When the Rose Garden has Prickly Pears

I can't say that I have ever particularly admired Jenna Bush. In fact, I can't say that I have formed much of an opinion of her one way or another. Like most kids, she has had to navigate her life within the lightfall generated by her parents. In her case, that has meant an extraordinary glare of light. Except for a few bumps in the road, I suppose she has done as well as most.

But today she has my unmitigated admiration. The President's daughter, she is getting married today not in the grandeur of the White House under the scrutinizing gaze of the world, but at the ranch which, according to her own description, better fits her personality. Good for her. I can't imagine the allure of a White House wedding -- and the pressure to treat the citizenry to one of our few opportunities to indulge in "royal pageantry." It would have been fine with me had she chosen that route. The problem is that it would not have been all that fine with her. The protocols would have chafed; the cameras would have distracted; the pundits would have critiqued, the myriad social secretaries would have fashioned and packaged a national event befitting the household of a head-of-state, and it would have been grand. It just wouldn't have been "her."

And a wedding is not about the nation. It is about two people and the breathtaking promises they are making to each other. It is about the construction, through conviction and symbol and blessing and vow, of a marriage that will hopefully last longer than the public's titillated attention, this couple, like any couple, has a right to keep their focus on this important act of creation. The legal system has a responsibility to ratify and record such an exchange -- in that sense a wedding is public -- but the world does not have the right to crash the party. I am not entitled to munch their mints or sip their punch, just because her dad is a global figure.

Good for you, then, Jenna, and your courage to honor your personal integrity. And good for you George and Laura, for respecting her wishes with your blessing. A White House wedding could have been grand, but a ranch wedding will be dear. So have a great time. Be "off duty" for the evening -- all of you. Be family. Make sacred and tender memories. Whoop if you choose to. Shed a tear if you need to. Get cake all over your mouths. Dance. Be in love.

It will be OK. We won't be watching.

A Different View of Morning

I woke this morning to a beautiful day. The sky is infinite blue, the temperature is cool but mild, the wind, for a change, is calm. My calendar is full, but easy. I woke this morning to a beautiful day.

A friend of mine woke this day to his first round of chemotherapy. It is the first formal response to Friday's diagnosis -- one that turned out grimmer than we had hoped. I don't know how these things routinely work, but this almost immediate commencement of treatment wafts an odor of urgency. We first talked shortly after he returned from the doctor. I can't say what was going on in his gut, but his voice was matter-of-fact. We talked again on Saturday -- he had been putzing chores around the house. Again, matter-of-fact. Yesterday they were in church, he and his wife, in their usual pew, accomplishing their usual volunteer tasks, having their usual conversations. Well, not their "usual" conversations. "Have you heard?" I was asked a dozen times over the course of the morning. The conversations were hardly routine.

I was somehow impressed. I don't know what I expected -- it wasn't likely they were suddenly going to book a cruise or bolt the door and bunker down against the thought of it all. What else would they do but continue to do those things that had shaped and informed their living, and connect with those people from whom they routinely draw nourishment?

I woke this morning to a beautiful day -- exercise, promise, purpose, routine, and also to a day suddenly larger, stretched by mindful concern for someone whose own day has, in a way, exploded into unimagined dimensions. But as I think about it, we both woke to a day in which we find ourselves held in the embracing presence of one who's love and capacity are still larger.

He adds some new things to his routine: no longer simply the lawn to mow and a grandson to watch and a job to perform and a book to shelve, but needles and ominous bags of fluid, as well, and nurses and waiting to see; watching; inventorying every wince for symptoms. All those, and a familiar pew, and the book cart, and conversations over coffee and a cookie. Those simple things have, after all, provided shape and meaning and support and friends. And the faith that, whatever the efficacy of the chemo, he is alive in a way that the cancer is powerless to alter.

Giving Away the Gospel

"There are two kinds of people in this world..." In reality, who can guess how many "kinds" there really might be? I'm not thinking of the "big" dividers -- race, religion, gender identity and sexual orientation -- although those are certainly relevant. I'm thinking of those subtler "wirings" that animate us and distinguish us.

Last night we attended an event held in the workplace of an entrepreneur whose family we count among our friends. His business is now well established, and reasonably successful, and he was showing a group of us the next expansion of his business soon to be launched. It's a clever idea, and he is visibly excited about it -- emanating that spicy mixture of enthusiasm and apprehension, giddiness and nervousness. As he talked, you could see the wheels of his creative imagination still spinning with tweaking possibilities and extensions. He talked of concept, of marketing, of application, of rationale. He waxed rhapsodically about incentives and human psychology and workplace dynamics and how the idea had been conceived and then born. If the listening group's noises of approval are any indication, our friend should do well.

And I left feeling a little like I do after visiting the farm: fascinated, but utterly foreign. I know just enough to know that I don't know anything about this world that is being described to me. I can follow the conversation, but can't intelligently participate in it. My mind simply doesn't work that way. To borrow from the prophet Isaiah, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways."

That's not critique -- on either of us. I'm fairly creative, with a busy imagination. I enjoy some measure of expertise at what I do. And I am impressed with my businessman friend, and, if the truth be told, a little bit envious. But listening to him talk I realized again why certain churches grow exponentially and why others -- OK, others like the ones I have served -- don't. I'm not suggesting that it's all about entrepreneurialism and marketing, but packaging and promotion are key dimensions, and while my mind rarely even breaks into that plane, my friend from last night actually lives there. I know there are those who talk about the church as a business, and evangelism in terms of expanding "market share," but I simply find such language distracting and unrelated. The marketplace is having one conversation; the church, it seems to me, is having a different one.

There is a part of me that would like to think that my friend might walk away from my world -- one in which he had heard me wax rhapsodically about the new insight I had come to from scripture, or the sermon I was in the process of writing, or the justice issue I was currently engaging -- feeling just as bewildered as I had in his. But the larger part of me wishes he might find himself quite at home.

I suppose that's one difference between ministry and business: in business you wish for some way to create and corner a market -- to be, somehow, profitably unique. In ministry you wish for some way to be utterly common.

As it stands, my friend is rolling out his product and I -- well, it's Sunday morning and I have another sermon ready to preach. Each of us doing our thing. He'll likely sell more sandwiches than I will give away gospel, but I plug along.

What the Shutter Can't Possibly Capture

It should be illegal to photograph a stream. Remnant in the photo is simply the image of water. It could be a rain-filled pothole in the street for all we know. It could be a backed up storm sewer or a mosquito puddle collected in a low place in the yard. Streams, after all, have movement, and sound. Streams are ever changing -- a leaf carried here; a bug landing there; a pebble pushed along the sandy bottom. Who would know from the photograph that any of these wonders is true? Who would be able to follow the course of it all over the rocks and down the valley to some presumed river further along? Who would be able to hum along with the gurgles and the rhythmic splashes as the currents traveled and then spilled and ultimately regrouped below for the next tumbling round? Streams are constantly moving, constantly changing, and a photo imposes an artificial frame and then freezes it, as though it finally represented anything.

But then everything is moving. A bowl of fruit captured as still life is similarly transient, albeit invisible to the naked eye. It doesn't dribble and splash and mist and run, but it mushes and wrinkles and rots and ultimately falls in upon itself. The autumn pumpkins that decorated our front steps that still robustly color the photos we took are now flattened and browned by the snowy winter and caved in and over onto the flowerbed below. Still life, indeed. And that portrait of our wedding a scant 10 years ago -- who are those two? If they are the same ones who today occupy the house where their mail is delivered one could hardly claim they have stayed "the same." Everything is moving.

Which is perhaps to say if we intend to go on taking pictures -- and in truth I could hardly give it up -- we would do well to discern behind the photographic image...
...the running trickle
...the gurgling chatter
...the inexhorably moving force which is the very pulse of life --
implicitly and woefully inadequately represented there.

Which is to say that photos must be viewed more with the soul than with the eyes. In fact, it wouldn't hurt to view most things that way -- whether we get around to taking their picture or not.

The Freeway Marring the View

The dogwood tree shades the entrance to the prayer trail that meanders down the hillside toward the stream. This time of year the high dogwood blossoms splay like a solar panel collage, separate but connected, gathering in the warmth and the light. Beneath them, the woodchip path switches back and forth, negotiating the bluff's grade among the varied trees.

And then the water, and then the highway which has amputated the remaining acres of the Conference Center's acreage so completely that the remnant on the far side is utterly, inaccessibly lost. Visible, but remote. Near, but out of reach.

And isn't that the way it is? What and how many freeways have interposed their frenetic passage across my life, surgically divorcing the body of me from the blossomed woods on the far side of my soul? What arteries of commerce or consumption cut across my contemplation, cramping and crowding my inspiration, and aurally littering the way with honks and racing engines? Isn't that the way it is -- the world invoking its imminent domain against the spirit?

But though the view is foreshortened and pristine character abraded, could it possibly be for the better? The world, after all, is never that far away. I carry it with me in my memory; it inhabits my imagination; I wear it and sing it and eat it and wash with it. I could not escape it if I tried. Let the sound of the highway newly nearby simply remind me that if I cannot ultimately remove myself from the world, neither should my prayers. It's messier that way -- not nearly as scenic -- but perhaps in the long run, holier.

Enjoying the Day-Old Flowers

"Do you think the church could use the flowers," first the father asked, and later the groom. They were, indeed, beautiful -- and as the father obliquely observed, "the florist hadn't given them away." I could only speculate. The tall, stately bouquets had first lined the center aisle of the ceremony, and had since been relocated to the banquet hall where they now graced the dozen -- or two -- tables. It would, quite rightly, be a shame for them to go to waste.

"We would be happy to enjoy them tomorrow," I assured them, but there were some logistical problems. I was on my way out, and the reception had hours yet before the last dance would be announced. The parents are frail, the bride and groom were leaving on their honeymoon too early to find anybody willing to unlock the church. We left it open-ended.

But though the flowers never appeared on Sunday morning, the idea was a great one. The bride and groom had no doubt invested considerably in the flowers -- too much, many would argue, for a single night's gala -- and though they had been well-enjoyed throughout the evening, they had spectacular beauty remaining. It was good thinking to imagine a secondary value.

It's April, and Earth Stewardship Month, and I'm thinking this fragile earth could benefit from a few more of us asking the groom's insightful question: "how else could this be used?" Who else could secondarily value this beauty...this utility...this tool? We acquire and use all sorts of things, but we rarely use them up. What would it mean to get in the habit of considering secondary applications? What would it look like if we developed a pattern of passing along rather than storing away -- more than the once every few years when our bloated basements or attics necessitate a trip to Goodwill?

As I say, the flowers the next morning never appeared. But the instinct was a good one. And surely someone took home a bouquet and enjoyed it over the subsequent course of days that were its useful life. I, at least, took home with me a view of a different kind of footprint -- and a larger instinct for the grace of living in community.

Stewardship and Sharing: what radical concepts.

And Suddenly the Green

I swept out today what surely must be the last remains of winter. The garage had become a veritable warehouse of sand, ferried inside in the tread of the tires from the roadways every time it snowed. A lot of sand gets spread through the course of winter -- especially on a sloped incline like the one approaching our driveway from the road down the hill. I'm routinely dissatisfied with how quickly it gets spread, having been forced one more than one occasion to leave my car at the bottom when it couldn't find the grip to make up the drive. So I can hardly be resentful of the beach that accrues in my garage. Desperate for it to arrive, I can't be picky about where it ends up.

But it's warming now, and even the orange snow fence across the road is getting rolled up until next year. So, I grabbed the broom and helped the tide to roll out. In the process, I noticed the lawn. Less than a week ago it was covered with a late snow. Today it has suddenly, inexplicably become green. Was it lurking beneath the white just waiting to spring into full-blown spring? And the beds, still cluttered with the detritus of the rotted autumn pumpkins that got frozen into place, are similarly making room for the perennial rush.

Perhaps the drab spirits so grayed and weighted by winter's girth and too many other disappointments to mention will find bulbs stirring deep within, and wake one day to discover for themselves...

...spring.