'... when you find yourself in the place just right': Discerning God's will

Reading Camp is a Mountain of Fun!

Part of the Heart of Our Mission: Announcements from around the diocese

ACC affirms Communion-wide listening process, members' voluntary withdrawal

Dean Mombo, member of Eames Commission, speaks in Diocese of Lexington

Commentaries

From the Bishop: A Summer Memory

Reflection: Coming home with MaryChun

X-ercizing: Who hopes for something he can't see?

Editoral: Seeking facts in a posturing on-line world

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From the Bishop: A Summer Memory

My grandmother had a strawberry patch. It was on an odd little piece of land in between some large pieces of granite that jutted out from the earth, smaller siblings of that mammoth collection of exposed granite 50 miles or so to the northeast, Stone Mountain. The grandchildren loved those outcroppings of granite. Each of us had a favorite and named it accordingly. The soil was too shallow there to be good for much else and the granite made it difficult to negotiate the plow that my grandfather still guided behind the mule pulling it. My grandmother tended it with a hoe. But the sun hit that little patch of ground just right, and it yielded big, juicy strawberries in the early summer.

My grandmother would go down to the strawberry patch right after breakfast before it got too hot and before she needed to turn her attention to “fixing” dinner. She always put on her sun bonnet first. The dew was still on the grass and my shoes would be soaked by the time we made the short walk from the house. They would have to be removed when we eventually got back from the strawberry patch. And when we arrived at the patch, we would pick strawberries. I would eat as we picked.

When we got back to the house, Grandmother would always fix me a bowl of strawberries. She cut off the little leaves and stems with a knife, and she would cut each strawberry into threes or fours. Sometimes she poured milk on them. Sometimes she sprinkled them with sugar from the sugar bowl that always sat on her table, as if the strawberries needed to be sweeter. Still, she made them so.

Strawberries are a curiosity. They really don’t have much of a purpose. They don’t have enough nutritional value to sustain a healthy life by themselves. There is nothing unique about them. One could lead a completely healthy life without ever eating one. You’d have to eat an awful lot of them to satisfy even a mild hunger. I’m no biologist, but I doubt that they serve any very important ecological purpose. I know from experience in the strawberry patch that the birds will eat them. But the birds, after all, have plenty of other things to eat. It is not that even they need the strawberries. Maybe they provide a little nourishment for some other wild animal. It must be hard to make much money from strawberries. Too labor intensive, I would think. Otherwise, I don’t think they would have been relegated to that odd little patch of ground among the granite climbing rocks.

Those luscious little red berries have no real utility in the scheme of things. They are nothing but an extravagance. I can’t think of a single reason why anyone would in any real sense need them. They serve one and only one purpose, it seems to me. They are simply delicious.

I can’t imagine that my grandmother would not have done just about anything in the world to get me something that I needed. But she also did a good deal just to get me something that was simply delicious and I didn’t really need at all. She walked out in the early morning, through the dew, to the patch. Even in the early morning, the summer sun in Georgia is not kind. And strawberries do not grow at a level so as to be convenient to pick. They grow close to the ground. As a child, I was happy to kneel or sit on the dirt rows to pick (and eat). Grandmother, though, bent over to pick. And she picked with a lot more intentionality than I ever did. As I am now beginning to get close to the age she was when I followed her to the strawberry patch as a little boy, I have an appreciation that I had lacked for Grandmother bending over for what seemed like forever to pick those strawberries. Occasionally she would straighten up and wipe her brow and perhaps remark about the heat. She would always say, “How you doing, boy?” I think it was more an encouragement to eat than it was to pick.

The whole thing, from beginning to end, from bending over to pick the strawberries growing close to the ground to sprinkling sugar on the already-sweet fruit was an extravagance. It was all an extravagance of love. Strawberries, it turns out, have no other purpose. The whole strawberry-picking experience had no purpose other than love.

I think that surely that must be why God created them in the first place. They are simply an extravagance of God’s love, a small reminder that God loves us beyond all imagination. Grandmother was just a hint of it. All we have to do is feast on it. I can almost see God straightening out from stooping over the strawberry patch and hear God asking, “How you doing, boy?” And I have an appreciation that I sometimes lack.

Agape,

Advocate Online Staff:

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