Whatever You Send Me, I Will Plant

A few days ago I was up early, journaling. I hadn't had a dream the night before, so I was just sitting in the living room watching the color come into the sky. Suddenly, and it seemed a manifestation of the sunrise, I felt a presence in my imagination on my right. I looked there and beheld an angel -- this is what I knew him to be -- all shimmery like pavement in noonday heat. And, wouldn't you know it, his hair was on fire.

I have been feeling the economic crunch lately. Not enough income, too many expenses, ends that barely make it into the same county, let alone meet. I have been feeling all asea and rudderless, waiting with all my senses open for some understanding of how to proceed. This has left me just a tad sarcastic. I thought, "My own personal burning bush. How nice."

I am an Episcopalian; I am allowed to be irreverent. Yet sometimes I do wonder if some messenger of my soul won't one day, in the face of my grumpy self-centeredness, just up and disappear in a huff, leaving me with the anxiety, the obsessive compulsive behaviors, or the despair that comes as the result of being out of relationship with the psyche.

This messenger, though, was not a creature of emotion. He merely looked at me steadily until all my bluster and ill humor had cleared like cobwebs in a bright wind. Then he held out his hand.

Incongruously, for the heat he was putting out must have been immense, he cupped a tiny plant. In a little mound of dirt it sat, a spindly stem with four brand new leaves spreading hopefully toward air and sunlight. Instinctively I held out my hand. He carefully tipped the dirt and little rooted being onto my palm.

A seedling is a living thing, precious and unique. I thought about all the potted plants I have nurtured over the years: my huge thirty-five-year-old fern that needs to be transplanted again; the purple leaf shamrock given me by a friend from an era long past; the cactus that got frostbitten and grows like an hour glass; the vines that are threatening to take over the sitting room. What else would I do with a new little green sprig except plant it?

Suddenly it dawned on me that the angel was asking me a question and it wasn't about literal greenery. There must be hundreds of brand new little shoots, gifts of the Spirit, that come into being every single day and then wither away through lack of nourishment or get mowed down by the yang-clang of existence. They need somebody standing by with a pot and a watering can.

I made a pledge, and my whole heart went into it. The angel is just the messenger; I made the promise to God. "Whatever you send me, I will plant," I said.

This is my Lenten discipline. And all of you, my friends, can ask me how it's going.