Cutting Back the Ivy

Out in the front yard, my stand of sunflowers is beginning to fade, as Fall approaches and summer says a long slow goodbye.  The stand is still standing, which wasn't a guaranteed thing.  

A big storm recently blasted through, bringing down the little apple tree that grows right next to the sunflowers.  But the flowers, with a little forethought, are still beautiful, if a bit battered.  The tallest ones no longer tower vertically, now canting discernably southward towards the nearby sidewalk, having been pressed hard by near-hurricane-force gusts.

But not a one of them fell.

The reason: other plants grow in that sunflower patch.  Milkweed and common pokeweed are intermingled with the stalks, adding their flowers to pollinator buffet.  And woven densely through all of it is a densely interwoven tangle of wild grape and porcelainberry vines.  

Between the two of them and left to their own devices, those two vines will smother just about everything else around them.  Their vines snake up the sunflower stalks at a remarkable rate, growing inches a day.  I've thought about rooting them out completely, but they serve a particular purpose.

Instead, once a week or so, I'll wander by the sunflowers and trim away any vines that get within a foot or two of the flowering tops.  My assumption, when I began that process a few years ago, had been that the vine growth would help stabilize the sunflowers without my having to put in metal stakes and support structures.  I'd had one whole patch that I'd staked flattened by high wind years ago, so figured I'd try the natural approach.

The recent storm tested that hypothesis, successfully so.  The complex interwoven mass of vines gave stability to the helianthus.  None were lost, even if they do look a little worse for wear.

That does, of course, come with a caveat.  That organic support structure desires to make more of itself.  If I'm not careful and attentive to cut away that which is not necessary, eventually all I'd have is a huge green mass of ivy, ivy growing upon ivy.  Sucking away nutrient resources, strangling out all other life around it and smothering the flowers this gardener intended them to strengthen.

A bit like bureaucrats and administrators, I found myself thinking.  

Don't Give to that Charity...They'll Only Use It To Buy Booze

As the economy has tanked, more and more calls have come to my church for emergency assistance.

We're a small church that exists only because we have a small endowment. We give a fairly solid amount of our budget to support local charities and service organizations. We volunteer our time to help out. But what we don't do a tremendous amount of is direct giving to individuals.

In fact, we pretty much don't do any direct giving at all. I struggle with this a bit.

On the one hand, I tend to think that communities can better serve those in need if they pool their resources. The scattershot, church-by-church approach to giving tends to result in disjointed care. For families who are genuinely struggling, that means an arbitrary hit-or-miss approach to getting help. With the economy hitting parishioners hard, it also means that faith communities are rallying around their own, and may not have the resources or the energy to help those outside of their fold.

It also provides a rich environment for folks whose entire livelihood is a carefully manufactured sob story, like the young woman who comes by our church every year having been "just laid off this week and forced to live in her car." It's a late model Accord, the EX-L, with sunroof and navigation and leather seating. Or the man whose car "runs out of gas" in the church parking lot, and who needs cash...preferably twenty bucks...to get to work.

It's for that reason that a local charity that our church supports recently set up "charity meters" outside of local businesses as a way of reducing giving to professional panhandlers. Why give loose change to someone who's just going to buy a forty with it, when you can drop those quarters with a group that you know will provide housing, food, and sustained support to people in need? It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it'll either work or last.

That's because just giving cash or loose change to local charities is not enough. What that does not do is engage you personally with human beings who are struggling. It doesn't develop relationships. It doesn't engage you as anything other than a Sugah Daddy or a Lady Beneficent. If you don't really get to know the humanity of children of God who've fallen on hard times, then it's hard to say you're showing charity. By that, I don't mean charity as a process of financially supporting the disenfranchised. I mean charity as a spiritual gift, as charis, the essential manifestation of God's reconciling love.

Relationships governed by grace are a vital part of the way we are called to help transform the world, and that path includes but goes far beyond the financial.

The Inviolability of Israel

American politics is littered with third rails, topics or subjects that can't be broached or addressed in any meaningful way without frying the individual in question.

BZZZZZAP.

I think that was recent nominee for a senior intelligence position.

That highly electrified rail is the complex relationship between the United States and Israel.

On the one hand, Israel is a parliamentary democracy. It's an essentially free state in a region that is defined by monarchies, despots, and repressive theocracies. It has every right to exist, and exist in peace. It is also a reliable and natural ally for our constitutional democracy.

On the other hand, Israel is a nation state, with all of the flaws and foibles that exist in such entities. It is not perfect, any more than the United States...or any of us individually...is perfect.

After it's most recent election, Israel now is governed by what may prove to be an unusually truculent coalition of nationalists and ultra-nationalists. Given the ongoing provocations by Hamas, the results of the recent election were predictable. Human beings who perceive themselves as under attack will always seek hardliners to protect them, and Israelis are no exception.

Their new foreign minister, for instance, is an ultraconservative supporter of the expansion of settlements, who views any suggestion of negotiations with Israel's opponents as evidence of treason. He supports the institution of mandatory loyalty oaths for Israelis, to the point at which he's at odds with some of the ultra-orthodox, who view this as a violation of Torah. Their new prime minister is a hard core hawk, and one of the architects of the ill-conceived wars in Lebanon in the 1980s. Take this cadre of leaders, add in the militants on the other side of the equation who need conflict to justify their existence, and the odds are good that things will at some point get messy. Or rather, messier.

The challenge, of course, is that many folks have a great deal of difficulty "supporting Israel" if that support requires every Israeli action to be a priori correct. In the United States, those views are largely held by American conservative Christians, whose attitudes towards Israel are governed by a strangely warped biblicism. Using a few verses of scripture picked out of context, suddenly even speaking a word of concern about Israel becomes forbidden. Israel is God's Country! You can't say anything bad about the Land of the Promise! At least, not until after Jesus comes back, at which point they'll all either bow down before him or go to hell.

This is particularly strange given where the Bible stands on the subject. Pretty much the entire prophetic literature is filled with invective against Israel and Judah. God is endlessly pissed off at the stubbornness of His Chosen People, and does a fair amount of kicking their butts. That doesn't break the covenant, mind you. He still loves 'em. But when they step away from covenant and/or become tools of injustice, they are not above being held to account. As far as God is concerned, Zion is not inviolable.

The challenge, of course, is how to articulate a concern for justice without seeming to threaten the integrity of that often embattled democratic state. Progressives and liberals in the U.S. generally do a pretty crappy job of this, falling into rhetoric that only alienates them from the very folks they're trying to influence. My own denomination has managed to do a pretty clumsy job of it, alternating between open dialogue and destructive invective.

Not sure the way out of this one...but it's a serious conundrum.