Belonging in the Garden

I’m not sure when the last time was that I was so glad for a dreary day but I really am, trust me. I am sure I am incredibly grateful that daylight savings time is over and I can go back to sleeping on the earth’s schedule. Hallelujah! I’m also grateful for the current atmospheric river (weather people have such fun names now, when I was a boy we called it “rain”), which has been greening my lawn and thinning out the autumn leaves for a few days now. Yesterday I pulled out my tomatoes and peppers, harvesting any late season fruit to ripen indoors. So, now I can put away the tomato cages and the fences that keep critters out of my vegetable garden. Tomorrow, when it stops raining, I will make a trip around the flower gardens clipping any buds (there are buds on all the roses and the dahlias), which I will hope will bloom indoors. It’s going to freeze tomorrow night or the next night, and then that will be that for the gardens (except for the arugula, thank goodness, which is just delighted at the cold and dark and rain).

I have gardened one way or another all of my life, but I don’t think I have been this close to nature since I was a kid living in Hawaii, where like Oregon, nature is essentially inescapable. I love the rhythm of it, and I love the fascination of the flowers and fruits. We have a fig tree at the end of the driveway and I tug off a bowl of them every few days; they’re terrific. I feel like I’m getting away with something eating food I didn’t haul home for $60 from a store!

So there is something, some sort of message from creation, in that feeling. It is almost like a sort of secret plot—”water us and clear the weeds and feed us once in awhile and we’ll delight you for months”—something like that.

There also is some sort of hidden gay thing in it too. Again, I can’t really put a finger on it, as it were. I remember when I first had my own house in Urbana, Illinois; I would be out planting around and it guys riding by on bikes would stop and chat me up. I’m sure they all were avid gardeners. Later, in Philadelphia, I actually met most of my gay friends by admiring their work in little pocket gardens on corners here and there in the Spruce Hill neighborhood where we first lived, and some of them would drop by and help me get accustomed to the soil and hills and the felonious fellow citizens who would steal plants unless you wired the roots to cinder blocks before planting them.

Community emerged from this shared experience of creation, and I think it made us all feel like we belonged in a way being gay men didn’t usually make us feel socially. Of course this all was happening in the beginning of the AIDS pandemic when we had to learn new ways of socializing. So I guess it makes sense that one of the delights of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the growth of social media groups like “bears in the garden” and “gay gardeners” and the newer “bears in the kitchen” where a cross section of gay men check in daily for support and advice and, of course, those much-sought “likes.” Back in July I broke the soufflé dish I hadn’t used in years—my husband had given it to me when we first were together four decades ago because he “always wanted a boyfriend who made soufflés.” Embarrassed, I bought a new one, and promptly made a cheese soufflé for dinner, and posted the pictures. I was humbled at the loving supportive response.

So where am I going with all this? Rain, time, winter, gardens, cooking, yes. But also, social acceptance, social support, belonging—all active forms of loving, all examples of walking in love, and still more so examples of healing, the sort of healing Jesus brought wherever he went. He helped people shift their reality into the dimension of love, which in turn brought them back to belonging, which in turn allowed them to walk in love. We see this formula over and over in his parables—person(s), problem, resolution, healing, thanksgiving, or, belonging as the shift into the dimension of love.

In today’s scripture Haggai prophesies (1:15b-2:9) that God’s spirit always remains among us, which is after all the spirit of belonging made manifest in the splendor of creation. Paul writes to the Thessalonians (2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17) to remind them that they were chosen by God to be “the first fruits for salvation” which they receive by shifting into the dimension of Christ through “the proclamation of the good news.” In Luke (20:27-38) Jesus answers satirical questions about marriage and resurrection by reminding the crowd that those who have found the dimension of love have eternal life, belonging “like angels and … children of God, being children of the resurrection.” God is “[God] of the living; for to [God] all of them are alive.”

PostScript

For readers who are citizens of the United States, Tuesday is election day. If you haven’t voted yet, please remember to do so on Tuesday. Please remember that voting is the most essential act of love we can perform as citizens of God.

Proper 27 Year C 2022 RCL (Haggai 1:15b-2:9; Psalm 145:1-5, 18-22; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38)

©2022 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.