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Birthday Flowers

April 21, 2020

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My mother, Emily, in her prime

 

Today is my mother’s birthday.  She would have been 99.  No one in our family has lived to such an age; it’s apparently not in our genetic code.

If church were meeting, I would be bringing flowers this week.  The last job my mother had was as church secretary for her Unitarian church.  Among her duties was bringing flowers if no one had signed up to do so.  And so I honor her with flowers.

 

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This year, not needing a large bouquet, I picked a few from my garden.  Snapdragons don’t last long as cut flowers, but they offer a cheerful mix of colors, appropriate to the Easter season.

An Easter Story

April 17, 2020

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Lee Van Ham’s new book, “The Liberating Birth of Jesus” came out in late fall.  The timing and the title might lead one to expect that it’s a story of Christmas.  It’s not, though there’s mention of how our culture crowds out the full meaning of Jesus’ birth.

It’s an Easter story.  Specifically, it’s about two Easter people, whom we know as Matthew and Luke, who wrote for Easter people, to help preserve for future generations the mind-blowing experience of encountering Jesus.

Why do we have these two birth narratives in the gospels of Matthew and Luke?  Because each writer is using different but complementary ways of making the case that the Jesus whom the early Christians encountered brought them to a new consciousness, a new creation.

Van Ham works through all the pieces of the story, the magi from afar, the shepherds close by, genealogy and dreams and angels, showing how they point to the arrival of a new creation.  For us today, this new way of seeing can lead us to living radical creation-centered lives.

Christmas as we know it came in with government-sanctioned Christianity in the fourth century of our era.  Over and over, the Easter message has been co-opted by human institutions.  Over and over, prophets arise to bring us back to the main point: the energy of Easter that is a new beginning.

“The Liberating Birth of Jesus” is a short but solid book that would make a good group study.  I highly recommend it.

Spring Photos

April 7, 2020

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Many plants are blooming now.  There are still poppies.poppies10230I expect this area to have more poppies next year.  The seeds have no place to go now that the plants have reached the wall.

pink10229This plant, whose name I cannot remember although I bought it, has dutifully bloomed all winter, but not so energetically as it is doing now.

Apache Plume0236The apache plume has begun to come out.  It’s named for its feathery seed heads, but the white flowers are much more visible.

Most of my gardening is in the back yard, where no one but me has much chance to see it, but this indian hawthorn that came with the house puts on a show for a brief time in spring.Front bush10233

And for an extra touch in the front yard I took the palm branch (it’s plastic) which was delivered from church with other materials to use for worship in holy week, and tied it to my front gate.palm0234

It blows nicely in the wind, but it may not be fit to return for reuse next year.

GUMO?

April 3, 2020

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In the National Park Service shop I was puzzled by black tee shirts with GUMO in large letters on the front.  Goo-moh?  How was I supposed to know it should be pronounced Gwa-moh?  It took me a moment or two to make the translation.  The Park Service’s standard use of two letters of two words coding for the parks does not work when U is functioning as a consonant.  I was at the Guadalupe Mountains National Park.Peak0219

 

The park was crowded.  The clerk said it was spring break, but I saw many older couples too.  The date was March 9, just before the reality of the coronavirus epidemic hit us all.  That morning in the busy little shop will remain my “before” image; so much we did not know.

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Fortunately, our national monuments, landscapes and parks will be here to come back to.  This park has one unusual historical landmark, the remains of buildings from a stop on the Butterfield Stage Route.

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The Butterfield mail route ran through these mountains from 1851 to 1859, when a safer route was chosen.  Then in 1861 the Civil War interrupted it.  For a business that only lasted ten years, the Butterfield Stage has a big place in southwestern lore.  Since they needed to change horses every twenty miles there are many ruins across the southwest, but few are as easy to get to as this one.

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