Where does one begin, when you start looking at it?
I mean that in no way to be some pervasive effort at a meaningful thought, but rather that I was looking at a pernicious shrub outside the entrance to our new church and trying to get a feel for what sort of pruning it was about to receive. In my fifteen and more years of being a gardener I have managed to long-learn that you have to start anything with a good look around the micro and the macro of things. You might even want to have a cup of tea first and brood over a shrub in casual sipping; a sort of how-do-you-do before you get on and go at it with the snips.
So that was as I was outside the church. All perfectly familiar stuff, but then I had an encounter with something which a gardener almost never does; questions from other people, in this case other church labourers/my dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
Now ostensibly this is because like most of my kin, I garden by my own company. There’s still chit-chat, but very little consulting with others. So when people started asking me about what to prune and where, I just kept going through my personal process with them and ended up doing nothing but sipping cups of tea and making concentration noises.
Nah, I’m just kidding. We tore that overgrowth a new one; it’s old one really, and it was palpably lovely for us all to give it back to itself. For the record, our local Orthodox gathering have been moved to a new church in the centre of Shrewsbury. We were on the outskirts, and still are, but there is now some local dual citizenship we have with the beating throb of the thoroughfare.
But yeah, those questions… my brain was quite tired on the way home. I suppose it was the sudden impediment of being useful, and the trying on of that for the first time.
‘What is this and what do I do with it?’ were the broad strokes of it, and I did my best, even going so far as to make up names for some shrubs because a shrubs’ honorifics have never really been my thing, but I had to give them something to make them feel strong about removing most of it.
And along the way we found some gems; of course we did, St Julian’s being a church and all. To note were a lining of roses which despite a legged doggedness had remained outside the boundary of one’s attention as you approached the entrance. Like something out of a Vietnam fiction we went in (perhaps by helicopter) and brought them back with a whole cacophony of 60’s music behind us. No, that doesn’t work because we absolutely left the roses where they were, there was no moving or stressing them, but we did clear them the sort of space to bloom that you could land a helicopter within. That’s better, and they should be come summer. They have good roots so I hold some excitement about them.
And now one year in to our new church, I had excitement about it all too. It has not been absent, but a blooming rose is a blooming rose.
Blessings upon my priests for their being useful!
Peace!
JW Bowe