This Earth That Even Heaven Envies

Dew drops slung off the tips of my shoes in every direction as I made my early morning way to the chicken yard and back.  It hasn’t rained for days, but even the rain chains hanging from the roof gutters glisten with the dew of this cool and ample morning.  It’s too soon to call it “autumn”, but daylight is slower to open its eyes these mornings; earlier to close them in the evenings.  The chickens help me to notice these seasonal undulations that once transpired invisibly in the ether, well beyond my awareness.

Tomatoes are ripening by the crates full these days, and we struggle to keep up with the stewardship of them.  Peppers, too, in greater and greater diversity.  Dehydrators have been running almost non-stop.  Our personal salsa and marinara factory churns out jars and freezer bags, but still the countertop is covered.  It’s a prodigal time of year when I reach to recall what I must have been thinking when I planted all those seeds.  But it’s a smiling reach, because I relish in the abundance.

Yesterday, in anticipation of some friends who were joining us for brunch, I went out and dug a few potatoes, pulled an onion, plucked some peppers and a squash and united them with the prior evening’s eggs.  To be able to accomplish such a thing is surreal gratification. The prairie grasses, mature and stately by this point in the season, sweep with the breeze – a three-acre bristling sea with its own instinctual tidal flow.  Branches of the plum tree, apples and pears, sag low from the fruited weight.  We haven’t yet considered the options for tending to that sweeter harvest.  It is a wondrously inspiring time of year.

A well-known Christian “leader” of a particular persuasion recently blamed the epidemic of mass shootings on the teaching of evolution in our schools.  “We’ve taught our kids that they come about by chance through primordial slime and then we’re surprised that they treat their fellow Americans like dirt,” said Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.  It’s a clever turn of phrase, but the logic is flawed.  Setting aside for the moment the considerable and substantive issues involved with confusing the public educational mission with that of the faith community, that something subtler, more complicated and sinister likelier accounts for our violence towards each other is evidenced by the fact that a greater awareness of our kinship with the earth and the breadth of the natural world hasn’t engendered any more care of it than the other humans with whom we share it.  More poignantly, that “primordial slime” is used as a slur – a pejorative – is ample enough evidence of how scornfully we view the creation that is simultaneously ancestor, sibling and spouse.  A local politician recently penned a partisan screed in the weekly newspaper mocking the environmental concerns of the opposing party, lampooning all the handwringing about “supposed” climate change as "alarmist scare-tactics."

Never mind the scientific consensus.

Never mind the visceral experience of increasingly troublesome weather.

And never mind that it simply doesn’t matter.

As I watch the grasses sway, the mother hen tend to her hatchling; as I shade my eyes from the blinding color of the blossoms on the stem and marvel at the heaviness of the fruit and the profligacy of the garden; as I wipe the dew from the deck chairs to enjoy yet another breakfast sprung from the land in the coolness of the morning, I think about that image voiced by John in his climactic biblical vision of that time when God finally gets God's way:  “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

Out of heaven, in order to come down here.  Looking around me I think, “who wouldn’t?”

And I wonder what deters us from doing everything we can to reverence and partner lovingly and protectively with this glorious home that even heaven aches to join – whether there is a crisis or not?