A Day in the Garden

For just a tad bit more than forty years I handled the holy stuff of the church.  I not only handled it, but was surrounded by it so much of the time.  And, if it was not in view, it was only a short walk to the sanctuary which was, of course, the home of the holy stuff.  There was a baptismal font.  There were two altar candles and during the Easter season the big candle, the Paschal Candle.  There was a pulpit, a huge pulpit Bible, an altar, and the Table from which the holy meal was served.  On those Sunday when the meal was offered, I prayed prayers to bless the bread and the wine and placed it in the hands of kneeling parishioners.   

Today I handled holy stuff again.  But, it was not the holy stuff of the past.  Using a push plow I broke open furrows in the holy dirt.  I dropped okra, corn, butter beans, and pea seed in the furrows before pushing the dirt over them.  As I dropped them in the dirt I actually heard myself quietly blessing the seed as it dropped from my hand.  In those moments of walking up one furrow and down the other, looking at the waiting dirt, and dropping seed, a strange awareness of holy presence seem to settle down over me and the garden around me.   

It has been a long journey which has brought me to the place I walked today.  While I have come to understand that there is holy stuff within the sanctuary that has been blessed by prayers, there is more holy stuff outside of the sanctuary than inside it.  For so long I lived with some kind of ecclesiastical blinders that kept me from seeing what others have surely realized long before these days in my life.   As the poet wrote long ago, "Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God..."  I learned the words in high school, but being the slow learner I am have only come to understand that everything the Creator God has touched is blessed and holy.  Everything.