These last few weeks have been late summer the way it should be. Highs in the 70s, with the humidity just right, perfect for a last trip to the pool or the beach; lows in the 60s for perfect sleeping weather with the windows open all night. Colors saturated beyond all belief in my favorite combination of green leaves, blue skies, and red bricks in the shade on a sunny day, colors you can’t capture in a photo on a screen. Quiet sidewalks and empty pews as half the city tries to squeeze one more weekend of fun out of the summer.

The State of Maine isn’t the only place that can lay claim to the phrase “the way life should be.” Not these few weeks.

But not everything is as perfect as it seems. The leaves on the tree next to my desk are already beginning to turn, a sign of stress after a hot, dry summer. The joy of the last game of pick-up baseball being played in the park comes along with the sinking feeling I remember all too well of a school year about to begin. Our late-summer peace is troubled by news of war and violence, and all the anxieties of yet another election year.

This combination of flourishing and stress, of bitter and sweet, may not be “the way life should be.” But it’s certainly the way life is. And as it is with the world around us, so it is with the world inside us. Life is always both good and imperfect. And we are also always both good and imperfect. It’s a part of the human condition that the writer Dave Zahl calls “mixedness.”

When we misunderstand this reality, it has the potential to lead us to despair. Some of us crush ourselves with perfection, thinking that we’re supposed to be all beauty and no mess, that we should be able to do the right things and say the right things all the time, never making a mistake and never failing, and we find ourselves drowned in shame if we slip up. Others think we really are that great, unwilling or unable to see our rougher edges and our darker sides, and we expect the people around us to be perfect as well. A few of us might suffer from the opposite: We only see our failings and our struggles, and refuse to acknowledge the ways in which we’re good. Any of these imbalanced paths can only lead to despair.

But if we embrace the unfortunate truth of life’s “mixedness” and our own, it has the power to set us free. If you’re reading this, I am almost sure that you are mostly trying to be good. I am absolutely sure that you are imperfect. So am I. So is everyone else in your life. (And everyone else in mine!)

I can’t speak for you, I guess, but the more I come to grips with this, the better I feel. I find it easier to take the pressure of myself when I remember that my best efforts will inevitably be imperfect. I find it easier to love other people when I remember that theirs will, too. The more this truth sinks in, the more I find myself set free: free from my anxiety about my own small imperfections, free from my anger at everyone else’s minor failing, free to embrace and enjoy the good things I find all around me, knowing that they aren’t ruined by the bad.

This may not be the way life should be, but it’s certainly the way life is. And—seeing us exactly as we are, and knowing us more deeply than we know ourselves—God has chosen to love us, and to offer us a thousand small reminders of that love.

Many of you know that we’re in the midst of a process to renovate and improve the Garden, especially focusing on making the Garden a more accessible community space: widening and restoring some of the paths so they are accessible, broadening some of the paved areas in which we gather for food and conversation, adding lighting along the pathways, and gently grading the lower section of the Garden so that it forms an accessible ramp up to the upper section, rather than the sunken step (and giant puddle!) currently between the two sections. This work is being funded by a $150,000 Community Preservation Act grant.

This month, our Vestry approved a bid from one of three contractors who submitted proposals. The total cost will be well within the estimate, allowing the full cost of the project to be covered by the CPA grant. (The grant only covers accessibility and lighting, not any additional planting.) The exact timeline of the construction process has not been determined yet, but work should begin this summer.

So this week, I thought it would be fun to share a few reflections, memories, and especially photographs from the Garden’s past, as we prepare for the Garden’s future.

Around this time every year, the Wolcott Cutler Memorial Garden behind St. John’s is transformed into a sanctuary of its own. During the winter and early spring, the Garden is bare and brown, like everything, and often cut off from the world by puddles or snow. But during the spring and in the summer, it becomes an urban oasis. I often sit in the Garden to read or to write a sermon during the warmer months, and sometimes find myself absorbed by the world around me instead. The breeze rustles the leaves high above me, the shade and the cool walls of the church dispel the summer heat, the birds sign hymns all around, and—wait, have I already read this page?

And at the same time, the Garden is a wonderful community meeting place, where people from St. John’s and all of Charlestown come together: for lemonade hours and cookouts, for Monday night AA meetings and the Monday afternoon Turn It Around, Jr. youth group, for Charlestown Mothers’ Association New Moms’ groups and for Charlestown Nursery School nature exploration.

These two uses have always been a part of what was originally called the Forest Garden when it was envisioned by the Rev. Wolcutt Cutler, and later renamed the Cutler Memorial Garden in his memory. The Rev. Mr. Cutler, as you may know, was an avid photographer, and his photographs document some of the early life of the Garden: I thought I’d share some of my favorites below, along with some modern companions!

I share these pictures, the Rev. Cutler’s and mine, with deep gratitude for his vision and for the generations of volunteers who built the Forest Garden and have maintained it for generations, and especially for those members of our church who continue to keep it in such beautiful condition, and to work to improve it, today.

In 2011, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman published a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow, in which he distinguishes between two separate pathways in our minds. “System 1” is the fast path, in which the mind quickly synthesizes information and makes decisions without conscious input. With System 1, you can complete the phrase, “in sickness and in _____,” or drive on the route you’ve been taking home for decades. “System 2” is the slow path, in which your conscious processes of logic and calculation are engaged. With System 2, you can write a letter, or decide on the best way to drive from Charlestown to Braintree for an appointment at 4:00pm. (Trick question: No matter when you leave, you will be late.)

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a good book. And it’s a great title. The title came to mind for me this weekend, as I sat through the eighth hour of a special diocesan convention on the day before Pentecost, and saw two different sides of the Holy Spirit: Fast and Slow.

The Holy Spirit is, after all, the mind of the Church. Or at least, it’s the Person of the Trinity to whom we assign most of the processes of discernment and decision-making in the Church, the one for whose intervention we pray when we are in need of guidance.

In the modern Church, we often associate the Holy Spirit with the spontaneous and disruptive, the unexpected and miraculous. “Pentecostalism” is, after all, the tradition of speaking in tongues and miracle cures, whose adherents have believed in sudden outpourings of the Holy Spirit since the Azusa Street Revival and even before. When the Holy Spirit shows up, it’s with a sudden rush of wind and fires lit on people’s heads, with charismatic gifts and remarkable events. Most days, the Holy Spirit seems like a System 1 person of the Trinity.

But the Holy Spirit has a System 2, as well; the Spirit moves in more deliberate ways. Last week, I think, I wrote that the Holy Spirit shapes and guides the Church over generations, smoothing out our liturgies, refining our prayers into words that stand the test of time. It’s certainly true that the Spirit shapes us over the course of our lives; it’s no accident that “spiritual journey” has become such a common phrase, cliché as it may be. (When you’re facing the 93 South of life, where the future seems intractable, the Spirit is certainly there.)

And the Spirit moves in church conventions, too, even as they move at a comically glacial pace. Our election convention was already half an hour behind the agenda by the time the first vote was cast. (45 minutes, it turns out, was not enough time for a Eucharist with 500 people.) Each ballot took a few minutes to cast a vote, followed by twenty minutes of counting, then a few minutes to announce the results of that ballot, followed by another twenty minutes for the candidates to decide if they want to drop out before the next one, round after round of electronic voting, each of which was theoretically instant but which took forty-five minutes nevertheless.

But sometimes, the Spirit can’t do its work without some delays. Those forty-minute breaks were essential to the process. The hour we took for lunch between ballots 2 and 3 was absolutely necessary. Taking the time to reflect, and pray, and wait in a beautiful church between rounds of voting transformed what could’ve been a process of political scheming into a holy time of discernment. Sometimes, parliamentary procedure and Robert’s Rules can stifle the movement of the Holy Spirit—but sometimes all that structure and rigamarole slows things down just enough, gives just enough space, for the Spirit to help us work.

The Spirit can move fast, when it wants to, shattering our preconceptions and overturning the world in a matter of minutes. But mostly it moves slow, in our conventions and in our lives, gradually reshaping and redirecting us. The Spirit is not only fire, but wind; not only sudden transformation that burns down everything, but a gentle breeze that slowly takes us where we need to go.

I spent Monday and Tuesday this week at our annual Clergy Conference. Along with time to catch up with old colleagues in ministry and participate in important conversations with diocesan leaders, every year’s Clergy Conference includes a series of presentations by a guest speaker. Sometimes these are great. Sometimes they’re just fine. This year, I was really blown away.

Our speaker this year with Debie Thomas, an Episcopal layperson who serves as Minister for Lifelong Formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto. Debie was raised in the United States by Indian immigrant parents, who came from the southern Indian state of Kerala, where they were members of the community of Mar Thoma Christians, who date their history back two thousand years to the ministry of Saint Thomas in India. Her father was an evangelical pastor in the US. Debie herself is a writer and a mother, “a seeker, an explorer, a believer, and a doubter,” as she puts it.

Her presentations grappled with each of the readings appointed to Pentecost, asking how each one might point us to a way in which the Holy Spirit is leading the Church today. What are the “dry bones” in our lives and in our churches, the things that seem dead and gone that only God can restore to life? How does the Holy Spirit translate the language of our faith into the language of our own lives, so that we hear God speaking to each one of us in a way we can understand, as the disciples heard at Pentecost? How does the Spirit pray for us, when we do not know how to pray for ourselves, with “sighs too deep for words,” as Paul says? What is the truth toward which Jesus is leading us in this “post-truth” age?

It was a week of many questions, and few answers. But luckily, Pentecost is still a few weeks away. I wonder, between now and then, whether you might pick one of those questions, and explore it in your prayer between now and then.

The Fourth Sunday of Easter, just past, is always one of the most idyllic Sundays of the year. Every year, we read one of the portions of Jesus’ “Good Shepherd” discourse, hearing those tender words, “I am the Good Shepherd.” We read the beloved 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd,” and sing favorite hymns like “Shepherd of souls, refresh and bless” or “My Shepherd will supply my need.” And in a world in which many of us feel as though we “walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” it’s comforting to be reminded that we need “fear no evil, for thou art with me.”

Even in a society in which most of us couldn’t shear a sheep to save our souls, many of us find this pastoral imagery deeply moving. And falling as it often does in mid-April, with flowers beginning to bloom and greenery returning to a mud-brown world, Good Shepherd Sunday celebrates the joyful fulfillment of Easter’s promise of new and abundant life.

But all of that is assuming one of the two possible readings of Jesus’ words. The pastoral imagery is what we get from Jesus saying, “I am the Good Shepherd.” But what would it mean if we switched the emphasis around? What would it mean to say, “I am the Good Shepherd,” instead?

“Shepherd,” in the ancient Near East, was not just a pleasant pastoral image evoking rolling green hills, nor was it merely the less-romanticized daily occupation of a large portion of the population.

“Shepherd” was also one of the most common images for kings and earthly rulers. For thousands of years, kings of Sumeria, Assyria, and Babylonia described identified themselves as the shepherds of their people:

•Gudea (Sumerian ensi; 2144–2124 BC) was a “shepherd who leads the people with a good religious hand.”[38]
•Lipit-Ishtar (Isin; 1934–1924 BC): “Lipit-Ishtar, the wise shepherd, whose name has been pronounced by the god Nunamnir.”[39]
•Hammurabi (Babylonia, 1792–1750 BC): “I am Hammurabi, the shepherd, selected by the god Enlil, he who heaps high abundance and plenty . . . [the one] who gathers together the scattered peoples.”[40] “I provided perpetual water for the land . . . [and] gathered the scattered peoples. . . . In abundance and plenty I shepherded them.”[41]
•Amenhotep III (Egypt; 1411–1374 BC): “the good shepherd, vigilant for all people.”[42]
•Seti I (Egypt; 1313–1292 BC): “the good shepherd, who preserves his soldiers alive.”[43]
•Merneptah (Egypt; 1225–1215 BC): “I am the ruler who shepherds you.”[44]
•Merodach-baladan I (Babylonia; 1171–1159 BC): “[I am] the shepherd who collects the dispersed (people).”[45]
•Adadnirari III (Assyria; 810–783 BC): “unrivalled king, wonderful shepherd . . . whose shepherdship the great gods have made pleasing to the people of Assyria.”[46]
•Esarhaddon (Assyria; 680–669 BC): “the true shepherd, favorite of the great gods.”[47]
•Assurbanipal (Assyria; 668–627 BC): “those peoples which Ashur, Ishtar and the (other) great gods had given to me to be their shepherd and had entrusted into my hands.”[48]
•Nabopolassar (Babylonia; 625–605 BC): “the king of justice, the shepherd called by Marduk.”[49]
•Nebuchadnezzar II (Babylonia; 604–562 BC): “Marduk . . . gave me the shepherdship of the country and the people,” and “the loyal shepherd, the one permanently selected by Marduk.”[50]

The prophets condemn, again and again, the incompetent and unjust “shepherds” who have led their people:

“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the LORD. Therefore thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the LORD.” (Jeremiah 23:1-2)

“Mortal, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel: prophesy, and say to them—to the shepherds: Thus says the Lord GOD: Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep?” (Ezekiel 34:2)

“The diviners see lies;
the dreamers tell false dreams,
and give empty consolation.
Therefore the people wander like sheep;
they suffer for lack of a shepherd.
My anger is hot against the shepherds,
and I will punish the leaders;
for the LORD of hosts cares for his flock.” (Zechariah 10:2-3)

And it’s easy enough to connect the dots: It would be odd to prophesy against the literal shepherds among the people of Israel, as if agricultural mismanagement were their concern. God is speaking to the self-proclaimed and metaphorical shepherds who lead the human flock.

The situation has gotten so bad that in the end, God gives up hope that human shepherds will take care of God’s sheep. Enough time has passed, and enough evidence has been gathered: God’s people have been led by too many shepherds who act like the hired hand, who runs away at the first sign of trouble. So God finally announces: “Thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out…I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord GOD.” (Ezekiel 34:11, 15)

And so it is that Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd.” I am the one who will lead you in a way your kings have not.

Two thousand years later, in a world still torn apart by war and violence, exploitation and mismanagement, it should be clear that there are still plenty of shepherds who “destroy and scatter the sheep.” We can follow them, if we’d like. We can set our hearts on anger and vengeance, we can follow the paths of destruction. Or we can wait, and search, and seek out the Good Shepherd who leads us beside stiller waters. We can look for God our Shepherd leading us in the paths of peace. We can wonder what it means to follow Jesus, and to let him seek us out, when the world is darkened by the shadow of death. And we can find comfort in the relief he brings. Because Jesus is not only the good shepherd who cares for each of our souls, and not only the good shepherd, unlike all our mighty kings. He’s both; and that is a good shepherd, indeed.