I live in the middle of a garden. To be more precise, my home is surrounded on three sides by gardens: lush roses on the south, herbs and small trees and gardenia and winter daphne on the west, and a huge new variety of plantings on the east. You see, my partner Andrew is not only a marvelous cook. He is a skilled gardener. (I was really smart to marry above my station!) And one of Andrew’s healthiest plants is a large rosemary bush near the front door.
When I say healthy, I mean that this bush seems to be telling us that it plans to live forever: it grows wildly, extending its branches in all directions every year, requiring significant trimmings just to keep it in one area of the planting space. And whenever Andrew makes a cutting of rosemary and nurses that cutting in a glass of water, the little branch soon sprouts thin white roots—like thin, elderly white hairs. These roots grow countless tiny branches, and after a few weeks Andrew has a new rosemary plant. Two of this rosemary bushes’ offspring are flourishing on our planting strip.
I mention this because when I see these plants so vibrant with life, I naturally think about—you guessed it—myself ! I think, what makes me flourish? Where do I flourish? What fills me with such deep and rich inspiration and energy that I can’t help but grow new, thin roots, finding my place in yet another corner of the world?
You’ve already guessed that I’m talking about St. Paul’s. For this is a place where people flourish, where they draw into themselves life-giving water, where they grow, and where they are sent forth to flourish in a world that so sorely needs more green.
This rosemary bush: I have more to say about it. This bush gave one of its branches for a liturgy of blessing. Here’s the story:
This past September I took a big risk in my career: I left a comfortable and secure job and started my own private practice as a psychotherapist, a counselor, hanging out my own shingle, building a business from the ground up.
I wanted to have my new office blessed, and when it turned out that Mother Melissa couldn’t do it on the weekend I had set aside, I asked Father Morrie and Scott Martin to come to my little office and offer a blessing. Andrew and I brought a branch of rosemary from home and we threw holy water across the room, into the four corners, onto the chair I use, onto the couch my clients use, around the whole space.
I brought the rosemary branch home, I wanted to start a new plant from it, so I placed it in a glass of water and hoped it would sprout new roots. Sure enough, just a few weeks ago, I noticed a very small, pale root growing out of the bottom of the branch, the kind of tiny root that the poet Jane Kenyon calls a “root hair.” Life had emerged again. My hope is to plant it outside my office window, an enduring symbol of the blessing invoked upon my small office, upon myself, and upon my clients.
And you know what? This was just another week around the parish at St. Paul’s. This kind of thing—this kind of ordinary yet extraordinary thing! I ask you, how many people in Seattle will have on hand so many wonderful priests, and so many wonderful parishioners, and have the chance to bring them to a workplace for a blessing? For us at St. Paul’s, this is just the way it goes. But it is extraordinary.
This is why I like to say that if I won the lottery, if “my ship came in,” as the saying goes, I would give a hundred million dollars to St. Paul’s. (And since this is stewardship season, I should say, as a Vestry member, that if you’re so inclined to give the parish a hundred million dollars, you have my full support!) But there’s something else I give to this place—something that so many of us give—that is worth far more than financial treasure. I give my heart to this place. Or, to be more accurate, I gave my heart to Christ, who fills this place, and draws this community closer to the heart of God.
But what I can’t remember, what I can’t figure out, is what day or what hour it was when I decided to do this, decided to give my heart to this community. When did it happen? Was it, oh let’s see…
Was it when I first heard the women’s choir singing the Passion of St. John on Good Friday, with such elegant simplicity and breathtaking beauty?
Or was it when, at the Easter Vigil, I heard Brian Box sing the Great Alleluia, and realized that until that moment I really hadn’t heard the word ‘alleluia,’ and certainly hadn’t ever understood it until he sang its meaning to me?
Or was it when, having listened to about 150 excellent sermons, I realized that the preachers in this place are always top-shelf?
Or was it when Barb Chattin-McNichols so gently and so skillfully showed a small group of us what Godly Play was all about, and how this amazing program ravishes our children with awe and wonder?
Or was it something more palpably human, something more raw? Did I give my heart to St. Paul’s when I made an announcement at coffee hour this summer, inviting people to visit Deacon Richard during his time of recovery from surgery? After I made the announcement, about a dozen people came toward me, all at once, in an overwhelming line of attack, it seemed, all of them eager to help, eager to pitch in, and most of them pretty new to St. Paul’s. How moved I was by that outpouring of generosity. Was it then that I gave my heart to this parish?
No, it wasn’t. These experiences of great beauty—great musical beauty, great poetic beauty, great human beauty—these experiences are wonderful, but I gave my heart to this parish during one of the moments that I realized that I was carrying the mercy of Christ into the world—into my daily work, my daily life. I don’t know which moment it was that brought it home for me, but it was one of the moments when I looked upon my clients with an increased reverence, or I looked upon my spouse with deeper respect, or I greeted my friends with an increased awareness of the presence of Christ within them, the signs of Christ’s mercy so evident in their characters, their work, their lives. My work and my relationships—both of these have been changed. They’ve been filled with a new sense of reverence and purpose.
When I do this—when I understand how my life and work has been changed—I manage to avoid two easy traps. The first trap is the one that the Pharisee in today’s Gospel reading fell into: the easy temptation to enter a holy place, a sacred space, a household that encloses a sacred community, and assume that one has found a place there because of one’s own righteousness, one’s own merit. I have done this. I have been this Pharisee. Comfortable, self-assured, self-satisfied…how easy it is to rest on your laurels, to say, “Yes, I have done well, thank God!” And if my stewardship—the stewardship of my daily life—if my stewardship flows from this impulse, then I’m in a little bit of trouble. I’ve missed the point. Because it’s not about the mercy of Christ anymore. It’s about little me, my little agenda, my little wants and desires, my little bit of glory and fame. And if I can find others who see it this way, we can create for ourselves a little mutual admiration society. It’s an easy trap.
But that tax collector—that tax collector. He is the sympathetic character in Jesus’ story. How many of us can identify with him? I think most of us have been there. He goes into the holy place convinced of his worthlessness, his disgrace. Yet though he is much easier to like than the Pharisee, this tax collector is also making a mistake, falling into a kind of trap. He’s making an assumption that the feast that is spread in the holy place is not for him. He’s convinced before he even walks in the door that the others he encounters here are better, stronger, smarter, or holier. And the trap for this tax collector is this: to be so convinced of one’s own worthlessness that it doesn’t occur to you that not only are you welcome, not only are you a member of this family, but…something is being asked of you, something is being required of you. Your gifts, your strengths, your contribution—these are valuable, precious things. And the sacred community that welcomes you is now holding out its hand to you, asking you for mercy!
So it’s about remembering—remembering what it means that we have given our hearts to God. And remembering what kind of effect God is having on us. In good weeks, on good days, I remember: I remember that it’s not about me and my glory, yet it is about me—about my daily life, my daily work, and where my heart is, where and to whom I choose to give my heart.
So I’ll close with a poem by Jane Kenyon, a poem that returns us to the image of Andrew’s rosemary bush, extending itself into the world one small cutting at a time. In this poem, the poet is speaking to someone who’s been in a place longer than she. She is the newbie, one of those who came upon a sacred space more recently. And she finds that, as short as her tenure here might be, it has become home. It has begun to fill her with new life. The poem is called “Here.”
Here
You always belonged here.
You were theirs, certain as a rock.
I’m the one who worries
if I fit in with the furniture
and the landscape.
But I “follow too much
the devices and desires of my own heart.”
Already the curves in the road
are familiar to me, and the mountain
in all kinds of light,
treating all people the same.
And when I come over the hill,
I see the house, with its generous
and firm proportions, smoke
rising gaily from the chimney.
I feel my life start up again,
like a cutting when it grows
the first pale and tentative
root hair in a glass of water.
