In the creek carved bottom land where we
live, trees crowd down the ridge slopes making an amphitheater of
leaves. When, after days of heavy summer stillness, the rare
breeze moves down the valley, it sets this bowl of branches into
motion. The leaves wave like so many hands and the
wind’s passage becomes a ripple of tree applause for the cool
blessing of moving air.
“And
all
the trees of
the field shall clap their hands.”
In north-central New Mexico the mountains I know best face
west. In July, the morning sun climbs from behind the peaks
into clear skies. But, by mid-afternoon, great thunderheads
have materialized out of thin air, gathering moisture and storing
energy as they move up the slopes. By late afternoon the
storms have commenced, lightning arcing between peak and sky in
fantastic patterns, thunder cracking and booming off high canyon walls,
purple veils of walking rain traversing the slopes.
Often the storms are just wrapping up as the sun drops toward the
western horizon. These are the Sangre de Cristos, the Blood
of Christ Mountains, and the setting sun paints them and the clouds
that crown them a deep rose red.
Sometimes, when I have stood facing east, watching the last
purple curtain of rain fall accompanied by the rumble of
retreating thunder, I have seen the westering sun’s slant
rays prismed into a double rainbow arching over rosy slopes, while
behind me the western sky has conducted a sunset symphony. It
is as if all creation were honoring the day’s passing with a
hallelujah
chorus.
“You
make the dawn and the dusk to sing for joy …
The mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song.”
The summer after we were married we planted our first garden in the
back yard of the little adobe farmhouse we were renting on Dolan Street
in Taos. Lucky for us, the place came with rights to the irrigation
ditch which ran along the northeast side of the
yard. Without water not much grows in that part of
the world except drought-resistant weeds.
Jonathan dug a web of channels that led from the ditch into
the garden’s deep furrows. When the mayor domo, the
community member who managed the ditch, notified us that it was our
turn, Jonathan would be out there, sometimes in the middle of
the night by moonlight, listening for the gurgle of water coming down
the ditch, sliding open the little wooden gate that divided it from our
waiting garden, clearing the way with his shovel for the precious
life-giving water to soak into dry earth and then trickle toward snow
peas and wax beans and Brussels sprouts and corn.
“You
visit the earth and water it abundantly; you make it very
plenteous…”
That garden was either an exercise in beginner’s luck or a
gift from God. Unbeknownst to us, the area where we planted
our tomatoes had once been home to a herd of pigs. We had the
healthiest tomato plants and the biggest fattest reddest tomatoes in
five counties.
“Listen!
A sower went out to sow…some seeds fell on the
path…other seeds fell on rocky ground
…other seeds fell among thorns…other seeds fell
on good soil…”
Then there were the zucchini. We knew absolutely nothing
about gardening except what the seed packets told us and, in our
enthusiasm, we often chose to ignore even that sparse wisdom.
The zucchini packets said to plant six seeds to a hill, and then thin
out the ones that germinated down to three plants. Since we
thought that each plant only produced one zucchini, we reasoned that it
would be better to keep all thirty-six plants that germinated in the
six hills we planted. Need I say more? By the end
of the summer our sleep was haunted by nighmares of zucchini taking
over the world and all of our friends were avoiding us and our
cudgel-sized squash.
“…and
brought forth grain, some a hundredfold…”
What I remember most about that prodigally voluptuous garden was the
opportunities for gratitude it afforded us. Ask Jonathan how
he felt those moonlit summer midnights spent as a shepherd of water,
companioned by the shadowed mountains from whose glistening peaks that
clear cold water had come. I think it’s safe to say
that gratitude would be among the feelings he would list.
“The
river
of God is
full of water…You drench the furrows…”
And how about that chilly September morning when I dumped a small
mountain of freshly harvested broccoli heads, their tightly fisted
purply-green flower buds christened with dew, onto the cutting
board. A wave of profound awe rushed up out of the depths of
my being, and I found myself salting that garden bounty with tears of
joy. Broccoli as a mystical experience of the Divine? A
vehicle for gratitude? Who’d a thunk it?
“You
soften the ground and bless its increase.
You crown the year with your goodness, and your paths overflow with
plenty.”
It is a peculiar kind of gratitude, this deep thankfulness which is
drawn forth from us by our interactions with the natural
world. It is different than the feeling we get when we find a
parking place right in front of the building where we’re
scheduled to be in three minutes or when we open a present and
it’s just what we wanted or when that unexpected check
arrives when the bank account is nearly empty and its time to pay the
rent. All these are occasions for gratitude, but like most of
our experiences of that attribute, they have to do with getting
something we know we need or want.
The kind of gratitude I’m talking about is something else
again. This kind of gratitude is born not out of our standing
to the side as we often do and observing creation, but out of our
participation in creation. It percolates up from the hidden
recesses of our selves, the secret places where God spends
God’s time gazing in delight at parts of us we
don’t know yet. This kind of gratitude has the
grace of drawing those Divine new things up into our
awareness. It gives us the golden opportunity to claim some
part of the image of God we carry that we have not known or owned
before. This kind of gratitude is the gift itself.
This kind of gratitude so fills us with the active presence of God that
we overflow with it, becoming both gifts and givers, spoken by God into
the world as word and sacrament.
I’m reminded of water flowing into newly opened channels,
moving outward into the world in an ever-widening network, bringing
life abundant to desert places. And God says,
“For
as the
rain and
the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there
until they have watered the earth, making it
bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the
eater, so shall my word be that
goes out from my mouth; it shall not
return to me empty, but it shall
accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent
it.” AMEN.