Loam

Loam:  15 April 2022

Emma went with me to dig up Mama’s peonies. I meant to do this last year, but I couldn’t remember where in the border they lived.

I don’t know when Mama discovered peonies. Maybe she’d always loved them. One year she showed me ones she’d planted in Montreat. Long after she died I noticed the Greenville blooms. That Mama loved peonies’ big, showy blossoms is deliciously inconsistent with her elegant, tailored, understated tastes. Her other favorites were snowdrops, gardenias, and the shamrocks that never failed to bloom on her St. Patrick’s Day birthday.

I looked up peonies on Clemson’s excellent Home and Garden Information website. Among the helpful information (Fall planting is best, oh well), was this: Well-drained, loamy soil is best for good growth of peonies. Loamy? I dug around another site about soil consistencies. Loam is 40% sand, 40% silt, and 20% clay.

Imagine this. You’re given a jar and big rocks and pea gravel and small rocks and you’re told to fit it all in the jar. What you discover is you can’t start with the small stuff. If you start with the gravel, the big rocks won’t fit, nor many of the small rocks. The activity is meant to help you prioritize. What are the big things in your life? There can only be a few of them, and you must focus on them first. Then fit in the next most important things. All the small stuff will fill the spaces. Sometimes you have to shake the jar a bit.

With the help of my spiritual director this week, I realized that I need to shake things up.

I’m not leading with my heart. In fact, my heart feels pretty defended. Given the past two, three years, this isn’t surprising. It’s been harder and harder to stay pliable while heart-breaking waves keep crashing. Yet I’ve also been struck by beauty every day. I’ve noticed kindness in the most unusual places. I’ve seen strength and resilience, been offered mercy and grace, witnessed humility and persistence. God’s been showing out, y’all. And even though I’ve noticed and appreciated, I’ve held on to my defenses.

The thing is, I’m doing all the right things. I’m meeting my work goals. I’m keeping track of logistics and fixing school lunches and making summer plans and running with Emma before school. I’m volunteering at church and contributing to good causes. I’m keeping up with the dog’s monthly heartworm pills. I’m managing everything that everyone expects of me. I’m managing. I’m dependable. I’m consistent. But I’m not feeling very loamy.

God’s nudging me to work on my heart’s consistency, instead of my actions’ consistency. I’ve been focusing on the wrong one.

I’ll need to start with the big stuff, and as a disciple, that’s got to be love.

When my spiritual director asked me why I cared about making the doctor appointments and fixing the lunches and signing kids up for summer clubs, I said because I’m the parent. She said, buy why do you do it? And I said because, God love him, Mark isn’t good at that stuff.  And she said, but why do you do it? And I said because somebody needs to do it. And she said, but what are your feelings? How do you feel about why you are doing this? And I said, Oh. You’re asking about how I feel?

I took a deep breath and thought, well damn. I don’t want to talk about feelings. Which is usually a pretty good indication that I need to be talking about feelings. I sometimes have a hard time feeling my feelings. I’ve worked on this for years, really since the first time I studied the Enneagram in the late 1990s. If you ask me what I’m feeling, I often tell you what I’m thinking. Not intentionally evasive, just, thinking is so much easier for me.

Another breath and I said: Well, my children amaze me. They are kind and funny. They are beautiful and smart. It makes me happy when they’re happy. I love who they are and I’m proud of who they’re becoming.

I felt a bit of wonderment there at the end. Loamy. Rachel and I both brushed away a few tears. She said her spiritual director never cries during her sessions, and I said that she might need to look for another.

The first thing in my heart jar must be love, at least 40% love.

Then I’m going to add some smaller rocks. For me, rocks are hope. I pick up rocks everywhere I go, and sometimes I remember where they’re from. But mostly I like the way they feel. I choose rocks by how they feel. Maybe there’s a nice thumb depression (a shard of obsidian from my ordination service). Maybe it slides like a slick coin (a flake of mica from the old mine Uncle Mike showed me). Maybe it returns the heat of my palm (an egg-shaped beach quartz from that Quaker committee meeting on Martha’s Vineyard). Sometimes my hope rocks are shells, or acorns, or seeds.

I keep a little stash in the hollow of my car door panel. In various small bowls around the house. Beside my bed. On my desk at work. They are tangible memories of relationships, talismans of beloved places, proofs of the miracle of this world. They represent both proof and hope. Beauty is and has been; beauty will be found again. The rock cycle as another expression of the Christ mystery.

Into my heart jar I’m adding about 40% hope.

Finally, I’ll add the gravel. This is the little stuff that flows around and finds and fills the crevices, holding everything together. In my heart jar this is faith. In loamy soil, it is the clay. You can’t have too much, or it will bind everything too tightly, be too hard for tender roots. But shouldn’t faith be the most important?

“Why are you afraid, you of little faith?” Jesus asks his nervous disciples on the boat. He’s right there with them, and yet they are afraid. I recognize myself in those panicky disciples. But poor Jesus. He’s come down from the mountain, he’s been followed by crowds for days. He’s kept his cool, and here’s what his disciples have witnessed just before this exchange in Matthew 8.  1) A leper kneels and asks to be healed. Jesus heals him. 2) He enters Capernaum, and a centurion asks him to heal his servant from a distance. Jesus does and wonders aloud at this show of faith so much greater than among his own followers. 3) He enters Peter’s house and heals his mother-in-law, and then, 4) cures everyone who was brought to him. Who wouldn’t need a little respite? He’s sleeping on the boat when the nervy disciples come to him about the storm.

Can you see his arched eyebrows, his slight incredulity, the measured breath before speaking?

(Maybe I’m identifying a little too closely with the Lord of the Universe today, but somehow all four of the other inhabitants of my house have managed to converge in whichever room I am trying to write. Obviously, things are a bit more dire in the boat.)

But can’t you see Jesus rubbing his forehead and thinking, “have you not been paying attention?” Lepers have more faith. Centurions, for goodness sakes, have more faith. And how much faith is he looking for, anyway?

Those poor bumbling disciples. In Matthew 17 they come to him all flustered because they can’t cast out a demon. They’re all why? why? why Jesus? And he says, and I’m paraphrasing, “Because your faith is too small.  If your faith were even the size of a mustard seed, you could move mountains.”

The diameter of a mustard seed is about two millimeters. Not much smaller than pea gravel.

Here goes 20% faith into my heart jar.

In another post I might explore the difference between faith and belief. I think people claim faith when they’re really clinging to belief. They’re talking a good pious game, but their heart’s soul has too much clay. No room for new people, new insights, new expressions of truth. No room for children (or congregations or countries) to grow into their true expression of the Divine. No room for the Holy Spirit to shake us into new life.

I hope Mama’s peonies survive. I might not know for a couple of years. But from now on, peonies will remind me to tend to the loam of my heart.

And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13:13