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This past Saturday, the beautiful day in the neighborhood journey took St. James to Our Savior Community Gardens, where Deacon Joey shared two things he had learned about gardening from his short time at the small farm: “Nothing is ever wasted, and everything belongs.”
Short and sweet and essential in its truth. It was a twin reality impossible for us to miss, even in our few hours spent in the gardens: how, on the farm, one person’s trash becomes another person’s compost. How compost in a garden is like gold! How every life assists the others and the end that decomposition is so often thought to be becomes the lifeblood for every new thing that happens.
In fact, the garden’s founder, Ms. Becky, showed us a small, thriving field of pumpkin plants that is the literal fruit of leftover pumpkins acquired from - where else? - our own October pumpkin patch! The leftovers here have become rich soil there, and seeds in that rich soil there have, in turn, sprung up to become fruit-bearing plants of their own. There’s a piece of St. James growing on a garden in Pleasant Grove!
From the gospel this coming Sunday: Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.”
How wonderful, I am continually reminded, that the flourishing we are a part of is not limited to what we see. Not confined to that for which we might be tempted to claim ownership. Not limited by what I counted as my failures. How marvelous, that pumpkin seeds and other seeds, like faith, bear fruit far beyond our understanding of the work. Perhaps you look back on your own life and recognize fruit of blessing that “stem” from a love planted in you by saints who could have no idea what the seed of their love has become in and for you.
Nothing is ever wasted. And everything belongs.
With a twinkle in his eye, Deacon Joey looked up and rhetorically wondered out loud whether this might be true for more than just gardens.
In the love of the Vine whose life makes us one,
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