to the season of tomatoes

Twelve tomato plants were shriveling and turning brown before my eyes on a cold and drizzly Sunday afternoon in October. I had already dug up the remaining sweet potatoes and tilled under the brittle corn stalks, and now I stood over these tomato plants, facing a moral dilemma.

Scattered all over the ground around the plants were dozens of small but still-ripe tomatoes, and there were at least a dozen more still clinging to the plants, literally holding on for dear life. I had room in my basket to load them all up and take them home. But this is October we are talking about. My enthusiasm for tomatoes builds in mid- July, peaks in early August, and is near extinction come Labor Day. Where I once was in love with the bulbous fleshy feel of plucking a ruby-red tomato from the vine, I now simply wish I wasn't looking at them, like an awkward encounter with an ex-girlfriend.

But my instinctive reaction of disgust gave way to my sense of virtue, and the moral dilemma began. After all, this was foodstuffs I was staring at. Scavengers of post-WWII Europe would have made off with these tomatoes weeks ago, and perhaps so would today's homeless of Kansas City, if only they knew where to look. Did I have a responsibility to not let this food go to waste? Or do I let these few remaining late season tomatoes simply remain to rot and replenish the soil? Who needs the nutrients more-- the self or the soil?

And then I heard something coming from a few blocks away-- the cheery sound of "Pop Goes the Weasel" coming from an ice cream truck. I remembered at that moment that certain things can be out of place in time. As the writer of Ecclesiastes says, "For everything, there is a season." An ice cream truck circling the block on a cold drizzly day in October simply doesn't belong. Picking plump tomatoes to take home should not take place on the same day that I prepare the garden for winter. The time for ice cream trucks and tomatoes has passed. And the time of year has arrived when I must slow myself, go indoors, turn inward, conserve my energy and eat starchy foods, and begin dreaming ahead-- rather than looking back-- to the season of tomatoes.

hit the RESUME button

I've been told that it has been too long since I blogged. I will try to start writing more in the coming days and weeks. As an apology to my three or so dedicated readers, I offer a photo collage of what I have been up to the past month or so.

saw a movie.

brewed a special beer for a party.

went hiking and celebrated the arrival of Autumn in Weston, MO.

went to the Wilco concert.

drove through West Virginia and stayed with our friend, Emily.


went to Chapel Hill, NC for my sister's wedding.

brewed a special beer for the wedding reception.

the boy.

new music tuesday

Sinful Babies in a Fucked Up World, pt. 2

When I wrote the original post on this topic, my wife was still a few weeks away from giving birth to our son. As such, my credibility in critiquing one parent's view of his child as being Satan's spawn was nil. Now that I have three weeks as a father under my belt, I can confidently say that my child, too, is the spawn of Satan. Every time I look at this child, his beady little eyes steal a piece of my soul, and I can hear the sound of the Jesus in my heart getting the crap kicked out of him, over and over again, just from being in the presence of this wicked wart of a child.

OK, back to reality. I am the father of a beautiful boy, born in God's image, entering into an amazing and loving world. True, my son has some of the funkiest shit I have ever seen/smelled/inhaled, but I can't really hold it against him (although, thanks to the diaper, he holds it against himself quite well. Ba-dum ching!). He cries quite regularly for several reasons: (1) when he is sitting in shit, (2) when he wants to eat, and (3) whenever he can't figure out where the heck he is. On this last point, if I spent nine months floating in warm liquid in the dark, and was suddenly shoved into this world, I would be crying a lot more than he does. He has my respect for how well he is handling the transition. Props to my boy.

So yes, he cries. Is he selfish? Is he sinning? Honestly, I don't know and I don't care. Like I wrote in the previous post, my "default setting" is to assume the best: my son is created in the image of the divine, with the capacity to choose. At three weeks old, he does not yet make cognitive choices but instead relies on instinct. He does what he needs to do. As he grows, he will learn from me and others how to choose, both for good and for bad. You may say that this is our curse as humans, but it is also our blessing. In the end, my theological thoughts toward my son matter little to him. What matters to him is how I respond to his needs, not how I theologize them.

But it does matter to me. It matters that I look at my child through a lens of love and acceptance rather than a lens which seeks evidence to validate my own worldview. I am in awe of the goodness of his humanity. I do not pity him for his condition, this creatureliness that we all carry at different times. What I pity is the person who sees in a child the proof of our fallen condition. Our redemption comes when we start to see God among us, "all this untouched beauty". But redemption is a long way off when each generation looks at the next as proof of the Fall and washes its hands of responsibility, thus teaching the next generation to do the same. These are all just broad generalizations, abstract ideas, wild hopes and dreams. May the best of these ideas, hopes, and dreams find their way into the very small and particular life of my son.

another good poem

Hurrahing in Harvest
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

SUMMER ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

a bit of a bloggity break

Our baby came. I'm goin' on break.

Sinful Babies in a Fucked Up World

"I want to have a baby/ some days I think that maybe/ this whole world's too fucked up for any first-born son/ but then there's all this untouched beauty/ the light, the dark both running through me/ is there still redemption for everyone?" -Over the Rhine

Several years ago, at the height of my questioning/doubting the evangelical worldview I grew up with, I ended up sitting next to my high school Young Life leader at a friend's wedding reception. He asked about how my relationship with Jesus was going, and after getting past some initial hesitancy over just being honest (at that time I barely believed in God, let alone Jesus), I laid everything out on the table.

Our conversation covered a lot of ground that night, but it really boiled down to this fundamental disagreement between us: is human nature and creation inherently good? or inherently fallen and sinful? I said that while we have the capacity to make choices, good or bad, creation and humanity are inherently good; he said that because of original sin, all humans are sinful creatures and are redeemed and capable of good only by accepting Jesus as a personal Lord and Savior.

At the time, he had a one-year-old daughter, and he tried to make his point about fallen humanity by saying, "When I look at my daughter, it is complete proof to me that we are fallen, because she is completely selfish, and she is only satisfied when her needs are met first. We are born this way, selfish and sinful." (He also asked me how my marriage could be healthy without Jesus Christ as the center, but that is another story.)

The part that threw me for a loop was that he looks at his own daughter and sees proof of our sinful nature. Of course, babies do cry and shit themselves and have immediate needs, but how does one make the leap to it being proof of sinfulness? When your own theology skews your view of the observable nature of things to the point where a beautiful human child is proof of Satan's grip on the world, I think something is a bit off. It is a top-down way of observing and understanding the world around us. It is a case of conclusion first, observation second.

To be continued....

In the meantime, watch this video as some proof of the goodness of humanity.