Gardener

Yes, Mason, I’m calling to ask Mr. King to oppose cuts to programs for the poor in the United States and in sub-Saharan Africa. To cut these programs is to say, “Let’em die" to millions of children and I know that Mr. King is pro-life and therefore . . . . What’s that? I don’t understand? When Mr. King says “pro-life” he means anti-abortion? Well, I understand that, Mason, but surely if he opposes the deaths of unborn children he would also oppose the deaths of born children. I see, yes, umhmm. So then it’s using tax money to save the lives of born children that Mr. King opposes? Un huh, so he thinks that churches and private charities are more efficient. Well, I suppose they might be, but does Mr. King think that five hundred dollars efficiently spent on the poor by the church will do more good than five million spend somewhat less efficiently by the government? What’s that? It’s too complicated for me to understand? You mean I’m just too dumb to grasp Mr. King’s pro-life ...

I made some disparaging remarks about the word spiritual in my last blog, and I suppose it was because I don't really understand what we mean by the word. What is a spiritual life? I know God is Spirit and I believe that the Holy Spirit in some mysterious way lives in me. But all that seems so inexplicable. Here's a quotation from Rob Mull's review of David Eaglelman's book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain: Many of the functions we ascribe to our core selves are dependent upon our brain functions. We're realizing how dependent our sense of ourselves is on our biology and its interaction with the environment. . . . We often talk as if we are separable from our bodies. Futurists want to download their thoughts and live forever online. Some faithful Christians look forward to discarding their shell of a body in favor of a spritual life in heaven. But if we could separate our thoughts and memories, even our sense of self, from our bodies, we would discover that ...

“How I have loved my physical life,” says old Pastor Ames in the novel Gilead . It is the kind of observation only an elderly person is likely to make. When one is young, he thinks he will always be as quick and nimble as he is at that moment, and therefore he cannot really reflect on how he loves his physical life. It would be like saying “How I have loved breathing.” Only after one has lost some of his physical abilities, can he come to a conclusion like that of Pastor Ames. But I’m 69 years old. I can say it using that present-perfect verb: How I have loved my physical life. Virtually all of it. (I have just enough pain to make me relish the fact that I’m usually pain free.) The great love of my youth was basketball. In high school I could never get my basketball shoes and jockstrap on quick enough before practices or games, couldn’t wait to get out there. It was all fun—the wind sprints, the shooting drills, running up and down the court shooting lay-ups at a hundred miles an hour....

One of the foundational tenets of my existence can be summarized in a line from a great old hymn from the 12th century written by Bernard of Clairvaux, “O Jesus Joy of Loving Hearts”: “From fullest bliss that earth imparts, we turn unfilled to the again.” I suppose I have been learning the truth of it my whole life, but I remember distinctly the moment when I knew in my bones the truth of this line from St. Bernard. I had had a really marvelous experience on a singing tour/mission trip to Puerto Rico, but then, reflecting on the experience, I felt a sort of emptiness, a longing for something else, a need for a new high. We live in the Shadowlands, C. S. Lewis said, and he meant by that, I believe, that our joys in this life are always muted by the knowledge that beyond the joy lies pain, death, loss. Yet even while muting the happiness, this knowledge contributes to it, for the happiness we feel is due in part to the underlying knowledge we have that it is transitory—the party will end...

Mary Oliver says in her poem “The Summer Day”: I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With you one wild and precious life? It strikes me that this “paying attention” is one of the chief parts of praise—and prayer, as Oliver suggests. Marilyn Robinson’s central character in Gilead, Pastor John Ames, also pays attention, and while Oliver pays attention to the natural world, Pastor Ames, again and again, finds the behavior of people a source of delight and praise. He says, “When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the “I” whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or “want,” and whose object can be “someone” or “nothing” and it ...