A Sunday lesson from the garden

With the early spring we're having here, I've already turned my winter compost pile and started cleaning up some of last fall's leftover detritus. And I've been moodling about the spiritual lessons my garden gives me...

I've never considered myself to be a particularly great gardener. For one thing, I'm kinda lazy. For another, I'm not terribly persistent. As a result, weeds and grass find their way in among the plants that I'm trying to cultivate, and I often find myself overwhelmed by dandelions or chickweed, especially when I think of the perfection of some peoples' gardens, or of my favourite Butchart Gardens near Victoria, BC.

On Thursday morning, I looked at my front perennial garden and was very tempted to clear away all the organic matter from last fall, leaving only black soil and green shoots. After all, it would look a lot tidier, more Butchart-ish, more like someone actually cared about the yard.

But then, for some unknown reason, Jesus' words came into my head -- "Be perfect as your heavenly father/mother is perfect."

Ha! Like my yard could ever be perfect; like I could ever be perfect. Perfection in this world is a rare thing. Even the things we humans call perfect often aren't, or are only fleetingly so. The perfect rose withers after a few days. The perfect models in magazines are often airbrushed and photoshopped. The perfect piece of fruit has a hidden bruise or a rotten core. The perfect actor might have an over-inflated ego...

As I wondered about how God sees the perfection Jesus was talking about, I started cutting down the dead stalks of my taller plants in my messy yard. And I came upon a lupin growing right in the middle of a patch of bee balm. How did that get there? The wind must have planted it, or maybe the birds. And next to it, there was an echinacea among the golden rudbeckia. And that wasn't all. Everywhere I worked, I found odd combinations of plants growing together, chives and tulips, spurge and sandcherry, all anything but orderly, organized, or perfectly arranged.

That's when it dawned on me that God's idea of perfection is probably wider and wilder than anything we can begin to imagine. Purple lupins among red bergamot. Pink cone flowers mixed in with bright yellow brown-eyed susans. And soil covered with old leaves and sticks and last year's foliage to hold in the moisture so that everything grows better.

And so it is with our lives. Our idea of perfection is too often tied to the orderly, law-abiding, eye-catching, and ego-driven. But God often surprises us: "Why can't I plant yellow and pink together? Why can't I make people straight and gay? Why can't I forgive even those who seem unforgivable? Why can't I love everyone as much as I love you? And what's with this fixation on perfection? Don't you know that you learn and grow the most because of your imperfections? And why can't you see that perfection is defined by loving as I love, forgiving as I forgive, and accepting yourself and others as I accept you?"

I knocked down the dead stalks, left the soil covered with last fall's organic matter, and smiled to myself. The yard doesn't look "perfect" by any means, and never will, but I'm thinking of it as my collaboration with a God whose ways are not human ways and whose thoughts are not human thoughts. Who sees my imperfections as my points of growth. Whose perfection isn't even imaginable. And whose garden colour schemes and other plans are definitely wilder and more imaginative than my own could ever be.

There is no perfect

I love working for L'Arche for many reasons, but the main one, of course, is the people with and without disabilities with whom I have developed friendships. Today I am thinking of a very fine young man without disabilities, an assistant in the community whom I have the pleasure of accompanying on his journey in L'Arche. He visits me once a month for an hour of "accompaniment" and a good cup of masala chai (at least he tells me it's a good cup). I listen to stories of his life in L'Arche, and ask questions for reflection, and encourage him (he does a good job, after all). Sometimes I feel like I am the one being accompanied, because he often leaves me with thoughts that stick in my mind.

The most recent is the heading of this moodling. I can't remember the exact context in which he said it, but the emphasis in his soft-spoken delivery hit me with force. He's absolutely right -- there is always a shadow over perfection, whether we realize it or not. The perfection of a rose only lasts a day; the perfect moment soon becomes a memory. More often than not, things and events and people are far from perfect in our interactions with them. Yet there are many places in our lives where we still expect perfection. Of ourselves, of others, of our governments. Of God, who, granted, is perfect, but who chooses to let us live in imperfection because that's how we human beings find our way to God. I suspect those who write God off have never understood that if God went around thunderbolting people and situations because of imperfection, we'd live on an extremely scorched planet! And if things were perfect here, it wouldn't be earth, but heaven!

Along with the idea of "no perfect" comes another idea that I received from Susan, the amazing woman I have recently been interviewing about the history of our L'Arche community in Edmonton. She has a dozen or so serious medical conditions at the moment, and she says, "Isn't it something how we are conditioned to believe that everything should always go right?" And yet, so much doesn't. In spite of their best efforts at pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, people I'm connected to these days have terminal cancer, heart attacks, money troubles, relationship problems, and frustrations that positive thinking can't melt away no matter how hard they think positively.

So, what to do?

See, even my attempts at imperfection aren't perfect!

We can be angry about all this imperfection, or we can embrace it as part of life and human nature. We can write imperfect people off, or we can recognize in them some of our own imperfections and be loving and accepting, as in L'Arche. We can choose denial, or we can work on grieving and healing our hearts. We can rail at God for the injustices in the system, or we can see our own participation in those injustices and "be the change."

It's when things don't work out that a person's true personality comes out, true growth occurs, and true grace appears, but even so, we tend to see life's trials as the worst things that can happen.

But that's not always the case. I can tell a dozen stories from my own life about when things got screwed up so badly, I couldn't possibly imagine them coming out okay. Here's just one pretty basic (but long-lasting) example: when I was seventeen, I was diagnosed with juvenile (Type I) diabetes. For the first month or so, it seemed like an adventure -- learning to take insulin injections, changing my diet, testing my blood sugars, and balancing food and exercise. Then it hit me  -- this diabetes thing was a permanent imperfection in my life. Unless there was a cure, I would never NOT have diabetes again. For the next eight years I went through a lot of denial, cheated on my diet, and risked my health. I gained 30 lbs and felt pretty lousy a lot of the time, blaming God and the disease rather than my own handling of the situation.

Fortunately, I woke up to reality before the terrible complications associated with diabetes set in. Three decades and three healthy children later, my kidneys are fine, my circulation is good, and my vision isn't any worse than other people my age. My only problem is this dizziness that seems to be permanent, and to which I have become mostly accustomed.

It's no picnic taking 6 needles a day and having fingers constantly full of holes because of blood tests... but I've also had plenty of time to see the blessings of the disease. Blessings? Yes, blessings. I eat healthy, and by association, so does my family. I get a lot of exercise (especially with my husband, Lee, and Shadow puppy, our new walking partner). My weight is where it should be, and my health is good. I have a certain kind of discipline in my life, for which I can thank a chronic illness. I may end up with more serious complications somewhere down the road (heart attacks and strokes claim a lot of people with diabetes) but that just means that I am aware of and appreciate my life and health while I have it.

There is no perfect, but if we look hard enough for it, there's often "pretty good."