Streams of Mercy
In the July issue of the Pinestraw magazine, Jim Dodson offers a beautiful essay entitled “The Garden of America.” He speaks of the blessing he finds each morning his garden – “the one time in the day when I feel, with the faith of a mustard seed, to quote the mystic Dame Julian of Norwich, that all will be well.”
He speaks of Andrea Wulf’s bestseller Founding Gardeners, and the way passion for nature, plants, gardens and agriculture is deeply woven into the fabric of America. “I believe it’s impossible to understand the makings of America without looking at the founding fathers as farmers and gardeners,” Wulf writes.
This image of America as a garden is helpful in opening up new ways of thinking about this season in our nation’s life. “The beautiful thing about a garden is that it is forever changing and never completed. Revision and evolution go hand in hand with making a garden flourish and bloom.” So it is with a nation.
In the midst of a global pandemic, in a time of reckoning with years of social injustice and ever-deepening systemic racism, with growing protests calling for reform, Dodson observes that American democracy is much like a garden. Gardens are amazingly resilient in storms and drought, and when tended regularly, weeded and watered, nurtured and fed, pruned and tended with a loving eye, they flourish again, and so it is with our beloved nation.
“A true gardener’s work is never complete, likewise for a true patriot of the diverse and ever-changing garden that is America.” It’s helpful to think that in these difficult days we are actually making progress in dealing with systemic injustices, with indifference and misunderstandings and half-truths that have infested the garden of America from its very beginning.
The 197th General Assembly (PCUSA, 1985) made its own the action of the 177th General Assembly (PCUS, 1977) with reference to A Declaration of Faith which is as follows: "That 'A Declaration of Faith' be adopted as a contemporary statement of faith, a reliable aid for Christian study, liturgy, and inspiration.” These words are from that document:
We are charged to root out prejudice and racism from our hearts and institutions. We are commissioned to stand with women and men of all ages, races, and classes as they struggle for dignity and respect, and the chance to exercise power for the common good. We must not permit or tolerate in the church and its institutions the inequities we seek to correct in the world. We must be willing to make such amends as we can for centuries of injustice which the church condoned.
May we do all this and more, as we tend the “diverse and ever-changing garden that is America.”
This season in our lives is being called a time of reckoning, and there are repeated calls for repentance, reconciliation and reparations. Last week I heard the word “re-imagine” in a conversation – a call to re-imagine ways of living together in our world in ways that are better for all people. What a positive, hopeful word, filled with possibilities!
May that prayer of Julian of Norwich be the prayer of our hearts in these days of reckoning, as we re-imagine possibilities for our common life.
“All shall be well,
And all shall be
Well, and
All manner of things
shall be well.”
Elizabeth