Pruning, Part 1

A cluster of three pecans on the tree | photo by Karen Miedrich-Luo

The Pecan branch cracked and whined as it split and peeled from the very healthy tree in our back yard. The leaves were green and glossy and the large pecans were voluminous. It was overladen with fruit, full to breaking, and it took my husband two hours to cut it so the trash truck would haul it away. The one branch was a good twenty feet long and each branching finger held dozens of thumb-sized pecans. It never occurred to me to prune a healthy tree. Last year we felled a dead Pecan and also pulled a seven-foot seedling growing too close to the fence. The seedling sheltered a large Azalea which was then left to bake in the hot August sun. No matter how much we watered, it baked to a crisp. Our neglect, even when everything seems healthy, has unintended consequences.

I have a tendency to become overripe with the many things I learn along this path. Blessed by God's gifts and the fruits of His labor in my soul, I often forget to prune or water or fertilize the seedlings He plants. I wait for the harvest, but for my own enjoyment.

I need, and was created to need, God, and I communicate with God through prayer and He communicates with me through Scripture, yet, I am most blessed when I release what I learn. The Psalmist declares that the person who delights in God's law is like a tree planted by streams of water which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither (Ps. 1:2-3). But if I don’t properly care for the tree, the healthy growth cracks with overripe fruit; the seeds find their way to the ground, but I am damaged. I imagine that pruning might prevent the breakage, but it certainly seems counter-intuitive. I tend to be a “live and let live” person. If something appears healthy, I let it be, but things are not always what they seem.

The story of Hagar caught my attention while slow-reading in Genesis this year. Hagar was Sarah's maidservant and when Sarah lost hope that God would give her the promised son, she devised a plan to use Hagar as a surrogate mother. The plan worked, Hagar birthed Ishmael between Sarah's knees, and the boy was raised as Abraham's son. But then the promised son came through Sarah and Ishmael taunted the young boy, Isaac. Sarah demanded that both Ishmael and Hagar be banished from the family inheritance. Abraham cast them both into the desert with few provisions even though it was against the moral law of the day to cast out a slave and her children. (F. LaGard Smith, The Narrated Bible in Chronological Order.)  Abraham prayed about it, but God released Abraham to do as Sarah demanded. Why? At first reading this seems so very heartless and even the Godless tribes of the surrounding lands recognized it as such. But it wasn't heartless in God's grand plan.

In the desert, dying of thirst, Hagar cried out to God and God responded. God spoke to Hagar through an angel who comforted her and promised that the boy would father a nation. God spoke to a slave woman. It was Hagar who later found a wife for Ishmael. She was free to do that! God pruned her from Abraham's household and gave her freedom and a promise to pass on to Ishmael.

(This post first appeared at Write/Create and is no longer available.)

Convergences

Mural art in Chinatown, San Francisco

This morning I scheduled a grooming appointment for sweet Caspian, who no longer smells of coconut. He needs to, it's the year of the dog.

This morning I built a chair to go around our kitchen table; one of six we bought from a big box store that requires its customers to do all the work, including assembling the product.

This morning a kind mentor waits for her husband to endure five hours of brain surgery which will set the stage for a surgical implant that will reduce the ravaging tremors brought on by Parkinson's disease.

This morning is an odd convergence of Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day; the slick marketing of a martyred saint into an economic orgy of card-swapping and flower-power and chocolates, paired with the six-week long observance of Christ's impending death and resurrection, marked by fasting and reflection. Yesterday was Fat Tuesday, another slick marketing of orgies from who knows where, to sate the bodily cravings with engorgement in preparation for the long fast. More chocolates, please. More flowers, too. Throw the beads in the air and where they land, I don't care.

This morning also marks the great migration home of a billion Chinese to their family of origin, like a swarm of bees in search of their queen. This year, the year of the dog, marks many shifts in this great swath of humanity which craves security and craves protection from a big brother more than happy to oblige. More chocolates, please. More flowers, too.

This day I will receive the imposition of the ashes as a prayer for my friend and for humility in the light of a resurrected Messiah. I will also indulge in the steak my sweet husband will cook for his family tonight, his message of love with a fist full of chocolates and flowers. More please.

And come Saturday, we will celebrate this year of the dog with friends from far away, friends who could not migrate home. This year of red, blue moons and other odd convergences are one more way to participate in the mysteries of God's goodness in the middle of a strange, messed up world.

In the beginning

The Golden Gate Bridge in Fog, November 2017

On January 4, I began reading from the New International Version (NIV) of The Narrated Bible in Chronological Order:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

Stop. The earth was formless and empty and dark. This is me. This is the way I feel in my darkest moments; the way I sense things as I grow older and my vision lessens and my memories dim like a fog settling over a town. I know there are alleys and paths I can follow, but sometimes I get lost as soon as I start down one way and then the map in my mind crumples and tears. The brain fog, the slower step, the deep stillness of thoughts without words, these are common woes, maybe depression, maybe just poor sleep. (I still have the presence of mind to worry these common beads!) In whatever form, it is a diminishing. And the waters, yes. Sometimes you feel like you are drowning in them.

Where are the waters? I used to think they were on the earth but the earth is formless and empty. This earth is not a sphere suspended in a newly formed universe. It has no form. It is empty, yet somewhere there is water because God is hovering over waters, much water.

God is hovering. There is energy in hovering, and waiting; there is patience, and closeness, and expectancy. Especially, there is closeness, like a bird hovering over her eggs, like an artist, a teacher, a mechanic, tending to the work at hand, listening for the right sounds, watching every movement. There is no distance here. To hover is to protect and nurture that which is beneath.

I began this year ruminating on the irony that the latter half of life feels like a retroactive descent back into childhood, back into non-memory. And in this season of new beginnings, I am struggling to regain the focus, the energy, and the sense of purpose I once felt. But here is a dramatic twist: The story of all beginnings, from creation to birth, is begun in darkness and emptiness and formlessness. God's creative Spirit is hovering, waiting, so close in this dark and lonely abyss; ready to speak something new to me, in me, for me. Are the waters even yet on the earth? What is God waiting for? I know the next three words will be, "And God said...." But before that, what is God waiting for?

I turned to the New Testament as part of my slow reading regimen and behold, for the first time I am reading John, not Matthew, because this is a narrative bible in chronological order:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

In the darkness, in the void, He is there. A spoken word has not yet been uttered but that is not the only word. The spoken word is the vocalization of the thought which broods in the speaker, the Creator,  they are one and they are the same. God is thinking, brooding, hovering, waiting as the mind and intent and desire of God becomes tangible, expressive. Something big is about to happen. Maybe something too, in me.

Word of God, make my mind beautiful to You. Perhaps restore is the wrong word. Make me new as you promise in Ezekiel 11:19. Give me a new heart and a new mind. Give me a heart of flesh for a heart of stone. Put a new spirit in me, one that cares for others - the one which hovers over the waters.
Renew the spirit of my mind (Romans 12:2). Help me speak truth and do good, speak words of encouragement, and be kind, for you have forgiven me (Ephesians 4:23 ff).

Lectio Divina

Reading the bible in a year has been my chosen form of meditation for the past six years, although I rarely read every passage every day, and, come December, the book of Revelation and the minor prophets are given short shrift. An Advent book of devotions such as Ann Voskamp's The Greatest Gift, or more often, Phyllis Tickle's Christmastide from her book The Divine Hours have been of better comfort than the Apocalypse. I find it hard to read deeply, or pause to follow a rabbit trail through the unbroken snows of Mt. Hermon, if it catches my eye, because I have a spiritual train to catch. So I have set different goals this year in which I will follow rabbit trails and read slowly - very slowly. The bible is still and always will be the rock and the road on which my pillars stand. Hopefully, this method will allow more opportunity to reflect on other works without the clock reminding me to move on quickly. And with my mind attuned to this new goal, I keep bumping into confirmation from poets, professors, and neurological discoveries indicating this is a better way to read anything.

Along with slow reading, I also aim to engage in slow writing. This blog is a way-marker for me and it is who I am at the moment I write it into existence. But I will confess that I strongly edited myself to remain upbeat and inviting and perhaps, at the time, to generate a persona that was upbeat and inviting, always. The last several years have been a struggle for me to be cheerful. I don't like what age is doing to my body and mind and I am often cranky about it. What I write in the future may or may not have a sunny disposition. I say that not for the reader, but to give myself permission to bring myself to the page, not who I want you to see.

Consistency is not my strong point, it is a supreme struggle. But it is my hope to write regularly what I discover as I read. If you choose to read this blog, even once, I thank you immensely for your time. Attentiveness is so scarce where there is an abundance of meat and sweets on the internet. And God knows I don't make it easy for you when I don't post links to my references because I don't wish to endorse anything here. As always, my blogs are signposts along the way to fellow travelers. Godspeed.