"Stewardship is giving of what you have"

(Originally published at "A Year of Service" 11/9/16)

This morning I woke up feeling dizzy, disoriented. Maybe I've been feeling dizzy for a while and I'm just now noticing. During the post-nomination campaign, I cycled back and forth from feeling doomed by a Trump win to feeling delivered by a Clinton win. On election morning my chest was as tight as a drum and I breathed shallowly. Then I found the live-stream from Rochester, NY showing thousands of pilgrims visiting Susan B. Anthony's grave and leaving their "I Voted" stickers on her tombstone. The reverence and pride in their voices was the change I needed from the poisonous tone of the election. I left the live-stream open on my screen as I worked and by noon I was thinking "Now THIS is America. THIS is who we are, not all of that negative stuff." At lunch break I took some time to meditate on history's curve towards justice. The battles are always difficult, but good seems to trump discrimination and ignorance over and over. By the end of the day, I was feeling confident about the outcome.

Then the election happened and this morning I was dizzy.  Clearly, we have become a nation of hate. We vote for people we don't respect in order to spite other people we don't even know. Discrimination is our most treasured privilege. Maybe all the progress we have made will be lost. Perhaps it has all been for nothing. We are deplorable, stupid, small and we deserve nothing.

But, of course, the truth is that America is both of these, at the same time. Our baser natures manifest as we injure, discriminate and kill our neighbors. Too many of us actively seek to harm others. Even greater numbers of Americans refuse to acknowledge the damage we do. Sometimes we protect our ignorance above all else.

At the same time, those ideals that lift us and drive us to be better are still here. But they have no permanent existence in the material world. Fairness, justice, equality, truth -- they aren't like rocks or trees or houses. You can't touch them and they don't have an address. Our government buildings, neutral stacks of marble, can't contain them. They cannot be set in stone, inviolate for all time. They only exist inside our human hearts. Occasionally, they bubble up into the real world in the shape of a law that helps someone. And then later, that law might be taken away. But the core of what is good about America only exists inside of us. People of good will, we are the keepers of America and we are the only ones who can pass this goodness on to the next generation.


Laws can be erased. Rights can be interrupted. We can be hurt. That is one truth.

The other truth is, this year, millions of us made our ideals visible as we campaigned, drove voters to the polls, voted with our hearts and heads, and visited the Anthony grave. This cannot be taken away by an election. Our flame burns even while we despair. It cannot be quenched.

In a few days, once we've rested, let that flame come back up. Tend it. Feed it a little direct action. The world needs us now more than ever before.



*The title of this essay is a sentence I heard during a meeting at Compton Heights Christian Church tonight. Sometimes I think of my own service in terms of success/ failure. It's good to be reminded that doing the right thing doesn't necessarily ensure success and failure doesn't always indicate an unworthy effort.

A YEAR OF SERVICE

This blog is a year-long meditation on the path I'm traveling right now. Everything I'm involved with seems to be some form of service to others. I didn't consciously choose service so how did I get here? Where am I going next? Is this just a phase? Is this a place where I can spend the rest of my life? I hope to arrive at some answers by next April!

Service is plural

(Originally published at "A Year of Service" 10/23/16)

It takes only one person to identify a social problem. Sometimes, that one person can imagine a workable solution. But implementing the solution? Making it permanent? This takes a team.

I don't have a lot to say about this so it will be a short post but this may be the most important lesson I have learned from working in my community: no two teams are alike and as much care must go into constructing the team as into any other aspect of the project.

We installed a quarter acre of prairie restoration along Hwy 44 a few years ago. That project worked because we rallied hundreds of allies including neighbors, local politicians, city departments, non-profits and grant funders. That team was able to accomplish the planting, publication of the project, community involvement and continuing support. As the project has aged the original team has contributed a little less each year. This year we began building a new team that is aligned with the evolving needs of the project. We no longer need community volunteers to dig holes. Instead, we need botanists to monitor specific species. We need public relations work. We need a specific piece of maintenance equipment. New needs, new team.

Similarly, the Shaw Memorial Forest began as a project requiring a lot of neighbor support and manual labor. We accomplished that by writing tree grants and inviting neighbors to plant a free tree for a loved one. The project has been a smashing success so far. As we look towards the beginning of the third year we anticipate changing project parameters. Planting and watering will be minor needs for the future. Mowing the grass and developing the public experience of the forest will become the main needs. That will require a large mower and small group of people who are passionate about memorials, place making and perhaps the Shaw neighborhood. Whether or not these people like to dig holes is immaterial. New needs, new team.

Both of these projects began as the idea of one or two people. They would have never gotten off the ground without our strategic efforts at team building. By the same token, the projects will fade away if we can't master the art of team succession. Stay tuned.

A YEAR OF SERVICE

This blog is a year-long meditation on the path I'm traveling right now. Everything I'm involved with seems to be some form of service to others. I didn't consciously choose service so how did I get here? Where am I going next? Is this just a phase? Is this a place where I can spend the rest of my life? I hope to arrive at some answers by next April!

Sacred gardens

(Originally published at "A Year of Service" 6/26/16)

I was asked by a coworker to write an essay about my connection to nature for our workplace newsletter. The essay is next month's contribution to an ongoing series called The Green Corner. I started doing just that -- writing about how I had developed a connection with nature -- but it became something else entirely. It morphed into a statement about service to nature and to people and where I see myself located between those two things. I'm thankful for the opportunity to work that out on paper because it helped me formulate some new thoughts on my work. The ecology projects I'm carrying out are acts of creative love. Here is my essay:

Why do snakes look so weird? Why did birds evolve to fly above the ground? Why are they both so different from us?  I don’t know those answers but the more we look at nature the more variation we see. It’s almost as if difference is valued by the creator, or natural selection, or both.

One of my favorite trees is called devil’s walking stick and I will never forget the day we met. As a child, I spent a lot of time in the woods and thought I knew all the trees and shrubs and forest flowers around me. One fateful day I ventured off my usual rambling trail and lost my footing in a pile of dry leaves at the top of a steep slope. As I slid down I reached out for a nearby trunk to slow my descent. The thorns greeted me first so I let go! When I eventually stopped sliding downhill I faced the stinging pain and wondered what on earth I had just encountered. What was that thing with those ridiculous thorns? Could trees even have thorns like that?

On my next trip to the library I found the tree in a field guide. It is a small tree, no more than 10 feet tall, and its leaves are lush and tropical. In spring the tree is topped with foamy clouds of white blossoms. I learned that the spines covering its trunk protect it from deer that would otherwise eat it to the ground and from smaller mammals that would climb the tree and devour its fruits. I learned that mammoths and mastodons may have been warded off by those spines in the distant past. The spines help the tree reserve its fruits for songbirds and, in return, they scatter the seeds far and wide.

This information transformed my dismay to respect. When I next visited the tree and reflected on its story, its script on the stage of life, my respect became admiration. Devil’s walking stick is uncommon and few people know that it exists.  As we continue to replace woods and fields with roads and shopping malls it will become even more uncommon. I wonder how many other wonderful things have already vanished along with their stories, unknown and unloved, victims of our carelessness.

One day shortly after these events I came home from school to the sound of heavy machinery and chainsaws. The 100-acre woods I had known as my own Eden was being cut down. The landowner made a few thousand dollars from the timber and put that money into an investment account. By the next spring, the creek had filled with silt. The leaves and flowers carpeting the ground had washed into the creek or died. Large erosion gullies appeared everywhere. The birds, the crayfish, the garter snakes, the butterflies, the devil’s walking stick, the 200-year-old beech tree with exposed roots forming a big chair high over the creek – all my friends – had disappeared.

It’s difficult to explain the sadness I felt but the loss of that place was very real to me. While a part of my sadness was selfish, a longing for the woods I loved so much, there was also grieving for the rich web of life that was extinguished there. Even as a child, I knew that the birds could fly away but the crayfish and the shiners in the creek pools could not. They died with the trees. I didn’t have the words for it at the time but now I can say the place was sacred. The animals were sacred, the trees were sacred. The wood was a temple where I went when I needed to pray. I always found quiet and I always encountered god there. I was a part of that place and the whole thing was sacred.

I can’t get that wood back but I still have a deep connection with nature. It is like a language learned through experience and reflection. It’s not a commonly spoken language but anyone can pick it up. I spend my evenings and weekends giving lessons by engaging my neighbors in habitat projects.

A year ago I was invited to design the country’s first Transgender Memorial Garden, a garden dedicated to the memory of transgender people who have been lost through acts of violence. I admit for about five minutes I wavered, wondering what people would say if they knew I had affiliated myself with the transgender community. But I was not put here to separate myself from others or from nature. The natural sacredness in the world includes us in all our variations. So I accepted and I designed with trees and flowers of eastern Missouri. I talked with the community about the native beauty that still exists, hidden and overlooked, in our alleys and waste places and how we can bring that back to life in the garden. I brought along my old friend, devil’s walking stick. The symbolism is not lost on the community: unknown and disregarded by many; with a name and thorns that present a façade of danger; yet beneath it all the complexity and intense beauty that can come with a struggle for survival.

I can’t speak for this community but I heard their stories of loss. They too have been cast out of Eden, out of their families, out of their churches, and all too often out of life itself. They have been told they are not sacred. I don’t know why people who are different trouble us so much. We are all part of the same family of life, infinitely varied.

In response, I drew a sacred landscape and filled it with native trees that are strange, formidable, unapologetic and almost entirely unheard of. The garden has rapidly become a haven, a pilgrimage site where people flock together to meet, grieve and share life. As knowledge of the garden spreads the trees are becoming a small part of the story of the transgender community in St. Louis. Often I sit apart and observe how the trees are anchors, even in their youth, connecting the community to this soil. They form a sacred structure  - real, true, beautiful, millions of years old - while around them the people transform their lives and bodies. The garden is sacred. The people are sacred. The whole thing is sacred.

I was asked to write an essay about my relationship to nature but I can’t separate the trees from the people. The only way I can go back to my sacred wood is by taking people with me. When I see beauty in nature and beauty in people I am there in spirit. The world is an amazing place full of variety we’ve not yet appreciated and stories we haven’t yet heard. I look for it and look at it in order to honor it. I’m going to keep looking and talking and holding because I don’t want any more of it to slip away.

A YEAR OF SERVICE

This blog is a year-long meditation on the path I'm traveling right now. Everything I'm involved with seems to be some form of service to others. I didn't consciously choose service so how did I get here? Where am I going next? Is this just a phase? Is this a place where I can spend the rest of my life? I hope to arrive at some answers by next April!

Like sunflowers that look towards the sun...

(Originally published at "A Year of Service" 5/11/16)

"Like sunflowers that look towards the sun and as a compass needle seeks the pole, so your minds should always turn to the Lord."  

Conferences, p.29 

St. Mary Euphrasia

This quote came across my screen today at work. Mary Euphrasia is the founder of the order I work for and Melinda, our Mission Effectiveness Coordinator, regularly sends us inspirational quotes from ME's writings. I always read them and from time to time the quote will resonate deeply with me or will spark an old memory or lead me off into a rewarding avenue of thought. I guess that isn't all that difficult to do since I live so much in my own head, but Melinda has a genius for selecting a phrase or quote that contains so much good stuff.

When I read the quote I thought 'well, that's me!' My mind constantly turns to god all through the day. It's certainly not the same god that I grew up with. It's not a supernatural smiter or miracle worker. I don't really know what god is but I am like that sunflower. Why do I still do that?

And then I thought of my mom and I remembered the stories she told of the time when I was a baby when she and dad took me before the church and dedicated me to god. Of course I don't remember it but she always spoke of the dedication with pride.

One Sunday just a few weeks ago a young couple at Compton Heights Christian Church brought their newborn to the front of the church and Pastor Jacque held the baby and dedicated it before the congregation. It was a moving ceremony but it didn't last very long. It seemed more a way to bring the child into the church family than a dedication of the child's entire life to god. Afterwards I thought about the other infant dedications I witnessed while growing up in the church. From what I remember they all seemed brief, not that remarkable. My dedication was probably not that different.

What I'm realizing for the first time is, regardless of what actually happened in the ceremony, its meaning was huge to my mom. I can't remember her ever speaking of my siblings' dedications but then I'm the first born. When she talks about my dedication she always says "We dedicated your life to God."

I suspect my mom saw parallels between her experience of my birth and dedication and the Bible story of Hannah and her son Samuel. Hannah couldn't bear children. She prayed so earnestly at the temple that her behavior violated the customs of how women should behave. God gave her a son, Samuel. In return, she took him to the temple to live as a servant for the priest Eli. My mother lost two babies before I was born. When I was born the midwife said I was dead too. The umbilical cord was wrapped tightly around around my neck and I wouldn't breathe. Apparently I was grey all over, not pink. After much prayer I began to breathe. Mom must have prayed many prayers before my birth. Perhaps she made a deal with God, like Hannah, to dedicate her first born to service.

Unlike Eli though, I was not forced into the ministry. While growing up I heard lots of other adults voice the expectation that I would become a preacher but neither mom nor dad ever said that. Consequently, I never felt that I had to become a preacher. Instead, what I felt was an extraordinary closeness, a personal relationship to God, a blessedness even, from childhood.

Did the retelling of the dedication story over the years do that to me? Has my face constantly turned to god as a result of the expectations set up by my mother's experiences? Those may sound like positive outcomes, but there is also a darker side. I was taught explicitly that I would always have access to supernatural help. Did the dedication represent a bargain? Have I always expected reciprocal gestures from god, a reciprocal amount of attention to my needs? This is a question I have never thought to ask myself before but when god didn't answer my fervent teen-aged prayers that he make me straight we went through a break up of monumental proportions. Of course. How could it have been any different?

A lot of answers I seek are still inaccessible to me. Maybe they will always be beyond my reach but of what use is it to complain about parental actions and unrealities taught to children? After all this time there is only the sorting through of the remaining threads, the making of meaning in the midst of my reality. I certainly have not been dealt with harshly and I'm beyond complaining. This world of beauty would be much less beautiful without the call I hear and to which I respond.

When god called out to Samuel in the night he misidentified the call. He ran to the priest Eli and said "Here I am". Eli's contribution was to teach Samuel to identify the call to service as the voice of god. For a few years now the world has been calling out to me. There is so much to do, so much need among people and among the creatures of creation. I have heard the call and have responded but where does the call come from? Is it coming from the earth? From my neighbors? From within my self? From god? Can the answer to all those questions be yes?

Right now I am playing with the idea that god can be understood as the totality of our love and existence - nothing less than that and nothing more than that. I know the Bible says god is love but I'm still having a hard time seeing past the old image of god as the supernatural ass kicker in the sky who doesn't exist. I'm mulling this over in my mind and attending church and seeing which parts do and don't match. In the meantime, there is a lot of work to do and I continue to answer the call. Maybe it doesn't matter where the call is coming from. Speak; for thy servant heareth.

A YEAR OF SERVICE

This blog is a year-long meditation on the path I'm traveling right now. Everything I'm involved with seems to be some form of service to others. I didn't consciously choose service so how did I get here? Where am I going next? Is this just a phase? Is this a place where I can spend the rest of my life? I hope to arrive at some answers by next April!

At the Start

(Originally published at "A Year of Service" 4/8/16)

I suppose anyone who begins a project of considerable length must also give an account of why the project has been undertaken lest somewhere along the road to completion they forget the original purpose. In this case, this blog is my meditation on the path I'm traveling right now. That path has evolved into a satisfying blend of work and leisure where nearly everything is some form of service to others. It's not the path I ever envisioned for myself and I certainly didn't consciously plan for it. So how did I get here? Where am I going next? Is this a place where I can spend the rest of my life?

Many of my day-to-day activities can be described as service. Indeed, I think of my job as service. It brings in an income but much of what I do involves developing and maintaining relationships with people in the workplace. I wouldn't be there if I weren't providing some significant service to my employers. My tree planting and other gardening activities are enjoyable for me but they are service as well. Hopefully, at least some of these trees will exist long after I have disappeared from the planet. I'm also hopeful that some of my neighbors enjoy my efforts and may themselves be inspired to protect and improve the environment. So while gardening is my passion, it's also become much bigger for me. It produces results that benefit the people around me and people who are yet to be born. If I'm successful, my efforts also provide some protection to our brother and sister species.

I plan to use this space to record and develop my thoughts about how service is shaping my life. Over the past couple of years I've begun to recognize service as an emerging new reality, the lens through which I now view myself. I'm unsure why service did not beckon to me when I was in my teens and twenties. I've always given generously of my time to others, but unlike so many youngsters, I never spoke about my future or my calling as one of service.

To see how meaningful service has become to me at this time in my life leaves me with questions. Why did I not recognize the value of service as occupation earlier?  Why has it become so important this late in life? How will this new self image as servant affect my choices? Is this just a phase? So, as always, I need to explore these questions and writing as I go will help me impose order on the noise.

A YEAR OF SERVICE

This blog is a year-long meditation on the path I'm traveling right now. Everything I'm involved with seems to be some form of service to others. I didn't consciously choose service so how did I get here? Where am I going next? Is this just a phase? Is this a place where I can spend the rest of my life? I hope to arrive at some answers by next April!