The cross I wear each day, a gift from my parents, is a cross with a tree cut out of the center. Lately I have had recurring themes coming to me from scripture, prayer, and discussions with others. A lot of this has centered on growth, and especially how agricultural growth can be a metaphor for our lives of faith and service.
For tonight's intern support committee meeting I am sharing the following as a devotion. It is from Parker Palmer's book Let your Life Speak, which I highly recommend to ANY Christian at any point in life, but deal specifically with vocation/calling, sense of self-worth, depression, and many other things.
"The spiritual journey is full of paradoxes. One of them is that the humiliation that brings us down - down to ground on which it is safe to stand and fall - eventually takes us to a firmer and fuller sense of self. . . I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace it all. . .
". . . (speaking about emerging from depression:) I was finally able to say yes to life, a choice for which I am grateful beyond measure, though how I found that yes remains a mystery to me. At one fork in the long road back to wholeness - when I was in fact walking along a country road past a freshly plowed field - I found a poem taking form within me . . . :
Harrowing
The plow has savaged this sweet field
Misshapen clods of earth kicked up
Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view
Last year's growth demolished by the blade.
I have plowed my life this way
Turned over a whole history
Looking for roots of what went wrong
Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.
Enough. The job is done.
Whatever's been uproted, let it be
Seedbed for the growing that's to come
I plowed to unearth last year's reasons -
The farmer plows to plant a greening season."
Christian faith, as I know it in my own life, is all about paradox, and Holy Week is the ultimate of those paradoxes. In order to conquer death, God, God's very self must die. In order to plant new growth, sometimes the field has to be plowed. I started Lent with an Ash Wednesday sermon on how burning the field created new growth in my dad's corn field, and I suppose it has come full circle. Now new life is right on the horizon for us - because we know how the Passion story really ends. . .
Perhaps it is also fitting that my favorite Easter hymn is "Now the Green Blade Rises"
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