Full of Light

Doing what I call "walkabout" one morning in the garden, I saw the freshly weeded beds beginning to sprout again with sons and daughters of the weeds I had just removed. I had not had time to plant and mulch in the direction I wanted the bed to go. This process reminds me so much of what my Rabbi says about cleaning up and cleaning out, and how if you don't fill the space with the "right stuff," it refills with the "wrong stuff" even more so--Matthew 12:43.

OK. So weeds don't actually pass through waterless places and find no place to rest and the analogy falters, but there is something to the need to crowd out the weeds to reduce their number--in our gardens and in our hearts.

But that is not what this post is about.

When I lifted my eyes I could see the garden as a whole, including its environs, glowing with the light of a soon-coming-Autumn sun, and I saw the hope of relief and refreshing and renewal for the coming year--the new year from the point in time of the blowing of the shofar. I reached to pluck out a weed and felt the oddness of appreciating it for the satisfaction it gave me in its removal. I love these weeds, I thought. They flatten themselves along the ground and spread from one source root, and yield to my tug in a most satisfying way. A new way of seeing for me. And I want to see in a new way: 

​"Jesus saw the Kingdom in a mustard-seed, and the adoring woman in a harlot. He saw the solid rock in Simon, and the lover in the son of thunder. He saw in a child the citizen of heaven, in a bit of bread His broken body, in a cup of common wine His sacred blood...Never was a vision such as this, because never was there a nature such as this." (George H. Morrison)

It makes me wonder what He sees in me. What He sees in us. Moreover, it makes me wonder:  What of the Kingdom could I see if I asked Him to show me, if I allowed Him to give me a new way of seeing...

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