Extraordinary and Quotidian

by Margaret Krumm

Dolphins swim in these waters of Fort Myers, Florida. To Northern eyes, they are quite a sight, so Dad and Grandma and I marveled at them before our two-bit pontoon boat cruise left the dock yesterday evening.

The co-captain/emcee made jokes into a microphone as we puttered a little deeper into the Caloosahatchee, and my dad—as an apparent result of his recommitment to the Lord—made his usual remarks about how incredible everything was.

I say "usual" like that because he is always saying the most quotidian of things—my finding a satisfactory parking spot, for instance—are "very cool", "awesome", or "just amazing", and I wonder sometimes which words he uses for things that really are.

At eight o'clock, we watched as the sun sank into the water.

"This is our second sunset in a row! Isn't this amazing..."

My grandma chimed in. "Beautiful." She says it like "beauty-full."

Of course it was gorgeous, but "Come on," I half-wanted to say. "The sun sets everywhere almost every day."

Additionally:
the sun also rises (zing!) everywhere almost every day
the moon is full every 29 days
and stars and their constellations are always there (though Pittsburgh clouds only occasionally reveal them).

Why such awe for objects so constantly present?

May my awe for their Creator surpass it.

[untitled]

by Margaret Krumm

Seeing footprints between rows,
I knew I had been wrong
to roll on over late last night
and keep weeds from being sown.
And at harvest time, don't trust me
to rightly hold a rake.
These weeds are looking fine for food,
but oh! for God's sake. . .

They Pruned But Did Not Rake in Eden

by Mark Kazmier

At the commencement of this spring I had a very nasty flu. It was mostly the fever that was so unbearable. For about 24 hours, my fever was 103 degrees Fahrenheit. That night I was delirious; the ceiling seemed to be spinning for about 10 hours. It reminded me of the time when I was seven years old and my Mom let me watch the Disney film Dumbo when I had a fever. That night I was deliriously tormented by pink elephants. Dancing Pink Elephants are scary enough without delirium.

Have you noticed that it always seems to be the most glorious weather when you are bed-ridden? Well, this time I rebelled against my bed and forced myself to lie on the wooden porch of the Monastery (our community living house in which the abbot, myself, happens to have a wife) in the sun. After my fever was reduced to 99 I decided to do a bit of gardening. A logical decision, of course. See, I had been staring at our little patch of flower and herb garden from the deck that has not been touched for two years and was naturally (or perhaps un-naturally) overrun with dead leaves, dead grass, and weeds. It was kind of depressing to stare at actually. So I grabbed the only rake we have in our shed, a rake with sharp metal ends spaced rather wide, not your average leave-rake. I moved very slowly because of bodily fatigue, but after two afternoons I cleared the bed with my metal rake of most all of the dead debris. It was actually quite odd now that I think of it, how passionate I was about clearing the bed of dead stuff so that the living daffodils and rose plants and herbs could be free from it. I had not communicated with the outside world for about six days because of my illness, and yet the only thing I could think to do was to clear that little patch of ground of death and make it neat and orderly.

God put Man and Woman (she was not actually named Eve until after that whole fruit-eating thing) in a Garden. Not a palace. A garden. And they were commanded to tend to it. And that command was pure joy to them. Making things beautiful is the real job of every man and woman. That’s why gardens are so attractive to us: the atrraction is merely a remembrance of our original occupation. Even in perfect Eden, the trees and bushes and plants would get unruly if not attended. There is even a sense in which nature was wild before death entered the world. If it was not wild, then why would have God given us dominion over it?

But there were no rakes in Eden because nothing died. Principally, rakes are needed only to remove death.

Oh that the Master Gardener would now take up His rake and remove the death that is suffocating the new growth in my heart. After all, when Time worked itself backwards and the Second Man rose from the earth, Mary mistook him for a Gardener.

Rake

The Details

by Chris Pipkin












(Picture: A groundskeeper's house in Sighisoara, Romania)


Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee;
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

--Alfred, L. Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.

It’s all artificial, of course. The order in my room. “A place for everything, and everything in its place,” my mother said once, quoting someone who was quoting someone else. But nothing really works that way. There are always more things than there are categories, or, if not, more categories than there is space. Even a good rake allows the occasional rogue leaf through.

At some point, there has to be compromise. I will have to place the sketchbook in with the other books, and store the drawing pencils with the pens, thus dividing “art supplies.” I will have to decide if The Great Divorce goes with the fictional, theological, or devotional books. This annoys me, but I remember that the ordering principle is only good insofar as it brings you closer to the objective of having a clean room. That’s hard, because I’m a fundamentalist at heart. Either the room is disregarded, like the ozone, or it must be faultless, like the Bible. You can only care about so many things when you care about them this way. But to follow the Way of Organization as simply a means--to not become obsessive-compulsive--actually feels like hypocrisy to me. In reality (I’m told) it is healthy.

I’ve noticed that certain of my English students are practically fluent. After painstakingly memorizing every rule and studying for years, they’ve arrived at an excellent working knowledge of English grammar--better than most native speakers, in fact, and frequently better than me. But they won’t sound like native speakers until they forget all the rules they’ve learned and just speak English. Rules were certainly not made to be broken. But they were also not made for their own sakes (especially not English rules).

I’ve toyed around with writing a (possibly heretical) story about Moses. He’s up on the mountain, and God is dictating the Law to him. As God dictates, Moses’s arm gets really tired. He starts missing words out, here and there, and God refuses to slow down. By the end of the day, he’s leaving out whole paragraphs, and his arm is completely numb. Night falls, and Moses, exhausted and depressed, hears the voice of God again, telling him to get up. Moses obeys, and God brings him to the stone where he’s been scratching out the commandments. God tells him to begin sanding down the words, and as Moses does, he feels the presence of God in the pitch darkness, terrifyingly intimate. The next day dawns, Moses is reinvigorated, and he tries taking God’s dictation over again, fails, and rubs it out that night in the midst of God’s presence. The process repeats itself thirty-nine times until Moses gets every last word etched into (what is now) a tablet. He feels thrilled that he has at last gotten it right, and goes to sleep. But lo and behold, he is woken up by God and instructed to sand the tablet down, as usual. Moses protests that he has written it all perfectly this time, every word, but God insists, and Moses again rubs the Law out. The next morning, he wakes to see the words on the tablet again, but in God’s handwriting this time. Moses is annoyed and asks what the point was of all the writing and erasing. God says “I Am,” or something equally Zen (and hopefully more satisfying in terms of story). I don’t know for sure, as it’s barely started. It takes so long for me to write anything. I get too hung up on the details.

On the other hand, if all are sinners, as Paul says--if none of us can yet speak the Language of God fluently--then grammar lessons we must have...