Beltane New (Early Growth) Moon
Cold, wet and occasionally sunny the short Minnesota growing season has finally begun. Our cold weather planting is done, sometime in the next week we’ll put in our tomatoes and peppers. Then, we wait for the sun to warm the soil, the rain to nourish the roots, carrying nutrients from the soil into the plants, elevatoring it up to the leaves where that true, abundant and necessary miracle photosynthesis will transubstantiate solar energy into the real body and blood. Each leaf a priest, each plant a diocese. A garden the whole catholic universe.
It is in here, somewhere, that reimagining faith will finally come home, right down here at that literally elemental level where the chemicals and elements of earth, soldered by sunlight make the essentials for life. No photosynthesis, no life, at least on the surface of the planet where we live. I understand there are different processes in the deep sea vents, strange creatures with arsenic in their veins, but up here, in the green world, we depend on–what a weak word–we live or die by this vegetative marvel.
It’s not as if there might not be gods, there may be. There may be. But I can think of no god that does more to sustain my life than the least of the leaves. Here’s the nexus where sin and redemption must occur. Sin makes our planet less hospitable for these; redemption conserves the planet’s soil, assures the availability of sun light.
(Gods Pantheon. Ratteau)
Think of the crucifixion each year as soils leach out their nutrients, become so friable that they can blow away in the wind. Think of the top soil, made fertile over hundreds of years, wasted in a season or two. Think of the aquifers, draining themselves for our sake with no hope of replenishment in a hundred hundred human lifetimes.
How will we roll away the stone on this deep crime? Who will stand at the tomb, that fine rising’ up mornin’, when the world cares for its soils and its forests and its lakes and its streams as if life of very life could not do without them? Someday. I hope. Someday.
