All Sacred

After speculating about the “what if’s” of war prevention last week, I’m now focused on a different kind of what if—the averted tragedy. While sitting at the dining room table with my daughter yesterday afternoon, I literally watched a huge tree limb peel off of the trunk like a band-aid. It stretched from our neighbor’s yard, across our garden fence diagonally, also filling the ally that runs behind the houses and the yard of the third house in the row. It just missed the car of the fourth neighbor. More importantly, there were no kids playing in the ally, as is often the case in summer. There were no cars driving down the ally, no one doing yard work. In short, we were all very lucky. In fact, I had been just about to open our kitchen windows, which would have been sliced off had I not gotten distracted by my daughter’s craft project. As it is, the tree tips are pressed up against the kitchen window like a green shade.

There is something about this sort of surprise that brings life into sharp focus. I could feel my adrenaline as I called the phone and electric companies to figure out which lines were down. Only one neighbor’s phone line is out, and the phone company seems in no hurry to fix it, overwhelmed as they are by all the other phone lines that have been downed by trees this summer. On the bright side, the neighbors have come together, offering help to the woman without a phone. The owners of the tree happen to be away, but that too is a blessing. Had they been here, our kids and theirs would likely have been in the ally.

The spiritual challenge for me this morning is to be present without getting anxious when more things to do suddenly get added to my list. For example, before getting the kids out the door to camp this morning, I was trying to figure out how to get the pictures from my camera onto my computer and then up to a web site that I couldn’t remember my user name for so that they could be seen by my vacationing neighbors. In the midst of it, my daughter wanted a bit of my attention, and my son wanted to discuss the DS games he’d like to own, which was the thing that made me snap at both of them to leave me alone. Afterwards I thought of the play Our Town, which Tom and I saw this summer. In the third act, a woman who has just died gets to come back and observe a day of her life. The other deceased of the town warn her not to do it, but she goes and observes her 12th birthday. She realizes how hurried her mother is, how even in doing the birthday preparations, she isn’t really seeing and appreciating her daughter, who (as the audience knows) won’t be there forever. I bawled through the whole scene; it was much too close to home. So as I speak to the insurance company on the phone tonight—something that really does need to be done—the trick will be to be present to all the needs around me. I’m finding it helpful to remember an interaction this weekend at Pendle Hill, where I was leading an Inquirer’s Weekend (a very good experience, by the way). I needed help with some equipment on Sunday morning, and a staff member went to take care of it right before worship. When I later apologized because she missed worship to help me, she replied, “It’s all sacred.” It was clear she really meant it, and we later talked about the importance of caring for other people with attention and love, even in the mundane details.

I tend to forget that the mundane details are sacred too, but the fallen tree reminds me that appreciating the fragility of life and taking care of life’s little details are both important and need to be integrated.