gardenias

In our back garden at The Old Place we had an enormous gardenia bush. We planted from small and encouraged over our years there, and it grew to eight or ten feet high and four or five feet across and in its own Time started blooming. In its season it was loaded with splendiferous white blossoms, filling the air with fragrance. I'm afraid - - no, it's neither my property nor my business so I'm not afraid, but I'm  thinking - - that the ignoramus who bought the property and destroyed many things, ancient faintly fragrant pink azaleas, half-century-old grafted camellias including a white empress, a tall prolific, grown-from-a-breakfast-seed ruby red grapefruit tree, a huge, luscious-bearing fig tree, also destroyed that gardenia bush. He was a gardenia fool who descended into despair that his wife, who had taken up with another man, would not even be enticed by this house to come back to him (what self-respecting man pines away to have such a woman back), and ended up putting a bullet through his head. Which was grievously tragic but also most telling.

The folks from way up North who now own the property seem responsible, again not my business, although only a Yankee might put a black metal roof on a home under the Florida sunshine. If I put my mind to it I could be sad they didn't get the wonderful things we left behind that the ignoramus destroyed.

Navel contemplating this morning, starting with gardenias and thinking I've pretty much done in life what, when ten or seventeen years old, I thought might happen to me, for me. A last moment resort and escape from either the draft or returning home upon college graduation, the U S Navy was never in the equation but it worked out. Some have known me better than the rest, but all in all Life is Good®‎ and here I am in 7H, at a table by my Bay, an osprey chirping at top volume and circling near and far as I think and type. Thoughts that in this vocation one minds one's, not manners or reputation exactly, but minds one's words so as not to offend or, worse, hurt anyone. Half the people fully deserve to be offended, but no one deserves to be hurt. Especially from the sanctuary of the Holy Comforter, by the clergy. 

Not to stir politics into religion, though both are about how people treat each other and therefore are intertwined and inseparable, clergy are ordinary humans who have the same range of views as anyone. We must be mindful of the errors of certainty, that we are not entitled to cram our views down your throat as if we know and you are ignorant. But one is not always confident that, in keeping one's mouth shut, one is balancing discretion with integrity. 

At theological seminary, one may early be stunned and offended to discover that the religion, certainty, that one brought all the way to adulthood from kindergarten Sunday School class is not affirmed. Rather, it's called into question, challenged. That there is far more, that to think is more appropriate than to be affirmed. That there's much to read, hear, discuss, learn. One experiences a new brutal honesty that doesn't piously reverence Tradition, but confronts, explores, challenges. Seeks. In time one realizes that one is not here to learn Bible verses and be drilled in doctrine so that one can go forth and pass it on, but to acquire the practice of studying and learning and thinking so that one can lead and teach and preach competently, and leave more questions than answers. 

At my seminary we were encouraged that, once we graduated and were ordained to our respective parishes, we should share what we had learned and encourage people to seek. For example, vigorously to explore the Bible. Conscientiously I've tried to do that, though what one generally meets in parish life (as opposed to seminary exploring), is people's expectation and wish to be assured and comforted, not to be afflicted with challenge and uncertainty.

As often happens, I ask Why am I writing this, rambling so? It's because of the gardenias. That skirting issues so as not to offend calls one's integrity into question. That everyone needs to be challenged, and that some, in their certainties, well need to be offended. That God, who is not obsessed with our sins as Lent might suggest, is love, and hatred is evil. That love as an action is not comforting and assuring certainties, but seeking and speaking and teaching and preaching truth come whence it may, cost what it will, even though one be offended, or offend. That one must give a gardenia about one's integrity.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/theperipateticpreacher/2020/05/the-peripatetic-preacher-the-death-of-expertise-in-our-day/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Christians+For+a+Better+Christianity&utm_content=43