Community Garden: It's really happening!

Saturday was the first workday of the ARCO Royal Avenue Community Garden Project in Partnership with First Presbyterian Church (how's that for a mouthful of a name!). When Keith and I first came to the church, we looked at their large and beautiful plots of land and thought, "Wouldn't it be great if we could help get a community garden going?" And then, Keith was randomly searching on Google Images, and came across the blog for the Monroe Community Gardens (http://monroegardens.blogspot.com/), a group that had already been working to create a community garden for more than a year. They were a "people without a country," with lots of interest and will-power, but no land. A serendipitous connection...or the Holy Spirit?

Through this group, we met Mike Roberts, one of the central organizers of the garden. Here he is, setting up recycled railroad ties to frame one of the plots. He is easily one of the most enthusiastic people I have ever met. This guy is a one-man course in community-building!

On Saturday, we started cleaning up the land and to laying out some "sample" plots. I attacked some tenacious vines which had taken over the fence-row on the lot's border with a borrowed rake, which I managed to break several times in my vehemence. Luckily, Gerald, the new gardening friend from whom I borrowed it, was forgiving, as he was also engaged in a battle with the vines.

I'm starting to scheme about what we'll plant in our plot. I can already imagine the taste of delicious fresh vegetables, which always taste better when you've grown them yourself! Doesn't get any more local than that!

Body awareness

So I went to my first yoga class in a long time this week. Our teacher guided us to move from our hectic thought-mind space into the slower, ebb and flow of our body-mind. It was wonderful. I've been realizing lately how much I live out of the "what's next, what's next" jumping-around of my brain, and how I've forgotten how to truly rest and enjoy the movements of my own body. Like everyone else, I'm too busy, with my toddler, my work, random and assorted projects, too much time on Facebook...

About nine years ago, I studied massage for three months at the Institute of Psycho-Structural Balancing (IPSB for short) in California( http://ipsb.com/news.htm ), one of the most enjoyable educational experiences ever. Talk about luxurious experiential education: I got at least one pretty wonderful therapeutic massage every other day or so. I was more aware of the miracle of the human body than ever before.

When I went, shortly after that, to Guatemala, my massage training led me to connect with Capacitar, http://www.capacitar.org/, an amazing organization whose teachers empower grass-roots communities all over the world with training in holistic health practices. Their founder, Patricia Cane, is one of the most inspiring people I've ever met, and I've often thought that I want to be just like her when I grow up.

When I worked with BorderLinks http://www.borderlinks.org/ , we were able to get Pat Cane to come and lead an Encuentro; people from both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border gathered and learned basic holistic health practices, like Tai Chi, reflexology, and breathing practices, together. Pat Cane did the most seamless, relaxed, bi-lingual teaching that I've ever seen.

Since I've been at seminary the past few years, it seems that my body awareness has grown ever dimmer as I've concentrated on learning the theology and practice of ministry. But as I am about to graduate and seek a call in the Presbyterian church, it is high time to remember the body, not just for my own ongoing health, but for the sake of the church itself. It is kind of ironic that a group of people, who follow a healer of not only spiritual, but also physical ailments, and who call themselves "the Body of Christ," can often be poor at caring for bodies, their own and others', privileging spiritual well-being over physical.

Holistic or hole-istic?

My sixteen-month-old son Lucas and I went for a walk this afternoon. He likes to pick up rocks and leaves and examine dandelions and clover. Acorns are a special favorite. Today, he was carrying around a cherished rock he had just encountered, and he came across a hole in the cement, a little divot; perhaps a rock had been mixed in there with the original cement but had come loose. Lucas poked the hole with his finger, looked at the rock in his hand, and placed it in the hole. The rock barely fit, but there was an undeniable logic to it. Lucas showed himself to be his problem-solving father's son. Later he attempted to fill another hole with a clover flower. That was when he showed himself to be his fanciful mother's son!

I was touched by these little actions, as a sappy mama is entitled to be. At the same time, I'd been thinking all morning about holistic approaches to work and parenting and living. As a theology student and activist and former massage therapy student, I feel I'm entitled to think in big, abstract ways about such things. But I was also thinking about the faith of my church community and what the best approach might be to nurturing it, as the pastor I am in the process of becoming. Even more specifically, I was thinking about how I might lead a parenting class. I was trying to decide whether to use a "practical tips" or a "holistic spirituality" kind of a famework.

Here's the thing. Parenting is one of those life experiences which teaches a person that their whole theoretical framework of life was nothing more than an edifice of air, a castle of cloud, blown away by the first, shrieking exhalation of the newborn child. And yet being a parent without a larger dream, without hanging onto the hope that one day the shrieking babe will become a healthy, sane adult, parenting would only be an excercise in daily chaos, in which we move from petty demand to demand until we collapse.

Irenaeus famously said, "The glory of God is humanity fully alive." I love this quote, but what does it mean to be "fully alive?" I believe God creates each one of us to come to a kind of wholeness of personhood and, indeed, holiness. Jesus Christ most fully exemplifies what that kind of wholeness looks like in a person. Okay, and so what was so great about Jesus? I think he lived (and died and rose again) out the greatest commandment: Love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind (Matt. 22:36-38).

Holistic philosophies seek health (another word related to whole and holy) in the interconnection and integration of heart, mind, spirit, and body. I think the greatest commandment points at this kind of health, the holistic work of all systems. One of my hopes for the church is that we can be a people and a place where such healing can take place, where whole, fully alive human beings can be nutured and can be sent out to nuture others.

But so often, reality seems to work against holistic practice. We divide the church up into committees in the administrative practice of my tradition. The Worship Commitee, the Evangelism Commitee, the Stewardship Commitee. We break it down, and we break it down again into bite size pieces. Sometimes, though, the glorious dream of full aliveness becomes so bitty that all we can do is argue about the color of the carpet in the sanctuary. But still we hope that somehow each bite-sized piece will form back up into a whole loaf, a whole communion, a whole interconnected Body of Christ, moving, breathing and thinking towards God's glory.

But Jesus said, "This is my body, broken for you." The only whole One, the fully alive One, allowed himself to be broken, so that we, in our brokenness, might be healed.

I'm frustrated with the small-scale of actual ministry work sometimes, the day-to-day piecemeal work. I'm frustrated with the gap between my dreams and reality, the long pathway, full of rubble. But God does give me pieces, rocks, dandelions, bottle caps, clover. It is not my job to heal seamlessly. My job is to try my best to fit them, sometimes awkwardly, into the holes in the sidewalk.

A whole new world

Today is the first day of the rest of my life.



I've been contemplating blogging for over two years now, holding off because I didn't think I wanted to spend any more time on the computer than I already do, and also, why would I want to share the intimate details of my life with the whole world?



So why am I doing this? And why now?



Because I've been a writer since the time I was eight years old. Because journaling is no longer enough. Because there is an incredible conversation out going on that I want to be part of. Because God gave each one of us voices, and blogging has given us new ways to share them with each other. All of our voices, all of our particular lives, all of these details: each one unique, each one astonishing. Why not mine, too? I've been holding back and holding out, and it's time to put some musings and mutterings out there and let them go.



I don't know how many intimate details I'll be sharing. But God has given me a voice. Sometimes it sounds like a sqawk, and sometimes like a croak, but sometimes it sounds like a glorious song. Sometimes (not very often) I'm as foreboding and gloomy as Edgar Allen Poe's raven. But mostly I sing to call attention to the glory of the world God has made and continues to make anew each and every day.