom and my little brother along, we went door to door in the growing darkness, our bags filling with candy.

A random neighbor with a pickup truck had filled his pickup with hay and haybales, and was offering impromptu hayrides up and down the main street of the neighborhood.  I was lifted up into the back with a dozen other children.  My brother, being four, was getting a little freaked out by all the hubbub, and didn't join me, so Mom stayed with him.  I whisked off into the evening with a truckbed full of children I didn't know, not a single one of us in a car seat, or even a seat.  The wind was brisk and cool, kids were laughing and showing off costumes, hollering at other trick or treaters, and bragging about their candy hauls, and it all felt like a little bit of a wild rumpus.

That's what Halloween, as a national festival, felt like.  It was and is a neighborly holiday, a time for children to meet other neighborhood children, and adults to meet the other adults who lived around them.  

As such, All Hallows Eve is anomalous and a little endangered, because in our anxious culture, we don't do slow and local well.  We don't know the people who inhabit the same space that we inhabit, as parental sociality is increasingly defined by planned children's activities, social media engagement, and our deepening and generalized distrust of the world.

Into that mess comes Trunk or Treat. 

 

It's a well-meaning thing, as most innovations are.  You go to a church, where the lot is filled with cars.  Maybe also a moonbounce.  Or a face painting station, if they're gettin' fancy.  It's at a more convenient time, it's contained, and it's safe, and there's very little walking involved.  You pull in, unload the becostumed progeny, and boom.  Done and did in time to get them to toddler taekwondo.  For the organizations sponsoring these events, it's ideal from a demographic standpoint.  Young! Families!  To tell the complete truth, it isn't necessarily terrible.  If you're country folk, it can be necessary, particularly where rural neighbors are at a great distance and it's a way to get together.

But if you can trick or treat, trunk or treat is socially inferior, by orders of magnitude.  It feels like a symptom of the loss of authentic neighborliness, which has been supplanted of late with synthetic, temporary, and inorganic substitutes.  It's a manifestation of consumer expectations and overscheduled childhoods.  It offers "safety" and convenience, but at the price of community.

Because who isn't at Trunk or Treat?  

Everyone who isn't a parent of small children.  

The elderly woman, living alone, whose family are distant.  Empty nesters missing their kids.  A house filled with recent migrants.  A young couple still awaiting their first child.  A queer couple.  These, as Sesame Street once put it, are the people in your neighborhood.  Do you know them?  Know their faces and voices?  More often than not, you don't.

"And who," a friend of mine once pointedly said, "is your neighbor?"  We honestly haven't a clue, in these days of madly rushing about.  We roar on by them, stressed and in traffic, already late to our next event.

It's a loss.

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.

The Stranger at the Door

The knock came on the door late in the evening, well after eleven.

The dogs, of course, were set off a-barking, and I was summoned upstairs by my wife to see who it was.

Just about a minute later, we let her into our house.   She was lost and confused, but clearly no threat.  She was totally trusting, even though we'd never ever met.  Our dog...being a gentle but occasionally suspicious sort...took to her right away, but we're dog-sitting our dog-in-law, who can get aggressive with strangers, so we sealed her away in the kitchen.

We tried to sort things out with her for a while, and in the meantime, our unexpected guest paced around anxiously.  We offered a snack and water, which she eagerly accepted, guzzling the water like she'd not had any in weeks, after which she flopped around on the floor for a while and tried to get us to rub her belly.

She was a dog, of course, a big derpy and utterly trusting yellow lab.  "Luna," we learned, from her collar.  A neighbor from a few houses down was walking home from a late night of futbol at a local field, saw her running around in the darkness, and thought that she might be our dog.

Hence the knock, which is usually beyond the ability of yellow labs.

She was clearly friendly, so we decided the best thing to do was to host her for a while as we figured out where she came from.

We put in calls to the numbers on her tags and collar, and found our way to the family that was at that very moment driving around the neighborhood in the darkness anxiously looking for their dog.

Luna, I learned from the immensely grateful dad who pulled up just a few minutes later, had spotted one of the foxes in the neighborhood, and gone barreling off in pursuit, leaping fences and generally having a delightful adventure.

After she'd left, having been fed and watered, I found myself reflecting on just how neighborly she'd been, and how much she'd evoked neighborliness in us.

Not every dog is that pleasant, I'll admit.  But her assumption was that we were her friends, that we were there to help.  She wasn't anxious, or afraid, or aggressive, or defensive.  Being a dog and all, she was utterly oblivious to the endless whispering madness of our fear-based profit-media and our social-media hysteria.

Dogs may have co-evolved with us as social animals, but that part of what we are becoming as social creatures they have blessedly missed.  Not for a moment did she fret about us, or worry about accepting the shelter of our home.  She was just happy to take what hospitality we had to offer.

It's one of the reasons it's good to keep them around, I think.  They remind us of things we forget about ourselves.

And Who Is My Neighbor?

I don't know exactly why I stepped outside.  It was just to see what the temperature was like, I think, and then to look up at the brightness of the night sky on an unusually warm February evening.

The moment I stepped outside, though, I knew something was off.  There was the smell of fire, not of wood, but that acrid sharpness of synthetics and plastics burning.  I stepped from our carport, and the street was filled with smoke, hanging heavy around the streetlights.

I called out my younger son, who agreed that there was something amiss.  We prowled down the street, checking, smelling, observing.  

Three houses down and across the way, the smoke seemed heaviest around a darkened home, and when I went to bang on the door, the muffled tone of a smoke detector's klaxon could be heard from within.

Other neighbors came out, and I called 911.  It took just minutes for the fire department to arrive in force.  They broke in, and thick smoke poured out from both front and rear of the house.  They found the fire, and extinguished it.

The word went around that there'd been a couple of small dogs removed the house, although I didn't see them myself.

But what we didn't know, what no-one I talked to seemed to know, was who actually lived there.  Not their next door neighbors.  Not the folks in the house across the street. 

It was a rental, and some folks knew the owner.  

Not a soul who gathered in the red-brilliant-stuttering light of those fire-engines knew the occupants.  There was no number to call, no urgent text or email to send, no way to say, hey, hey, your house is on fire, get back now.   I may have seen them, I think, now and then.  Getting into and out of their vehicles, a shadowy flutter between home and car, witnessed in passing.

Here, there were human beings who live close enough to my house that I could hit their home with a well placed frisbee throw.  I may have called in the volunteer heroes who saved their house and--God willing--their pets, but I do not know who they are.  I couldn't pick them out of a lineup.  

And I remember, this morning in my reflections, that time a man asked Jesus, so Jesus, who is my neighbor?

Back then, that meant one thing.  It assumed we would know, that the physical, material reality of the human beings who share our place was known to us.  It assumed we would be biased in favor of those souls, and against the stranger.  My Teacher challenged his listeners to expand their thinking about who is and is not a neighbor, about who deserves our compassion and care.

But now?  Now that question has different, stranger resonances.

Jesus.  Who is my neighbor?

The Shoveler

As the Washington Metro area recovers from what is the single biggest one-day dump of snowfall in quite a while, I find myself delighting in it. Not so much the sparkly winter wonderlandiness of it all, or even the opportunity for some toboggan launches off of our carport hill.

It is, instead, a great time to get to see neighbors as you heave snow around. For most of today, the snow has been too deep to drive a non-AWD/4WD vehicle through. That means people are walking, not hermetically sealed away in wheeled compartments.

As I shoveled out our drive, what passed by were not cars, but human beings. To each of them, the natural response was a shouted hallooo, followed by some moments of pleasant conversation. Suddenly, the neighborhood was full of people, people who've lived within 100 meters of us for years but with whom not a single word has been passed over all those years. For those moments, it felt less like a 'burb, and more like a community.

I learned two names while out heaving snow into big piles on the lawn. The pleasant older gentleman who lives cattycorner to us told me his name years ago...and it promptly slipped out of my sieve-like cortex. I now know it. The guy across the street who we've called "Chimpy" for years? His name actually sounds like "Chimpy."

But there was more shoveling goodness. Earlier today on Facebook, I said:

David Williams is reasonably sure that shoveling counts as a spiritual discipline. Like most forms of meditation, it involves prolonged and ritualistic repetition of one particular movement, coupled with repeated verbal invocations of the Maker.

Now, I'm sure it's a spiritual discipline. Not so much because of the silliness I suggested, but because after finishing up my walk this afternoon, I went over to the house of some unusually pleasant neighbors undergoing unusually hard times. Both are older, and he just finished a course of radiation treatment in preparation for cancer surgery. Though I'm hardly the king of cardio, the hour I spent clearing their driveway was more than worth the burn in my legs and arms and back. I talked with them. Shared time with them. And in a small way, made things better for them, I hope.

Deep snow and snowshovels are a marvelous opportunity for Jesus people.