It has been a rather cool couple of days up here in the Mid-Atlantic–warm enough to melt the NY snow but cool enough to make me want to stay indoors and drink something warm.  The rain was pretty heavy yesterday, and is supposed to pick back up today, which means that, when added to the snow melt, we are looking at the possibility of the Delaware flooding its banks by evening tonight.  We aren’t close enough to the water line to be in any danger, but some folks in the church are, so we will have to see whether there is any fall out.  It is nice, though, to have all that rain melt away all the gross old snow.  You almost forget for a moment that it is winter.

It’s been a big week in the church calendar as well–Ash Wednesday was this week, and, when you add that with Presbytery, Lenten Vespers, and regular services, I found myself up to my eyeballs in things to do.  I had been up in NJ by myself this week, and had expected to get a good deal of reading done, but the week is almost come and gone, and instead I have found that little things really do add up.  Hopefully things will cool down come next week–I could use a bit of a breather.

Overall, not a bad week, though.  Every day I am reminded by the little kicker inside me that my life is changing rapidly, but I am excited about it.  And while Lent can be busy, I enjoy the change in pace in the church.  Hopefully the sun might break through, a little, though, and give me a good excuse to sit on the porch instead of in the house while I am working away.

Many Christians spend a lot of energy pointing on all the mistakes that the Israelites made on the journey–they will look the stories of the people’s doubt and fear as examples of their lack of faith.  They will point to the golden calf and they will proclaim, “Hah!  Those fools had God with them in the wilderness and still they sinned!  No wonder they suffered so!”

But as I find myself in the middle of my own desert wandering, my own peculiar “40″ experience, I am inclined to sympathize with that band of courageous and, yes, desperately human people who found themselves in the middle of an unknown land and unsure of what might be before them.

I imagine that, in the beginning, the people of God must have been excited, perhaps even thrilled, by the possibility of what lay before them.  Perhaps they didn’t even really believe that this could be real–was it really the case that their identity as slaves was no more?  Could it be true that Egypt held them captive no more?  Were they really free?  It must have been exhilarating.

But as the days begin to pass, and little seems to be changing, I can imagine how questions might begin to rise up like steam, clouding the future and erasing the certainty that they had once held tight to.  Where were they, anyways?  20 years into the wilderness, and only a pillar of cloud and fire to guide the way might make me downright cranky.  Even knowing that God has promised an end might be of little comfort when you are barely halfway there and most of your life is behind you.

I wonder how many of us find ourselves on a journey and don’t even realize it until the beginning is long over and the end is nowhere in sight?  It certainly didn’t occur to me to think of my 40 as “wilderness” time until almost 10 weeks had passed, and with every sunrise and sunset, I feel myself wrestling with opposing emotions:  frustration and expectancy for what is to come, hope and doubt of how this might change me, how it might already be changing me without my even realizing it.

As I sit and as I write on this, my 19th week of journeying, I can’t help but wonder what lies before me without my even realizing it.  What doubts or fears might arise within me?  What frustrations might I wrestle with in the coming days and weeks?  When it is all over, how might I look back and realize that my life was changed forever by what I am experiencing right now?  I have no pillar to follow, only my own feeble and desperate trust that God is with me in this, guiding me through the unknown towards a land and an identity that God has prepared for me.  May it be so.

Music has always been the heart of the Church and our worship of the Mighty one. In the desert wilderness, the wandering Israelites sang prayers and hymns to a God whom they followed as a pillar of cloud by day, and as a raging fire by night. In the land of Canaan, the people of Israel composed psalms to express their love, their praise, their grief, and their struggles to a God who had made covenant with his people. On the way to Babylon, the exiles dried their tears with songs from home, prayers to the One who created.

And so it should not surprise us that when the Holy Spirit came to Mary, she cried out to God in song, proclaiming thanks that God’s revolution was near, offering thanksgiving to the one who shined in the darkness and could not be overcome. At Christ’s birth, angels sang alelluias, and shepherds whispered songs of wonderment to the baby lying in the manger. The magi marched ever closer to the star, drawn by strange and exotic rhythms to the cave where Jesus laid his head.

And this is only the beginning of a story that spans a lifetime—I imagine that Jesus would in turn be formed by the songs of his people: the melodic prayers of a people who see God in every part of their lives, whether it be rejoicing, or sorrow. The familiar words would comfort him in his grief, comfort the disciples and followers of Christ who stood in the shadow of the cross and who waited for the Holy Spirit to be with them.

We are the bearers of this tradition, of singing our faith to God and to one another. Our ancestors, the saints of the church, have passed on their faith to us through the songs they sing—O Come O Come Emmanuel, Amazing Grace, O Come All Ye Faithful, Joy to the World. And each and every psalm is a window into faith of those who have sat in these pews before us, who have waited in the darkness of Advent for a light to shine, hoping and praying and singing for a Savior who would come to redeem them. They, like us, hear the psalmist’s cry: “ Sing to the Lord a new Song, tell of his salvation from day to day.” They cower with the shepherds in the fields as the angels as their praise to God sets the sky afire.

I believe that these hymns are at the center of our worship, especially during this season, for they are a reminder for us of why we bother gathering at all—we gather because the one we worship, whom we call God-with-us, Light of Light, Rod of Jesse and Dayspring from on High, is more than just a baby in manger, he is also our King and Savior. This tiny, vulnerable child, born out of poverty and scandal to unwed parents, brought into the world in a dirty stable and laid in a trough, attended by shepherds and worshiped by foreigners, wise men from distant lands, will, through his life and his death, teach us what it means to be light to the world. To those most forgotten and forlorn, he will open his arms wide in an embrace to remind us that God’s love is beyond anything we can comprehend. And to those who are already embraced by the world, to the comfortable and the happy, he will issue a challenge—follow me, empty yourself, create a space where God can dwell, learn to love as God first loved us—welcome everyone, sick, hungry, thirsty, imprisoned, resisting the very human impulse to be content with what is rather than the Kingdom of God that should be, even unto death.

Perhaps this is why, during this season of Advent, I have found myself again and again drawn to the words of a hymn that speaks not of the manger, and mentions no shepherd and angels, or even a star in the sky. Instead, I have found myself more often than not, drawn to the words of an Easter hymn, for I am reminded during this Christmas season that the joy of the manger means nothing without the cross. That the star in the sky points us to more than a holy family—it shines a light on the one who will be light for all people. And this is why, this Christmas, I find myself singing with the saints:

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!

What wondrous love is this, O my soul!

What wondrous love is this

That caused the Lord of bliss

To bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,

To bear the dreadful curse for my soul!

To God and to the Lamb I will sing, I will sing;

To God and to the Lamb I will sing;

To God and to the Lamb,

Who is the great I AM,

While millions join the theme, I will sing, I will sing,

While millions join the theme, I will sing.

May it be, that during this season of Christmas, we are with the million who sing, drawn deeper into the mystery and the joy of the One who comes to redeem us all. Alleluia, Amen.

Poison Ivy

by Sibelan Forrester

1. The First Time

Who says wrists and ankles aren’t still eroticized?
They’re the first parts you can get to, the parts
most at risk even if you dress in all the clothes
you can think of, long sleeves, socks and shoes,
gardening gloves — hey, I’m not a specialist.

Hauling on the big vines, using your weight
to master them, of course when they snap
you tumble into the little beginning sprouts
that you don’t recognize. The next day,
or in three the first touches will appear
like slender irritated necklaces, puss
pearls on a fraying red thread.

Proving who is the true god of the garden.

2. The Second Time

Poison ivy is like sexual obsession,
it pulls all my body’s attention
to those blistering organs of delight.
My body says, touch me there, touch
my ankle. Rub a little. Ooooooooh.

Three minutes later it’s calling again
with every seductive swish of my skirt,
begging any passing hands, especially my own.

3. The Fall

I was being so good, not scratching
the fulminating bubbles, in spite
of all the temptation: I was doing
what the doctor said, until
I went downstairs to put on the laundry
and stood for five minutes, head down,
in front of the dryer, scratching every bit
of available skin from the knees down
to the cold cement ground.

Weak woman,
leaky vessel!
Now I am seeping,
I must wear the red Letter.

4. So I Am Changed

Now that I am an initiate
I see it everywhere, the glossy
triangular eyes of its young
leer at me from every garden
and roadside in recognition.

All these years I didn’t know
what might be out there to get me,
but now wherever I walk I keep
an eye out for that glossy leaf
and tendril, lurking at the edge
of the lawn, the soft touch
and proof of my angry imperfection.

Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.

-Isaiah 5:1-2

I can’t help but think of my own garden when I read these words from Isaiah.  As a person who grew up in my mother’s garden and who has longed for a few free feet of soil to work in, and who has despaired of their absence during years in cities like Los Angeles, Boston, and Philadelphia where open space is a dream, and container gardening the only option, my first year at my new call in Belvidere, NJ, a land of open space, was a dream come true (Phew!  That was a long sentence!)

Back in the fall, hubbie and I (okay okay, I) pored over seed catalogs–territorial seed, seedsavers– and made lists and lists of our dream plants.  We ordered garlic for the fall, and I eagerly rototilled what seemed like an ambitious plot of land– 15 feet square in the open space of our back yard.  We debated planting strategies and the merits of fences in a land of woodchucks and rabbits.  In the fall we planted Garlic–German extra heavy–and I watched for signs of life.  I ordered tomatoes and carrots, rainbow chard and beets, ground cherries and salad greens and potatoes and winter squash, accumulating a growing bag of seeds for the spring months.  In March I could stand it anymore, and as the garlic peeked out of a mix of compost and snow, I started seeds–cucumber, tomato, squash, ground cherry.  My eyes danced with glee as bits of green began to struggle out of the dirt, leaves unfurling slowly, and then faster as the plants got their legs.

We fenced our garden, pulled weeds, prepared soil for our tender newborns.  We babied them into the soil and fiercely guarded them from those who might do them harm.  We relished the first cucumbers, the first tomatoes, ground cherries, carrots and beets, offering hymns of praise to our Creator.

If what I have written sounds too perfect to be true, it is.  For just as we relished the garden, just as we planted it and whispered to one another our dreams for its life, so did our garden teach us.  First of all, we learned, as many do, that gardens do not always want what we do (they dont, for example, always look or sound like this one).  Our garden, for example, has decided to become a monstrosity that we must contain more often than encourage.  Our little babies, our beautiful little plants, are more often than not at war with one another–for food, for light, for space.  The ground cherries, for example, would love nothing better than to blanket the beds of carrots nearby with large, dense foilage, for no other reason than that they can.  The Butternut Squash, who waited for our two week vacation, has decided to make a break for the back yard, and has covered 30 feet of fence and made a 10 foot run out over the grass and towards the garage.  And the tomatoes, well they have grown to 7 feet tall and counting.

And this is just the garden, the things we chose to plant, the things we want to grow.  Add in the tomato horn worms, the japanese beetles and june bugs, the cabbage moths and slugs, and our garden begins to sound less like the orderly vineyard that Isaiah envisions and starts to sound a whole lot more like a battlefield.

Which is precisely the point, I think, of Isaiah.  You see, God planted a vineyard (that’s us) and like so many God had the best of intentions.  But like all vineyards and gardens, what is planted is not always what takes root.  The fertile ground of a garden is welcoming to every plant, and every hungry beast and bug.  The garden beckons to the weed–grow here!  the ground is soft and moist and full of potential!–and if we are not careful, and if we do not pay attention, our garden risks becoming overrun by all of these forces of nature.

It is in this sense, then, that I can relate to Michael Pollan’s insight in his book entitled “Second Nature,” that you haven’t become a gardener until you begin to recognize the distance between the dream of the garden and its reality.  For a garden cannot flourish without the ever-present hand of the Gardener.  You can’t just plant grapes and expect them to grow–they need attention, just like my own garden needs me if I want it to do what I want it to.  In other words, to Garden is to hold the chaos at bay, to build a fence and tend the soil and, when necessary, to pluck out that which is not what was planted.

Perhaps this is why, then, in Psalm 80, the people of God push back at Isaiah, begging God to return to the work he started.  ”Come and save us!” they cry to God, from the forces that seek to destroy us.  ”Let your hand be upon us” they ask, knowing that the garden cannot live without the presence of the Lord.  the Garden of God’s people needs weeding, and God is the only one that can tend to the health of the Vine.

When we do tend to the garden, of course, then we experience the joys that result from our work.  For a healthy garden offers its fruit in abundance to the Gardener–luscious cantaloupes, tender carrots and chard, mind-blowing tomatoes, the queens of the garden haul.  The gardener’s hands cannot hope to carry all that the Garden produces–it is truly a wonder and a blessing, beyond anything one might expect.

What a blessing to be privileged and challenged by my time in the Garden, and to be challenged and cared for by no less than the Great Gardener of Creation.