Gardener

“Let us spent one day as deliberately as nature and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing,” Thoreau says somewhere in Walden. I don’t know if I could spend a whole day as deliberately as nature—I imagine myself as a tree, for example, doing little more than rustling in the wind and engaging in photosynthesis—but Saturday morning I set out to live as deliberately as my two-year-old granddaughter, Corrie. I took her to the College Rec Center and turned her loose. She spent a lot of time running about on the large gymnastics area in one corner of a room—a raised semi-soft surface for exercises and tumbles of all sorts. I sat on the surface and watched her, chased her, caught her and watched her some more. She was blissfully happy and, most of the time, in her own world. After about an hour (I know, if I were living as deliberately as a child, I would not have noticed how long we were there), we wandered into a racquet ball court where about 15 balls of var...

For Peter Vander Muelen and whoever cares about Climate Change: I wonder if any of you at the OSJ have read Bill McKibben's new book Eaarth. McKibben, you may remember, wrote one of the most significant books on global warming, The End of Nature , about 20 years ago--and of course many other fine books on creation/science issues, but Eaarth absolutely knocked me off my feet. In it McKibben paints a picture not of what might happen if we don't act, but of what already has happened: "The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. . . . We may, with commitment and luck, yet be able to maintain a planet that will sustain some kind of civilization, but it won't be the same planet, and hence it can't be the same civilization. The earth that we knew--the only earth that we ever knew--is gone." Now I suppose any of us who has been paying attention, had some sense of this, but his description of what has happened, a summary loaded with document...

I have been walking and jogging in the Dordt Recreation Center about four times a week hoping, I suppose, to add a few “cubits unto my stature” even though scripture tells us clearly that none of us can, by taking thought, add one cubit to his stature or one day to his life. (Actually, when I finish jogging I feel as though I may have subtracted some days from my life.) Since I am usually in pain when I jog, I try to find things to think about that take my mind off the pain, and this morning, as I rounded the curve at the north end of the track, I heard a young woman say to an older couple, “She wants you to pray for her, she’s potty-training her child.” “What?” they shouted. “Pray for her potty-training,” she shouted back. Well, there’s food for thought. Are some things too trivial to pray for? Should we bother God with our pettiest concerns? As I try to think of prayers about trivial subjects that are recorded in scripture, I draw a blank. Hannah prayed for a child, no...

Here’s a statement I hear rather frequently where I live and work: “Well, of course, I’m no ‘tree hugger,’ but . . .” and then follows a mild expression of concern about some part of the creation. For many people in my part of the country, being known as a “tree hugger” is a shameful thing. I’m not sure why they feel this way, but I suspect it grows out of a fear of being identified with people—“radicals”—who have chained themselves to old growth trees in an effort to prevent them from being cut down. Apparently this kind of behavior seems extravagant, all out of proportion, especially since the trees are owned by a company which seems to have the right to do with them whatever it wishes. Or maybe they believe, as one of my students told me, tree-hugging can lead to pantheism. Whatever the reason, “tree hugger” seems to have negative connotations. Wikopedia tells me it is “slang, a sometimes derogatory term for environmentalist.” But most environmentalists are prou...

One of the issues in the just past election that concerned me most was the Iowa Water and Land Legacy Amendment, an amendment that would allocate three-eights of one percent of sales tax to the conservation and maintaining of Iowa's grasslands, wetlands, waterways and forests as well as the conserving of its agricultural soils. To me it seemed like a no-brainer(and apparently to the Iowa Senate also which approved it by a 49-1 vote) since Iowa ranks 47th out of 50 states in conservation spending, has extremely polluted water ways, and is likely to lose more than 230,000 acres of habitat by 2012. Thankfully, the amendment passed, but the majority in my county opposed the amendment. And I can only think of two possible reasons, neither of them very persuasive. Perhaps some voters were opposed to any possible increase in taxes, even 3/8ths of one per cent of sales tax, and even if the money is used for the common good--things like hiking, fishing, hunting, health, and flood protec...

I'm still reading the third volume of C. S. Lewis's Collected Letters (on page 300 with about 1100 pages to go.) Many of the letters are thoughtful responses to his readers--but not necessarily interesting to me. But occasionally one comes upon a letter that is sheer poetry, as this one to a Nell Berners-Price: Dear Nell, I am sorry to hear about your Mother. In a way you were most fortunate to have had her so long (mine died when I was a little boy), yet in another way it probably makes it worse, for you have lived into the period when the relationship is really really reversed and you were mothering her: and of course, the more we have had to do for people the more we miss them--loving goes deeper than being loved. But it must be nice for her. Getting our of an old body into a new life--like stripping off tiresome clothers and getting into a bath--must be a most wonderful experience. And here's another Lewis quote I ran into reading a book on imigration by Soerens and...

Major league baseball has given us two morality tales this season, one heart-warming, one unsettling, both profound. The first was the almost “perfect” game thrown by Detroit Tiger pitcher Armando Galarraga. With two outs in the ninth inning of that game, a hard hit ground ball resulted in a close play at first base and umpire Jim Joyce called the runner safe. So Galarraga lost his perfect game. However most observers saw that the runner was clearly out—and TV replays gave concrete visible evidence to the fact. Here was a situation ripe for harsh language, bitterness, and recrimination on one side and stonewalling defensiveness on the other. But it did not come—at least not from the two key players in this little drama, Galarraga and Joyce. Galarraga’s immediate response was a shy, incredulous smile, followed a short time later by the comment that nobody’s perfect and everybody makes a mistake from time to time. Joyce admitted he had blown the call, apologized personally to Gala...