It may be only among strangers in airports or waiting rooms, planes or elevators, that I manage to suspend my well-honed biases. Oh, I know, we must always receive the stranger as a guest, lest we miss entertaining angels unawares. But it is only when I have read everything in sight or played enough Solitaire on my iPhone I will look up wondering if there is a conversation worth having. 

Travelers have a destination in common. It’s a good place to start. In unfamiliar places, foreign locations, I am readier to engage someone who might know a little more or seems as lost as I. Company in misery. On tours participants share the interest that led to a common appreciation, cameras at the ready for long-envied sights. Proximity lends itself to familiarity that is mostly nonthreatening. Such an approach might be useful in other situations.

Such encounters may be what philosopher Anthony Appiah calls “sidling.” Rather than confront someone with religious or political views opposed to mine, he suggests “sidling up” to them. Sidling is a better way to construct a bridge across a chasm of differences–race, religion, gender, economics, politics–than to exchange opposing points like a ping pong ball. Instead of trading shots without hope of common ground, it might be more productive to describe where I was when I was six, then invite a conversation partner to share. Childhood, schools, and early work could fill a canvas with family experience, a list of callings, nuance that makes up a whole person. This brings the background to the foreground and might justify or just explain the values any of us holds when and if we get around to examining more divergent views. 

I have an email pal in North Carolina I’ve never met. A staunch Southern Baptist, she believes the Bible is inerrant and that “total truth” cannot only be discerned, but practiced. We have been corresponding for a number of months. We do not agree. But she, in particular, finds the correspondence heartening. I’m not sure I do. She knows I am a person of faith. She just can’t figure out why I don’t share her beliefs. She’s curious how I manage it. How I preach the Word without her Truth.  She has sent two books to convince me. 

I am trying to glance off the obvious differences between us. To make myself a little vulnerable with a few personal experiences, tangents and questions. I spend a great deal of time thinking how to do this, a lot more work than firing off a volley to squelch her last assertion. I grew up exchanging volleys with my dad, a competition rather than dialogue. I’m used to it, used to hearing it everyday.

It may be that humankind has come to a place where our ping pong habit can get us nowhere. There is no return: unless we learn to listen to one another, we won’t be able to go on together at all. Sidling up to each other may create a small clearing before the great divides. I am convinced that dialogue will not open into its rich wealth of gifts unless one of us dares say more–or less–than a trite closed statement. I hope what I am practicing will lead me to entertain more angels unawares. 

When I was a kid, my dad took our family out camping in a trailer he built out of plywood with a double bunk bed–the top for us three siblings, the bottom for my parents. Next was a “five-man” dark green umbrella tent. Campgrounds were full of treasures: silence under tall fir as cooking pots clinked on Coleman stoves, we hiked to and from the baths carrying towel and soap, sat by bonfires flaming, snapping, then dying with sighs and growing darkness.

We visited a number of dams, so impressed Dad was with the feats of engineering, and no doubt the promise of irrigation inland in Washington State. I still have a granite core taken from the Grand Coulee. On our way there I remember stopping in the middle of nowhere for him to show us shale and explain how it formed. And he often told tales of old fires that blackened the forests we drove through. 

He studied forestry in college, but never did work with those skills. Rather, he worked for a pulp mill, then paper mill that stewed wood chips to make paper. If he love the woods, how did he ever reconcile destroying them to make something else? If a forest fire was a disaster, weren’t log trucks dieseling through the forest with cut trees just as much a tragedy? 

My partner and I spent a few days last week near Port Angeles to view the Elwha River, free to flow wherever its heart pleases. Pure joy. Five years since it was liberated, it has flooded the river road that partnered it, and built up shoals at its mouth to invite  perch and smelt, clams and oysters to thrive. Will we ever return to natural sources of energy, rather than sealing off canyons to force water to meet our needs or ruin the environment with mines, slag and polluted air?

I am a fan of progress, but I lament the loss of natural habitat–concrete that seals earth over. I rejoice at the grass that–not so slowly–begins to break through the cracks, and can break down walls.

I stand on Queen Anne or First Hill in Seattle trying to imagine our hills covered in fir, cedar, and hemlock, such ancient forests that little undergrowth thrived. One could walk through the trees on moss and duff for miles, or near ancient native middens, seeing our snow-capped mountains only in rare clearings or above the tree line. 

Must we continue to destroy this fragile earth, our home? Earth will win in the end. Civilizations rarely continue to stand once we’re gone and vegetation regrows. We nurture huge cedar in our backyard just to maintain a sense of the wilderness.

…how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?

Mary Oliver knows what more of us must learn. Whatever we are doing, is what we are doing. Why worry that we ought to be doing something else? I putter about for this or that scrap to piece together…a word for the day, the week, a frame on which to stretch a canvas. A peg to hang ideas on.

Should we be doing or being? What, in you, is being today? Being is tough. Doing is easier. Being is suspect. People wonder what we’re doing! 

What do I show for what I’m doing? for who I am being? What frame for my canvas, what design for the quilt? No matter theory, the big picture, or a meaning I lay on diverse events, life keeps coming down to chapter and verse. This specific event, this word with that person, these hours spent flipping through books, notes, and remembering to water the hanging begonias.

We each are only one person who can do mostly only one thing at a time. Each choice we make in a day like today eliminates other choices, or limits what else will suit. Every plunge into the pool is a risk of an habitual order.

And would it have been worth it after all? Would it have been worthwhile? [Prufrock, Eliot]

I labor always over the BIG risks: the yawning abyss into vulnerability, deep relationship, substantial change, or speaking truth in the face of enemies. But every day, every moment requires a commitment of its own, large, small, or immeasurable.

Just these moments add up to a way of life. My puttering over this book and that, this view or that, sorting through scraps of papers long ago filed away, give me away. I seek meaning in everything. The moment I have, the now that is mine, the truth of myself. Every day presents an empty canvas. Every day the cat must be fed, caressed. The apple cut, the water poured, the garden tended. The word laid down.

Miracles are made of ordinary stuff.

Beneath this parable is a bedrock assumption of abundance that we too rarely trust.

There is seed enough to lose, and the God who makes the sun to shine and rain

 to fall upon the righteous and unrighteous (Matt 5:45) is indiscriminate

about sharing. Grace is flung and wasted everywhere.

Brian Hiortdahl, The Christian Century06.29.2011

Grace Happens        Rev. Catherine Fransson       Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23   July 10, 2011     

Did you, as I, vacation with friends at Spirit Lake at the foot of Mt. St. Helens before the blast? Did you row on the lake, take pictures of her round snowy dome and, seeking shade, hike through venerable old pine, fir and cedar forests? Then perhaps those images haunted us both when St. Helens stirred to life in 1980 in an earthquake, blew a 250 foot hole through her pristine peak, then spewed her whole north side over 200 square miles of grand landscape.

Fifty seven people died. Seven thousand large animals, deer, elk and bears, were killed, and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of small animals died. In one of the nation’s show places, there was devastation of the largest order.

But not so fast. Unknown to us then, vegetation began to recover immediately from the plants that survived the blast and the dispersal of seeds from beyond the blast zone. Scientists were surprised survivors would be so diverse and widespread. They continue to discover many factors that aid the ongoing recovery, beginning with the season the blast occurred, May, when there was enough snow on the ground to provide water to the tiny animals living underground. Yes, the pocket gopher survived. Deaths of cousin animals provided nutrients to the others. Even the wind-blown spiders floating in on the breeze who died provided organic material that supported the life of other organisms and plants. “With what seems like excruciating patience and persistence, nature transform[ed] a desolate landscape into one capable of supporting life.”

Life persists, right? Look at your yard! As silent, mysterious, and hidden is the germination of a seed in the soil, a plant will surely follow. As silent and hidden is the germination of the realm of God, for which the disciples prayed and for which we continue to pray, the kindom will certainly come.  Even if the sower, as in today’s case, casts seed upon hard-baked earth, into the thorns and on the rocks, seed will settle, send down roots and thrive. Life persists against the greatest odds.

Missing something? Did you not hear what you often hear in this parable? Whenever I’ve heard it before a small knot in my stomach tells me I am being weighed in the balance and found wanting. Even Jesus explains this parable to show it is the quality of the soil on which the seed is thrown that determines whether the seed takes root and thrives. The point is: is your soil plowed, prepared and ready for the seeds of God? Oh oh.

The image is of Christ casting the seeds of grace, offering life with abandon. Seed falls on the rocks, the path, places it’s never likely to grow. Thorns grow up and choke it. Only part of the seed falls on ground good enough to nurture it thirty, sixty or a hundred fold. If we are the ground, it’s a pretty poor prognosis.

But what of this farmer?! How careless he is! In any other context the point of the story would be his foolishness. Nobody sows seed on a path or rocks and expects it to take root. Even I, only a sometime gardener, know that.

Jesus has to explain this parable, the first in Matthew’s gospel, to the disciples. I speak like this because you are my friends, he tells them, and those others are not. You are blessed to be here with me, and blessed because your eyes see, and your ears hear. We speak the same language. I will tell you what I mean because you have already heard my voice and responded. You have risked everything to follow me.

The disciples may be insiders in Galilee, immediately near Capernaum where Jesus’ ministry is, but even they are not sure they get it. And the gospel writer’s interpretation is but one of many that can be made on this illustration. As we try to understand the open-ended meanings of scripture today, it is unwise for us to settle on any one truth. There are many truths here.

So what about this farmer’s carelessness? Flagrantly ineffective, he sows with abandon, appearing not to notice. Seed is a precious commodity. Those of us who plant, do so carefully, working the ground, preparing it, adding nutrients, water, ensuring the seed will find a home where it can settle in to grow. And yet look what happened at Spirit Lake. Destruction everywhere. The land laid waste. The forest felled over acres of ground. The lake full of trees, rocks, ash; polluted with dead marine life. The area was virtually dead.

There is only so much we can do about ensuring a good crop, protecting the environment from natural cataclysm, but paradoxically, that doesn’t matter. A few verses ahead of these, Jesus explains, the sower sows each day and then goes to bed, gets up and does it again. “Through it all the seed sprouts and grows without the sower knowing how it happens.” (4.27) Paul voices a similar truth in his letter to the Corinthians: I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God gave the growth. (1 Cor 3:6) Is the seed is so potent it takes care of itself? Is God so potent we don’t have to worry?

Admit it, we have little control over the ground. We think we have some over the weather, but that is in great dispute and much of the time, we have little control of ourselves. Even the great missionary Paul confessed he could not control himself. He tried to do what he knew was right, and failed. All he could do was recognize his mistakes and begin again. God has no such trouble. God never gives up. In communities like ours we encourage each other to have our hard places plowed, turned over and loosened up, our rocky places named and removed, our shallowness deepened and enriched…in short, we ready each other to begin again.

Since God is sowing the seed and seeing to the growth, then even on hostile, indifferent and unreceptive ground, the seed will not return to God empty. This is a God who spreads love and life recklessly. As silent and mysterious and invisible is the germination of a seed, so is the growth of the kindom for which we pray. Grace simply happens!

Now, I do believe all things work together for good. But I have as much trouble as anyone discerning whatgood will come of whichthings. And when. Anne Lamott comes immediately to mind…”Grace,” she says, “eventually.” Grace…yes. But not exactly when we want it, and sometimes not exactly what we want.

I need help to live this kind of life: friends, wise mentors, a pit crew. I need time, coaching, practice, and forgiveness. Paul Loeb’s collection of essays, The Impossible Will Take a Little While, details people working small projects against great odds, only occasionally successfully. But Vaclav Havel, for example, believed hope “the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” Every effort does not have to turn out. Some of what we try to do in our lives, at this church, in our city and our nation, are simply worth doing not because they turn out, but because they make sense, because they are embodiments of who we are and what we believe. “People are often unreasonable and self-centered,” wrote Mother Teresa. “Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway. If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway. For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.” We do what we think reveals grace because it honors our God. And it casts seed on all sorts of unlikely places. Especially on unlikely places and people.

Rachel Naomi Remen, founder of the mind/body holistic health movement, tells of her father who believed his family always had bad luck. Two things: he went bankrupt and she, his only daughter, had chronic illness, so that seemed true. She tells this story: in 1971 her dad won a prize in the New York State lottery…”more money than my dad had ever seen in his life in one place.” He won it when he was in the hospital recovering from the removal of a–benign–tumor. (luck, yes?) He taped the ticket to his chest and declared no one could be trusted to redeem it for him, not any of his friends or family, not even his wife. For a long time he couldn’t even be persuaded to turn it in. As its deadline approached, he convinced Rachel and her mother not to tell anyone, lest they try to take advantage of them if they knew. Eventually he redeemed the ticket, but he never spent the money because he was afraid others would then know he had it.

Remen said she learned more from what he did than what she so often heard him say. Her father created his luck. But even that didn’t prevent her from growing into the intuitive, healing person that she is.

At Mt. St. Helens some plants survived the blast. Some root remnants were watered by the snowmelt. Prairie Lupine was the first to return, taking nitrogen from the air. The northern pocket gopher survived in her dens and tunnels, pulling down the roots of the lupine for nourishment, pushing rich old forest soil up through the ash to create mounds that caught plant spores lofting in from out of the blast zone. Some thrived there. Some died. Others adapted. Today that unbelievable devastation is slowly healing. Earth healing itself. In time earth will heal itself even of nuclear accident…even if humanity as we know it is severely compromised. Earth does not need us. Indeed, it is we who threaten it. If, instead, we plant, and share the watering, God will give the growth.

Grace happens. In spite of volcanoes, typhoons, tsunamis, and wildfire, life persists. In spite of death life persists. God continues to scatter life and love and growth, health and wisdom and patience day after day after day, year after year. Because of that abundance, we know that life begets life.

“If God exists,” writes Sara Maitland, “she exists as a God who wishes to reveal herself; who labours constantly and complexly in her relationships with the creation, both individual and communal, tossing down clues and invitations and introductory notes here, there and everywhere like an ambitious hostess; a God who yearns to be loved and known and engaged with.”

How can we possibly lose?!

Keeping the Faith

I am loafing in an enjoyably warm, peaceful summer. Were it not for politics, war and my awareness of the inequity and poverty in our own neighborhoods, I would say I was content. But how can I be grateful for status or the wealth of my choices without the guilt that so many others suffer? There is no end of the need for us to be doing as much as we can to influence or correct these ugly realities.

The balance is very difficult to keep. Since Jan. 20, 2017 we get no help from a president who daily cries wolf. Nor freedom from wars and rumors of wars. In an “all hands on deck” mode, who is selfish enough to think our desires could come first?

And for us whose sympathies lie with the least, the last and the left out, who may also be tired, aged, ill or disabled so that, regardless what we do in our prime or what our lasting true gifts are, we do not have energy for the fight against the outrageous, heartbreaking need all around? My heart truly aches for the suffering. I do name them in my prayers. But is that enough?

Eventually, even the best known activists among us take time out. Some shift to mentoring, urging our younger, abler sisters and brothers to find their own passions among those who lack necessities like clean water, healthful groceries, ethical police, and children on our streets day and night.

We can do only what we can do, whatever it is, with God’s help. We plant seeds, water them, and every day, do what we can to lighten these burdens. We cannot “fix” homelessness, but we can decrease its numbers and improve our services. We cannot “fix” the juvenile justice system but we can continue to lobby for compassion and restorative justice. One of these priorities may exactly be your call.

We can imagine the realm of god, what it could look like, and talk about it, pray for it, and nurture faith and hopefulness. But we don’t have to work until we drop. Thomas Merton counsels us not to commit [ourselves] to too many projects, and thus succumb to violence….He continues, The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. [Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander]

Discerning between our rush to help and our need for nurture is our primary, ongoing call. Not to decide is, of course, ironically, to decide. But to rush in every direction at once is to stall immediately. To put ourselves forward as helpers when we don’t have the mental, emotional or physical resilience, is to offer little.

Let’s lighten up and take in some love, friendship, summer laziness, sleeping in or staying up late, and visit the Science Center or a museum or two…not to mention parks, before this gorgeous summer again turns to rain. The world, the nations, and difficult people are always with us.

Cathy Fransson