The garden’s woes, the garden woos

“I’ve got a garden blanket to put over the frame for your lettuce bed, whenever you’re ready to plant a fall garden,” my friend mentioned to me on the way out of church.

I mentally surveyed the condition of my garden.

It’s that time of year when all the warm weather plants are birthing their ripened fruit. I feel like the lone obstetrician in a maternity ward where fifty pregnant women are in labor at the same time.

I’ve shared some of the bounty, but I have tomatoes ripening so fast that some are rotting before I can get to them. It’s the same with the okra. My wife cooks the world’s best fried okra, but it’s a chore and not something we eat more than once a week, so I’ve started canning them, and still some are maturing too quickly for me to keep them from becoming too large and tough. I’ve enjoyed grilled and smoked cabbage, and Lori has made delicious cabbage soup, but I lost another cabbage the other day. It had rotted before I could get to it.

It’s a gardener’s dream and a gardener’s nightmare all at once.

Of course, the vegetables are not the only plants that have been prolific. I’ve tried to stay as close to organic as possible, but on more than one occasion, I’ve been tempted to blast those weeds with a strong dose of pesticides, herbicides or any cide that will kill them.  Those pesky plants have dropped me to my knees, then well near broke my back as I’ve pulled, yanked, and chopped them. Still they are winning. Flinging them in the air as I throw them out of the garden, I yell, “Out of my garden.” My two Schnauzers’ heads move back and forth in unison as they follow the trajectory of the weeds exiting the garden. Curious eyed, the dogs stare at the whole episode, as if it is some strange human ritual.

All this flashed through my mind as my friend mentioned the fall garden.

Do I really want a fall garden? Am I up to it?

The nineteenth century English poet, Alfred Austin said, “Show me your garden, and I’ll show you what you are.”

“If he’s right, I could be in trouble, “I thought to myself as I continued visualizing the state of my garden.

“You’ve been much too busy this summer,” my wife tells me as I share with her.  “And by the way, those carrots you worked so hard to cultivate, well, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I’m not sure it was worth your time.”

She is right, I admit to myself. It’s not been a leisurely summer. And I wonder if gardening is worth the time.

Stopping by the grocery store is so much more convenient. Why bother with all that composting, and preparing the soil, and planting, and cultivating, and harvesting, and cleaning produce, and canning?

But then, as troublesome as gardening can be, there is a joy in it beyond the reward of fresh vegetables. There is a deep satisfaction knowing they were grown on the soil you worked, that little piece of earth you sweated over as you’ve made at least some contribution to The Giving Tree.

The garden has always been there for me, waiting for me, and not just for me to tend to her, but for her to tend to me.

  “I’m going to the garden, “I often tell Lori after a difficult day. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “All my hurts my garden spade can heal.”

Walking down to the garden after my conversation with my friend, I take another look.  I have to admit: The garden is only doing what she’s supposed to do in response to the soil preparation, and the planting, and the cultivating.

I could feel Mother Nature smiling on my garden and me.

“Lori,” I shouted from the garden as I made my way back to the house, “I’ve just had a revelation.  I can‘t say ‘no’ to Mother Nature. She’s calling me back, back to the garden. I’ve got to start getting ready for a fall garden.”

Lori sighs and nods in tacit agreement.

“I’ll get the skillet ready,” she says. “Bring me a batch of okra.”

Where is the love?

Imagine that your 42 year old son has died after a four year battle with a rare disease that has destroyed his internal organs. You are grieving at his casket the night of the wake when an official of the church---the church which earlier in this horrid week approved the ceremony---calls you, informing you that they can no longer honor your request to have the funeral in the church as planned tomorrow.

“Why?” you ask.

“Because we found out your son was married…to a man.”

The conversation may not have been in those exact words, but that’s what happened to Julie Atwood a few weeks ago when the Reverend T. W. Jenkins, Pastor of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Tampa, Florida, officially cancelled her son’s funeral the night before it was to take place the next day. Her son, Julion Evans, was married to Kendall Capers two years ago after 17 years together.

“It was devastating,” Ms. Atwood said of the experience. “I did feel like he (Julion) was being denied the dignity of death.” Church officials told Ms. Atwood it would be “blasphemous” to have the funeral in the church, the same church where she was baptized and where family members still attend.

Kendall Capers expressed to Tampa Bay NBC affiliate WFLA that he understood the Pastor’s position but added that the abrupt cancellation was “disrespectful” and “wrong.”

“Regardless of our background, our sexual orientation, how can you wait that long and put someone in a bind when they're going through a loss? asked Capers.

They did have the service at the funeral home where the wake had been held, but many mourners missed the service because they went to New Hope Church, unaware that the venue had been changed the night before.

What to make of this?

I can understand Pastor Jenkins dilemma.  For whatever reason, he apparently wasn’t aware that Mr. Evans and Mr. Capers were a gay couple. When several irate church members brought it to his attention, he made a decision not to violate his own principles:  "I try not to condemn anyone's lifestyle, but at the same time, I am a man of God and have to stand upon my principles.”

And ultimately, Reverend Jenkins and his church had every right to refuse the family’s request for the funeral in the church.

And yet, more than a principle is involved here. These are real people with real feelings: grieving people, hurting people, desperate people.

People needing a word of hope.

But hope is not what they received from a people whose church is named New Hope.

Pastor Jenkins said he tries not “to condemn anyone’s lifestyle.” Yet two person’s lifestyle is the very reason he refused to conduct the funeral.

As a pastor, I’m sure I've conducted funerals for people whose lifestyle I didn't approve: people addicted to alcohol and drugs, adulterers, gossips, hypocrites. But conducting a funeral is not necessarily an endorsement of the deceased’s lifestyle choices.

Pastor Jenkins and the church could have made that clear to the family and gone ahead with the funeral as planned.

But even then, is it always necessary for a church to point out to the grievers all the areas where the deceased’s lifestyle was at variance with the church’s standards? Does that help mourners work through their grief?

And what if not all the deceased’s family shares all the pastor’s principles? The couple in question certainly didn't view their sexual orientation as blasphemous, nor did they think it necessary to hide it: “It’s not like we woke up and said, ‘let’s be gay,’ someone we were born with and we've dealt with it for me, 40 years, him 42 years, and we make the best possible choices,” said  Capers to WFLA. Granted, their lifestyle was in violation of this particular church’s principles, but is refusing to minister to the grieving the best way to convince them to live by a church’s teaching?

Perhaps in their minds, the pastor and people were expressing love by their harsh actions. Maybe they thought such a demonstration of “tough love” would prompt sinners to repent. If so, New Hope would not be the first to justify their actions with that kind of reasoning. Indeed, such rationalization was institutionalized during a dismal era of the church, the Medieval Inquisition, when the church resorted to torture in order to ferret out heresy.

No, I don’t believe the family of Julion Evans is feeling the love, at least not from New Hope.

Love will have to come from another kind of Christianity, a Christianity intent on loving people unconditionally, even those people who do not abide by the church’s principles.

Stories from the baptistery

Connor rocked back and forth on his heels, biting his lip as his eyes darted back and forth, scanning my office.

It was his baptism day.

“It’s okay to be nervous,” I said, trying to put him at ease as he left my office with his parents on the way to the baptistery.

His father had warned me earlier that Connor was anxious about being baptized. “He’s worried that you’re going to ask him a lot of questions,” his dad had grinned.

I understood for I had been close to Connor’s age, eight, when I was baptized. Like Connor, I was an outgoing child, but the day I stood next to the pastor and made what we in my faith tradition call a “profession of faith” before being baptized, I was more than a bit fidgety: I felt like bolting and running. When the pastor introduced me in front of the congregation, I tried scooting behind him and hiding.

“Connor, I won’t ask you any questions other than the two we've already talked about, okay?”

He exhaled in relief.

But I could hear his voice quivering once we were standing outside the baptistery: “Is the water hot?”

I let him dip his hands in to test it.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” is the lead sentence in Joan Didion’s essay, The White Album. The sentence became the title for her collected works I suppose because it is so pregnant with meaning. In one simple sentence it addresses the complex nature of life and how we yearn to glean some order or purpose from the ambiguities that surround us daily. We do that by telling ourselves stories, “in order to live,” Didion wrote.

“And sometimes in order to relieve tension,” I thought as I watched Connor clasping and unclasping his hands.

I looked at the ladies who assisted with the baptism but stood close to Connor to make sure he heard my story.

“One time when I was in a different church, I was about to baptize a guy about Connor’s age,” I said as I placed my hand on his head.  “What I didn't know was that the custodian had gotten the water way too hot. When the boy stepped into the water he screamed like a cat that got its tail caught in the door, and everyone in the congregation looked toward the baptistery to see what was going on. “Yeeouh, I can’t do it,” he yelled after he jerked his foot out of the hot water.

“What did you do?” one of the ladies helping Connor asked.

“Well, his grandparents had driven several hours to see the baptism that morning. So, I told some of the men in the church to let the water cool while I preached, and then after my sermon we would have the baptism. I gave the men strict instructions to fill several buckets with ice. They were to wait until the music was playing and the people were singing during the invitational hymn and only then were they to throw the ice into the water.”

“What happened?” Connor asked.

“The men missed their cue. Just when I had everyone bow their heads and close their eyes for prayer, just at that tender and quiet moment in the worship service when I ask people to make decisions for Christ, lo and behold if the men didn't throw all that ice into the baptistery. The audience heard a big crash like a glacier had collapsed, leaving them looking at each other, wondering, ‘What in the world was that?’ But I did get the little guy baptized, and everything worked out.”

By now Connor was giggling.

“Watch your step,” I cautioned Connor as we entered the baptismal waters.

“Connor, did you receive Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord?”

Without the slightest hesitation in his voice, Connor responded, “Yes, sir.”

“Do you choose to be his follower, his disciple?”

“Yes sir,” Connor declared.

When Connor looked up to me just before I lowered him into the water, he didn't need to say anything more because the peace in his eyes bespoke the presence  of the one in whose name he was about to be baptized.

“I’m proud for you, Connor,” I said as we exited the baptistery.

“Now you've got a story to tell about the day you were baptized. Remember to tell it, “I added.

And I believe he will.

For we indeed tell stories in order to live.

And sometimes to relax a bit and take in the story we are living in the moment.