In the yard

 

Do you ever get tired? Not for a few hours, but for what feels like weeks?

There’s always the backyard in spring, in Eastertide, to rest and recover in God.

The other day, after picking up stones from an area where I’ll soon load in top soil and plant grass, I sat on a rock and felt that I could spend a large portion of my life happily in this yard, watching all that occurs inbetween my digging and piling of stones and planting of seeds.
 
Much has occurred here over the Easter season.
 
On the morning of the sunrise service we returned home and the crocuses were out with a fury, laid out as a violet, succulent feast for the bees. Behind them, weathered by winter, the bricks in an improvised terrace tumbled and crumbled. It was an image of Easter; a collapse and a renewal.
 
When the midday sun came out the bees feasted on the nectars. Little wonder the flowers have flourished so happily here each year at this time. I can’t recall planting them with such a purpose in mind.  I’d moved them behind a raised bed in order to plant grass. Somehow, the separation of their roots seems to have liberated them, allowing each plant to propogate.
 
They’re gone now. Crocuses only stay a brief time, just as Jesus only rested a while with his despairing and then elated disciples. The crocuses' flowers were here long enough for the bees I’d say, who were dripping with pollen by the first week of April.
 
The yard is where I've been remembering things read over the weeks.
 
I’ve been reading Matthew, slowly. A few days after the crocuses departed, I settle on 5:43, "Forgive your enemies…set no bounds for your love…Just as your heavenly father sets no bounds for his love.” Or heavenly mother, I say to myself.
 
This dovetailed with the sunrise service’s homily this year. As Christ Church was flooded by Easter light, Rev. Jody Clarke spoke of setting oneself the ambitious goal of higher humanity, of no longer settling for “I’m only human,” but of seeing oneself as potentially loving beyond the borders of ordinary humanity.
 
Holy Week had seeped into my hard-headed consciousness in a series of evening services, gathered for readings in a small group gathered in the sanctuary. Jesus’ washing of the disciples feet; his recognition _ albeit with broken heart _ of Judas’ human failing; Jesus' lonely death, and his rebirth into the presence of Mary and then the doubting men around her.
 
On April 9th, a few days after the sunrise service and the crocuses, I recall glancing up at the television screen and seeing that Tiger Woods had returned to golf. On and on it went: news conferences, speculation on the number of mistresses, the carefully worded apology of a wealthy and still powerful man. The Web lit up. There’s even an Internet Tiger Woods joke page. (“A lion wouldn’t commit adultery, but a Tiger wood,” etc.) The public’s fascination with judgment of the famous stood up as a massive opposite to Matthew 5, and I was little better than the average person in my curiousity. Was I witnessing redemption, a carefully staged campaign, a process of public forgiveness?
 
What draws us away from unbounded love to this? On the Monday, after Easter's fourth Sunday, I returned from a trial in Sydney, listening to CBC radio for the full four hours of driving. A former colleague, journalist Lynn Glazier, broadcast her documentary about teen culture and, in particular, the role that social media can play in permitting sometimes vicious attacks of one human upon another.
 
A social media feature called the "honesty box" has proved irresistible to many young people because it was a place they could find no-holds-barred commentary on how others perceived them. Who could resist such a temptation, to know the minds of others in relation to themselves? Until, of course, you encounter the lower humanity of insults and cruelty that the mask of the social media permits.
 
After coming in from the backyard one day, I curled up in a sleepy state to spend an evening watching the movie Gandhi, and was reminded of his view on judgment. Near the end of the film, before he is shot, Gandhi tells the photographer from Life Magazine he is going to visit Pakistan, in order that its citizens should see that the legend from their neighbouring enemy is a mere mortal, rather than some devil they might imagined. “The only devils in this world are those running around inside our own hearts, and that is where all our battles should be fought,” he tells the journalist. (www.spiritual-experiences.com/spiritual-quotes)
 
In the backyard, these thoughts of judgment were fading away by the fourth weekend after Easter. I'm becoming fairly convinced those crocuses and bees and stones and soil are like grace, chasing devils right out of the heart _ or at least distracting them.
 
A big jack hammer has combined with an excavator to dig a trench around the side pathway of the house, tearing apart the old side garden and compelling us to start afresh with redigging the mashed-up lawn. The blessing from all this is that it may allow a dry basement and a lawn that isn’t rather like a swamp. A curling pathway is taking shape over where the drainage ditch gravel is laid in.
 
So many stones are turned up from deep in the ground in this process, that I endeavour to build a stone fence along the back, where excess fill can be dropped in and the early outlines of a raised garden laid out. Andrew Holmes, the backhoe operator, controls the digger gracefully, tenderly scooping up a bush and carrying it to a safe haven by the rear fence, like King Kong holding the heroine in his thick fingers. Later, I lift and turn and twist, hoping to make the stones fit in a row. Wall builders arrive and chuckle, saying my efforts will make good fill for something they might create with properly shaped "blue stone". But we are out of money, and this will have to suffice for now.
 
Which brings us back to the present of this writing, the morning after the fifth Sunday past Easter. Outside, Cathy makes the wooden guides for a crushed stone pathway, using levels, rebar and strings to ensure proper placement. We are dreaming now of flowers and greenery emerging from the stone piles. In the yards on two sides, small girls are running and a father to my left is building a magnificent treehouse, complete with screened in lower floor for evening refuge from mosquitoes and a loft where his children will be able to signal to their friends an entire block away.
 
It’s all quite a restoration. Fatigue falls away here, possibilities are endless. The backyard beckons now away from thoughts and into its slow recreation.
 
In the evening, I read from a small book given to me by my friend and spiritual counsellor: The Gift of Faith, Reflections from Anglicans.  L. William Countryman, an Episcopal priest and professor of new testament at Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif., describes forgiving and letting go. "Be loved. Why would you refuse it? Perhaps you do it out of pique because you think God isn't taking you seriously enough. Perhaps you do it out of shame and embarrassment because God is being kinder to you than you think you deserve. Either way, get over yourself. You are forgiven. Start there. In the whole universe, it is the only starting point there is, anyway. There is no reality deeper than God's overflowing love."