Volunteer Tomato Gives All

During the summer I’ve subjected my Facebook friends to a short series of photos of a volunteer Roma tomato plant that had taken up residence in a window well on the south side of our house. For posterity’s sake, I will now commit (and finish) this story into the permanence of cyberspace on my Coeli et Terra blog.

In early summer I noticed, through the plastic cover over that window well, a huge green leafy mass filling the space. I removed the cover, and there, much to my surprise, was a somewhat bedraggled tomato plant in need of water and air. I carefully freed its vines and tied them to a stake, later adding adding two more stakes. I put this picture on Facebook...

Someone wondered if a volunteer tomato could/would produce fruit.  It was teasing me with blossoms. ”We’ll see,” I said. From time to time I watered the plant. That was about the extent of my contribution to its health and productivity. By September its fruit was growing under the thick foliage, but it was so thick I had no idea how much fruit might be there. As the tomatoes ripened they tended to fall into the well, making them very hard to retrieve. I practice defensive harvesting, picking tomatoes before they were fully ripe, when I could find them. Harvest was the hardest part of the whole story.

By October I had picked and/or retrieved quite a few tomatoes, and they were beautiful. When I posted this picture and wondered what to do with all the still-green tomatoes on the vines, people suggested fried green tomatoes and Kosher dill tomatoes.

The plant was beginning to look a little tired. It had worked very hard in the hot sun for three long months. It still hid most of its bounty from me, I being afraid to paw through the vines too much out of fear of breaking them.

On October 29, Frankenstorm’s rain falling and winds picking up, I decided tomato-growing season was over. With regret I cut and yanked out the vines, pulled the remaining tomatoes off, and replaced the cover over the window well. Maxine counted 70 tomatoes of various sizes and stages of ripeness. I think my volunteer tomato produced at least 100 tomatoes this year.

That for which I did nearly nothing did very well. The tomatoes I nurtured from seeds nearly died and didn’t produce a thing because I had no idea what I was doing. The hot house plants I put out in my garden did just okay...maybe 30 tomatoes from about 6 plants.

But the one that was a gift to me and that I just let be...that plant out-produced them all at least three-fold. Sounds like some parables I’ve heard somewhere.

Discovery

At the start of Sunday afternoon’s walk in my familiar South Chagrin Metropark, I obeyed a notion to take a trail I had never taken before. It was by no means a brave decision. I know that park; I am well-oriented to it; it isn’t far to a paved road from anywhere in it .

Still, I felt a certain thrill, a moment of anticipation: what would I experience on that unfamiliar route to some assured destination?

The trail was slightly obscured by the season’s leaves, and required a muddy detour around a fallen tree. After just ten minutes or so I came to a picnic pavilion I knew. A man was addressing a large gathering inside. He seemed to be giving instructions.

From there I took off on another new-to-me trail. It wasn’t difficult, and I enjoyed what I saw and smelled and touched. I loved the new experience.

When I reached a paved path, I saw small groups of walkers huddled around sheets of instructions. From one group I overheard a discussion of whether they would next try to find “number 45” or “number 36.” Another group was debating how to get to the bridge whose boards they were to count. I am sure they were on a scavenger hunt that had set out from that pavilion. Like me, they were no doubt walking new trails and seeing new things.

True explorers push into wildernesses whose only trails may be those of animals. They also strike out through dense green undergrowth or across trackless deserts or snow fields. The earliest humans probably explored such places with little sense of where they fit in to any bigger picture. Later, compasses and other navigation gear told them their direction, if not their destination.

Now we rarely explore anything without being quite sure how we will get there and where we will end up. Few of us ever explore what’s totally unknown, maybe because there’s precious little that’s totally unknown available to us.

So we follow paths new to us, but which others have laid out, enjoying the path we are on until we come to what we know. Or we follow directions toward specific outcomes and, focused on our goals, pay little attention to the path itself.

Do any of us dare dream of being first to blaze a new trail to a wholly new destination? Probably not.

Still, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able both to appreciate our own journey and to anticipate its end? Wouldn’t it be fulfilling to absorb completely both our progress toward and our discovery of the purpose life holds for us?

Turnpike "Evangelism"

In the men’s room of an Ohio Turnpike rest stop I recently heard the good news. Sort of.

As I faced the row of urinals, a man’s voice from behind me – from near the row of lavatories – rose above the other sounds echoing off the tile walls. He was preaching. This is what I remember of his words:

“‘Gospel’ is the good news of the love of Jesus for you. You cannot ever understand his love, or know why he has chosen you to receive it. All you can do is believe it.”

Then his tone changed.

“I don’t know why you said and did what you said and did to me. It hurt me a lot, but I forgive you. The love of Jesus is stronger than anything that happens. He has forgiven me, so I can forgive you. You must accept him and trust him with your life today, and you will receive eternal life from him.”

I lingered a moment longer, not sure if I wanted to turn around and see who was preaching to whom.

When the person to whom the man was apparently speaking said nothing in reply, the preacher concluded his sermon:

“The tragic thing is: the bulk of humanity will reject Jesus and spend eternity burning in hell.”

I finally turned, walked toward the lavatories, and snuck a furtive glance. Who had been involved in this attempt at evangelism on that early evening just off the Ohio Turnpike?

Two men - one black, one white - stood facing each other. I assumed, perhaps from the way he had been talking, that the speaker was the white man, but I could be wrong about that. I washed and dried my hands, looking straight into the mirror in front of me, and made for the door.

As I waited for my wife, the white man came out of the restroom. If I had to guess I’d say he was a truck driver, based upon the the way he was dressed...but again, I could be wrong. The black man did not leave while I waited.

Questions: If you have to believe something given to you that you will never understand in order to be saved, why would anyone be condemned for not believing? And why does such good news for one have to be bad news for the many?

Maybe this news isn’t so good after all.

Debate Post Mortem #879716537789786767

Wrote the following to a friend whose brother produces calbuzz.com, and who commented on last night’s debate. Check that out before you read this and it will all make perfect sense.

“Unfortunately, I think your brother is right. The real problem is the whole way these things are conducted and carried out, with no respect either for the public or for the rules. For the public because neither candidate can stand simply to answer a question without trying to tell us how to respond to that answer. For the rules because the time limit is something to be ignored if the one answering the question wants to wander into whatever far country seems to beckon. I am so tired of hearing "talking points" repeated over and over again. I do not know much about the people who "prepare" their candidates for these events, but if I were doing it I'd tell them just to answer the question as simply yet as fully as they can and let it be. Don't they trust us to judge for ourselves whether we like their answer? I'd vote for (almost) anyone would do that.

“All that having been said, I think Romney played the "bully" in this (Maxine says that's too strong a word) and pushed Jim Lehrer into the street the way a kid might attack an old man. That in itself said quite a bit to me about his respect for another person trying to do a job. I wonder if anyone in the media has commented on that.

“Obama has to get himself up for the remaining debates. Or is he simply too tired to give it his best? He has to be a candidate AND a president; Romney just has to be a candidate. There must be times when Barack says to Michelle, "Sometimes I wonder why the Hell I'm putting me and our family through all this for another four years of constant attack and criticism." (And maybe when the date was suggested he should have said, “No that’s our wedding anniversary.”) But then, after he wonders to Michelle and she wonders with him, he has to stand up and deliver. Otherwise he will give it all away. Makes me think of how LeBron played his last games for the Cavs.

“Shoot...I should have put all that on my blog; maybe I will.”

Well, I did.

BTW: If you care  to learn more about how I am voting, go back and read my September 8 post. (Last night’s debate didn’t begin to change my mind.) Interestingly, it is the least read of all my little-read posts, about which I tell folks mostly through Facebook, which says to me that my Facebook friends don’t care how I will vote and may mean pushing politics endlessly on Facebook may be counterproductive and risk friendships. Whew!

Modest Expectations of Great Things

There shall be showers of blessing;

Showers of blessing we need.

Mercy drops ’round us are falling,

But for the showers we plead.

I sang this old gospel song on a recent visit to Iowa, and it surely spoke a tantalizing hope to the drought-weary farmers in the congregation. By that August Sunday any showers that might come were likely too late to make much difference in this season’s crops. But they would, if they were sufficient, give hope for next year. In drought, a few drops of rain evaporate in the dust they stir up; what’s needed for a blessing are steady, gentle showers.

The song and its refrain have come into my mind at unexpected moments ever since. And I’ve wondered about the yearning for spiritual showers, which is the kind of showers the song is really about.

A shower of the spirit can wash away sin and guilt, of course; it can signal the arrival of new possibilities. But it can also, if it comes "too much-too fast" cloud truth about ourselves, make us feel superior to others, or justify our ongoing wrong-headedness. A shower can impair our vision, as anyone who has driven into a sudden thunderstorm knows. I am cautious around spiritual showers.

I do think sometimes I need to be more aware of and grateful for the drops of mercy - the forgiveness, the love, the peace, the justice - that fall around me every day. I need to reach out my hand or stick out my tongue and feel and taste the smaller mercies that are all around me, and worry less about the supposedly greater blessings that are not. I might learn that a few well-placed and gratefully-received mercy drops are all I need...and all I need to offer to others. Just learning that could be blessing enough.

And furthermore, I plan to vote for _____, because...

Fairly complete honesty forces me to admit that as far as I can tell, when it comes to “truth telling” at conventions (see my previous blog), the Democrats are only slightly better than the Republicans. I don’t know if they told any outright lies like Paul Ryan’s story of the GM plant, but their “shadings” of fact and of what actually happened and when and as the result of whose deeds and misdeeds seem to have followed close on those of the their counterparts in Tampa. Pilate was whispering his eternal question in speakers’ ears in both arenas.

(By the way, the most annoying thing the Democrats did last week was insert “God” into their platform. That was a cheap shot at the Holy One, worthy of another blog, maybe someday.)

I think a purist mind in politics is impossible to maintain. I excuse no one; since I am a Democrat most of the time I’d like to see that party do better. I even emailed someone at the Convention’s web site and chastised them not only for their misrepresentations but also for their silence on deficit/debt issues. Their response? “Send money to US!”

I think two things:

1) Politics is about deciding who you believe, even when they are not telling the truth. Put more baldly, it’s about whose lies you want to believe and whose half-truths you want to trust.

2) In the end, we rely on promises made in campaigns to capture our votes. That’s not as small as it sounds, because the promises politicians make are enfolded in the narrative they tell about and the vision and hope they have for our nation…and,

…at the end of these two weeks, I think the Democrats tell the truer overall narrative: we got into trouble economically because of the poor stewardship of our nation’s finances during Republican administrations (particularly W’s), and because of the deregulation of financial institutions the Republicans constantly push for. It’s really hard to deny those facts, and they are recurring facts.

Further I think the Democrats have a corner on the hope and vision thing: they more widely represent the wild and often unwieldy and marvelous human diversity of our nation, and are therefore far more likely to govern in a way that keeps us together rather than tears us apart. And, very important to me, I think the only real chance of our facing up to the environmental crisis is, for now, in the hands of the Democrats, small as that chance is.

And since I generally want to believe Democrats (whether they are in fact always truthful or not), and since I generally much prefer their vision for our nation over that of the Republicans, I will vote for Obama/Biden and (here in Ohio) for Senator Sherrod Brown.

There you have it.

And the Truth Is...

Paul Ryan’s apparent “mis-statements” in his speech to the Republican National Convention are disturbing and revealing. It’s hard to believe that he was able to tell the story about the GM plant in his own hometown in a speech that had been carefully (presumably) written and reviewed by a reliable team, and then even more carefully rehearsed, without someone, sometime, saying, “Hey, that didn’t happen! You can’t use that story!”

Hard to believe, but not in politics.

Some 2000 years ago a Roman governor named Pontius Pilate faced a particularly dicey decision about executing an innocent man because the polls on the street indicated the public wanted him dead. When Pilate’s detainee started talking about truth, and claimed that those who are committed to the truth listen to him, Pilate sneered the question, “What is truth?” (Read the Gospel of John 18:33-38 in the Christian Bible for the original story.)

Pilate sneered (better, spat out) that question because his political instincts were perfect: whether you are seeking to slay the innocent or to defeat your opponent, precious “truth” must not stand in your way. As he spoke Wednesday night, Mr. Ryan was apparently deafened to the voice of that man who stood before Pilate. Yet he makes loud claims to be one of his followers.

Years ago I heard some wag suggest “the homiletical theory of truth,” which is: “A statement or story is true in direct proportion to its usefulness in preaching.” If it works, present it as truth, even if it isn’t. And the better it works, the truer it surely is. Preachers in pulpits and politicians behind podiums are subject to very similar temptations when it comes to truth-telling. And the claims of politicians who sound like preachers require our most critical scrutiny.

UPDATE: I turned off Mitt Romney after he told us Paul Ryan loves his mother. Maybe he does...but that doesn’t excuse his lying about his home town...also makes me wonder...but it’s unkind to wonder that...