Christmas

“But some seed fell on rich soil, and produced fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold. Whoever has ears ought to hear.” (Matthew 13:9)

My father’s garden wasn’t much by the standards of many gardens. It was situated on a small plot of land in the backyard of my North St. Louis home in the 1960s and early ‘70s, planted with love, passion and knowledge gleaned from the pages of Organic Gardening magazine.

It sat at the back of the yard, near the alley, and I can still picture its layout in my mind’s eye, row by row. Onions against the fence, followed by lettuce and cabbage, tomatoes and green peppers, beans growing up the legs of my no-longer-used and rusting swing set, carrots, radishes, and no doubt a few others I can no longer remember. 

All organic, and all planted with the knowledge that the soil was (or could be) naturally fertile and ready to accept the seeds or the young seedlings that my father started in our basement during winter under fluorescent lights. If it sounds like I appreciated all his effort and creativity, I didn’t. Not at the time, anyway. I was a kid and saw it as largely wasted space where I couldn’t play ball and poor use of a swing set, even if I didn’t use it all that much anymore. I was told, in so many ways, to keep out. 

All these years later, I have a more mature view of what he was trying to do. He was giving us healthy, organic food free of pesticides and herbicides. He was helping us get by on a mailman’s salary and trying to teach us something we could take into adulthood with us. He was giving us something extraordinary amid the ordinary of an urban backyard. He was doing all this to tell us he loved us, even if he could never muster those words.

More than anything, I think he was seeking quiet, sacred moments with himself and God. He was trying to make sense of his father’s suicide (unknown to us kids at the time). He was silently grappling with own failed professional career as a chiropractor and perhaps wrestling with the oncoming darkness of depression and alcoholism.He was searching for something sacred in an ordinary garden. What I thought was wasted space he knew was holy ground.

We are called to prepare our hearts for the coming of the Word of God into our lives of faith like my father organically prepared the soil of his garden. The Word is planted in us already if we can just stir up the earth a little and add a little compost. The incarnation of Christ is not just about Christmas. It’s about the continual coming and planting of the Word into our lives today. It’s about seeking the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary.

We need the Incarnated Jesus. We need a walking, breathing, working-with-us Jesus. Otherwise, he remains a word on a page of old parchment, an unfulfilled promise, an old story that’s nice to listen to but never quite seems real. A scattered seed that was planted long ago but never really took root and grew and bore fruit.

In contemplating the Incarnation during these post-Christmas, cold and often-dark days of a Midwest winter, I come to see and appreciate how our human and earthly nature is quickened and sparked by the Divine, just as life begins to grow in the dark of the soil. Even in the depth of winter, we can begin to see life through that spring lens. We can see we are the soil where the Word of God grows and, over time, we can learn to recognize the holy when God puts it right before our eyes.