It’s off to DC tomorrow to facilitate a workshop at one of our Episcopal seminaries and after that, a good stretch of time here at home.  I am exhausted. Two or three times this month, I have woken up and wondered where in God’s creation I was.  The work has been fruitful, visits with friends and our girl essential.  Now, I am eagerly anticipating lots of morning in the garden. Every day there is a lot of produce to pick and I will start some canning this afternoon.  I relish the thought of returning to summer routines that I grew to love last year. Life is good…

There is a certain presumptuousness on my part to say that I am a farmer.  I have seen farmer’s hands and mine have never worked that hard.  But this morning I woke up and went out to see the chicken coop, see the deep grooves where the coyote tried to go in through the silly little window on the chicken palace and the place where he or she finally got in.  The bottom of the nesting box is removable–week in and week out, I have removed that bottom, put the pine shavings on a pile that we are composting, scrubbed all the chicken droppings off and sprayed it with vinegar.  I hate that part of my work but no one said it would all be fun and easy.  That a feature of the coop that made my life a little easier was also what made those beautiful girls vulnerable hurts.  As Sherod and I looked at the damage, we agreed that we would pull that fancy house out and replace it with a far more utilitarian coop where new chickens will one day be safer.

Then, I went back inside and put a new mail order in.  We will get new baby chicks around the 22nd of June, in time for our grand babies to help care for them when they come spend a week at what the Mallowman calls “Camp YES SIR“.  Then I went out with Sherod to harvest what was ready for today.  After a week-long absence, we had so much produce it got a bit overwhelming.  Our green beans are all planted in the ground and there are about 15 bushes–leaning over to pick them all is hard on the old back, but doable.  Sherod is still out there picking blueberries.  He will harvest more than a quart and there will be 3 or 4 times that many to harvest in the weeks to come. Later today, we will share the bounty with friends here in Lowndesboro and my friend and colleague in Birmingham.  I am taking her some of my roses and daises and zinnias, and some thyme, lavender and basil as well.  I didn’t even bother to tackle the hydrangeas.  They are beautiful right where they are.

A farm requires a new kind of heart.  You have to do your grieving fiercely but you can’t linger.  The answer to the prayer “lighten our darkness” is morning, with all its work and responsibilities, with all its mercies that require grit and effort and hardened hands to receive.  A priest does well learning at least some of these lessons…

It is late evening and I am back home after 3 days in Fort Lauderdale, getting ready to head out on another work-related trip tomorrow at lunch time. Behind me, out in the garden, sits an empty chicken coop.  Earlier in the week, while we were gone, a coyote figured out how to breach the coop and killed our beautiful girls, Serafina, Sophie, Bitsy, Ivy and Lucy.

When I found out this morning, waiting to catch the flight back to Atlanta, it was hard to feel grief.  Sherod and I had just dropped Maria back at her day program after an intense visit. She is in as safe and nurturing an environment as we could possibly hope for. While there have been setbacks since she returned to Ft Lauderdale, there have also been some gains.  And it is equally true that each time I leave her, I feel like I am abandoning her again and it never gets easier. Now, the thought of those beautiful chickens being killed by the coyote weighs heavy. All this and tomorrow it is 4 years since the bleak evening in Panama, the last one I got to spend with my mom. On a night like tonight, I am grateful for the words of others:

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 1928 Book of Common Prayer

  
Some of the Royal Poincianas are in bloom; they are beautiful.  And getting to hold my girl’s hand, getting to simply sit next to her and look at her, is the absolute sweetest joy of my life…

 

This morning started at 5 and I’d been working pretty steadily since then. I have another 10 days of significant travel that start with flights that will take me through Dallas-Fort Worth this afternoon and land me in Detroit almost at 11 tonight. I was getting stressed out thinking about it all.  And then, I was not.

Go for a week, when the heat has begun to take hold,  when there has been rain, when the creatures around here have seen the land lie fallow for so long they’ve forgotten the kinds of delicious morsels that appear round about now; then, return to a garden that stuns.  I keep thinking I know abundance only to learn some more.  Massive amounts of canning ahead! 

Grateful.  Again…
 
 
   

     

Enjoying another version of farm life.  With our Memphis friends, Mike and Mary, and their offspring, who are now awesome adults.  Their youngest, Will, is in the kitchen cooking up a storm because he is catering his mom and dad’s 60th birthday party while he waits to hear if he is going to be one of the chefs that will tour with Jimmy Buffett.  AND his big sister Katie just announced her engagement.  Lots to celebrate at the party that’s coming up tonight…

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.” Thomas Merton

To get to Gethsemani, you go down New Hope Road for a few miles and then turn on Monks Road. I have remembered this particular place often through the years. Soon after my ordination as priest of the church, I came to participate in a weeklong training program on Faith-based Community Organizing here in Kentucky. Along with several RC priests, a Lutheran, a Presbyterian and a couple of Methodist pastors, and a Jewish rabbi, I was helping to found BOLD Justice in Broward County. I had already been actively involved in community ministry with the homeless population \and other outreach programs in Broward. I kept bumping into the intractability of the systemic issues underlying the misery and pain I saw all around me. I believed then, and still believe now, that it takes many people working together and maintaining steady, courageous and unrelenting pressure on a system to bring about meaningful change.  BOLD Justice was a way to explore how that might be lived out.

The training program I participated in was rigorous and demanding so I was glad, about half way through the week, when we got a late afternoon and evening off. I had a rental car and knew the Cistercian Abbey where Thomas Merton spent much of his life as a monk was close to the convent where we were doing the training. On a whim, I set off to find the Abbey and got there in time to sit in the visitor section of the church to participate in the Vespers service. Because it was summer, I also was able to go out to walk in the simple cemetery by the church where Merton is buried. The beauty of the place was deeply moving to me.

Sherod and I are doing a quick run-about in Kentucky and Indiana, first visting some dear friends, and then later this weekend, spending time with Sherod’s daughter and her children. Today, we could take a leisurely path from Bowling Green to Louisville so Sherod decided to get off I-65 and head to Bardstown. I vaguely remembered that Gethsemani was not too far from Bardstown and a quick check on my iPhone showed that it was actually on the route we were taking. It was sort-of providential and very meaningful to be able to stop there for a little while.

I’m at a strange place with the church. I am simply jubilant to find myself serving with the good people of St. Paul’s, Lowndesboro. I continue to make good progress with the work I have been given to do with ECF and am grateful as well, for the relationships I am building within the Diocese of Alabama. Yet my heart breaks often for the Church. I see so much anxiety, a deep uneasiness that what we’ve always done isn’t really working and an even deeper fear that the cost of letting go for the sake of what God might do next is simply too high. We grind along, neither moving towards death and resurrection, nor content to immerse ourselves fully in denial.

As I wrote in my previous post, this is the season when I must acknowledge the reality that death and loss have been writ large in my life these past few years. What I also know is that allowing myself to “host” what I most feared changed me forever, it helped me understand resurrection in body, mind and spirit, in ways I would never have discovered if I had continued to play the endless games of magical thinking I had lived in before. Quite simply, my life is infinitely richer, more joyful, more meaningful for what these years have taught me. As one who has lost most of her fear about losing, even losing everything, I find myself in a very different place than a lot of other people who are trying to help the church find its way through this strange new passage we are in the midst of.

It was providential to find myself close to the Abbey where Brother Louis, as Merton was known in his community, lived and then was laid to rest.  Even the brief time of entering the silence of the Abbey was filled with grace.  It led me back to Merton’s prayer, which is where I live these days. I have no idea where I am going, especially as a priest of the church.  I have to trust as Merton trusted. I have profound respect for Merton’s capacity for being both a contemplative and a deeply committed activist who understood that Micah’s words—love mercy, do justice, walk humbly with your God—call on us to do more than simply look at the brokenness of the world and retreat into spaces of comfort and safety.  l have no idea what that means for me now–back when I was ordained and just launching El Centro Hispano de Todos los Santos it was all so much more clear.

Looking back through the pictures I took this early afternoon—on a cold, more wintery than summer day (54 degrees and a slight drizzle), I have to believe with Merton, that “that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing”. As confused and limited as my line of sight is, this much I can say:  I desire deeply to know what God would have me do.  For tonight, I trust that that is enough.

We will travel to Ft Lauderdale before too long to visit with Maria. We have very intentionally decided to use all that time with her alone. Because of her circumstances, I anticipate we will be back in Fort Lauderdale with some regularity and will have other opportunities to visit with friends we love and miss, but this time, it is just our little family unit, coming together for a very few days.

There are some trees in bloom here in Alabama. Though they are far more muted, they make me recall the other, far more spectacular trees of South Florida, the Royal Poincianas. As our days were slipping away in Fort Lauderdale last year, I used to drive around trying to see the Royal Poincianas with enough intent, enough attention, enough gratitude, to make those images last for always. Seeing them come into bloom each year had been one of the absolutely wonderful gifts of living in that part of the world and I had anticipated I would miss them.

Now, the knowledge that I will probably see at least some in bloom, stirs some real ambivalence for me. Turns out that they are now associated with a lot of leave-takings. It was in the season of their bloom that my mother died–four years ago on June 5th;  we moved Maria into BARC, 3 years ago on June 5th. I left the ministry at St Ambrose on June 8th a year ago. No small amount of grief wells up along with the joy of recalling their beauty.

Home for 3 days between trips, I have spent a big part of my last two days out in the garden, tending to the plants and flowers that fill my new life. On Sunday, the liturgical year will pivot to the “Season after Pentecost”, with its rich and lovely hues of green. The growing season is upon us that mirrors all the growth happening in our garden. It seems many of our vegetable plants grow several inches from one day to the next; blossoms have given way to small fruit that are also swelling and growing daily. There is such abundance all around me.

Again, the paradox, the “both-and-ness” to this time. The abundance makes the sense of loss more piercing, in a way. The abundance also requires more of my attention, my energy, my work, so the days pass quickly and sleep comes fast and deep at night. The beauty and goodness of where I am now will not be denied or overlooked. It carries the invitation that I acknowledge the sadness and not surrender to it, carry it lightly and set it down to hold a sweet clucking hen, an armful of flowers or a post digger, shovel and compost to dig space for a gorgeous new rose someone gave me.

From the thirty-seventh floor of a hotel right across from the United Nations, looking downtown towards One World Trade Center.  I stood at the window a while ago and realized that if, on 9/11, anyone had stood where I was standing, he or she would have seen the devastation of the WTC towers on that fateful day.  In the midst of the busy-ness of my day and evening, that was a deeply sobering and sad realization. Say another little prayer for all those souls that were there that day, and for the soul of our country…