The Cage of Asparagus

It wasn't the best harvest season for my little asparagus plot this year.

It's been five years since I put that rootstock into the soil of a four by six bed, and I've been tending and feeding it ever since.  The first two years I just let the bed run, tall sprawling ferns rising taller than I.  For the last three, I've taken the first month of growth, a modest yield of tasty spears to begin the spring growing season.

This year, the weather has wildly oscillated, and the asparagus got a little caught out.  Two weeks of summer-warm heat back in April started the spring growth cranking, but things suddenly shifted back to near freezing many nights.  The surge which began with the ferocity of an advancing phalanx petered out to near nothing, with yields significantly below the prior two years.  

After four weeks of harvesting a small handful a day, I decided to call it.  I didn't want to strain the roots, pushing those plants to the point where I was actually harming them with my picking.   Like all living things, asparagus officinalis needs rest, needs a time of Sabbath from the demands of production.  If you take and take and take and take, what you end up with a dead plot the next year.

There's a metaphor in there for our compulsive busyness, I think. 

So I let the ferns grow, and set about building a structure around the bed to support their growth.  I've done this in prior years, as I realized that those six foot plus ferns weren't exactly stable.  As they leaned to the south to catch the light of the sun, they'd flop down onto neighboring beds, or collapse during high wind events.

The structure is made entirely of the growth of my garden, as I take the dried stalks of last year's sunflowers, a roll of garden twine, and with a little snipping and securing, hey presto, I've got a structural cage for asparagus.  They're stablised, protected from the wind and errant lawnmowers.

I suppose the next step would be to add a movable protective cover, to shield those delicate ferns in the event we get significant hail.

As every gardener knows, it's important to have an awning for the cage of asparagus.

Structures

Years ago, as I would drop in to visit with the pastor who mentored me during my seminary internship, there were several warning signs that told me things were not well with him and his ministry work. Bruce could be a warm, cheerful, and ebullient guy, but an ongoing struggle with obesity-related health issues and a resultant propensity to intermittent depression meant that sometimes he'd just completely check out. When he was down, he was barely there at all, distant and muted. That was hard to miss. When his health issues finally took him, I wish I could say I was surprised.

But then there were those times when I'd pop in, and he'd be fine, and we'd chat about life. I'd ask him what was new or interesting or exciting in the church community he served. And he would talk about the facility. About building renovations and new bathrooms. About carpet. About trees that needed to be removed. At the time, this struck me as another sign that things were off. It wasn't as in-your-face as the depression and the health issues, but it seemed symptomatic of where the energy and focus of his work lay. And that work...not ministry, but work...was largely about building maintenance, about the structure in which his community met and worshiped. What I didn't hear was about classes that were inspiring or energizing, or about new or ongoing mission projects in the community, or anything that spoke to vision or to purpose or to the Gospel. Not hearing those things from someone whose primary purpose is spiritual leadership raised flags. It concerned me.

As I've worked in my own ministry context over the last seven years, I've felt that same strong gravitic pull into the administrative and the structural. The nature of my community...small in numbers, with a large and demanding facility...has meant that even with the diligent work of some amazingly committed and stalwart volunteers, I've had to step in to do things that aren't exactly Ministry of Word and Sacrament. I've done budgeting. I've done HR. I've slopped out downspouts and wetvac'd floors and dug ditches and chopped wood and painted and even done some rudimentary carpentry. That's the reality of pastoring a teensy tinesy congregation. I anticipated this, and I'm cool with it.

Up to a point. So long as that work facilitates the stuff that matters, it's fine. But then there are times when I realize that the structural demands on me seem to be...spreading. Extending tendrils. Sometimes I notice that dealing with the latest building emergency seems to consume a greater and greater proportion of my time. I'll listen to the conversations I'm having with church folk outside of that blessed hour of Sunday Bible Study, and they're all about structure. Or when someone asks me what's new at my church, and the first thing that pops into my head is asbestos abatement. And whenever that happens, it raises flags. It's a sign I need to make course corrections.

The relationships we forge as communities of Christ-followers are by nature multifaceted. They include many of the same elements that one might find in a fraternal organization or a secular nonprofit. But when the dynamics of facilities and process grow to the point at which they...and not our faith...are the thing we always talk about, then we've wandered off track.

I feel this strongly whenever I look at the vast overabundance of governance structures in my denomination. They may not be a bricks and mortar building, but they can be even more consuming. The ease with which we fall into a tight-chatter orbit around issues of polity and organizational dynamics reflects, I think, that it is the place we're most comfortable. It's the idol of choice for we highly educated folks who feel somewhat awkward speaking about the things that really touch us.

Shaking ourselves loose from those professional and busy-seeming distractions is...well...it's something we need to attend to.