Come into the Garden

I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with gardening: on in April, off in August. I suspect this is common; everybody gets excited about a clean patch of black, soft soil, and ecstatic when the first bean plants poke their brave little necks into the sunlight. For the first few weeks I run out to see how much has sprouted, how much has blossomed, how much has—oh joy!—matured into edibility.

Each plant has its own personality. I don’t like peas that much, but plant them anyway because I love how they twine their little tendrils around the wires, like a baby instinctively closing a fist around a finger. And the way pole beans blindly seek something to climb on—you can see them feeling the air, reaching, joyfully wrapping (or collapsing if you don’t get around to putting up that fence. Cornstalks don’t need no support from you—they provide their own, thank you very much.

Then comes July.

The soft ground is baked to slate gray, leaves are drooping and changing color, and bugs are gleefully sharing the produce. Squash bugs don’t even share—they destroy. The first time I saw a full-size tomato worm I almost screamed. (The first hint of tomato worms is that the top branches of the plant are stripped. Color that was on the plant is now inside the worm, which why you can’t see them until—suddenly!—you can.)

Summertime is travel time, too, so the weeds took advantage of my absence to come out and play. By the time I get back, they’ve established themselves as master. It’s too much to keep up with! The garden seems to reflect my discouragement in every drying leaf and misshapen bean: we give up. Just put us out of our misery.

But I’m not giving up. This year will be different. Two main reasons, which I hope will provide the formula for a successful garden:

p/p + m_{2 =}S (i.e., success)

P is for preparation divided by pickup. In all the years we’ve lived here, we haven’t owned a truck. Who needed a truck, with a trusty station wagon and a rusty trailer? The station wagon is long gone and the trailer is a pain to hook up and haul around. So this year, this pickup:

Which makes hauling manure and compost a snap. (Unloading it is not so snappy, but getting it someplace to unload was the real challenge, now solved.)

M is for maintenance x maintenance. Once we’re all planted, one hour/day should keep the weeds down and the produce up. Maybe some extra watering at sundown, if needed. Bugs are a given, but if I ride herd on them maybe they won’t ride herd on me. No travel plans either, so no big gaps in the maintenance continuum.

Wishful thinking? Well, we’ll see.

If the main point was food for the table, no cost/benefit analysis would stand for it in these days of plenty. Gardening is about exercising dominion over creation, as humans were created to do. I suspect that’s why it strikes a chord in so many hearts—at least the hearts of those who don’t have to do it. (Subsistence farmers may just as often have their hearts broken.) It’s a skill and an art and takes a bit of time and experience to learn. I hope I’ve put in enough time and experience by now because I don’t have much left of either.

This summer, I hope to walk into the garden in the cool of the morning, with a touch of the same wonder felt by the first gardeners. Their experience went awry, giving us thorns and weeds and earning our bread by the sweat of our brow. But a new day was on the way:

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but of the dawn.
G.K. Chesterton

Gardening is an act of faith. There’s always another dawn, another spring, another Easter—until there isn’t. When all those things cease, we’ve reached our goal and can happily lay down our trowels and rakes. Unless there’s gardening in heaven, too. I wouldn’t be surprised.

April 14, 2021April 14, 2021

The Meaning of Meanings

Infrastructure

^{/ ˈɪn frəˌstrʌk tʃər /}

The Biden Infrastructure bill is getting a lot of criticism for what it isn’t—an infrastructure bill. That is, it’s only tangentially about infrastructure. Anywhere from 5-20% of the roughly $2 trillion goes to roads, bridges, and utilities—what we generally consider infrastructure. And not just us, but the dictionary too: “The basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society, such as transportation and communications systems.” Concrete, asphalt, steel, and wire, and the maintenance thereof—that’s what most people consider to be infrastructure. Or do they?

The Biden administration is thinking more creatively. I’m not going to argue on the virtues or venalities of the bill or why Congress should allocate $2 tril for it; I’m more interested in the terminology. To road-and-bridge maintenance, the administration adds

“Care infrastructure”: money for elder and child care
“Educational infrastructure”: money for building new schools
“Human infrastructure”: money for job-training and union organizing,
“Research infrastructure”: money for universities and think tanks (to come up with conclusions the government likes, says my cynical side)
“Environmental infrastructure”: money for incentivizing electric cars and phasing out gasoline engines

We can argue about each item on the list—and there are a lot of items—and whether government bureaucracy is the best way to facilitate them, but (being a language person), I’m most interested in the way the administration is finding so many applications of the world “infrastructure.” They’ve stretched it to embrace anything the administration wants to do, thereby making it practically meaningless. This shapeless blob of a word now covers broad consensus (roads and the power grid should be adequately maintained) as well as ideological fringes.

Such terminology is perilous, in that it

Blurs distinctions and definitions. This is a feature, not a bug, of postmodernism, which pretty much denies objective meaning. As an academic theory po-mo only harms students; as a governing philosophy it harms everybody.
Tends to make humans into a commodity: buying units to purchase desired products, workers to be trained, young minds to be conditioned, old people to be sidelined. American citizens become part of American “infrastructure.” And what does that mean?

“Infrastructure,” then, isn’t about asphalt and wire; it’s about forcing American society into a model favored by one end of the political spectrum. If everything is infrastructure, everything is subject to restructuring.

April 7, 2021April 7, 2021

Is He Worth It?

“Any one of you who does not renounce all he has cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:33

But wait—don’t we say the gift of grace is free? Why does he say here that it costs all we have? (And the parable of the Pearl of Great Price says the same thing allegorically.) But in the passage before that, he tells a story about a great feast that the invited guests refuse to attend, so the host throws open the doors and invites all the riffraff from the streets.

So it’s free, or it costs. Which one?

Both—it’s free. And it costs.

The Interstate highway system is (mostly) free, but there’s a cost to driving on it: auto maintenance, gas, taxes. Food banks are free but there’s a cost to stocking and maintaining them. Oxygen is free, but there’s a cost to breathing it, as every breath puts your body to work and the body eventually wears out.

Not perfect analogies, but there’s a cost to everything, and it’s not the same as the price. Sometimes the two can be wildly disparate, as when a one-dollar lottery ticket nets $50,000. Or when a $50 investment nets nothing. We can’t pay a price for grace because it is literally price-less. But the cost is steep: all you have.

I can’t pay. But I can “renounce.”

Not just my possessions (some of which I work hard for), but my assumptions, my pretentions, my affections, my time. And it’s not a once-and-done deal, either: cost is something that must be continually reassessed. From my side, not his. He has already priced in my weakness and wavering, but I can be poleaxed between desires. I have to keep asking, Is he worth this sacrifice? These funds? This time? This life?

In Daniel Nayeri’s memoir, Everything Sad Is Untrue, the author tells how his mother, a Sufi Muslim in the top ranks of Iranian society, converted to Christianity and, as a result, had to flee for her life with her two children in tow. When asked why she gave up so much for a religious belief, her reply was simple: “Because it’s true.” Almighty God had sent his own son to die so that she might live forever with him–why wouldn’t she sacrifice all she had for that?

Is he worth it? He is.

April 2, 2021April 2, 2021

And It Was . . . Done

According to all that the Lord had commanded Moses, so the people of Israel had done all the work. And Moses saw all the work, and behold, they had done it; as the Lord commanded, so they had done it. Ex. 39:42-43

Reading those words, do you hear an echo?

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good . . .

And Moses saw . . .

From the beginning of Genesis to the end of Exodus encloses a lot of history—much more than any other Bible time-period. From prehistory all the way up to the birth of a nation, the LORD is building a grand plot. From the promised seed, through the flood, Father Abraham, the 12 patriarchs who grew into a multitude now gathered on a desert plain, the question is, Will they take Yahweh to be their lawfully wedded husband?

He covenants with them, he feeds and shepherds them, he instructs and promises to live with them. And then they fall into a terrible act of apostasy that should have ended it all. The people go back on their word just days after swearing to it. Even while Moses is on the mountain receiving instruction on how to consecrate Aaron as chief priest, Aaron is down on the plain hammering out a golden calf.

Doesn’t God know what’s going on, even while giving detailed instructions about how to build his dwelling place? Of course he does. But he waits, allowing the measure of sin to fill up on. And then he storms upon the scene, threatening to destroy his people. Moses intervenes for him, using every persuasive argument that comes to mind, until the Lord “changes his mind.” I won’t go with you/ I will go with you/ I will destroy them/ I won’t destroy them.

(This back-and-forth echoes a long-ago conversation with Abraham, who bargains with the Lord until he gets the acceptable number of righteous men needed to preserve Sodom down to ten. It’s not enough, of course; not even ten righteous men can be found in Sodom, and nephew Lot’s righteousness-status is rather iffy. But that doesn’t mean God is merely humoring Abraham in this conversation. He’s God; he knows the outcome. But he is also an active participant in the story, along with Abraham. The play is written, but that makes it no less compelling or real. God “changes his mind” according to what he’s already determined.)

Anyway. After this great trauma, with a people properly repentant and eager to make amends, the tabernacle work goes forward. Sixteen times in chapters 39 and 40 comes the phrase, “as the Lord commanded Moses.” As though there is to be no doubt that they’ve learned a lesson—for now—and “All that the Lord commands, we will do.” At the end, they’ve constructed a dwelling place that follows the blueprint to the letter.

But is it “good”? At the end of Creation, God saw all that he had made and pronounced it good. At the conclusion of tabernacle construction, Moses surveys the work and declares it “done.”

Is it good? No, but it’s done, according to God’s command. One more step toward redemption is accomplished. After the golden calf disaster and the recriminations and accusations and consequences dealt, God will still dwell with his people. Because he’s committed. What could have been the finale instead becomes a major plot point in the continuing drama.

But do you hear another echo?

It is finished.

It was good at the beginning. It was done as a temporary expedient, and kept on being “done” through a first temple, a second temple, and a third temple; through major dissolutions and reformations, countless animal sacrifices and rivers of blood.

Now it’s finished: the plot wraps up.

But it also continues, in present tense. We live in the dénouement, or “falling action,” of the great story that came to a climax when the main character walked out the grave . He had solved the unresolved tension between man and God—that is finished. The uneasy debt is paid. But each generation experiences that “finishing” for itself as the drama plays out again over millions of individual lives. And he’s just as involved and active as he ever was, only through his Holy Spirit at work in every reborn soul.

For there’s no more back-and-forth, no more bargaining. For each one of us, it is finished: in present tense, until we reach the final page.