From Your New Minister
BY MEG RILEY, CLF SENIOR MINISTER
“Why do you always want to be out in the garden?” grumbles my thirteen-year-old. An only child, she’s been known to refer to the garden as “the little sister I never wanted to have.”
“I have more friends in the garden than I do on Facebook!” I call over my shoulder on my way out the door. The truth is, between spring and fall, gardening is my primary spiritual practice. In the long Minnesota winters, I stare out the window at the hard ground the way I used to listen to the baby monitor while my infant daughter slept. Feeling relieved, mostly, but incomplete at the same time.
Each morning, I wake up at dawn and throw on a grubby pair of overalls. Two tortoise shell cats and one yellow lab accompany me outside. In a glorious greeting of the day, we do what I call our promenade. We start at one edge of my city corner lot turned garden, and walk to the other edge. I don’t do as much as pull a single weed. I simply admire what is new, and every day there is an incredible amount to admire. The animals, too, appreciate plants they like. Often they sniff, taste, and roll on them. After the promenade, gardening commences.
As I write this column, it is early spring here in Minneapolis. Daffodils, violas and tulips are in full bloom; the crocus and magnolia blossoms have already come and gone. Most plants are just beginning to come up out of winter dormancy.
I learn many lessons from the garden. The primary, overarching wisdom is to savor the offerings of each day. I can look at the peonies this morning, their red stems about six inches high, still weeks away from even a bud. The moment I so much as imagine the future glory of their full open heads, I know that in order to see them, I must relinquish the beauty before me now. No more daffodils, no more tulips.
So I stop myself from imagining the future. To truly savor today, I bask instead in the peonies’ short loveliness just as it is. In my mind’s eye, I can enjoy the anticipation of their upcoming heyday, just as I now savor the memory of those fallen magnolia blossoms. But neither memory nor anticipation is as complete and real, compelling and vibrant, as the tulips and daffodils presenting themselves in all of their particularity in the present moment.
As a personality, I tilt towards the future. I’m always imagining what can be brought into being tomorrow. The garden tells me, over and over, that there is a tangible cost to savoring tomorrow’s glory, and that cost is full presence with today’s spectacular beauty.
I write this column, aware that by the time you receive it, it will be full summer. In all likelihood my morning promenade will feature snap dragons, which wake up as late as my adolescent daughter; dahlias; the smells and tastes of herbs and vegetables. Whatever is going on in the garden by late summer, I know that the daylight hours, growing steadily longer as I write this, will be shrinking again as you read it.
I write this column aware that my ministry at the Church of the Larger Fellowship, though I can already imagine it in full bloom in my mind’s eye, is really in the tiniest beginning stages. I am awed just thinking about what we can do and who we can be together! We have unparalleled opportunity to create a deep and wide spiritual oasis together. But while I am excited to imagine what we can become, most of all I want to walk through each day in full gratitude of what is already here.
CLF is more like a thousand acres than a city lot. I can’t walk its perimeter each day. So I would love your help in the days ahead—please reach out to me, say hello, let me know what life looks like from your corner. Each conversation I have with a CLF member is a step on a spiritual promenade for me, which helps me to appreciate still more the abundant life that graces our church without walls.
At the very same moment that I run full tilt into appreciation of today, I am aware of the completion of the ministry of Rev. Jane Rzepka as senior minister of the CLF. Jane has ministered to me and to you and to many others who have spoken with her, listened to her preach, or read her words in Quest. She continues to do so. But not in these pages, not any more.
Joseph Campbell said: “Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. That’s it. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.”
In my garden, I touch eternity. Anything that calls us fully into the moment helps us to realize what Campbell identifies as the very function of our lives—to experience eternity right here and now. Jane Rzepka’s ministry at the Church of the Larger Fellowship, if it touched you, is not in the past. It is eternal. I pray that, in its season, my own ministry at Church of the Larger Fellowship touches eternity too.
Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), 25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108-2823, U.S.
or
Phone: 617-948-6166; or for international callers, use 00-1-617-948-6166
Fax: 617-523-4123, or for international faxes, use 00-1-617-523-4123
