If you’ve walked around outside in the last couple of weeks, you’ve probably seen the wreckage: tree limbs dangling perilously off electrical wires, downed branches on the sidewalks and the playgrounds, a new layer of twigs and sticks scattered like birdseed across the backyard. The two powerful windstorms of the last month have brought a variety of emotions for adults: anxiety about the danger of a live wire, annoyance at the prospect of yet another branch to clean up, sadness at a fallen favorite tree.

But the preschoolers have been delighted.

You may have noticed that our friends at Charlestown Nursery School are having school outside this fall, rain or shine. Most days, we get a visit from one group of preschoolers or another, looking for life in the Garden with magnifying glasses in hand, or listening for new noises on a “sound walk” around the neighborhood, or sitting on our sunny grass for circle time. And one day, as they walked back into the Garden, I got to go out and tell them: Be careful! There’s a big branch down.

When you’re barely three feet tall, this is marvelous. The leaves on the trees, normally so far above your head, are suddenly down at your level. You can feel them, smell them, see them as you never have before. Up close and personal, the green blob of leaves becomes a complicated forest of yellow and green, a city’s-worth of bark and twigs too intricate to grasp.

2020 has downed a branch in all our lives. We’ve seen things up close we’ve never seen before: what our spouses really do at work and what our kids are like in class; what our relationships are like when we don’t have enough time apart; how lonely we can be without our daily dose of casual conversation. These fallen branches can be annoying, they can be sad; they can even be dangerous. But they can also be chance for us to look at the world through a preschooler’s eyes, holding up our magnifying glass to our own lives in wonder, inspecting ourselves and our world and trying to grow. So my prayer for all of us this week is that we can look at our lives with the wisdom of children, to look at the world around and, even when it is annoying, or sad, or dangerous, to wonder at what it contains.

Peace,
Greg

Turn now, O God of hosts, look down from heaven; behold and tend this vine; *
preserve what your right hand has planted.
– Psalm 80:14

I spent a few hours this week chatting with a handful of parishioners on the patio at Gardens for Charlestown. As the weather cools and our lives move indoors, I’ve cherished these last few opportunities to spend a pleasant morning outside—and not just because of COVID. I’ve always loved those late-spring, early-fall days, between the cold rain of April and the bitter breeze of late November, days when it’s comfortable to wear jeans and a fleece and sit outside for hours. (Unfortunately, I’ve lived my whole life in New England.)

There’s something sad about an early-October community garden. The summer’s bounty of vegetables has been harvested; the flowers’ beauty has faded away. A few green cherry tomatoes remain, unlikely ever to ripen now.

There’s something beautiful, too, about a garden’s fall. It gives us time to start afresh, time to pull out the plants that bore no fruit, to let the earth lie fallow for a season, to make plans for a garden made anew. Do we stick with our trusty perennials, the things we know work for us time and again? Do we give up on this year’s experiment, tossing it on the compost heap of failed experiments? Do we learn from our mistakes and try again?

Maybe you can see where I’m going with this. The Church is in a strange, autumnal time. Old habits that we loved have faded away. There’s fruit from March still left green on the vine. It’s okay to mourn the loss of brighter days, the loss of the warmth we once felt from one another’s sun. And it’s okay to dream. To plan. To imagine what comes next for our little garden plot. To gather up the plants that never thrived and leave them behind; to look ahead with joy to our perennials’ return.

Peace,
Greg