Cleaning Up

 

Seasons come and seasons go. Some things change, some things do not. My daily walks, even as they continue per usual, now accompanied by the crunch crunch of autumn leaves and an occasional morning with my slightly heavier jacket. I am reminded of a blog I posted a couple years ago. It was entitled “Sidewalk Inspector” (Feb 19, 2021) detailing impressions of my neighborhood based on sidewalks shoveled or not and other related things. This post could be of same title for it is perspective of this inspector who still walks, but I shall be more seasonally specific this time. “Cleaning Up” comes to mind as autumn leaves are falling. 

Autumn leaves make for incredible mess, and also provide interesting vantage on what's important to us. There are those who clean them up slavishly leaf by leaf, and of course those who accept them naturally as a matter of course in windy ordered environment.  [I think I am of the latter category] This has been in my mind these last days as the leaves flutter - not of ultimate importance but ... I think of many things.😉 What a sight to behold; the beautiful green dresses of our huge poplars and birches and other deciduous suddenly ablaze with new colors flowing and floating and blowing all around. Sure enough there he is! This morning it's the sound of my neighbor Richard, gas guzzling air blower corralling his leaves plus his neighbor’s on either side of him into neat piles and then into bags (non-compostable black garbage bags no less … Aargh). It’s his third time out here this year, he says proudly, gotta clean up. “Yup”, I say non-assertively. No need to be sarcastic today. I’ll tease his anality in front of our Tim Horton’s friends one of these mornings.

A little further down the street is another take on cleaning up. This driveway has had little pebble piles and variety of gravel and earth all summer long. This neighbor is so environmentally conscious she is installing a roof drainage system for her lawn and garden so as to utilize rainwater for underground irrigation. And it's a slow process, her trees and garden and driveway looking like a construction site for at least three years by now. I agree with her too - totally affirm her environmental diligence - and also appreciate some pails full of surplus pebbles she has been giving to me. They are now part of the landscaping in my yard!

A couple of blocks down and just around the corner, the other day I discovered another friend. An elderly woman up in her crabapple tree surprised me with the sound of apples plopping into a box as I walked by. My greeting quickly yielded a pailful for an apple jelly project at our place later that evening, plus a few stories of how we used to preserve on the farm back in Saskatchewan (yup we hail from similar open fields), plus in short order she had this younger guy (me) up a ladder to help fill another bucket for her from near top of the tree. I'm thinking her tree has done well this year, just before color change yielding some fine apples and some good neighborliness.

These are specific one by one encounters. And then there is the macro experience. This local sight and sound also brings on a little sentimentalism for me. There is a bigger better picture also in my mind. Who cares who is raking whose leaves anyway? And so what if they don't get all cleaned up? It's better to leave them on the lawns over winter anyway, isn’t it? My wife and daughter certainly say so, reminding me they make a great bed for ladybugs to sleep all winter. 

I live with another set of sensors and leaf memories. None of this Calgary color comes even close to what I gazed upon many times during my long-haul trucking years, especially up and down the Eastern seaboard, Maine, New York, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania; yes also Indiana and Ohio and Ontario – incredible oranges, yellows and fiery reds sometimes right up to top of the Appalachians! Always I was sorry I couldn’t pick up a load of maple leaves and deliver to Calgary Prince's Island Park just for all to enjoy! 

Having been glamorized by those other trees I am considerably less impressed with my leaf-blowing neighbor and all us ordinary leaf rakers. There is no need to get too preoccupied with the temporary mess they make on our streets and curbs and decks. If we don’t get them all raked, no problem. I live next to Fish Creek Park and the wind can blow them in there. It's a natural wild-type habitat, with room even for all of Pennsylvania's leaves, to say nothing of the Calgary leaves we don’t get raked.

It is the season. Short days ago it was flowers galore, some bordered by neatly cut lawns, others with the more 'natural' look. Seasons come, seasons go. My hope is that the next season just around the corner will provide lots of the white stuff to make it all beautiful regardless of who got what cleaned up.

A Lifetime in Waiting

September 9, 2022

Two persons have been uppermost in my mind this last day. One is Prince Charles, heir to the throne of the British Commonwealth, eldest son of Queen Elizabeth, who died yesterday mid-day at the ripe old age of 96. The other is Richard Rohr, best-selling author of many books, including Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass, 2011). According to this book the first half of our lives is devoted to accomplishing something; the second half to reflecting on what has or has not been accomplished!

Charles was the princely boy whom my brother and I watched not like a hero, but as one who would be king someday and who lived his life way out there up there somewhere waiting for the day. That's quite a while ago. And while we were apparently growing up and trying to make something of ourselves, in our mind Charles just needed to show up with his sister Anne, looking handsome and well-groomed and only needing to behave royally. Then Charles changed a bit, as we probably also did during the growing up years, Charles definitely becoming a little more interesting at least according to radio reports and newspaper and journal articles (no sidebars, no social media, in fact no computers yet in our possession)! He was fascinating, somewhat of a free thinker quite akin to many others our age with hippyish inclinations during the 1960s. Then Charles entered into marriage including some behaviors which caused much grief to his beautiful wife Diana, also his parents the Queen and the Duke, and obviously feeding eager journalists and paparazzi with many a juicy tale. The slow maturation of life then included Diana’s tragic death, allowing Charles to marry 'the other woman', quietly enduring the pain caused to his two sons and the ill-repute which has dogged him ever since, even among his own family members. Now at age 74 he is King!

How can a person with spotty personal life, spending an almost total lifetime in training, learning protocol, riding in motorcades, reading speeches written by others, step up to a position increasingly questioned not only by those who idolized his mother, but also wondering about the man who would now be king. I do not blame a people questioning the state of British monarchy, and possibly the state of a monarchy period. Is it an outdated expense for all concerned? Needless to say, the wrinkles and worry lines on Charles’ face suggest he may have already spent considerable time thinking about this.

This begs the subject many have reflected on, many have agonized about, and yes many have made a profitable profession of, including psychologists, psychiatrists, theologians, and of course historians who have provided the story line (?) for our kids in elementary and high schools in the many countries of the Commonwealth. How Should we then Live? said Francis Schaeffer a Presbyterian minister a number of years ago in his famous book of that title (Crossway, 1976), even then already noting the mainstreaming of religion blended into everyday western life. Schaeffer’s still troubling question probably is why Father Richard Rohr's books have come to my mind alongside the Prince. Rohr’s contemporary wisdom of a doing–reflecting life cycle strikes a chord seemingly for many, religious and non-religious, for persons of faith in many religions certainly including Catholics and Protestants, and interestingly with advocates and critics in both the evangelical as well as the liberal versions of Christianity.

I do not believe Rohr's wide popularity makes him a shoo-in winner for all, but I do find his perspective helpful at this particular juncture of our western history; King Charles lll ascending the throne. Rohr begins the lofty topic by firstly speaking of God. "Aagh" says my thirsty soul. As a Christian I need to hear or read somebody saying that. “You can’t weigh or measure or calculate or dole out the infinite” says Rohr. "It’s time for us to recognize a world of abundance, even among all the scarcity being lamented these days – environment, economies, warfaring." Yes, scarcity limits us to who should be doing what and why isn't it being done - the world of politics, newsworld. He goes on “Stop counting who’s worthy, who’s not worthy. It ends you in a hole, a dead end. It’s stupid.”

Rohr's provocative declarations address all of us in today’s pluralistic society, certainly not only his church the Roman Catholics, nor those within the Church of England! So even as Charles at this point, as required, claims 'the church' as his faith, I see in Richard Rohr's words a good instruct to Charles and to all citizenry. It's right there in the Bible, I came that they may have life and have it abundantly (John 10:10). The new head of the Church of England and all of us need this abundance. Rohr's reference to scarcity or abundance in trying to describe God is a good reminder about describing (evaluating?) earthly Monarchs. Whether Charles has ever done anything noble or noteworthy is less important than his state of mind at this time. Recognize that in his lifetime he may have acquired the wisdom and the perspective needed to get us all a good look at monarchy and what elements are still essential and what may need to be scrapped. 

Charles lll may now have precisely the experience and the vantage and hopefully the humility to lead the British Commonwealth as well as the Church of England into a more realistic appraisal of its participation in a new world order. "How should we now live?" Francis Schaeffer's question even more relevant today, methinks. We will be best served if we think abundance rather than scarcity as we honor our new King. It certainly behooves all who still believe in a God who is over all creation. 

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.⁵ Therefore one must be subject, not necessarily because of wrath but also because of conscience (Romans 13:1,5 NRSV).

Perhaps in reverse order of Richard Rohr wisdom, our King’s lifetime of waiting, of reflection and/or acting out may well be what has equipped him for the role he now assumes. May our Creator God grant him the wisdom and the courage to be and to do, significant actions toward the end of his days.

God save our gracious King.

 

A Reciprocating Pen

It happened again – sort of anyway. I was in our local library totally engrossed in a book, when the author hit upon a point I just needed to record somewhere. No pen!  Looking beside me I noticed I was in company of a young lady fully dressed in ‘modest clothes’ including hijab. Sensing English would be no problem for this young lady, also aware that most kids do not carry pens these days because it’s all laptops or ipads or devices, I asked her anyway. “Excuse me, would you have a pen I might borrow? I need to make note of something.” There was a shy smile, a dig into her purse, and in short order I was hard at work with pen and paper. She had what I needed. When my note-writing was done I elected not to disturb her, merely positioned pen close to her for obvious easy retrieval whenever, and I continued reading. Half an hour later (approximately) she was gone, pen still exactly where I had put it! Well, dear old thinker kicks in. This was not exactly a cheap pen. Should I chase her down somewhere perhaps among the library stacks to try to return the pen … or maybe just keep it? 😏 I chose the latter. This young lady had probably left the pen as a gift for this old man!

A deliberate gift? I am reminded of a recent blogpost actually on similar topic. It's an incident of one of our neighborhood shop owners providing free repair service for a vacuum cleaner which had been donated to a refugee family which my wife and I were involved with. He chose on the spot to add his charity to what he recognized as our charity. Takat is an occasion of charity which must not be passed up, as he explained to us. It is the third pillar in Islam and he ‘must do it’ if he wants to enter heaven! We now have some extra appreciation for one another as neighbors in this our community of Midnapore, this corner of Calgary. With that recent incident in mind, I decided this young lady with the pen was probably on same page as our Muslim shopkeeper neighbor. I was a Takat recipient!

My thinker can’t quite stop here. This is happening precisely as my retirement contains a considerable amount of work as a church committee member, involvement with immigrants, South Sudanese, Syrians, Ukrainians and others entering into our modern urban neighborhoods. Even as we try to discern good ways to facilitate hospitality for newcomers to our communities, I cannot but observe a caution which characterizes us Christians. Not only mentally screening immigrants, but we evaluate church programs and budgets almost like we evaluate politicians and our tax dollars. They are scrutinized against our personal comfort, making sure we don’t waste money on bad causes. Fundraising has become the work of professionals by now, with financial advisors and stewardship consultants to help us not squander our wealth, still looking to retain as much as possible for - who knows what? This morning’s Bible reading was about the guy storing up treasures, and then at the end of his days, God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ (Luke 12:20). Nothing new here, even for those who hardly ever read their Bible.

Stewardship is important for all of us hard-working faithful folk, and slowly I am learning that it's more than what each of us do with total assets or profiles, or whatever it is we call our money. Both the Quran and the Bible point to the importance of the ‘collection’ being not for patronage, but more akin to tithing. Patronage maintains the power and prestige of the patron through public giving of gifts, granting prestige (often advertised as sponsors) to the patron and of course material assistance to the other. Tithing, on other hand, is more a matter of redistribution of that which belongs to Allah – God. "Ay, there is the rub", as Shakespeare said once upon a time. This vantage requires neighborly thinking, private interests deferred to community.

I have now finished reading that book which required the note-taking - done reading but the contents still blowing my mind! Fascinating, creative and oh so well written, this lifestyle/environment/stewardship topic is larger yet than this wise old guy had it figured until now! Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013) is about Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. She is a mother, scientist, university professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, New York State. Her book does not posit Christian or Indigenous or Muslim religious theology, but actually engages all of these. It posits all of us on this Mother Earth needing to observe giant cedars and strawberries and animals as our oldest teachers. We, us human beings, have a reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. The great disaster, according to her, is that we have forgotten to listen to our teachers and the consequences are all around us by now. She has left me with a big big big topic, quite akin to the Luke 12 passage quoted above. The things we have accomplished, whose will they be?

Even as Dr. Kimmerer leaves me with her prophetic discomfort there is also an undeniable winsomeness in her tone which is easy, so hope-filled, because she writes like a plain old fashioned loving mother! She reminds me of my mom. Mom always had a living room full of potted plants. Most vividly in her very senior years she would sit in her chair, with flowers and greenery that breathed life and pleasure for any of us who might want to come and sit for a while. And it was also an 'unofficial fact' which my siblings and I whispered about, mom listened to and she spoke with her plants!

Now I cannot but smile, still thinking of the young Muslim lady who left her pen on my table. It's nice just to think she was probably committed to my convenience rather than her own.