Someone reported that while leaving the state of Maine this week he could detect the first whiff of autumn in the air. Then I stumbled on this picture of a lightly frosted red leaf. Let us pray for autumn rain as the ground is dry, the rivers, aquifers and reservoirs need re-filling after this extraordinarily hot and dry summer.
I have always had an appreciation for plants and animals. I planted seeds with my mother as a very young boy and had a vegetable garden carved out of a corner of the backyard. When I was a new priest I had a pretty big garden behind the parish school and escaped there mid-afternoon for an hour or so. One teacher said to me, "All the kids in this school know of you is that you're the gardener priest." She wasn't being kind. Licking my wound someone said to me, "Not bad, better being thought of as a gardener priest than the alcoholic priest or the high-living fancy car priest or the abuser priest." Now I take care of a public garden by the train station and the low walled garden in an old church cemetery.
George Harrison said, "Everyone should have themselves regularly overwhelmed by nature." Pope Benedict said at World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia in 2008 "It is as though one catches glimpses of the Genesis story — light and darkness, the sun and the moon, the waters, the earth, and living creatures, all of which are 'good' in God's eyes. Immersed in such beauty, who could not echo the words of the Psalmist, in praise of the Creator, 'How majestic is your name in all the earth.'"
So ready or not, autumn is coming — a uniquely lovely season. All the seasons say, "We can change" And we do need to change, don't we? Now they are selling child sized (real) guns. I could despair, but I saw Monarchs on the verbena and zinnias this week, and a goldfinch teasing seeds out of the coneflower, and the hundreds of bees and wasps continue to forage on the mountain mint. And a young mother brings her little boy to the garden every morning so he can kiss the cement "bunny" garden ornament. How dear is that?!
This is St. Paul's good advice, and his time was as crazy in it own right as ours:
"Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things." Philippians 4:8
