A Canopy of Grace

As the Poolesville Community Garden winds down its first year of operation, it's been great seeing the church and our partnership with Poolesville Green, the town, and local businesses thrive.    It's exciting, and a blessing, because gardens are a wonderful, amazing way to be fed.

I feel that in my own little plot of land, over in Annandale, where I've been working to bring the fruit of the earth from my own four-by-eight patches of heavy Virginia clay.

Gardens are good, honest work.  They nourish us and feed us, and that nourishment goes well beyond the delicious, local and fresh food they provide.

As my pastoral imagination is discovering, they are also a nearly endless font of metaphors for faith.  Lord help the congregation.

This year and last, it's been green beans at this point in the season.  I went with bush beans last year, for the sole reason that I saw a packet of them at the supermarket, said to myself "Ooo I'd like to grow beans," and went with it.

Honestly, I thought I was buying pole beans, which are much, much more productive on a small plot.  But we often don't pay attention during an impulse buy, because, you know, it's an impulse.  Oops.  Those seeds did well, though, filling my family table with green beans for over a month, and giving me enough to share.  They did so well that I decided I was up for it again.

I selectively seed-saved them from last year.  I over-saved, in fact, meaning I ended up with way more seed than I needed.  That meant that I was going to go with bush beans again this year, no question.  But it also meant that this year, I wanted to try something different with those beans.  An experiment in weed control, if you will.

The instructions for the beans suggested planting in widely separated rows, with plants a good distance apart.  I'd done that last year, and the plants had done well.  They had lots of light between them, and lots of distance and space to expand.  But that distance made room for the weeds, which proceeded to grow fiercely in the spaces between the plants.  I had to attend them to on a semi-daily basis, which I kinda sorta did.

This year, I thought about those bushy plants, and the shade they'd cast if I let them nestle up a bit closer together.  So three rows on the plot became four rows.  The space between the plants went from a foot to eight inches.  I prepped the clay with richer earth, and aerated the soil, and laid the seeds in.

The plants shot up fast in the well-prepared soil, and after the first month, I found that I no longer needed to weed.  They'd grown up so thick and so tall that they'd woven themselves into a single cohesive thing.  They were capturing all of the light, forming a dense canopy over the soil.  Bending down and peering through them at ground level, it was like a forest of towering trees, beneath which very little else could grow.  Every one of those bush bean plants was helping every other one of those bush bean plants.  They were working together, keeping other plants from taking the nutrients and light that would fuel their growth.

They seemed...happier...together.  Not to mention that their yield has been a little overwhelming.  Green bean casserole, anyone?  Baked cornbread battered greenbeans? How about a green bean smoothie?  Hmmm.  Maybe stick with the casserole.

If we want to live a gracious life, one defined by the Way that Jesus taught, it's helpful to approach our thoughts and actions in the same way those beans have flourished.

We all want to be good, want to shape ourselves as good people.  The peculiar thing about grace and kindness is that it thrives the more we act upon it.  Every good act supports every other good act, like bean plants that knit themselves together to form a canopy.  If we space our opportunities to express grace into the world too far apart, distracted by busyness or stress, we leave room for "weeds" and the influx of other, more negative ways of being.

It's why getting into the habit of showing simple kindnesses, mercy and forgiveness is so important.  Growing those moments so thick that they form a canopy of grace is a good way to grow as a human being.

As we tend to the gardens of our souls, it's a good thing to keep in mind.

Who You Gonna Call?

With my forty-fourth birthday past, I found myself awaiting the arrival of a requested gift.   The order was out, to an Amazon seller going by the moniker "General Electromagnetics," and yesterday, that box arrived.

You see, I've got this plan.

When I arrived at my wee kirk just a tick over a year ago, one of the first things I encountered was an interesting attitude towards the manse.  The manse...meaning the building where a pastor might live...predates the 1847 sanctuary by half a generation.  My office is there, as are classrooms for kids and the copy room.  It's a peculiar space.

It was built in 1827, and feels every one of those years.   A little research has shown that slaves lived in that house, which is a peculiar echo.  Depending on the stories you hear, soldiers may have lost their lives and/or had limbs amputated in that building following the nearby Battle of Ball's Bluff.  It's a building with a long memory, the echoes of war and human suffering woven deep into that old wood.

And buildings with memory are...interesting.

During the day, it's fine, if a bit on the ramshackle side.  But people aren't comfortable there after the sun sets.  Our part-time admin assistant would rather not step foot in it alone at night, not after that time she was sure she heard footsteps upstairs when no-one was in the building.  My Buildings and Grounds elder swears that the light to that old locked hidden room...the slave quarters above the kitchen...was turned off that one evening, but was back on again by morning.  Door was locked.  Light was off.  Most odd.  Soldiers who've done tours in Afghanistan have marveled at my willingness to be in the building by myself after dark.

Thing is, we need that dear old wreck.  It's going to take a sustained multi-year effort to get 'er painted and restored and repaired and insulated, but without those rooms, the church can't yet be what it needs to be.  So we're having a church auction on February 9th, of goods and services, to help with the restoration of this historic part of Poolesville.

To that auction, I'm already contributing Sunday afternoon motorcycle rides around the Ag Reserve, which are certainly worth something come the Spring.  Seriously.  There are few roads in America more beautiful than those around Poolesville for a bit of two-wheeled motoring on a day when the air is warm and sweet.  I've got an extra helmet and gloves, and that is priceless, my friends, priceless.

But I'm also planning on offering one particular service, for the discerning sponsor who sees value in it.  That service?  A bit of ghostbusting.  So for my birthday, I asked for and got some bona fide parapsychological kit.

I now own two electromagnetic field sensors, each targeted to a particular spectrum, for quantifying those moments the hairs on the back of your neck suddenly stand on end.  I now possess motion detectors, for the shades and flutterings of shadow on the periphery of your vision.  I've got an ambient temperature sensor, for those pesky free roaming vapors and their cold spots.

Real stuff, so far as that stuff is real.  And as a U.VA. graduate, well, one never knows what kind of training Mr. Jefferson's University might have provided to the discerning and the curious.

So come Spring, if the funds are raised at auction to...err...finance this expedition, I'll commit to spending a whole night in the manse.  I'll be there from sundown to sunrise, my array of sensors at the ready.  My sons...12 and 14...have sniffed the sweet smell of adventure, and volunteered to assist.

I'll liveblog it.  I'll tweet it.  I'll get the word out about it.

But wait!  If you act now, there's more!  I'll video it.  I'll prep an creepy and authentically amateurish Blair Witch Project-esque video for distribution on YouTube, laying out the history behind the building and chronicling the night's activities.

For the right donor, the right benefactor, the one who bids highest on this vital...VITAL...service to our church, I'll make sure you're mentioned at the very beginning of said YouTube video, in classic Public Television style.

And if we do pick up anything in the manse, well, then it'll be good having the Pastor deal with it.  We'll see if we can't clean it out a bit.  Assuming the liveblogs don't suddenly stop at midnight, that is.

"We had this crazy pastor one time.  Tried to stay in the manse all night, with his kids, see what was really goin' on.  All we found the next day was a shoe.  Don't even know whose, but Lord, it didn't even smell human anymore."

One advantage to having part time supply pastors, I guess.  Easier to replace 'em.

Previous Tenants

The old church "manse" where my office can be found is a rickety, porous structure.  Unlike the carefully custom-designed bewindowed ministerial study at my last congregation, my nicely redone current office is the most well-maintained room in a very, very...um..."historic" structure.

In the winter, the building feels every one of its one hundred and eighty five years, with white siding and a metal roof that has seen better days and rooms that get real cold real quick if those baseboard heaters aren't clacking and humming away.  That's history, real history.

Back during the Civil War, or rather, what in these here parts would have been called the War of Northern Aggression, the manse was used as an emergency hospital for troops wounded during the nearby Battle of Ball's Bluff.

Those old floorboards really were once stained with the blood of the dying, which is one of the many reasons some church folk are reluctant to come into the manse after dark.  There are some odd creaks and thumps here on occasion, or so the stories go.

But the suffering of those who likely died in this house was not the only difficult memory that may hang around here.   At the back of the house, there's a kitchen, now used as a storage room.  In the kitchen, there are stairs that lead up to a small room with two small windows.  Though next to the house, the room can only be accessed from the kitchen.  It feels like a secret room, and it's typically kept locked up to keep kids in the church from...well...doing what kids do.

As church lore would have it, that room was the living quarters for the slaves owned by the family that lived in the manse.  Poolesville was a strongly Southern-sympathizing town back then, one of the reasons why there were 11,000 troops stationed here during the War.  It would make sense that there might have been slaves in this house, and it adds a peculiar resonance to the building.

The room itself?  It's a little space, maybe twelve by twelve, with sloping ceilings, and I have on occasion gone up into that room to pray and meditate.  What would it have been like to live there, I've wondered.  In my mind's eye, I visualized a woman living alone in that room, separated from the family for whom she would have been property.  What might she have thought or prayed in the dark of that small room?  I've sat in silence, and shared the space with the possibility of that soul's existence.

After a recent conversation with one of the elders of my church about that possible history, that elder showed up having done a bit of research.  The name of the owner had been found, and cross-referencing that with other historical records, it appeared that yes, that family did own slaves.  In 1840, the Census revealed one slave woman in the household, aged between 24 and 35.

But she wasn't alone.  As of the 1840 Census, also in the household were three slave children, two girls and a boy, all under the age of ten.  All of them would have been crammed into that one twelve by twelve room, which now suddenly seems a whole bunch smaller.

Were they a mother and her children?  It seems likely.  What was the fate of the father?  What were their names?   It's not clear.

But it is worth remembering that they were here, sharing this very same space.   They weren't just abstractions.  They were people, no matter what the misbegotten laws of the time may have assumed.  It's important not to forget that they lived, and that they were human beings as worthy of the love of the Creator as any of us.

Selby's

Friday afternoon, I popped by our local Bloom grocery, looking to snag some food and supplies for an overnight "man-trip" to West Virginia with some old friends.   It's the closest store to us, a seven-minute walk from our home.  It has only been in operation for a few years, replacing a frayed Magruders that had been there for just about ever.  


To my dismay, the store had signs all over the front of it announcing it's imminent closure.  It weren't just our Bloom, neither.  The Dutch holding company that owned the brand evidently wasn't making money on it.  So they are now, in the BizSpeak of their US CEO, closing all their stores to "solidify our U.S. operations and enable our company to focus on our successful brand strategy repositioning."   The success of their brand strategy repositioning comes as a great comfort to the five thousand souls they're laying off, I'm sure.  A bummer for them, although only a minor bummer for us, as there's also a Giant, a Safeway, and a Harris Teeter within a two mile radius of our home.  Retail density is one of the few advantages of living in an inner suburb, and not out in a small town.


Like, say, my recently adopted bi-weekly church home in Poolesville, which has in living memory only had one grocery store.  Poolesville, hermetically sealed away in the growth-restricted Montgomery County Agricultural Reserve, stands as a kind of last redoubt of Small Town America.  It is the Helms Deep of denominationalism and the family owned grocer.  


From the moment I arrived in Poolesville this last October, I knew the family owned grocer was in trouble.   

Selby's was one of the first places I saw and heard about in the little 'burg where my little church lives.   As a family-owned and named small town grocery store, it was one of the few remaining examples of a dying breed.  It was one of those "hubs" of the community, a place where folks could go to shop, where girl scouts could camp out to hawk cookies to passers-by, and where pastors of local congregations could put up flyers announcing events at their churches.

It was in putting up my very first flyer that I noticed the unmistakable marks of a business on its last legs.  Light foot traffic and empty, unstocked shelves mean only one thing.  Suppliers are drying up.  Credit is short.  Restocking can't be done.  

It felt a great deal like other businesses I've watched go under.  Corporations are not people, not quite, but small businesses die in much the same way human beings die.  One system fails, then another, then another, until the cascade makes continuing existence impossible.

The scuttlebutt amongst the folks who actually live in the town was that after a long run, Selby's was finally succumbing to the same cultural and market forces that have taken down Mom-and-Pop stores everywhere.   The Walmart in Germantown may be nearly 12 miles away, but what's 12 miles?   Your average soccer/ballet/karate mom puts in twice that before breakfast.  And the Harris Teeter that recently encamped on the Western front of Darnestown?   That's just 8.4 traffic free miles from P-ville.


David sometimes beats Goliath. But if Goliath is wearing powered Chobham ceramic composite armor and wielding a AA-12 Combat Shotgun with Frag-12 rounds, the odds get considerably worse.  The greater selection that comes from larger stores, the increased leverage with suppliers that comes from being a Big Box Corporation, and the expectation-meeting advertising and store-design resources that come with brand marketing, those things are just too much.  

Now that the going out of business signs are up, though, the challenge for this little community is that with the loss, it will become a slightly less desirable place to live.   Not having the option of shopping locally may feel like a minor inconvenience for those used to driving everywhere, but come the next Snowmageddon, not being able to walk to get groceries will be notable.  More significantly, it will be more difficult for those for whom driving is an issue.  


Where to get groceries, if cash for gas or a car itself is lacking?   There's a CVS for milk and eggs.  There's a friendly but pricey organic food store run by the local klatch of Buddhists.   Whichever way, it's going to be a challenge for those in the community who are struggling to get by.  The local pastors are already wrassling with what that will mean.   


It is also having an effect of the geist of the town.  The closing of Bloom will mean a bit more blight on one of the strips in my native Annandale.  But Bloom was a recent and unsuccessful incursion by a faceless multinational corporation.   


It's a very different context than the environment in Poolesville.  The depth of relationship, the personal knowing and histories of a small town, well...that makes the closing of a place like Selby's more difficult.  When it has a face, it's more than just losing a business.

Why Vultures Gather

In between the second service and the Christmas Potluck this last Sunday, I found myself in need of pickin' some stuff up for the evening event.   One of the disadvantages of riding a motorcycle wherever you go is that it makes bringing along a casserole somewhat challenging.  Bungee cords and casseroles aren't the best mix.  Particularly when it's 24 degrees out, or negative 18 when you factor in the windchill at highway speeds.

I'm not sure "frozen casserole hunks" makes the best potluck offering.  

So as the afternoon wore on, I wandered through the little town to the grocery store to buy some bread for the meal.  This is the only place to buy affordable groceries and produce in all of Poolesville.   It's been a long-standing institution, run by a local family, but the arrival of Walmart and Costco and a Harris Teeter in the larger towns nearby has bitten deep into their business.  The life-pattern of soccer moms and commuters lends itself to driving distance to buy in bulk, which bodes ill for the small town grocer.

They aren't going to make it through the next year, as humming rumor and their increasingly empty shelves tell it.  It'll be a loss for the community.

So I made a point of getting my bread there.  I walked, of course, because it's good for human beings to use their legs for something other than pressing pedals.   As I walked, and the cold gentle breeze of the December day nibbled at my face, I noticed a gathering off just to the north-east of the store, on the other side of the One Oh Seven.

At the top of several trees was a large mixed committee of turkey vultures and black vultures.  These are the same critters that can be seen regularly prowling the skies around Poolesville in search of roadkill and children who haven't been good this year.  It was impressive, as the setting sun of the winter day cast their great dark figures into stark relief against the dimming blue sky.

It reminded me, as things so often do, of a passage from the Bible.   It's a little popular saying from the first century, offered up by Jesus as a way of explaining how we'll know the Kingdom is near at hand:  

"Wherever the carcass is, there the vultures will gather."

Anyone who sees a batch of vultures circling knows what that means.  Something is dead.  The saying tells the listener:  you'll know.  You'll see the signs.  You'll be able to tell.

But gathered buzzards can mean other things.  

On a cold winter day, that mass of ominous figures peering down from the treetops at sunfall does not mean they're waiting to swoop down and snap up that nearby retail property.   It means they're catching the last little trickle of star-heat coming over the edge of the world, to warm their bodies at the end of the day.   

And other times, when they circle upward in great spiraling columns, it means that they've found one of the thermals that rise at the end of a day as the earth cools, hitching a free ride skyward.

If you know vultures, you'll know these things.   But if we're unprepared, or serially inattentive, or unwilling to learn, any sign...even the most seemingly obvious...can be misinterpreted.  We Jesus folk have proven remarkably good at that over the last two millennia.

Church Growth, Presbyterian Style

The goal of every pastor, pretty much without exception these days, is to "grow your congregation."  We train and attend seminars and pray earnestly that the Good Lord will see to bless our efforts with an abundant harvest of eager new pledge uni...I mean, disciples of Jesus of Nazareth.   We talk about new buildings, and salivate over that great plump bunch of unchurched bipeds that seems to dangle ever beyond our reach, like we're Tantalus in Church Planting Hell.

Well, that's the case for pastors outside of the oldline churches, at least.  Y'all either have nice new buildings radiant with big screens and parking and a great honking mortgage, or you're renting and dreaming about it, or you're still flailing away with the same dozen folks in that Bible study/praise circle that was supposed to be a megachurch already, dagflabbit.  

In older churches, there is yearning for more folks, but less earnest entrepreneurial evangelism.  

And we Presbyterians, we're, well, older.  We've been around longer.  We move at our own pace, sonny.

Yesterday, I gave a group of local pastors a brief tour through my rumpled, comfortable, and well-worn church.  I showed them our warm little sanctuary, built in 1847, which is easily the smallest church building in our small town.  I walked them through the building containing my office and the classrooms.  That aging structure was built in 1827, and feels every one of those years. 

One of the pastors, the Baptist, noticed the glassed-in bookcase in my office.  "Wow," he said, perusing the ancient tomes.  "Look at this!  These are really, really old catechisms!"   I told him I'd been meaning to look at them, but the case appeared to be locked.

After they left, I decided to explore the case further.  I fiddled with the lock for a moment, then realized the bookshelf wasn't locked at all, but held closed with an interior clasp.  I gave it a bit of a tug, and the door opened.  The smell of dust and must was strong, but I began to peruse the objects within. 

They were, almost without exception, ancient.  There was a silver bell, undoubtedly used to bring a classroom or meeting to order, that still sounded a tone so bright and clear and sustained that I half expected to look around and find myself in Narnia.   Many were old hymnals from the first decade of the 20th century.  Many more were books that had once been part of a Sunday School, readers and stories and collections of lessons that little groups of children would have had to memorize and recite.

There was, as seen above, a neatly maintained roll book for the Poolesville Presbyterian Sunday School.  Lists showed the names of every child who'd attended school, and whether they'd completed their assignments, and whether or not they'd checked a book out of the library.  It covered the years 1883 through 1885.

At the top of the case, I found a book of Session minutes.  The Session, for if you're blissfully unaware of Presbyterianese, is the group of Elders who are charged with gettin' the work of the church done.   Our board, basically.  As I had a Session meeting coming up in the evening, what better time to peruse Session minutes?   I wiped the dust off off the cover, dust that had gathered over what had clearly been many years, and cracked open the book.

Inside, the minutes began with a record of a meeting of the Session of Poolesville Presbyterian Church on July 12, 1885.   It was written in ink, possibly with a quill, and was in a neatly angled handwritten cursive, precise and meticulous.  This clerk of session---that's the person charged with maintaining the records---really cared about his work.  

He chronicled the decisions of the church, the folks who were seeking to join, and the activities of the pastor, who barely missed a day, except when the weather was most severe or he was called to preach the Gospel elsewhere.   He noted, in a reflection section, that Poolesville Presbyterian Church was not prone to outbursts of the Spirit, as were so many others, or prone to manifesting charismatic gifts.  But they were nonetheless, he mused, doing just fine.  Sounds oddly familiar.

As I read, my curiosity was piqued.  If this was a Session book...of a Presbyterian Church...then it would have the statistical records and accounting.  It would tell me just how big my church was back then.  I flipped through to where that would be in a current book, and lo and behold, there it was.

Total membership of Poolesville Presbyterian Church, one hundred and twenty six years ago?  

Seventy One.

Our current membership lies at around eighty-four.

I guess that means we're growing, by, hmm, what is that, almost 20% every one hundred years.   

So we're on track to be a thousand member church by, hold on, let's do the extrapolation, the Year of Our Lord Thirty Four Hundred and Two.

All part of the plan, my friends.  All part of the plan.