Category Archives: reality

Gardeners and Bells

my garden, poetry, reality, , ,
I prefer to write about beautiful things, so I don’t want to tell about the mess I made this evening of staking a tomato plant about two months too late. It is a robust Juliet cherry with branches 2-3 feet long that had started to send down roots where they were sprawled on the damp ground. I gathered up the legginess as best I could with gardener’s tape, around three splintery stakes. In spite of the chaotic result, I expect there will be fruit, thanks to the rain and sunshine that falls on the gardens of the just and the unjust, the diligent and the lazy.
Beautiful tomatoes from the past

A few days ago I ran across Leonard Cohen’s verse (below) that has been singing itself in my head ever since, making me notice many ways that our earthly lives fall short of the ideal, often in more significant places than the garden. We fail to do our best, others fail to love us, the banks and the corporations do us wrong — we populate this list day by day.

It’s an aspect of reality that can only be denied at the risk of one’s sanity. The humbling we experience when contemplating the “streets filled with broken hearts” and other destruction that Bob Dylan sings about in “Everything is Broken” is the best start toward mental and spiritual health.

 Then the Gardener, the Physician of our souls, the Light of the World, can do His work, and give us grace to keep working at repairing the bad jobs we’ve made. He also gives us Himself as the rejoicing of our hearts — and nothing is more Real than that.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
    –from “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen

A Dream of What’s Real

birds, love, reality,

It was about 40 years ago I had a dream that I know was from God. I don’t remember any since then about which I felt such assurance. Many dreams I have are mild nightmares of household disasters, though I have also experienced dreadful nightmares that left a cloud over the first hours of the day.

This dream was of a garden. I was walking in a lush and green garden, where birds were singing and flowers were blooming. Cool lawns stretched between all the most fitting tall trees and flower beds, everything breathing with new life. The air was warm and balmy — it was obviously Spring or early Summer. As I followed the paths and took in the beauty I felt very happy and peaceful, but I didn’t think of taking a nap on the grass, because the atmosphere of the place made me feel too alive and awake. Then, the words were spoken, “This is your heart.” And I woke up.

I can well recall the sweetness that filled me as I lay in bed in those few minutes after waking, knowing that God had given me a taste of His presence. That lovely feeling stayed with me all day. I told a few people about the dream, and was often encouraged by it in a vague way. There was no clear doctrine to hold to; it was more like a promise.

This morning when I woke I got to thinking about that garden, and how it might still have something to teach me about prayer. It is possible, the fathers teach us, to always live in the garden of the heart, where God and His love are constantly available to us, even when our minds are required by the everyday cares of life to be busy elsewhere. We can live in that garden even when our earthly houses and treasures are in ruin from earthquake, or when we walk in the front door to find that thieves have stolen us blind. The Life that we absorb through our pores in that place can energize us to do the necessary work of repair and healing.

In the last week I’ve been hearing a bird song in the backyard in the mornings, but it was not my robin whom I wrote about before, a messenger of comfort from just a few years ago. I strained to hear that robin’s chirp that means so much to me now, but he was not on the airwaves. Lo! this morning before I got out of bed there he was, and he started in. God sends birds like angels.

“The kingdom of God is within you,”  said our Lord. The robins and other angels are there, nearby where He makes us to lie down in green pastures under heavens that declare His glory, and where nothing can separate us from the Love of God.

Chartwell, Kent

Sweep away all false things…

quotes, reality
St. John the Forerunner

“The sweet work of repentance that is set before us as followers of Christ, is nothing other than the return to reality.”

“How we feel about many things has this same make-believe quality. We find certain styles of clothing and certain products (cars, houses, etc.) attractive and desirable, but often with little more than subjective reasons for our desires. The power of this make-believe is so great that it is well-known that many people “go shopping” to battle depression. It is a strange therapy.”

Read the rest of the article by Father Stephen Freeman here — about the real cause of so much of our grief and misery in everyday life, “a ceaseless struggle with things that have no true existence.”

When I look around his blog I always find plenty to provoke my thoughts in a good direction. I’m assuming his book Everywhere Present that just came out will put a lot of this food for the soul together in one nourishing bowl.