Near God's Heart

                       

                       The kiss of the sun for pardon,

The song of the birds for mirth—

One is nearer God’s heart in a garden

Than anywhere else on earth.

The vegetable and flower gardens over which my maternal grandparents, James and Mary Bohaty, presided were marked by a metal plaque bearing those words. There is nothing unusual about that. Very similar plaques are in gardens everywhere. This one graced my mother’s garden after Grandma’s death, and now it is at the edge of our poor excuse for one. I know one of our daughters will get it after we are gone. They are both gardeners.

The Bohatys national origin was Bohemian. Grandpa was born in this country of immigrant parents. Grandma (Mary Fajrajzl, but soon, Frazel) came here as a child with her family in 1901 from a small, rural village southwest of Prague. Gardening was in the Bohaty and the Frazel blood, and Jim and Mary gardened until they could do it no longer, both living into their 90s.

Significantly, they practiced organic gardening decades before most people had ever heard of it. Grandma did not believe in eating anything whose ingredients she could not identify—“chemicals,” she called them. Sometime in the 1950s they traded in their Mercury for a Nash Rambler, something my family found amusing, if not foolish. The Bohatys found great satisfaction in economy and simplicity.

In my youngest memories, they were not church goers. My mother always said they did not go to church because Catholicism was impressed upon them by the Hapsburg Empire, of which the Bohemian/Czech lands were a part. They came to America to escape oppression, religious and political.

Our family, on the other hand, were regulars in worship and at all other activities in the our local Presbyterian Church. We were Presbyterians because, somewhat ironically, my grandparents sent all three of their children to Sunday School at the Riverside, Illinois, Presbyterian Church. They themselves did not go to church, but apparently they felt their children could benefit from the moral education provided by a church—as long as it was not Catholic.

When I was young, I did not fully understand or accept people not going to church. It was hard for me to believe there were people who were not church-goers. I was not so concerned about the eternal fate of their souls as I was mystified by where they found direction and friendships in this life.

And so when I was old enough to read and understand the lines about God’s heart posted in the Bohaty garden, I wondered: How can my grandparents know anything about “God’s heart” if they never go to church? Why wasn’t a garden just a garden to them?

Of course, my mistake was in thinking God was only found in church and through church. It took me longer than it probably should have to fully appreciate the diversity of locales and situations in which people experience God.

I also did not know about the spiritual/mystical relationship between human beings and the natural world expressed artistically in late 19th and early 20th century Romanticism’s embrace of nature. In my twenties I began to understand how European composers, writers, poets, painters, and the like often found their inspiration in nature, and celebrated—almost worshipped it—in their works.

My hunch now is that the less-obviously creative masses of the population had the same feelings about nature, even if they did not leave records of it for our enjoyment.

Unless you take seriously the seasonal art that is gardening. Maybe in tilling and tending the earth to produce delicious food and gorgeous flowers they expressed themselves as surely as did the much better known artists.

Perhaps that is why, in their garden, my grandparents felt themselves to be near God’s heart.

Although these four lines remind me especially of both of my maternal grandparents, it calls to mind my grandmother in particular. Hers was a quiet, non-confrontational, calming sort of presence. “Long-suffering” is too strong a descriptor. Perhaps “receptive” is better for a woman who took things in and accepted them in her own way, a way that I have never fully understood. Perhaps like her namesake who was Jesus’s mother, she was able to “let it be” when it was best to do so. She wasn’t a pushover; she worked hard, served her family well, and even pushed back when Grandpa Bohaty got too paternalistic. But I can feel her accepting the sun’s kiss as pardon enough, and birds’ songs as mirth enough for her life. For her, her garden was church; and God’s heart was found there more than anywhere else on earth.

Sometime during my late childhood, the Bohatys began to attend a Unitarian church, which seemed almost as mysterious to me as attending no church at all. Very late in their lives, when they moved to the town my parents lived in, they became Presbyterians, though I have no idea how they understood that move beyond just being in church with my parents. And my mother noted that near the end of her life, Grandma started crossing herself when they said grace around the table. Somehow, through gardens, and by way of unitarian and trinitarian Protestant churches, she came back to where she’d started.

A couple of weeks ago I saw this same sign in a neighbor’s yard. That set me to wondering about the origin of the verse. It is the 4th stanza of a 5-stanza poem entitled God’s Garden by Englishwoman Dorothy Frances Gurney, whose other claim upon posterity is the wedding hymn, O Perfect Love. I will not share God’s Garden here. It is easily found on the web.

I will report that it is a religious poem which begins in the Garden of Eden and ends in the Garden of Gethsemane, where, it asserts, Jesus broke His heart for us.

Jesus broke for us the heart that is pardon, the heart that is mirth. The heart that is God’s, for others, like Grandma Bohaty’s.

Did she know the entire poem? I will never know, but I can imagine stanza 4 resonating inside of her, and I feel her with me when I feel the kiss of the sun and hear the songs of the birds, always near God’s heart.

Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital's Police (for no good reason)

 

Downsizing Our U.S.A.

Several years ago my wife and I downsized our home, discarding many things that had been ours for decades. We were moving into a smaller home, appropriate to our age and abilities. Such downsizing is a common practice for our generation.

Today’s Republican Party is leading our United States into downsizing, even though we are not old as nations go. We are shedding much of what we have picked up during the last two and a half centuries, even some of what we claimed was ours at our founding.

Republicans under Donald Trump seem to think our country is weary of its life, and no longer able to muster the energy to imagine and live beyond the present moment.

Have we tired of the rule of law, and the equality of all people before that law? Does it take too much energy to respect one another and appropriately constituted authority? Are we weary of protecting religious pluralism, and of encouraging the unfettered search for truth in science and the humanities? Are we so shriveled inside our thin skins that we cannot tolerate diversity of personal expression and artistic experimentation? Does age-related ringing in our ears make it hard for us to sort out political tensions as they are reported to us by a free and responsible press?

The Republican right legislates and budgets as if we no longer have the resources to assure basic necessities of life for our poor, or health care for our sick, or opportunities for those who have long been excluded.

The party of the right downsizes our understanding of who we are when it denigrates the millions of us who are not of European heritage. If it cannot deport them, it can and will end programs and policies that might allow them to participate fully in our economic and social abundance. It is as if we tried that kind of idealistic thing when we were young, but now we are old, and we really don’t care any longer about anyone but us and our kind.

We shrink back from the rest of the world, and forego long-established treaties and alliances, often in favor of regimes the likes of which the United States has spent the last 80 years resisting. Relationships of mutual trust are bullied into transactional deals, reducing ourselves to one more player among many. It was hard work being the leader we once were; let someone else take the reins.

We abandon our history by insisting its telling be scrubbed of anything that does not make us look good—like a funeral elegy in which it is not polite to tell the whole truth.

When my wife and I downsized our possessions, we did not give up who we are at heart. But that is what is happening to our country under this administration and its enablers. An impoverished hard-right leadership is trashing the very things that have made us a truly great nation, casting aside values and promises that can never be reclaimed or restored. Loud boasting about our greatness will never regain what we have given up.

Our republic does not have to end this way. We can challenge the agents of our downsizing by renewing our commitment to what made the world take notice of us in the first place—our love of liberty and justice for all. Each of us can choose at least one ideal, practice, or person to stand up for in public. We can send the naysayers on the right packing, and reclaim our heart.

Independence Day, 2025

On national holidays I plant two 12 by 18-inch Americans flags in amongst the flowers in front of our house. I will plant them tomorrow morning, on the Fourth of July, our Independence Day, 2025. But it won’t be easy.

I know: some Americans are celebrating where the Republican administration and congress and, I feel, Supreme Court are leading us. But I am among the dissenters who disapprove of where we are being taken, who feel it is a betrayal of the best of our values, ideals, and practice of self-government. So I am tempted not to fly our flag tomorrow.

But I am not going to do that. In part because, I would not have liked it had someone done the same, for example, when the Democrats were in positions to govern. But more importantly, because I am an American and I want everyone to know it.

I have a claim on and stake in this nation, and honestly believe we can do better—much better—for the good of all of us than does the law the President will sign tomorrow. I will continue to make my aspirations for our nation known as long as I am able. 

Tomorrow we celebrate the 249th birthday of our nation. But we were not really free to be that nation until several years later after a bloody war. It took a fight not only to liberate us from Great Britain’s rule, but also to be free to constitute a nation whose government, as Abraham Lincoln famously put it, would be of the PEOPLE, by the PEOPLE, and for the PEOPLE! 

In the end, I will plant my flags tomorrow for you and for me and for all of us people, and in the fervent hope that one day, the people willing, we will once again aspire to be a nation where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are real possibilities for us all.

The good old days of working together

This afternoon, while our U.S. Senators squabbled in Washington, I rode my bicycle along 13.5 miles of the towpath trail in our wonderful Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It was a beautiful day, and I was deeply thankful I was here rather than there.

CVNP was created out of mostly privately-owned land through the joint efforts of Republicans and Democrats some 50 years ago. (It was the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area at first.) If this land had not been protected by our Federal Government, today it would no doubt be packed with as many homes, businesses, and perhaps even factories as its rugged terrain could bear, all tied together by endless strands of concrete and asphalt. Instead, it is 33,000 acres of natural beauty stretching between Cleveland and Akron, offering easy escape to some sense of wildness to millions of people.

I could not help but wonder if such cooperation as created our park would be at all possible today. Frankly, I doubt it. Seemingly gone forever are politicians who want to work together for the honest public good, not for who can gain or exploit what from whom.

Cuyahoga Valley National Park could not happen today. Who knows when someone will find an excuse to undermine it, given the trajectory we are on? It's one more reason I shudder for our nation's future.

Tell the truth? Someone may be listening!

 

This sign is now posted at our nearby Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Makes me wonder how the Native American guide we had several years ago at Little Bighorn National Monument is faring. If she's not unemployed already, she soon will be. Makes me angry.

Deportation by the Numbers

Fox News reports this morning that President Trump has ordered ICE to “‘expand efforts to detain and deport’ illegal immigrants in ‘America’s largest [c]ities,’ including Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.”

Trump is quoted, “ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” He further justified the effort as “fulfilling our Mandate to the American People.” (Did he mean from the American people?)

When the LA demonstrations were at their peak, I began a piece offering my opinion that, when it comes to immigration enforcement, quotas are the problem, referring to the demand that ICE arrest for deportation at least 3,000 people a day. An enforcement quota strongly pushes officers to round up as many people as possible, with little regard to their individual circumstances, in order to meet the quota. Trump’s Truth posting today confirms the fact that this whole thing is about politics, and nothing else.

Adding to it is the fact that he has now ordered ICE to ease up on the agricultural and hospitality industries, and to focus on urban areas largely populated by Democrats. It is patently obvious that the President is serving his own interests (votes from rural areas and money for his hotels and resorts) rather than the nation’s, something he instinctively does with almost everything he touches.

I am reasonably certain that the majority of Americans support the fair application of our laws when it comes to immigration enforcement, as flawed as many believe those laws to be. There was a chance to make these laws more just and tailored to current realities before the last election, but candidate Trump advocated not passing that bill. Doing so would not have served his need to keep the immigration pot boiling.

Deportation by the numbers and over-the-top responses to protests both make Donald Trump look strong. But behind that look there hides an extremely insecure man, and many are suffering and compromising their integrity in order to bolster his poor sense of self-worth.