Reflection :: April 18
Parishioner Mark Carpenter shares the following reflection:
Meister Eckhart said, “If the only prayer you said in your entire lifetime is “thank you,” it will be enough.”
I am going to admit something: I love summer in Indiana. Yes, summer is humid here; but summer here is nothing like summer in Texas, which has daytime highs over 100 degrees and lows around 80, with high humidity from the Gulf of Mexico, very little rain and very little wind for weeks on end.
Not long after I joined St. Paul’s, a summer book club was organized on Robin Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass.” The group met outside, before church, every other Sunday during the summer. By nature I’m very introverted, and by participating in this group I started making friends at St. Paul’s.
Robin Kimmerer is a botanist, and an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Nation. In the book, she wrote about her personal experiences working with plants and reuniting with her people’s cultural traditions. In the Potawatomi creation myth, sweetgrass is believed to be the first plant to grow on earth.
We applied some of the ideas mentioned in “Braiding Sweetgrass”: it’s how the St. Paul community garden, and ultimately the Green Team, came into being. I applied some techniques from the book into my own garden: I started talking to my plants, treating them very gently, actually asking them when I could harvest fruit from them, and thanking the plants when I did harvest rather than just plucking the fruit from the plant. (If you detect resistance from a plant when harvesting, leave it alone. It's not ready.) I never harvested all the fruit off the plants until just before the last freeze, when I thanked the plants for the work they had done producing fruit.
That summer, the yields from my plants doubled. I forswore my allegiance to Monsanto and started using natural insecticides. I spent about two hours every day in my gardens, and gave thanks that the sunlight on my body gave me much more freedom of movement in arthritic joints. We were giving away poblano and Serrano peppers and tomatoes. My basil plant grew to four feet in height: it looked like a bush.
Time and time again in the Bible, Jesus gives thanks before (and after) performing a miracle. On the other hand, it’s rare that anyone on whom Jesus bestowed a miracle thanked Jesus for what happened. People “wondered”; often they were “amazed” (as I was with a four-foot tall basil plant!); but only one of the 10 lepers Jesus healed came back to thank Him.
That might be a metaphor for the way we treat the gifts of creation. Do we merely use what we have received, without actually taking the time to thank God for the gifts of creation, and our good Earth, where these gifts come from? It’s easy to plant our gardens and fields, grow the plants, and then harvest them without ever taking time to give thanks to God for providing this planet, our island home, or for the plants who did the actual work of producing fruit.
On our last book club meeting in August, 2022, I noted that I would really like to continue what we were learning from the book – and that’s how the Green Team was born. We’re now working towards continuing co-creation, sustainability, finding ways to recycle more, lowering our carbon footprint, and a complete energy audit of the church. The Green Team meets on the first Sunday of each month, right after the second service. Please feel welcome to join us!
Mark Carpenter, St. Paul's Parishioner
