Schroedinger's Basil

Every year, I'm tantalized by the weather and my eagerness to put my hands in the soil.

I step outside, and it's coming up on mid April, and the temperature is in the nineties, and I think, Lord, but it has to be time to plant.  Then I check the calendar, and there's that average last frost date, just a week away.  And the forecast, for summerlike warmth, all the way to that average date and beyond.

Some years, if I go into the ground early, it means an early harvest.  But others?  Others are like this year, when despite a run of days hot enough to draw sweat standing, the evening wind suddenly turns cold and fierce.  

I'd gotten my basil in the ground ten days ago, all the little seedlings that I'd started back in late March.   Surely, surely we were done with winter.  But winter wanted one last word in, and so up went the frost warnings.

They were right on the cusp, particularly for life here in my inner suburb.  Heat island effect is a real thing in Annandale, with temperatures here usually running five or six degrees warmer than they do out near my rural congregation.   That's a buffer, but one can't be sure, particularly with frost sensitive seedlings.

So I covered all of them at sundown last night, putting each under an inverted growing pot.  Heat would be retained and frost staved off.  Hopefully.  Or maybe not.  My plan: remove the pots only when the morning sun cleared the little rise to the East, and the air and soil were warmed.

Stepping out into the still morning chill, I looked across the lawn, at the frosted tips of the recently mown grass.  Then I glanced down the little bed by my driveway.  There were the pots, in neat little rows.  Beneath them, there were seedlings, unobserved and unobservable, and each those seedlings were either alive or dead.  

Which was it?  Which outcome might it be?

I'd have to wait until the sunrise.

Crowds and Mountains

The morning began early early.  I found myself rousing for the first service of the day.  The moon still hung bright and high in the sky, and my mind was semi-functional as I went about the morning preparations, my motions filtered through that slight faint metallic haze that accompanies any early morning wakings.  And by early, I don't mean seven, or six, or five.

It was a sunrise service, the first I've participated in since beginning my ministry.  You need to get up early for those services , and I'm usually up before sunrise anyway.  But this was an hour's drive away from Annandale.  So the alarm went off at four.

Waking at four for a four-thirty departure really does mark a day as different.   And so into the Prius I went, and drove through the dark traffic-less morning.  From the Beltway to 270 and northward I drove, quaffing coffee the whole way, as alertness began to seep into my mind.  From 270, I hopped off onto Route 109, and moved westward, into the Ag Reserve, that sweet expanse of land in the north of DC suburban Montgomery County untainted by sprawl.   The destination was a mountain, although this was hardly Denali or the Eiger.

It was the menacingly named Sugarloaf Mountain, which sits amiably in the Ag Reserve offering up lovely bucolic vistas to any with the courage and stamina required to drive up to the top.   At an overlook facing the sunrise, an amphitheater sits, and there every year in recent memory the pastor of the Presbyterian church in nearby Boyds, Maryland has organized a sunrise service, helping direct the joint effort of a team of congregations.

I arrived in the darkness, and walked over to the overlook, which sat in the faint light of a setting moon.   People milled about like shadows, and I settled into a semi-central position, where I chatted with another pastor for a while.  Cars arrived.  And arrived.  And arrived.  From the overlook you could see them coming, headlights clearly visible on the country roads.  The place began to fill up, and light began to brighten the air around us.

As the scope of the amphitheater became clear, it became equally clear that it would be a challenge to fill it with even my large-venue voice.  Open air is rather unforgiving acoustically, and no matter how good the sermon, it ain't nuthin' if folks can't hear it.

Thankfully, one of the five other pastors helping lead had brought a portable powered lectern and amp.   The light grew brighter, and then brighter still, and I realized that I wouldn't need to read my sermon from my iPhone after all.

And the gathered group grew, and grew, and grew some more.   It was a beautiful, beautiful morning, clear and crisp but not frigid, and the light cast into the sky seeped smooth and gold-blue even into the dark.   When the time came for me to preach...for preaching had been my assignment...I looked out over the gathered faces and realized that this would be the largest crowd I'd ever preached to in my just-over-seven years of small church ministry.  The tally, confirmed by thems who counted later, was somewhere around five hundred.  Five times the capacity of my sweet little church.   Not a wee kirk.  Not a family.  But a crowd.  A throng.

Yikes.

And yet not yikes.  My public speaking anxiety dropped away years ago, worn away to nothing by years of weekly practice.  Whether it's fifteen or five hundred, it's almost the same so long as you're prepared.

Almost.

When you've gotten to know a little church, every face is familiar.  Every face has a name, and a backstory, and you understand the character and interrelation of the community.  But when you bump up over one-fifty, the group is different.  You do not know them, and even those you do know can get lost in the sea of faces.  They do not deeply know each other, not all of them, and while the web of human connectedness weaves them all together through mutual friendships and/or Kevin Bacon, they are a different sort of entity.

But that difference was difference in a good way.  As the organizing pastor put it, every one of them was only there because they wanted to be.  And that made the gathering a church in the real and best sense of the word.  So with the sun rising, we sang, and heard scripture, and when it came time to preach, I did.  

It was fine, in the best sense of fine.

And then we sang some more, and gathered up an offering for a local charity, and prayed, and with alleluias were blessed on our way.

It was a delightful beginning to what would prove to be a really joyful Easter day.

Eating the Elderly

Last Friday, with my big guy doing a sleepover and the wife doing a mother-daughter overnight, it was just me and the little dude.   That night, he and I hit a restaurant, snagged some ice cream, and then together picked out the movie for the evening.  We'd initially thought we'd go with Godzilla, but he decided maybe that wasn't quite right.  And so, after much deliberation, I steered him towards Soylent Green.  It's one of the classics of sci fi, set in 2022.

Back in 1973, that seemed a ways off.  Now?  Not so much.

The film, starring a scenery-chomping Charlton Heston in all his toothy, man-slab glory, involves a detective living in a crumbling, overpopulated dystopia. Unemployment is rampant, and the vast majority of human beings are desperately poor, with a tiny minority of the wealthy controlling everything.  "The Greenhouse Effect" has turned the world into a desert-like hothouse, in which crops struggle to grow, and big corporations control the entirety of the food supply.  Most of that is now processed food.

So, yeah, total fantasy.  Nothing at all like 2012.  Nope.

The movie revolves around a murder, as Charlton finds himself trying to figure out why a muckity-muck in the Solyent corporation has been assassinated.  The answer, of course, is that he's realized that Soylent Green...the latest and last hope for the dwindling supply of protein...isn't made out of soy and plankton at all.  The seas are dying, and increasingly devoid of life.

If you haven't seen it, stop reading now.

It is, of course, reprocessed human beings, either those harvested from the streets or those who get old and volunteer to die.  Those who volunteer?  They're gently euthanized, given wine and beautiful images and music to soothe their passing.

My little guy wasn't quite sure to make of it.  "A good movie, but it's so depressing," he sighed.  "And it's not even European!"

But here's the crazy thing.  I'm not sure that the way that this horrific imagined dystopia dealt with its elderly is any less kind than the way our culture deals with the old.

As a volunteer for Meals on Wheels, I encounter the radical isolation of the old in our communities.  I take the time to talk, as much as they need, when I do deliveries of food twice a month.  What I experience is a life of closed blinds and clutter, as human beings spend the last of their days slowly fading to black.  Families are distant and distracted.  Friends are aging or dead.  Too often, it's life as a shade, as a shadow.

The Industrial Retirement Warehouses into which we put our grandparents and parents are no better.  They tend to look pretty for visiting distant family, but honestly?  That's just a whited sepulchre.  They're grim, grim places.  Some are passable, but most?  Most are devoid of the laughter of children, closed off from the sky and the air and the sun, smelling of stale flesh and antiseptic.  If this is in my future, then I'd almost rather be processed into a Tofurky.

And what to do about it?  Our consumer-cultural tendency to get us to adolescence as quickly as possible and to keep us there as long as possible means we're just not paying attention to the passing of time.  We cling to youth, blind ourselves to our own mortality, hide away from any hint of aging and dying...and then the next thing we know, we're alone in a room, estranged, confused, alone.

Fighting it seems both as necessary and hopeless as the wounded Heston's shouts as he's carried away at the end of the film, that we've got to do something, something, somehow.

Because it's made of people.  People.