Life at the intersection of faith, nature, history and art
“So I said, ‘here I am.’” Psalm 40:8
Childhood memories are strange and powerful things.
Visiting with a woman in hospice care earlier this year, she could vividly recollect ice skating across Fairgrounds Park’s frozen lake in North St. Louis in the 1920s, even though she couldn’t tell me what she had for lunch an hour before I arrived. Perhaps sometimes God gives us just the memories we need, those that bring a little peace and joy.
“But you do see; you take note of misery and sorrow; you take the matter in hand.” Psalm 10:14
I can still vividly recall the scene. I am watching from a distance as my son, Jon, who is two or three, is running around on a playground. He is so immersed in his play that I can see joy oozing from his pores. He is beginning to experience the wonder and power of independence from the parental units, a chance to be on his own and test his own abilities as a human. How fast can I run, he wonders. How high can I climb?
But then he falls hard, tripped up by an untied shoelace or perhaps just the clumsy feet of a toddler. He gets up and looks around. Seeing no one, he resumes playing, unwilling to give up his freedom. But as I walk toward him he sees me and, you guessed it, begins crying and pointing at his knees. Apparently, he didn’t know he was hurt until he saw someone who cared, someone who would scoop him up and take care of him.
There’s an old chestnut of an icebreaker/conversation starter that goes something like this: What person, living or deceased, would you most like to spend some time with? (Go ahead, discuss…)
Margaret Silf’s “Just Call Me López: Getting to the Heart of Ignatius Loyola (Loyola Press, 144 pages) takes that question on a spiritual journey and allows us to come along for the ride, as long as we’re willing to suspend our disbelief in the impossibility of the premise of the book – the contemporary narrator’s months-long interactions with the 16th century saint and founder of the Jesuits. Along the way, what we get is far more than a creative approach to Ignatius’ biography (his middle name was López) or an introduction to his famed spiritual exercises, although we get plenty of both. For those who know nothing or little of Ignatius’ life and approach to spirituality, this slim volume will serve as a fine introduction.
In this unlikely tale of a 16th-century soldier-turned-saint and 21st-century woman, we see what happens when one person opens herself to a real-life, real-time experience of the communion of saints. The two are as different as pen-and-ink and laptops are as writing instruments, but their conversations show us that life’s really important questions don’t change with the times and technology. And perhaps the most essential question we can ask as spiritual beings (what is God’s will and plan for my life?) is the question to which most of us continue to seek an answer. That introspective and prayerful approach to life is what lies at the heart of Ignatian spirituality.
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Walking with Sue yesterday morning at Long Lake Regional Park in New Brighton, Minnesota, I was aware, as I always try to be when I walk in nature, of not only the beauty of everything around me but of its movement. For where there is movement there is energy and life.
Even the minutest movements illustrate the animation of life. With my camera I stop to capture a purple wildflower, only to notice the ever-so-slight movement of a pale yellow insect I would have otherwise missed, slowly and methodically working its way around the flower, doing what it is made to do with flowers. Energy and life.
Walking along a path, a flurry of brown and black motion catches my eye and I shift my attention and focus. It’s the rump of a chipmunk, hard at work digging in the soft soil, oblivious to us until we are nearly on top of it. Energy and life.
“Taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Psalm 34:8)
The sad truth is, it seems to me on this early Sunday morning, that I have spent far too much of my life not realizing how good the Lord tastes. It’s an odd notion for the psalmist to make, I admit. How is it (the wonder and mystery of the Eucharist aside) we can go about tasting the Lord?
The glorious truth is, we have been given a bounty in the tastes and colors and scents that come from the gardens and farms of God’s good creation. What better and further proof, if we have need of that, of God’s presence and action in the world than that of an heirloom tomato just hours from being on the vine? This misshapen and seemingly mis-colored fruit/vegetable (argue about that amongst yourselves!) is as difficult for our modern sensibilities to grasp as is the presence of the creator. We pass it by in the stores and markets because it doesn’t match our expectations of what a tomato is supposed to look like. But taste it…take it in…make it part of you…and the difference becomes obvious. And we find ourselves saying, “So that’s what a tomato is supposed to taste like!” It is our experience of the heirloom tomato, like our experience of God, that makes it real.
[Read more…] about God, Grace, Heirloom Tomatoes and My Father’s Garden