Bevian

EULOGY FOR VIVIAN WALL

Jason, Hudson, Mr. Groening, Ron and Kim, Pearl and Frank – family and friends.

I was Vivian's friend – she was mine. Many years ago I had the great honour of standing up for her at her wedding to Jason. I am very sad, and so very honoured and grateful that Jason asked me to stand up for her once more today – to pay tribute, as her friend, to the woman that I knew her to be. The loss of her in my life is like the naked space that is left in the skyline when a giant tree is felled to the ground. I feel sorrow – for how beautiful of a soul she was, and for how empty and wrong it feels that she is gone. She was a really good friend. She was funny and thoughtful. She was loyal. If she had your trust, she did not betray it. She didn't judge your feelings. She loved with a love that did not let go. She was my soul sister.

It's been 30 years since she first became my friend. Back in high school – in the days before cell phones and text messages – I would call her house and her dad would answer. I would ask if Viv was there, and every time her dad would say the same thing, “Who? Bev? There's no Bev here.” Eventually I got wiser, and I would ask for Vivian. And her dad would say, “Bevian? There's no Bevian here”. Every. Time. There is no way we could have known all the ways that life would challenge us, and what our friendship would come to mean to each of us – but she will always be my double-jointed friend, Bevian, who could drive a car sitting with one leg on the gas pedal and the other bent straight up over her head with her foot flat on the roof of the car.

I looked up the word eulogy - according to the internet, my task this evening is to “praise the dead”, to make Vivian Wall sound saintly and obnoxiously more impressive than she actually was. I intend to do her justice. After 30 years of friendship, I promise that I do know she was flawed. As a point of fact, she could be a little bossy. There were times when she hurt my feelings. If you wanted someone to flatter you, she was probably not the friend you wanted to call. You called her if you wanted the unvarnished truth, because she told the truth, and she would say what she thought. She was good to take shopping.

Viv was a practised shopper with an eye for beautiful things and a good deal. She also happened to love thrift stores. We were shopping, and I was trying on a pair of jeans – I was very excited because finding a great fitting pair of jeans in a thrift store is no small feat. I came out of the change room, did my little fashion spin for her and asked her what she thought. She looked at my shirt – the shirt that I had been wearing all day – she scrunched up her nose with disapproval and shook her head, “No”.

There are so many things to say about Viv. Because she did not believe in flattery, it is my intention to honour her this evening by saying only what I believe to be true about her, without embellishment or exaggeration.

If I were to ask anyone in this room who knew her to describe Viv's personality in five words or less, the two most frequent words we would hear would likely be, 'Type A'. Viv was a classic Type A personality. She was competitive, enthusiastic, ambitious, and outgoing. She loved her work. She took great pride in always being punctual. She was highly responsible and organized. She was accessorized. She always wore beautiful shoes. She was a great sales person.

Early in her career she worked for a little establishment called 'Lady Footlocker'. She was very good at her job, and she was promoted quickly to manager. I went to visit her one afternoon at Portage Place Mall, thinking I would harass her and make life awkward for her in front of her employees – because that's what good friends do – and before I left she had sold me a stack of clothes I didn't know I needed, with hair scrunchies to match.

She was a clear, quick thinker but she didn't necessarily choose to do things the easy way. She knew how to take the big things in stride, and she knew when the little things were actually big things. This past December/January she planned a birthday party for Jason – she knew how difficult the last year had been, and it was really important to her that he felt loved and valued. She wanted it to be great – but she couldn't pull it together on her own. So she asked me if I would help her by baking Jason a birthday cake – a simple dark chocolate cake with real whipped cream. So she hauled out a recipe from her binder, and that cake must have had 50 ingredients and 12,000 steps. It was not a “simple chocolate cake” – and it was called, 'The Best Chocolate Cake in the World'. Things had to be sifted and separated and beaten and folded and coddled. Many bowls and several appliances were used. I had to read and re-read and re-read those instructions because they were not written for an A.D.D. brain. She just watched me and laughed – and I am sure that she and her Type-A personality wished more than anything that she could make that cake herself – it would have taken her maybe 20 minutes, while it took me a solid hour. But she was patient. Type A people aren't supposed to be patient, but she was patient. It was not easy for her to slow down, to have to let people help her when her body would not let her do what her mind wanted to do – when she could have done it better and faster herself – but she learned how to do that, too. Viv was always learning.

If it weren't for her love of corporate life, she would have made a great pioneer woman. She loved to do things from scratch. She loved to garden – she grew her own food from her own seeds. She sewed her own wallet. She made her own art. She went a very long time without using shampoo. She was not afraid of hard work. She was quite possibly the strongest woman that I have ever known. I do not want to embellish here, but she had a strength of mind and heart and spirit that were exceptional. She had the courage of her convictions. She had the courage to live and act and respond to life's challenges out of what she believed. She did not alter her convictions when her circumstances changed. I am going to steal from Bill Clinton here – in his eulogy of Muhammad Ali – because I think he phrased my sentiments exactly. He began by asking this really provocative question, “How do some people refuse to become victims and rise from every defeat? [Viv] decided very young to write [her] own life story – before fate and time could work their will on her – she decided that she would never be ever DIS-empowered. She decided that not her grace nor her place nor the expectations of others – positive, negative or otherwise – would strip her of the power to write her own story. She decided to use her gifts – her mind and heart – to figure out who she was, what she believed and how to live with the consequences of acting on what she believed. ... She was a free woman of faith. Being a woman of faith, she realized she would never be in full control of her life... but being free she realized that life was still open to choices.”

Viv believed in the power of thought and the power of words. From as far back as her Lady Footlocker days, she was writing motivational words on the walls. She CHOSE her thoughts – she took them captive – and she set her heart and mind on the things that fed her spirit with life. She CHOSE her words – with her mouth she spoke peace over her relationships, over the cells in her body and over her circumstance. She regularly spoke to herself, and it would be strange if you didn't know that was what she was doing. I was visiting her – maybe the last time I was visiting her – and she was really struggling with anxiety. She was sitting quietly... and I told you that she spoke to the cells in her body, and she spoke to her anxiety to take authority over it... and so she was sitting quietly while Jason and I were talking, and suddenly she just blurted out, “STOP! .... it's Hammer time”. She was funny.

She took particularly great care with the words that she used to talk about her health over the last few years. She didn't talk about a “battle” or a “fight”. She never said that she HAD cancer – she never 'owned it'. She blessed her body – even the struggling cells. She blessed her body with “Shalom” - peace – a peace defined as “nothing missing – nothing broken”. She paid attention to what language people used to describe her journey, and she was not hesitant about educating you if you used words that did not resonate with the spirit of life, of blessing and of peace.

She believed in the power of prayer. She did not “vent” - she prayed. And she did not vent when she prayed – she was discerning and intentional in everything she prayed. If she shared something with me, it was not because she necessarily needed an ear, or because she was looking for empathy – it was because she had already determined a course of action, and she was inviting me to join her in prayer. She might even send me a copy of exactly what she was praying, and ask me to join her in praying that.

Viv believed in re-purposing. She believed in a God who does not throw things away when they have outlived their obvious purposes – she believed in a God who does not waste anything. She believed this and she lived this – these were the choices that she made. She redeemed things, made them new, found new purposes for them, gave them new life. She redeemed experiences – she did not waste the lessons that she learned or the opportunities that she was given to approach life in a new way. She looked for the good in things – in objects and in people and in circumstances. These are her words from a text that she sent me in 2014, after she had received her original diagnosis – She wrote: “As much as you may think, I am really not living with fear over this... that is a God thing. Cancer will not own any part of my day, my attitudes or my words. In fact today as I was out working in the garden, I heard the verse, “When trials come consider it as a sheer gift...” Really God? A GIFT? So that is what I want you to pray about... WHAT in this is a gift for me? I'm going to watch for it, and I know He will deliver that revelation to me.”

She told me this last year what one of the gifts had been. She said that she had been praying to have something that she and Jason could do together. The way that he supported her and believed in her and stepped up for her meant the world to her. And I really don't want to define her life by the cancer that took her – it did not define her and it is not her story. That is not who she was. She would not want to be remembered for the story of cancer. And yet, I don't know how else to prove how rare and beautiful she was, except through the lens of how she dealt with that diagnosis. What came out of her when she was squeezed, was what ALWAYS came out of her when she was squeezed. Courage. Faith. Truth. Grit.

The last time that I saw her before she left for Mexico, we spent some time driving around Birds Hill Park. We tried really hard to find some sunshine to sit in. It seemed like it was never going to be spring – the sun just would not come out for her. She was determined to be in the sun. At some point we came back and sat out on her back deck. We had been talking a lot about obeying the Spirit and not worrying about outcome, something Oswald Chambers talks about – obeying God, and leaving Him to deal with the consequences of your obedience to Him – and she had grown so sensitive to the voice of God – she stood up and said, “I'm supposed to dance”. And out of all the years and all the memories, it is this image of her that is emblazoned in my mind – she lifted up her arms, like in her Facebook photo – and she danced before the Lord, swaying and moving in a slow circle – and out of her mouth came words of praise and thanksgiving. And she was just open to receiving whatever it was that God had for her – because she knew that He is good, and that all His plans for her were for good.

That is who she was – that is how she lived her life, in and out of season – that is how she died – with her heart open to life, with her lips filled with praise, with her trust and her hope staked on the promises of God.

She chose not to follow the path of conventional medicine for her healing – because when struggle came to her, she did not bend in her belief that our bodies were created to be well – that if we put into our bodies what is healthy, we will reap health. She did not alter her convictions, or compromise who she was, or change how she responded to life simply because conventional wisdom had a ready-made plan for what she should do. She chose instead to walk boldly in what she believed was the better path to health, and to face the consequences for living according to what she believed. She was not wrong. I promise you, she was not wrong. I have never known anyone more fully invested and committed to living, more determined and focused and driven to be well than Viv was. She walked every day in wholeness – body, mind, soul, spirit – she walked in health, in truth, in peace – until one day she was just gone.

She is gone, and it is very difficult, and our lives will never be the same – there will always FEEL like something is missing, and our hearts will always FEEL broken when we think about how much we wish she were still here – but that is not TRUTH. I knew it the moment that she died – that peace that passes understanding, that knowing – that despite the pain, despite the fear, despite the emptiness of knowing that she is just not coming back – nothing is truly missing, nothing is truly broken. It doesn't seem possible. But, you know, death is completely powerless over love. It cannot touch it. Death cannot touch the love that is here in this room for her, the love that is in my heart.

The last word I remember her saying as she was physically dying was, “Peace” – Peace. She was speaking it with authority – she was speaking it over her body, over her mind, over her spirit – she blessed us with love, she blessed herself with peace.

Shalom, Bevian – rest in peace. The love you gave us – the love we have for you – it is all still here. Nothing is missing. Nothing is broken.

The Brute

Yesterday the phone rang as I was trying to use the bathroom. It happens. First world problems.

On the best of days, at the best of times, I do not enjoy talking on the telephone. This last month has been alternating doses of heart-breaking, enraging and depressing – what with two year olds drowning in creeks, bombs going off in Brussels, Donald Trump getting votes and all. I guess I'm in a bit of a *mood*.

Me: Hello?

Steve: Hello, Ma'am. (Very enthusiastic) This is Steve Lloyd calling from the Headquarters of your Visa-Mastercard. I want to talk to you about reducing your interest rates!

Me: (pause) My Visa-Mastercard? That doesn't even make sense.

Steve: (pause) Yes, Ma'am. I am calling about your Visa... Mastercard! I want to talk to you about reducing your very high interests rates.

Me: But that doesn't even make sense. There is no such thing as a Visa-Mastercard. Why, I do declare, Steve Lloyd, I believe you are trying to SCAM me.

Steve: (laugh) No, I am not trying to SCAM you.

Me: (laugh) Yes, you are. You're trying to scam me. You are trying to steal my money. Steve Lloyd, are you by any chance calling me from India??

Steve: (pause) No, I am not calling you from India.

Me: You are. You are calling me from India. You are lying to me and trying to scam me.

Steve: You think I am trying to scam you? No, I am not trying to scam you.

Me: You are. You know you are. There is no such thing as a Visa-Mastercard. And you know what? Shame on you.

Steve: Look, I am not trying to SCAM you. You know, you are a real b*tch.

Me: (pause) What did you call me? Did you just call me a b*tch? Ok, that is not nice at all. First you try to steal my money, and now you are calling me names? You should be ashamed of yourself.

Steve: Oh really. I should be ashamed. You know... you... are a joke to your father.

Me: I am a joke to my father?! Yes... yes, I guess I do make my dad laugh. How about you? Do you make your father happy? Is he pleased with you? Do you make your father proud, Steve Lloyd?

Steve: Ok, don't make this personal!

Me: I'm not making this personal, you are making this personal. First, you try to steal my money, then you call me names and now you tell me that I am a joke to my father. You are making it personal. And you know what, Steve Lloyd? Not everyone is as smart as me. You are purposely preying on vulnerable people, and that is just not right. But I tell you what. It's ok. I am going to pray for you. I am going to pray for you, that you would come to repentance. Because I think that life must be very difficult for you, if this is how you have to make your living. Yes, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to pray for you.

Steve: (laughing) Oh my god. Oh. My. God.

Me: Yes, exactly. Pray.

Steve: (Steve is angry now) Wow. Oh. Oh, you just hate Indians! You just said all you Indians are evil and bad!

Me: What are you even talking about?! I never said that. I do not hate Indians. I have friends in India. I have dear friends, that I love, who are Indian, who live in India!

Steve: (long pause) I figured it out. You know what you are? You are a chootie.

Me: I'm a chootie? What's a chootie? Are you swearing at me again? That's not even a word in English.

Steve: Yes, chootie. C-H-O-O-T-I-E. Chootie.

Me: Chootie is not a word.

Steve: It means you are.. a good person. You know what? I want to kiss you.

Me: You want to what?! You want to kiss me? That's just gross.

Steve: I want to kiss you. Yes. Give me your email address.

Me: I am not going to give you my email address.

Steve: Do you like Tom Cruise?

Me: Ok, what? I don't know what you're saying. Do I like Tom Cruise? No, no I don't. I hate Tom Cruise.

Steve: I hate Tom Cruise.

Me: See? Well, we have that in common.

Steve: What about Cristano Ronaldo? Do you like Cristano Ronaldo?

Me: What? Ronaldo? I don't know what you're saying.

Steve: (sounding a little frantic) I want to kiss you. I want to marry you! Please, give me your email address. I want your skype address!

Me: Now you want to marry me? You're trying to steal my money, you call me names, and now you want to kiss me and marry me. 

Steve: Yes, I want you to forgive me. Would you forgive me? 

Me: Yes, I forgive you.

Steve: I want you to marry me.

Me: That's just inappropriate. That is so inappropriate.

Steve: I love you.

(click) The sound of my ten year-old hanging up the phone.

Afterwards, my daughter said that the phone conversation reminded her of Anton Chekhov's play, “The Brute”. And you know, she is completely right. Apparently you CAN make this stuff up, and it goes into high school textbooks.

**Update**

Apparently my friend, Steve Lloyd, has been on his business venture for a few years. I am praying for him. If he happens to call your home, you can tell him that. xo

Sacrilege

I grew up in a Christian home. That's how a lot of testimonies start out - I grew up in a Christian home. Of course, that could mean anything, really. There are a lot of different kinds of Christians. I don't think my parents ever felt bound to one denomination, and so we attended a lot of different kinds of churches. To my mind, non-denominational was the same as it's okay to disagree. Doctrine is a brick house, and Spirit is wind. If you're going to insist on having walls, it's good to have a lot of windows open.

Protestants don't really do sacraments, but we bicker about the two that we have - baptism and communion. Can you be baptized by having water poured over your head, or sprinkled over your head, or do you have to be dunked completely under? And can your father maybe baptize you, or does it have to be a minister? And how old do you have to be? If you were baptized as a baby, before you were old enough to make a personal decision for Christ, does that even count?

And communion - the symbolic body and blood of Christ - does that have to be bread and wine? Can we use grape juice and crackers? Actually, how about using Oreos and milk? And how old do you have to be before you can participate in communion? And what exactly does it mean to take it in an unworthy manner?

It's getting more and more difficult to know what is worth getting upset about. I don't personally have an investment in the particulars of how the sacraments are administered. I've participated in a variety of communion services, and have seen a variety of elements distributed in a variety of settings. I was taught that God is concerned with what is in our heart.

When my brother and I were young, our mom usually told us if she knew it was going to be communion Sunday, so that we had time to prepare our hearts - because that was the thing that mattered. Your heart. You have to prepare it. You have to make it fit for communion - because God is holy and communion is sacred, and you don't just do it. If you are fighting with your brother, you need to make that right before you leave for church. If there is sin in your heart, you need to repent of it. Quiet your heart. Prepare ye the way of the Lord. In your heart and your mind and your body, prepare yourself to take and to eat.

Maybe all she really wanted was quiet in the car on the way to church. I don't know. But it worked.

Do this in remembrance of Me.

What does that even mean?

Hey, remember Jesus? He was such a great guy.

Yeah, he was awesome. Remember when he died for our sins?

Well, you know I wasn't there, but I heard about it. Broken body, blood spilled out. It must have hurt a LOT.

Nobody loves like Jesus. Nobody will ever love you as much as he loves you, and don't you forget it.

All this talk about old times really makes me miss him. I wonder when he's coming back?

I'm not a theologian, but I don't think that's what it means. I don't think taking communion is about reminding ourselves and one another what Jesus did two thousand years ago on the cross, or how we are the center of his universe and how everything he did and does is for us, lest we forget. It's not about training our hearts to achieve appropriate levels of gratitude.

Wheat is such a great metaphor for the life of Christ in us, and for the Christian life. Jesus said, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. In this way, in the physical realm, we get it - that to die is gain. Spiritually, we have such a hard time with it.

What value is there in meditating upon the broken body and spilled blood of Jesus? He's not dead. Why meditate upon the crushed grain, the pressed fruit? Why do we take time to ritually reflect upon brokenness and death and its exponential power in our lives? Because that is the Christian life. That's it. It's not about privilege, it's about sacrifice. Like the Christ that we follow, for the joy set before us, we are called to a cross and to brokenness.

These little rituals that we do - they hold no power in and of themselves, but they do express something of great importance. They are acts of obedience. They are physical expressions of holy confessions. They impress upon our hearts those things that are sacred, to be set apart and reverenced.

And so this made me cry.

This made me cry because I was actually served this in church, and I was not in a Monty Python movie. This made me cry because it was so jarring - I hadn't had time to prepare my heart for this. I feared that, maybe for the first time in my life, I was taking communion in an unworthy manner. Honestly, I almost didn't - and let me tell you, there is something quite horrifying about finding yourself holding the elements of communion and considering letting them pass you by because they are offensive to your spirit. That is completely backwards, any way you look at it. I actually felt God tap me and say, it is God who sanctifies and who makes the unclean holy - including my own sanitized heart. And this reeked to high heaven of sanitized. I almost gagged on all the sin that was in that cup, and I didn't want to drink it.

I am a recovering Pharisee - I'm not saying this to be self-righteous. It was like being handed the quintessential metaphor for all the sin and the shame of the church today, and being asked to take it and eat it in remembrance of Christ, and nobody was being ironic about it.

God is holy. We say that, but we don't even know what it means - because we don't consider anything sacred. In the Hebrew Bible, if a person laid hands upon the ark of God's covenant, they died. The ark was a carved box of wood and gold, and it was not to be touched. It was constructed to be carried on long poles on the shoulders - an honour strictly reserved for the Levites. It was the place of the Mercy Seat. It was the place of the presence of God. It was probably incredibly heavy.

In 2 Samuel 6, David decides it would be more convenient and expedient to put the ark onto a cart for transport. He is not intending to be disrespectful - he just wants it to be quicker and easier in the delivery. He puts it on a brand new cart. He gives it an escort. He and his entourage go before it celebrating with all their might before the Lord, with castanets, harps, lyres, timbrels, sistrums and cymbals. When they come to the threshing floor of Nakon, the oxen stumbles. Uzzah, walking beside the ark, reacts, reaches out his hands to stop the ark from toppling, and drops dead. David was angry. At God.

What kind of God kills a man for touching His stuff? We might as well say it - because I suspect that that's really what we think. We think that when God acts like that He is not being very loving - maybe being a little full of Himself. We think we are sacred all on our own, without any help from Him.

We don't like our God to be angry with us for doing what He asked us not to do. We are actually offended at the thought that God should be so petty as to demand that level of reverence. David was. How much more so are we, now that we hold the cross of Christ like an ace up our sleeve. We are so grateful for Jesus - we can dispense with all that reverence business. We have been made holy, co-heirs with Christ, and we can put our hands on anything we want to. We're like a kid who just inherited his Daddy's business - we take every opportunity to streamline and to simplify God's expectations in His covenant of mercy with us. We want to make it all more marketable, more convenient, more efficient, less burdensome.

We want the body and the blood of Christ. We want his life, we want his joy, we want his power, we want his grace. We want his peace that passes all understanding. We want unrestricted access to his presence. We are more than happy to take and to eat and drink, and to reflect upon how loved we are. We are not obedient. We have dispensed with reverence. We have lost the fear of God. We are brazen and without shame, and have actually allowed the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ to be a market, for the sake of our own convenience. And why not? The whole entire bride of Christ is one big, fat, trillion dollar market.

We are so far from reverencing the depth and the magnitude of the beauty that the act of communion symbolizes, that we permit God's perfect metaphor - the very emblem of His own sorrow, His own suffering, His own glory completely emptied and spilled out, His own Love - to be placed into a pre-filled, pre-portioned, pre-packaged, gluten free, dairy free, sugar reduced, spill free, disposable, dove stamped juice cup/crispy cracker combo with a long shelf life that makes a little crackling sound like candy wrapper when you open it.

Because it is convenient. Because it is practical. Because it is cost effective. Because we don't have to worry about left-overs. Because we have dietary restrictions and we are afraid of germs. Because people are busy and tired. Because the more people you have, the longer it takes to fill all those little cups and break the bread into tidy little pieces and clean up after. Because there are just too many of us. Because just look at how darling they are.

We have made it all about us. And it's not about us - it's about Him.

What is in our heart? If communion isn't sacred, then why do we bother? In everything, if the sacred is not worth our effort, then what is even the point? If we are always just going through the motions of our Christian faith as pleasantly and efficiently as possible, we are not remembering what it means to be a follower of Christ - we are acting. We are making all kinds of clanging and gonging, and singing songs with all our might, but we are being disobedient to the very heart of God's word.

Here's a thought. Why don't we just all pretend we are taking communion - just say the words, and imagine it - and just dispense with the elements altogether. Because it's not a pill. There's nothing in it but the solemn remembrance of our Christ and our own call to obedience, to brokenness and death and life abundant.

We are called to a life of radical inconvenience. We are the People of the Way, and the way is through the cross of Christ. The way is pouring yourself out in love, even to the point of ridicule and pain, even to the point where you have no more to give, even to death.

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 

Remember that when you take communion. Remember what manner of love it was that bought us, Whose we are and who it is we are being asked to be in return.

To die is gain.

Do this in remembrance of Me.

Smashed Alabaster: The Importance of Brokenness

Now one of the Pharisees was requesting [Jesus] to dine with him. And He entered the Pharisee’s house, and reclined at the table. And behold, there was a woman in the city who was an immoral woman; and when she learned that He was reclining at the table in the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster vial of perfume, and standing behind Him at His feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing His feet, and anointing them with perfume. Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet He would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching Him, that she is an immoral woman.”

And Jesus answered and said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he replied, “Say it, Teacher.” “A certain moneylender had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. Which of them therefore will love him more?” Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have judged correctly.” And turning toward the woman, He said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has wet My feet with her tears, and wiped them with her hair. You gave Me no kiss; but she since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss My feet. You did not anoint My head with oil, but she anointed My feet with perfume. For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” And He said to her, “Your sins have been forgiven.” And those who were reclining at the table with Him began to say to themselves, “Who is this man who even forgives sins?” And He said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”  (Luke 7:36-50)

God has been doing most of the talking in my life as of late. I have a billion things in my head, a billion things I want to try to say, but God said loud and clear to me - almost audible - "Chew with your mouth closed". So I've been thinking on some things. Chewing. Swallowing. Being nourished. Expelling some waste.

I've been thinking an awful lot about Smashed Alabaster. I've been thinking about how very attached I have been to the memory of that alabaster box that I broke years ago at Jesus' feet. Sentimental. I kept all the pieces of it - poured some cement, pressed them artfully into a nice round mold and made some stepping stones out of them.

I let go the fragrance.

Somewhere I started to have the idea that breaking the alabaster box was about the sacrifice, pouring out tears before my beloved Saviour God, spilling an offering precious and costly and impossible to retrieve. I thought it was about me, about dying to self, about how much I was willing to surrender, about How much do you really love Him?

God is not a narcissist.

So I am interrupting my blogging hiatus, because I really, really wanted to share a little of what I'm chewing on:

RETURN TO LIFE

Crows talk about you, you know. They have the unsettling ability to remember, and they have been known to hold a grudge. They remember your face. They chat to their neighbours about you, describing you in such vivid detail that crows who have never laid eyes on you will know you on sight. I'm not saying that they're petty - but don't ever throw stuff at them. 

 

I was very, very nice to them last year, and so far they don't seem interested in much more than stopping by. There has been no swooping, and I don't get the feeling that they're plotting against me. I did take this picture through the window from inside my house - just in case they're camera shy.

Crows are definitely eye-candy - like a big bag of horrible licorice gumdrops. When it comes to Spring fever, I really prefer the strong, silent type.

Enough said.

GRAFTED

For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please… Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarned you that those who practice such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. ~ Galatians 5:17-23

I am developing a tree obsession – a deep study of the beauty, the intricacies and the out workings of any one single tree could easily inspire a year’s worth of blog posts. I have two plum trees growing in my back yard that wrap around each other like lovers, side by side as though one tree. They were planted that way, for fruit bearing purposes – only when they are bare can you tell them apart.

 

I believe that everything God creates speaks something to us about the Ineffable – mysterious, unknowable, unspeakable things that are within the Divine heart. There are things that are too Spiritual to elevate us while harnessed by words.

Trees have sacred carved all over them – devoted to God for Divine purpose. Not carved totems of Theology, but living witnesses to the workings of the mysterious, unknowable Knower. Trees are preachers of Truth that is at once both wild and ordained – they make entry into our most pivotal stories, from the Garden of Eden to the crucifixion to the New Jerusalem.

Standing in a forest, we feel the importance of the created thing – our hearts instinctively grow quiet, swelling up with poems and songs and meditations that are all completely inadequate to express what is inside us. We want to breathe deeply, we feel pressed with the need for silence. The hush is a reaching out, a soul response to the Good News we hear preached to us, each in our own language – a response to their heavenly glossolalia, like the tongues of angels – words we hear and understand, but that we cannot repeat back.  

Sacred can’t be uttered – the best of words can diminish it making it appear trivial, exaggerated and ornamental. You have to climb a tree. You have to sit in its branches, wrap your arms around it, feel its strength and its bending, its roots and its reaching, and be one of the living things that nests in it. You have to smell its blossoms, get scraped by it, sit under it, pick its fruit, rake its dead leaves, be still and contemplate.

In contemplating the metaphor of the fruit bearing tree, and exploring whether or not a person might realistically be able to grow an apple tree from seed, I discovered something completely fascinating about the nature of apple trees. You can grow an apple tree from seed – but the fact is that if you want to grow a particular kind of apple, this is not how the tree is reproduced. You cannot plant the seeds from the fruit in your lunch, and expect to grow a tree bearing Golden Delicious apples.  

It has everything to do with the birds and the bees – Spring air, blossoms and pollination. The seeds an apple carries are not clones of it, but are rather a combined genetic coding of two separate trees – the parent tree that it grew on, and the random tree with no name that fertilized it. If you grew an apple tree from seed, it could take ten years of watering, pruning, fertilizing, de-bugging, watching the weather, before you had any idea what kind of apple you were even growing. Chances are good that it wouldn’t be tasty, and you’d love it for its profusion of blossoms. Chances are good that the baby daddy would be a crab apple.

A tree will always produce the same kind of apples, but the seeds its apples carry may be different with every harvest. If you want to grow a tree that will produce the same kind of apple as the one you hold in your hand, you can’t do it from seed – a chosen rootstalk must be grafted with a branch from a tree that bears the desired fruit.

Grafting is a simple process of making a split into the branch of a tree or into a rootstalk, into which a branch from another tree is inserted. The grafted branch is bound tightly and eventually fuses together with the rootstalk, becoming part of the tree as it grows. Amazingly, through grafting you can actually grow peaches, apricots, cherries and plums, or grow several different varieties of apples, all together on one single tree at the same time.

This, of course, makes me think about Romans 11, where Paul refers to the church in Rome as a grafted in branch – a wild olive branch grafted in to a cultivated tree. Apparently, like virtually all fruit trees, olive trees that have been grown directly from seed do not generally make for tasty fruit. Olive trees grown from the seed of cultivated trees backslide into wild olive trees – the fruit they produce is almost certain to be bitter and tiny, inedible though pretty to look at.

I am pondering the metaphor – wondering what exactly God desires me to see. I am wondering which I am – the seeded tree, or the grafted branch – or if I am somehow both.

I see how I am part of the great, blended family of undefined parent origins – one part of the Tree, one part of the world – Divine nurture and sin nature wrapped in rings through my growing. I bear fruit of peace filled with wild seeds, reproducing in my own sullied image, involuntarily spreading, prolific without intention – sometimes tasty, sometimes tart. I am part of an ever enlarging kingdom of trees growing Spirit fruit – created to sow seed, to expand, to branch off, to spread wastefully without trying, seeding new and differing apple trees with every season.

Some of what comes out of me is fit for human consumption, some feeds the birds, some feeds the earth – but the Spirit of God is somehow at work in it all. God alone is able to distinguish the good from the bad, the ornamental from the necessary, letting it all grow together, fully able to work all things together for good for those who love Him and are called to His purposes.

This truly is how we grow. We are each unique – whatever our doctrine, its outworking in our lives never looks the same. We don’t bear fruit or reproduce trees that bear fruit with the exact quality and flavour as any other of our type. We don’t bear fruit in every season. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control – these can seem somewhat subjective. One person’s love is another person’s hate. One person’s faithfulness tastes sweet while another’s is bitter and sours the stomach.

We are all intentioned to make an offering of the small, simple, honest thing that is in us, though it varies greatly in taste and appearance – to let joy ripen and drop freely from our branches, and to not concern ourselves with what lies dormant inside it, or with where and what it will grow. To explode wastefully, bountifully, lavishly, like God does, without thought for self-preservation or worry – to exponentially multiply the fruit of His Spirit within us for the nourishment of the world. We do not bring life to the dead seed, we do not cause the fruit to grow, and we do not control what influences its nature. We are not the Life, we are not the Arborist, we are not the Wind.

Still, I know that there is wildness in my flesh. Unless I am somehow saved from this inherent pomme sauvage savagery, there is a latent tendency both in my seed and in my very nature towards growing and exponentially reproducing fruit that is bitter, small and just for show. My goodness is so hard, so meager, it wouldn’t satisfy anybody. It is no kind of food source. Only God is good.

I am one who has been purposed by the Wise Arborist, a twig plucked out of the natural, the uncultivated, the neglected, and grafted in to the One Good Root Stalk. I have been tightly bound to the One Tree in order to be part of It, to have a share in It, to be sustained by It, nourished by It, sanctified by It – to be transformed to Its nature, in order to produce good fruit that is pleasing, satisfying, and nourishing to the world God loves. God intentioned us to carry the select fruit that His Spirit bears, choosing to supernaturally bypass the erratic, unruly nature of our seeds, going so far as to make them irrelevant. If I don’t bear good fruit, then for the health of the Tree, for the purposes of the Tree, I can be cut off to make room for a twig that will.

It is a big, beautiful metaphor – it’s bigger than me, branching off into a thousand directions. I’m not entirely sure what it all means, but I feel it diminished with every word. It makes me wish for all the world for Spring leaves to blanket the bare branches of the trees – that those two growing stark as lovers in my back yard would cover themselves and appear to me as one. I want to climb up into my best climbing tree and just sit there. I want to watch the wind moving through the green, listen to the birds, and study the bugs. I want to close my eyes and breathe deeply of God in all His mysterious splendour – feel in every cell of my body the silencing beauty of wildness. I want to be still and know that He is God.

I want to know everything within me humming in harmony to the melody of tree – Who is like Thee among the gods, O Lord? Who is like Thee, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, working wonders? ~ Exodus 15:11

By this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. ~ Jesus

On Bearing Fruit

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
 A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;
 A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
 A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
 Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
 Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

~ Joyce Kilmer

Living in the land of indomitable Winter, I am trying to be chill about the return of Spring. It will come. Truthfully, it’s already here – though perhaps a little climate challenged. But mid-April snowfall has me thinking about the fruit trees in my yard, and about how much I love when those first green buds appear – almost more than I love the blossoms, and certainly more than I love the apricots and the crabby apples they produce.

I love all things Spring – proof of life, and the signs of things to come. There is so very much that happens in the slow, slow metamorphosis from seed to tree, from tree to seed bearer, it’s easy to get dazzled by the process. I never enjoy breathing in more than when every tree in my yard is flowering. My small piece of Earth feels cathedral, arched pillars wrapped in green garlands, draped in white, monarchs dressed in velvets of orange and black, gathering by the dozens; everything alive, whispering of holiness, spreading itself open, drinking deeply of the Divine, giving, receiving, worshipping.  

When the trees are just there for show, for the blossoms and for what they attract, it’s easy to become intoxicated by the growing, to not have a mind to the harvest. It is easy to have contempt for what has been heralded – for the tiny, tart thing – when Safeway down the street is importing Golden Delicious. You can’t even give crab-apples away – they brown with rot, squash beneath bare feet, get shovelled off the grass by the barrel full.

If every seed in every crab-apple on every crab-apple tree died, was planted, resurrected and grew into a fruit bearing tree which in turn seeded, season after season, producing and reproducing in exactly the same way – one tree for every seed – heaven help us.

Maybe it’s because we live in the land of the grocery store, but I do sometimes forget the purpose of the fruit to the tree. I think of an apple as food – I do not think of an apple as a seed bearer. I do not hold the glossy red flesh in my hand and think orchard.

And so I think it is very easy for me to misunderstand what is fully meant by the fruit of the Spirit. I have a tendency to think, The Spirit is an energy source.  I have a tendency to think, Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control are wholesome behaviours that are accessible in the Spirit, waiting to be born in me, to be stocked up and kept cool in the crisper for when they are needed. If I am annoyed with my children or with the woman working the drive-thru at Tim Hortons, I can take a deep breath, pull out patience and munch a really big bite of it.

But I don’t think that is the full picture – I think it stops far short of the whole point. I think it makes the fruit of the Spirit sound a little bit like Comfort food – a little bit like bumbleberry pie.

I wonder if having joy, peace, or patience in your own self isn’t a lot like those first buds that shoot forth from the branch in Spring. They are proof of life – but they are not the fruit. Getting a fruit tree to actually bear fruit can be quite a complex process, with more than a few variables: the size and the age of the tree, its exposure to the sun, the fertility of its soil, which trees are growing near to it, how regularly and wisely it is pruned, how the temperature holds after the buds appear, and how well it is protected from disease and pests. A fruit tree is not reliant upon its ability to bear fruit to live, to grow, to be beautiful – one can grow tall, bud and explode with beautiful blossoms without ever once producing an apricot.

But God didn’t make us just to look pretty – we were purposed to be host for God’s Spirit, and Spirit is a tree that bears fruit. The fruit of the Spirit growing in our lives – the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control – these things are not tools to equip us to be better people. They are not things that we reach for, they are not ways that we behave – they are not things that we do. They are the inevitable, natural outcropping of a life that is led by the Spirit.

Fruit is a by-product – it is the seed-bearing flesh that is picked off, rolled into a box, wrapped, and carried across borders, able to be placed freely into the hungry hands of another. It is the solid food that ripens and drops off by the bucket full, that you give to your neighbours, and that you call your friends over to help you gather, hoisting the ladder, shaking the tree – marvelling at how much, more than a person could ever hope to have a use for alone.

God has not given Spirit merely as a force to sustain us today, manna in the wilderness, fresh on the ground every morning. God has seeded into us with a mind to the harvest – in planting the seed, God has planted a tree, has planted an orchard, has planted a kingdom. The kingdom of God is tree to seed to tree again – it is ripe, bountiful and ever multiplying love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Thy kingdom come.