It’s a beautiful, if windy, day today.

“The sun is shining.

The grass is ris.

I wonder where all the birdies is.”

That’s the poem my Grammy would say, with a twinkle in her bright blue eyes and a lilt in her voice, on a day like today. Then she’d listen for the birdies.

It’s something of a relief. After the beastly hot weather of Holy Week, and the cold snow of Easter (believe it or not), today was the first day it felt like real life outside. So I got to digging in my garden again. I planted my Easter hydrangeas. I got (for myself) 2 tiny little hydrangea plants for Easter decorations. They each had one bloom on them. I already have one hydrangea bush in my garden but it needs two more for my plan. So now these two will grow into their space. They look sort of sad and deranged out there right now. But some day they will look like this:

I also dug up the numerous dandylion plants that thought my garden plot was a nice place to rest. I don’t mind dandylions per se. But I don’t like them in garden. We have lots of them in our yard. I think the rest of the residents in our perfect lawn neighborhood curse us. But we don’t like the chemicals we have to use to remove them. You see, we live in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and those chemicals go right into the bay, destroying the plant and animal life there and eventually into the ocean. That seems like an outlandish thing to do so that I can have a dandylion-free lawn. So we have lots of dandylions. Except for in my garden. I pull those.

The other cool thing about not using chemicals is that your dirt gets healthy. Did you know that dirt can be healthy or sick? I think that’s a fascinating concept. But I’m proud to say that I have healthy dirt. My foremost indicator is that I have a lot of worms. Worms love my garden. Which is ultimately good for the plants too. That’s the problem with chemicals as far as I can see. Once you begin using them, you have to continue because you’ve stripped away the ability of the dirt (soil) to maintain it’s own health. It can no longer support the vegetable life it was meant to. It doesn’t have the chemical compounds anymore, nor does it have the internal structures to fight off disease, pests and weeds on it’s own. It becomes sterile; merely an agent in which plants are grown, but everything else must be artificially added. However, if you do a little research and learn how to garden without chemicals, you can have healthy soil which will support vibrant plant life. Here’s the caveat though, you must be willing to accept more weeds than the gardener who uses chemicals. You must be willing to have a garden which is not picture perfect, but looks more natural; sort of fuzzy around the edges, but which attracts hummingbirds and butterflies, birds and perhaps deer.

As I was digging in the dirt and admiring the plentiful golden dots on my lawn, I thought about this. I thought about how this applies to the Church. For many people today the Church is sterile, it has become an agent where people are grown, maybe, but all Jesus-y agents must be added from without. They are learning to look good; as I quoted from Machiavelli yesterday:

“…that he may appear to him who sees and hears him altogether merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious. There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this last quality, inasmuch as men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand,…”

But it is a sterile environment. And weeds are not tolerated. Oh, we’d love to attract some butterflies and hummingbirds on occasion, but they are so unstable and don’t really add anything to the bottom line, err, I mean, contribute to the ministry in a fashion that is acceptable.

I wonder what might happen if we Jesus-followers decided to become natural gardeners? If we allowed our churches to become natural environments, and our soil to become healthy? What would happen if we allowed the weeds to pop up here and there. What if our gardens were specifically designed to attract certain types of life? What if we stopped building walls around our sterile perfect gardens and let in the weeds, the butterflies and the hummingbirds and created some healthy soil for ourselves and everyone else? Now that would be a garden!

This is beautiful:

I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God’s majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.

Read the rest of the article about Francis S. Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.  It’s at CNN.com and is entitled, Collins:  How a scientist can believe in God.

“… science can actually be a means of worship.”  What a powerful statement of faith in the beauty and wonder of creation.  I’m awed.

I remember catching toads when I was young. They were much easier to catch than frogs. Frogs, after all, lived at the edges of ponds (so they had easy escape routes) and they are slippery. Toads live pretty much anywhere and they are bumpy. They are risky because they might pee on you, but fascinatingly grotesque. Thus, when I saw this provocative headline, Toad the Size of Small Dog, it was a must read.

I had visions of The Wind in the Willows, or a small boy having caught and fed a toad in order to enter the Guiness Book of World Records. But, no. This was a toad found and caught in the “wilds” so to speak of the suburbs of Darwin, Australia. It’s a case of toads gone bad. Toads wrecking the local eco-system. Toads brought in from South America in the 1930’s to control the beetle population, but they demolished other things too. So now they catch the toads, kill them and reprocess them to make “a great fertilizer.”

I began thinking about this. In a certain sense this is a very funny article about large men with large flashlights tiptoeing about stalking toads in the deep dark night and I’d love to write the screenplay for the comic movie about it. In another sense this article is about how little we know and understand the delicate balance of nature and science. We think we get it, but we are like the 5 blind men describing the elephant. Except we’ve just got the trunk. We understand one part of the elephant’s trunk and are making decisions about the whole elephant based upon our knowledge of his trunk, or a little piece of his tail. But we do not understand how the whole elephant fits together and moves and grows and lives.

I also began to think about how much of the damage that’s been done in and on the earth and to each other has come about because of our impatience. We are impatient to grow more food faster. We are impatient to live perfect happy lives. We are impatient with illness and sadness. We are impatient gray skies and cloudy days. We are impatient with hunger. We are impatient.

I am also beginning to think that it’s pretty likely that we passed the point of population sustainability sometime in the 1800s. I know that means that I should not be writing this. And likely 7 out of 10 of my readers should not be reading it. This is a harsh reality. But then so is the reality that many people in the developing world live out day after starving day.

Last week there was a groundswell amongst bloggers and in e-mail about a certain glove that got thrown down between Jim Wallis (leader of Sojourners, a left leaning religio-political organization) and Jim Dobson (leader of Focus on the Family, a right leaning religio-political organization). It seems that Dobson had written a letter calling the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Richard Cizik, to task for widening the list of “great moral issues of our time” to include such issues as global warming. Mr. Dobson (and 24 other evangelical leaders) want to keep that list small and quite manageable. They see that there are three great moral issues of our day and drawing attention to other issues on a national level would be “…. divisive and dangerous.”

More importantly, we have observed that Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children. In their place has come a preoccupation with climate concerns that extend beyond the NAE’s mandate and its own statement of purpose.

We acknowledge that within the NAE’s membership of thirty million, there are many opinions and perspectives about the warming of the earth. We are not suggesting that our beliefs about it necessarily reflect the majority of our fellow evangelicals. However, we do oppose the efforts of Mr. Cizik and others to speak in a way that is divisive and dangerous.

You can read the text of the entire letter here. As well as Mr. Wallis’ challenge here to a duel … er … debate. At the time that the whole episode broke it made me tired. Mr. Dobson is beginning to sound like a shrewish fishwife. He lists as his primary concern the sanctity of human life. But that only seems to be a facade to get the babies born. If they must live and die young in poverty, disease, and filth … well … so be it. Now the challenge has been made for a debate and both sides will sound shrewish and in the end, what good will have been done?

I’m coming more and more to believe that walking with Jesus means not trying to force my perspective on the masses. I hold my responsibility and right to vote with care and joy. But I am gathering a growing distaste for moralizing and judging in public. To my eye, the issues are too finely nuanced for bumper stickers and soundbites.

Once in a while though, a well-placed challenge is enough. The debate may never happen, and I hope it doesn’t. But in the meantime, the National Association of Evangelicals has chosen to stand with their president in full support of his priorities. Read the CNN article. I think it might be safe to say that Mr. Dobson and his compatriots might be losing some ground. Maybe.

However, the association board not only stood behind Cizik, but also further broadened the group’s agenda with a statement condemning torture, which charged that in pursuing the war on terror, the United States had crossed “boundaries of what is legally and morally permissible.”

But one of the board members, the Rev. Paul de Vries, said, “It ought to be God’s agenda, not the Republican Party’s agenda, that drives us.

“We’re actually tired of being represented by people with a very narrow focus,” he said. “We want to have a focus as big as God’s focus.”

“… A focus as big as God’s focus.”  Yeah.  That seems as good a reason as any to face today with a smile.

More from the LightHusband file.  Today it’s an article in BBC about fire ants dropping upon the worshippers at a Buddhist Temple in Malaysia.

According to the tenets of Buddhism, living creatures are not to be harmed.  So the monks face quite a dilemma in dealing with the fire ants, who are biting them and fellow worshippers at the temple.  Previously there was a snake in residence, but s/he seemed oblivious so life went on.  The ants are not quite so accommodating.  The chief monk seems to have hit upon a solution though:

They cannot encourage anyone to harm the ants, but the chief monk says that if someone turns up unbidden and deals with them without the monks’ involvement then that is the will of the universe.

“… the will of the universe.”  I like that.  This sounds like a prayer on the internet.  I like that too.

Do you ever stop being homesick?

I left my hometown and homestate when I was 18. I’m still unsettled. When my mother sends photos like this one, of their most recent snowstorm, I just want to go home.

About a week ago I received an e-mail from my sister-in-law regarding global warming. This is not unusual. My nuclear and extended family has been attuned to environmental issues for as long as I can remember. When I was 12 my parents joined a group called Co-FEC. I don’t remember exactly what that stood for, but the upshot was that it was Citizens for a More Effective Electric Cooperative. Or something. Our electricity came to us via a co-op and that co-op needed an overhaul … needed to be more responsive to the people it served and needed to be more environmentally friendly.

We participated in Green Up Day every single year. This is the first Saturday in May (so it was my birthday on several occasions) and citizens fan out across the state of Vermont to clean up the roadsides of all the winter litter that fell out of the snow.

I don’t know if we were active in the campaign to bring back bottle returns ($.05 per bottle) but I’m certain my parents wanted to be. We certainly recycle everything possible. And always have. We recycled as a family before there were recycling centers. We used things until they wore out and then tried to use them for something else. Until there was nothing left but shreds. Plastic toboggans which were no longer useful for sliding became carriers for wood for our woodstoves, until there was nothing left of the bottoms. It pains me to throw so much stuff away.

Soooo … back to the e-mail. She challenged us, her family, to be thinking about ways we can live more gently on this earth. Here is the text of the e-mail (it’s dated Jan. 30):

This Friday a large report on global warming will be made public. Watch the news. The report is issued by scientists from around the world from what I know. The lowdown is that global warming is not just for future generations to deal with…..serious effects, while already being felt, will escalate in the next 10 years.
We, as a family, plan to make changes in our lifestyle. What those are we don’t not yet know if full. If any of you have thoughts on this topic, I would love to hear about it.

I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit. Coming on the tail of the great pantry challenge, I’ve been caught by it. How will we change? What can we do?

My assumptions have always been that if everyone were to change a little bit. And then a little bit more. If we all committed to doing one little thing each quarter and holding to it. It doesn’t have to be the same thing, just one thing that commits us to living more gently on the earth, it will make a great difference. That we all separately are small drips, but together we can form a great flood.

My mother responded with some tips from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and a website called Go Carbon Neutral. The tips from the CBC are below:

1. Don’t idle your car or leave it running.
2. Turn down the heat.
3. Recycle, recycle, recycle.
4. Use compact flourescent light bulbs as much as possible.
5. Reduce air travel.
6. Buy renewable energy.
7. Buy less and buy local.
8. Trade up to Energy Star rated appliances.
9. Drive less.
10. Retrofit your home.

… and the LightMother noted that this will “… take a massive amount of reorienting our lives to meet this challenge – not unlike the changes during WWII when there was rationing and meatless Mondays so the troops had enough meat. Or WWI when there were heatless Thursdays (and businesses closed) so there was enough coal for the ships taking goods and men to Europe.”

So … what will you do? Become part of the flood, before the “flood.”

UPDATE:  I love Vermonters and what they do when they come to Washington.  James Jeffords, who recently retired from the US Senate, first came to DC as a Congressional Representative in the 1970’s during the oil embargo and resulting gas crisis.  His response … install a woodstove in his DC office to reduce the need for petroleum.  Similar leadership is now needed and Vermonters are among the first to provide it in Congress.  Read this article from the Houston Chronicle … what I found astonishing was that the amount of money needed to offset the annual travel by a Representative and his staff was only $672 to for his whole office to become carbon neutral.  His money quote follows here:

“That ads up,” Welch said. “So thousands of small actions are going to add up to a different way of doing business that can be good for the environment.”

Be part of the flood …

Bumpersticker: Not One Millionaire Left Behind

Lots of vanity plates including this one: HCKYMAN surrounded by a Capitals plate holder.

Large sign spanning all lanes just before the Delaware Memorial Bridge reminding us that we can call the Anti-Terrorist Hotline if we need to. Fear everyone, trust no one. I cannot abide this. I will not participate in this national campaign of fear.

Gas prices holding steady, even on the Jersey Turnpike, at $3.03 for regular. Interestingly enough, Exxon-Mobil’s profits are rising by ever larger proportions. Who knew that profitting on war and death could be so easy? Pirates are popular these days.

Blues and jazz being played at McDonald’s on the Garden State Parkway. I was almost knocked over with a feather.