“The Trump Administration formally notified the United Nations on Monday that it would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, leaving global climate diplomats to plot away forward without the cooperation of the world’s largest economy.” New York Times, November 4th, 2019

Not long ago I looked at the weather report. I saw an alert had been issued by the weather service that coastal flooding was imminent.

The news alarmed me. I went to the window to see how the tides were affecting the shoreline of my property. We are close to the water. The signs were ominous. The tide had already topped the edges of the shoreline and was reaching much higher than normal. It was encroaching on the lawn, creeping up to the house. When I looked at the tide tables I discovered that flood tide would be at four o’clock. It was only noon. The water continued to rise. All I could do was watch. My lawn was newly replanted only days before. Would it survive an inundation of brackish water?

Inordinately high tides occur regularly around the Chesapeake. They’ve become higher now and are flooding more small towns and lowlands. I had accepted this as a way of life here on the shore. This time, however, with my newly planted lawn, the stakes were higher. It’s strange how something as critical to my survival as the issue of global warming is, can seem so remote until it creeps up on my front lawn. I don’t “get it” easily.

Over the last few years I have had a dream, like a vision. Recently it’s grown more vivid. It’s not the nocturnal sort dream or vision, but the kind of dream that hope inspires. It’s a daydream of sorts, but not an idle one. I cling to it.

This dream returns again and again and I pray about it. Things happen in the natural world around me that seem so mindless and destructive and I feel sad. I pray more fervently that the dream I have will come true.

I dream that one day our abuses of the environment (and of each other) will finally create such a backlash that deniability of the abuses will be out of the question – no more equivocations. This time what happens will be immediate to us, closer than the Arctic’s cascading ice shelves falling into the sea thousands of miles away or the chemical laden streams that catch fire as if they were heralding an apocalypse.

In those days, I dream that we will have as the director of the Environmental Protection Agency a man or woman who actually loves the natural world, the kind of a person suggested in the Genesis myth.

God, having created the world thinks his creation is good, “very good.” God has a stake in its future according to Genesis. He appoints someone he trusts to look after it. This is a sacred trust. “The Lord God took Adam (human kind) and placed him in the garden of Eden to tend and to keep it.”

What does it look like to love the natural world, to tend it and to keep it, and I would add, to be its voice, its advocate? I believe it looks something like naturalist, W. H. Hudson’s tender description of a day in late April when he came upon “a shallow lakelet or pond five or six acres in extent which I had discovered some weeks before hidden in a depression in the land among luxuriant furze (an evergreen shrub with flowers), bramble, and blackthorn bushes.”

He then writes, “I sat on a branch and rested for a long time enjoying the sight of that rare unexpected loveliness. Two or three warblers we’re flitting about among the alder leaves within a few feet of my head and a dozen at least we’re singing within a few feet of my head. I listen again to the birds then let my eyes rest on the expense of red and cream-colored spikes before me, then on the masses of flame colored furze beyond. This springtime verdure and bloom, this fragrance of the furze, the infinite blue of Heaven, the bell like double note of my little feathered neighbors and the alder trees; surely this is enough to satisfy my heart.”

This new “Adam,” this Agency Director, as I imagine him or her, would have this same passionate love of the earth in their hearts, and could not be driven from their task by power brokers. This director will be wise in the matters of the material world. This person would have feet on the ground (earth, not macadam) and an eye on the sky (weather, not high-rises); they would passionately love the natural with the fervor Mr. Hudson had. Love like that may save us and heal our planet

This director will have a realistic grasp of the needs of an industrial society in which she lives. He will, like Solomon, do justice. He will weigh the reasonable requirements of industrial production and still advocate for the earth. He or she will know that the natural world is not a commodity just to be bought, sold, and traded; this new Adam understands the natural world as a sacred trust, a planet to love, tend and care for.

Too Idealistic? Too Visionary? I sure hope so. That’s precisely the missing piece in managing our present environmental realities. Currently, I see no vision, no ideals, just expediency and greed.

Since that day of the flood advisories two more extremely high tides came and went. The weather finally grew cooler and with it returned intense blue skies, filled with gray-bellied white clouds and a brisk northwest wind of about forty knots. The northwest winds around here drive the tides out, making the ebbs unnaturally low. The tides ebbed and flooded, and for a while I felt safe. The feeling is illusory.

My world, the one in which I once thought tides were predictable and would remain always within bounds, had returned but only briefly. The world of my yesterday is long gone, and even higher tides will return as they must, because they are responding in the only ways they can to the deaf ears on which their warnings have fallen.

“Listen to the earth and it will teach you,” Job instructs us. Few listen.

I drove to the recycle station the other day. I often go there. This trip was different.

I had literally filled the trunk of my car with a lifetime of correspondences, workshop designs, communication involving friends and children, family letters, publishers’ contracts, graduation and ordination certificates. There were letters from mentors, pictures of teachers and supervisors who shaped my life. There were many pages from my embryonic attempts at writing a book and also photographs I planned to use in it. I found letters and cards written to me by appreciative people to whom I had ministered in my capacity as a pastor. Other letters expressed gratitude for the help I had offered in a variety of spiritual and writing workshops over the years. All very satisfying. However, there were other papers as well.

There were letters of rejection from publishers; some abrupt and perfunctory. There were a few others leaving a thin a ray of hope: “Sorry we have to pass, but try us another time.” There were divorce papers, death certificates, two of my report cards from grade school that revealed miserable school performances. I’d often wondered why my mother kept them. I found them in her papers only after her death. I discovered acrimonious letters written back and forth from me and the senior pastor of my first church. It was a bitter time begun with all the hope and promise of “firsts” and then the crushing disappointment of discovering I was part of the worst kind of clerical dysfunctional. The church is a noble institution. When it goes bad, it really goes bad.

There were many more letters, notes, and documents. Of all these artifacts, what should I surrender and what should I keep?

On a good day, my personality doesn’t lend itself to being decisive. The decision-making in this instance of intense harvesting and culling of my past was agonizingly laborious; at times, I got sufficiently obsessive to almost immobilize myself. However painful, the process of reviewing the material and deciding what to keep or get rid of provided me with a hands-on review of my life that was more intense and vivid than anything I had ever experienced before. I alternately felt grief and gratitude.

I suppose I was like the crab in the process of shedding his shell. The crab knows intuitively that it’s time to shed it and get on with new life. I imagine the crab feels vulnerable and lost for a while since the old shell had been such an intimate part of his beginnings. These papers were the symbolic remains of my past.

The papers filled two huge boxes: I was feeling encumbered by them. The difference between the crab and me is that the crab knew instinctively that he would grow a new shell. I was less sure of what was ahead of me so I had, for reassurance, been clinging to the certainties of my past.

When I arrived at the recycle center I thought, this is where people take the pieces of their lives for which they have no further use. The papers I delivered to the recycle bin would soon be taken away and lost to me, but they would also be transformed, not destroyed as such, but transformed. Into what is anything transformed? Who knows? It’s the mystery at the heart of the universe. Matter is neither created nor destroyed; only transformed. I suspect that in matters of our spirit, similar laws apply. All these artifacts represented the many events and people influencing my life. The artifacts of my past would soon be gone, but gone only in the state that they were when I delivered them to the bin. I’d retain the essence of their contents in my heart.

As I drove to the recycle station I thought about some of the ironies in this existential mission. Here I was with my past strewn, page by page, all over the trunk of my car, scattered like fall leaves. I did not want to rid myself of the papers bound up in heavy packages because I might damage my aging back lifting them. The spiritual and the physical realities meet at the significant moments of a life.

On my way back home, I felt a strong wave of grief and then a fleeting impulse to return the bin and retrieve the papers. It was a feeling I recall as a boy when some of my relatives died. When leaving the gravesite, I’d feel a wave of panic. I wanted to go back and retrieve them. I did not want to surrender these people who had been a part of my life. The circumstances of surrender differed in this way: on my trip to the bin I made the choice to let go. As boy, I had no choice when loved ones died; they left and I had no say in the matter. It was harder to let go.

In order to make room in the trunk for all the papers, I had taken out some odds and ends I keep there routinely: a flash light, a first aid kit, some cloth shopping bags, two umbrellas and a bottle of water that I’d always hear rolling from one side to the other as I made turns.

Back home I opened the trunk. It was eerily empty, nothing there. Whatever had been there only minutes ago now existed only in me. Artifacts of my past were gone. What remained were all the stories they told, now woven like a thousand threads through the fabric of my being.

I put back into the empty trunk the things I knew I’d need for now.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

As a boy, I had my own bedroom. I also had another room. This one was special.

Located in the basement, we called it the ‘ping pong’ room. No one played ping pong there anymore. The room had a wooden floor which was dry rotted in spots. There were two casement windows on opposite walls – one opened to the outside and the other, oddly, opened to nowhere except a cement wall. During the time of my adolescence, I spent hours in the room alone, processing photographs in a darkroom I’d contrived. I’d listen to music. Occasionally, I’d invite friends to come and watch Donald Duck movies on Castle Films with an old 16mm projector.

A model schooner stood along one wall. Exquisitely crafted, it was maybe four feet from stem to stern. I never knew who built it. It was magnificent and I’d sometimes just look at it and dream of sailing around the world as I’d read Joshua Slocum had. It was my space to make photographic images and to dream and I loved it. I was safe there. Happy.

In Virginia Woolf’s iconic essay, “A Room of One’s Own” she advocates specifically for recognizing a woman’s need for “a room of her own.” She needed her own space and the economic means to give expression to who she was, in her case, a gifted writer. Even from privileged families, Victorian society didn’t recognize women’s skills nor were women allowed rights of their own, particularly rights to their own space.

What has been a luxury of the privileged is now a recognized necessity for everyone. In both a metaphorical and literal sense, everyone needs a room of one’s own.

Even today, Woolf’s concern extends beyond gender equality and well beyond literature. Having one’s own safe personal space without intrusion is a requisite for sanity, for a balanced and fulfilling life. Economic inequality, gender and racial discrimination have deprived many people from realizing their inner potential. They have been deprived of a room of their own, like the millions of immigrants fleeing oppression to seek a safe space; to find a safe haven of their own and the means to live there with dignity.

I have adequate means. I have a room of my own. It’s a studio converted from an old tool shed. I do much the same in that space as I did when I was a boy in the ‘ping pong’ room; I dream and make images – photographic images and create the thousand words that might describe what the pictures are trying to say. There’s a small model of a square rigger I bought for ten dollars at the early attic store in Royal Oak. By the window is a marble top table from my mother’s house where the model sits. From my chair, I can look out past the model on the table and watch the busyness of marsh creatures doing the things they love to do. Having a room of one’s own is a blessing.

Speaking of personal space, marriages need it. . . if one wants the marriage to last. It doesn’t take long for the bonding quality of first love to lose some of its adhesive properties. The adhesive quality eventually gives way and couples find they need room of their own, their own space whether literally or metaphorically. My studio provides me my own space. Occasionally my wife suggests I might like to go there for a while. Having my own space has inadvertently given her the space she needs. An old wheeze puts it this way: “For better or for worse, but not for lunch.”

Respecting others’ space is not a social convention that many observe any more. It’s most evident in social discourse and today’s political rhetoric. Violating one’s space is now the name of the game, and the venerable practice of extending respect to others is as arcane as a man deferentially tipping his hat to an acquaintance. There are few boundaries left. Respecting the boundaries of personal space are critical for maintaining good will and helping us to get along.

To make space for others is the oldest of the social conventions that human beings have practiced – not as often as we might have wished – but practiced, nonetheless. You and I know this convention as hospitality.

A significant form of hospitality can be seen practiced here in Easton. It is an organized expression of love in action. This hospitality is extended by the Talbot Interfaith Shelter. They provide room for the people who have none. They offer safe space for the vulnerable and extend respect for those whom society has marginalized.

“For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms–only in space are events, and objects and people unique and significant –and therefore beautiful,” writes Anne Morrow Lindbergh in her classic essay: Gifts from the Sea. Her observation is relevant to much more than just the shells she discovers on a beach. She’s describing a way of life.

Bonds of affection originate when we welcome others into our space while being welcomed into theirs.

My first awareness of the effects of making space, happened in a creative writing course I took years ago in college. Mr. Atkinson was the professor. He invited us to write an essay of our own choosing. The only caveat was that we had to write what we really thought, not what we thought would just look good. Big words wouldn’t cut it – just how I really think, would. There was no topic.

The assignment confused me at first; almost my entire school life I was meeting standards, trying to assimilate the facts others introduced, doing assignments right, working at being correct. Now I was on my own. In the best sense, it was all about me.

Mr. Atkinson looked at my first attempt. In the kindest way, he smiled and said to the effect: You’re not telling me what you really think. That’s all I want to know. Try it again, and tell me in your own words how it was for you in that incident.

Simply put, he was offering me the space in which I might be who I was. That’s all, just who I was. His gesture was both heartwarming and disorienting at the same time, but looking at it years later I understood. In retrospect, I often feel a profound sense of gratitude for this man’s hospitality. By finding myself in his space, I was being encouraged to enter my own and perhaps know it for the first time.

It’s good to have room of one’s own. It’s even better when we know we’ve helped others to find theirs.

I’ll turn eighty-five in a few days. It’s very nice to be alive on my birthday.

My feelings are nevertheless mixed. Two biblical metaphors of aging express my ambivalence. One describes our latter days as those “stricken in years.” The other depicts us as “full of years.”

The images are diametrical opposites. Like anything that’s intrinsically true, its opposite is equally true. These two metaphors suggest of my life and of yours that things are never either-or, but always both-and. Life is a paradoxical business.

I’m happy to report that, at this moment at least, I’m not stricken with debilitating conditions as I’ve known other friends and acquaintances to suffer. In that regard, I am fortunate, but nonetheless plagued with those common diminishments of aging that drive me batty. To that extent, I’m stricken in years.

I don’t trust my gait any more. For my entire life, walking was second nature, something I did all the time but never gave it a second thought. I now walk with caution, a deliberateness that’s new to me. There are times when I feel like the man walking a tightrope: he dares not take any step for granted. Each one counts; the wrong one might be disastrous.

Most elders are familiar with what I call the ‘mission inexplicable’ syndrome. You know how when you leave one room to get something you need from another room you have no idea why you’d gone to this other room in the first place. I will usually figure it out. In the meantime, it’s aggravating.

Names! Why is it with advancing years, it’s names that become so difficult to recall? I’ve found no credible scientific or medical explanations. I read once that Nelson Rockefeller, even on a good day, could never remember names. He greeted everyone with the salutation “Hi fella” typically delivered robustly, with a big smile and lots of enthusiasm. I never learned how he addressed women whose name he couldn’t recall. He worked it out somehow: he remained electable during his career despite this handicap. There’s hope.

The way names elude us is incredibly arbitrary; the phenomenon behaves like lightning, striking unexpectedly and always in the least likely places. I can tell you all about a person I’ve known for years; times we’ve been together, about their kids, their job’s, their age’s and spouse’s and for all that I cannot recall their names. And then too, just the other day, I bumped into an acquaintance in Walmart I’d not seen for thirty years. I greeted her by name right away. You just never know.

My mind has developed a mind of its own. With age, it’s become perverse, as if it had grown resentful of doing my bidding for all these years and rarely receiving any thanks. Minds declare their independence. They protest at the most inopportune times. Our minds know just how to even the score. Best be kind to them while we can. Show gratitude.

To be ‘full of years’ is a distinct part of the aging experience. It’s about arriving at a vantage point that offers a unique perspective that only longevity affords. We have the opportunity to see the larger picture more clearly.

To me it looks something like this:

Consider your life as if it were a single day – say, from sunrise to sunset. The light of day varies from hour to hour. In our youth, in the morning hours of life, light is continually growing brighter by the hour. Our appetite for discovery is voracious; in fact, we spend just about all our time exploring what’s out there. We’re less concerned, at least then, about what’s in here. We’re seeking opportunities, learning where opportunities are, forming a vocation, playing, raising children and otherwise positioning ourselves for the life we hope to lead. This activity reaches its zenith around mid-day. This mid-life sun is brightest and illuminates everything with what we might call overhead light. The world will never be as bright again as it was at high noon. Mid-life is dazzling.

Bright overhead light is especially useful when we are involved in single-focused tasks. Seeing details in the particulars of what we are doing is important. The management tasks of childrearing, of securing a sound economic base, cultivating new relationships, running a business, managing a household; the tasks go on and on and they relentlessly demand our attention. However, how much we actually wind up seeing has to do less with the brightness of the light than how it’s slanted.

Mid-day light lingers briefly. It begins to yield to early afternoon, often subtly, the way summer slips unnoticed into autumn. A noonday sun is, for all the brilliance of its luminance, limited. Rather than revealing the contours and textures of the larger landscape in which we’ve been living, it can obscure them. Overhead light doesn’t cast the lateral shadows necessary for revealing the shape of our landscape. It’s a curious comment to make, but to see as much of our entire lives as we can, its shadows are as critical as the light to comprehending the whole picture.

This is a long way around to say how the long look at my life is enriching. Sitting still I notice so much more.

It still amazes me how a huge part of my life eluded me for years; one example is how little I really knew my mother even though I spent my boyhood with her. Wasn’t she someone whom God placed there to serve me and my siblings and who had no feelings and trials (except me) of her own? I loved her, but didn’t know her at all. It wasn’t until about age fifty-five when, for unknown reasons, I suddenly appreciated her strength.

My father was serving overseas in Europe from late 1943 to 1945. He was near the front lines. Our only links to him were the sporadic V-Mails, by which combatants communicated with loved ones. Mother was never sure from day to day just where he was (V-Mails revealed only ‘Somewhere in Europe’) or whether he was alive or dead. For me, the war was a lark in which I idolized my father the victorious hero, not the vulnerable soldier. To the question of why it took me so long to recognize her strengths as a person, I can only say that for people like me, it takes a long time to grasp the big picture.

Another birthday offers me the opportunity to see greater details in the big picture, pieces of the landscape I’d not noticed before. As it turns out, late afternoons are the most revealing times of day.

Full of years is something like that. It’s very nice to be alive on my birthday.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

One morning I rode my bike near a field of sunflowers. As I pedaled by, they were wagging their heads seductively – like Sirens. How could I resist such charms?

I got off the bike and approached them. The sunflowers I’d first seen from the road, I saw only from behind. Now I saw their faces. They were doing something no human being can do without doing harm to oneself; looking the sun squarely in the eye. They relish all the light that the universe throws at them. We often scramble for the shadows, too afraid that light will expose us.

Like congregations of a church, the sunflowers were in rows, dressed in their Sunday best. They were behaving more like Quakers who worship silently than say, Episcopalians, who sing hymns, endure sermons, pray out loud and whisper to one another throughout worship. The sunflowers only rocked their heads side to side, as if listening to the breeze or to the sun delivering a soundless meditation, and each flower in response nodding a gentle assent.

Except for those in one corner of the field, most faced the sun. There, the sunflowers turned every which way, as if uncertain, not sure of their place, like parishioners who come late to a service looking for a seat. I wondered why? Then I saw that shade fell in that corner of the field, and as the sun rose, exposing the sunflowers to the light, they were caught looking the wrong way and were, in a manner of speaking, getting their heads on straight.

It had become murderously hot. Flies deviled me. Although uncomfortable, I felt a pure, spontaneous delight and I laughed out loud. Was anybody looking? Surely, they’d think I was crazy. I wasn’t crazy, just surprised by joy, and with the pleasure that comes by being surrounded with sunflowers’ radiant faces as they commune with the sun. They offered me their hospitality and lots of delight. I’d had my day in the sun and my heart was much the lighter for it.

A sunflower is more than just a pretty face.

I’ve been reading The Oxford Book of English Prose. Marianne  Whitcomb, of blessed memory, for years the faithful servant of the St. Michaels Library, gave it to me years ago. I hadn’t read it until recently. I suspected the essays might be too stuffy for me. They weren’t.

As an Episcopal priest who spent half his professional career working with Methodists, one essay particularly caught my eye.

In 1790, Sir Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, wrote to Lt. General Calvert complaining about the quality of military chaplains in the British Army. In his view, only second-rate Anglican priests were appointed as Army chaplains, and worse still, most were retirees.

Sir Arthur was concerned that the soldiers receive better “religious instruction” and that a better quality of chaplains was critical for the “greatest support and aid to military discipline and order.”

Sir Arthur told the General he believed there was one particular cause weakening military discipline and order. It was not, as you might expect, womanizing, brawling or heavy drinking; it was Methodists.

Sir Arthur wrote: “It has, besides, come to my knowledge that Methodism is spreading very fast in the Army.”

“There are two, if not three, Methodist meetings in this town of which one is held in the Guards. The men meet in the evening, and sing psalms. And I believe sergeant Smith now and then gives them a sermon.”

Sir Arthur urged the general: “here and in other circumstances we want the assistance of a respectable clergyman . . . to moderate the zeal and enthusiasm to prevent the meetings from being mischievous.”

Sir Arthur believed that who would be better suited to dampen the enthusiasm and take the energy out of religious worship more than a stodgy and respectable Anglican priest? Anglican clergy, and their American counterparts, Episcopal priests, unfortunately have had a reputation for being elitist and snooty.

I am here to say it’s a new day.

I can speak with authority on this matter – not as it relates specifically to Methodists in the military, but from this respectable Episcopal priest’s experience as having been on the staff of a Methodist church for half of my professional career. I served the psychological needs of clergy in the Baltimore Conference of the United Methodist Church. Did their enthusiasm compromise my responsibilities? No. Did their zeal make any mischief for me? No way. Did their lusty singing of psalms (mostly it was hymns) in any way divert me away from my responsibilities? Absolutely not.

Quite to the contrary, I was enchanted, and at times inspired by Methodists.

My initial contact with Methodism in this region was with Bishop James Matthews, one of the great visionary clerics of the era. I interviewed with him for the position of assistant director of pastoral counseling services sponsored by the Baltimore Conference of the United Methodist church. Bishop Matthews studied the life of Gandhi, was a committed activist for social justice and a great leader in civil rights. He was deeply concerned for the mental health and well-being of his clergy. He was easy with the thought of an Episcopal priest holding the appointment in a Methodist agency, and in fact, welcomed the ecumenical implications.

I remember feeling awed by the friendly and matter of fact way by which he spoke with me knowing that he was one of the spiritual giants of the day.

I received his blessing for the position. I would be working from Grace United Methodist Church in Baltimore. The minister there was also a celebrated voice in Methodism, Dr. F. Norman Van Brunt. He had served as the Associate Chaplain of the U.S. Senate. He warmly welcomed me on the staff of Grace Church. Over the years I grew deeply fond of his courtly manner, and his personal dignity and warmth.

It’s worth noting that Methodism took off on the Eastern Shore precisely because of the “respectability” of Anglican clergy who had been on the shore prior to Methodism. They tended to be elitist, entitled and heady in their sermons, not to the taste or farmers and watermen. Methodist preachers, on the other hand, were earthy and inspiring and particularly articulate. They were just folks and fire breathing preachers, like the local preacher Joshua Thomas known as the ‘Parson of the Islands.’ Preaching to farmers and watermen from the bow of a pungy, Thomas stirred the souls of working men and brought many Shore folk to the Lord.

Camp meetings were held regularly near Crisfield. Methodist preachers came from afar to save souls. Apparently, in addition to the religious fervor generated at the meetings, other passions were inadvertently aroused, leading one local observer to comment on camp meetings that, “more souls were begat than saved.”

One Methodist institution, not mentioned in religious literature, is the Methodist “church supper.” The Episcopal Church’s coffee hour is small potatoes by comparison. During my interviews for the position, I was taken to several church suppers in parishes in southern Maryland to meet regional clergy. The Methodist church supper falls short only to the Messianic Banquet to which, bye and bye, we will all be invited. It is memorable for its delectable fried oysters, crab cakes, ham, Maryland fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, corn on the cob and especially the fast disappearing dish of my grandmother’s day, stewed tomatoes. Attending three of these suppers clinched the deal. I was in.

Since Methodist preachers are abstemious and don’t drink (in front of each other, anyway) the closest they come to serious decadence is the church supper, and I haven’t even mentioned desert, which is often homemade apple pie topped with ice cream.

Suppers to die for? Medically speaking, yes.

The dinners are calorically lethal. Methodists should die young from clogged arteries. Not so, I learned later from one study I read on longevity among clergy. In fact, Methodist clergy live longer than average among clergy. So much for fruits and nuts.

My years serving the people at Grace Church and in the Baltimore Conference were treasured times. I also gained weight.

Speaking of weighty matters, today ecumenism is the wave of the future. If our denominations don’t find ways to cooperate, to work and pray together, I think we will all become lost souls.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

A little bug lives around my porch. He looks like a fly, but just barely. He’s fun to watch.

His body is smooth. It’s without the hair common to flies and he’s shaped shiny and sinuous like the body of an ant and about as big. His proboscis is long considering his overall size. He’s always walking around looking for something.

While looking around, his wings will extend outward and expose large distinctive black circles at their tips. His wings look like Mickey Mouse’s ears.

He’ll often light on me to just explore the contours of my skin. He stumbles through the hair on my arm, like an expeditionary force forging paths through dense jungle undergrowth.

I was lying in the sun one day and he landed on the top of my hand. It’s mostly hairless, so he moved around easily. He got to my index finger, walked to and fro on it finally arriving at the tip and settling on my fingernail. It must have seemed like a clearing. The cuticle especially interested him. I noticed his proboscis and how he used it to examine the cuticle. He placed it like a blind man uses his cane, tapping the terrain ahead to get the lay of the land. He was checking out every millimeter.

What was he looking for? I will never know, of course, but it might be that the search was sufficient for him. Just exploring a new neighborhood was enough.

What are any of us looking for? In a manner of speaking, we have very long proboscises. We have investigated everything in and out of sight, from the composition of DNA to the outer reaches of space. However, nothing sates us very long; whatever we find isn’t what we want. I think we’re looking for nourishment; I believe it’s food for the soul.

I’m persuaded that a compulsive appetite for more is driven by the thrill of acquisition, not the value of the object sought. Just getting something is the nature of that kind of game.

There’s another kind of search, though. This search is for no other reason than the sheer joy of it.

A man who does yard work will occasionally bring his young son with him. The boy is about five. One day the man appeared with two boys, his son and the son’s older cousin.

The dad began his chores. The boys began roaming the property. They’d pass by my studio windows the way I’ve seen squirrels, darting from one thing to the next, as if scouring the ground for morsels. In this case, they were (they’d tell us later) in the search of treasures.

At times they looked like string-puppets, their limbs twitching, heads wagging as though they were affixed to invisible strings dictating their motions.

The older boy was clearly the leader. Whither he went, the younger happily followed. Everywhere they roamed, the older one shepherded him, like a mentor, showing and sharing with him all the mysteries he uncovered in our front yard. Follow the leader, unpopular today, was a good thing in this case.

They romped back and forth past my window. The object of one sortie was the magnolia tree, particularly the seed pods, the remains of the spent blossoms which had fallen on the bed of river rocks arranged around its base. They picked the pods up, scrutinized them briefly, and then held them as if emulating flight, perhaps of a dirigible, making sounds I couldn’t make out. Tiring of this, they threw them like miniature footballs out onto the yard.

The boys were the icons of perpetual motion.

The trust the younger felt for the older was apparent and no matter what new thing they came upon, the older immediately enlisted the younger in exploring it with him. I was especially moved by this; perhaps for feeling jaded in this era of ours that seems to be wanting in the kind of leadership that invites partnership and particularly communicates caring.

My wife invited them into the house. But, no! They were content to stay outdoors. It was a wide and wonderful world out there in the yard, too much so for them to be confined indoors.

The boys invited her to join them at the shoreline. They’d unearthed a treasure they were eager to have her see.

The treasure turned out to be a rock. It was unremarkable except that it appeared to have been sliced clean in half, revealing a marvelous interior. Perhaps an agate, a geode? In either case its bland gray exterior belied the rich hues of the interior, like colored crystals, which if you were to turn the stone in the light, the colors appeared to glow.

The boys asked if they might take home the treasures. Of course, they could.

Familiarity breeds unawareness. We stop looking. In fact, there is so much that has been staring you and me in the face that we never really see. Children don’t miss a thing. Turn them loose and they’re sure to widen our horizons. They remain awe-stricken by the world. It’s a great place to just explore.

In their search, the boys had discovered the magnolia’s seed pod stems. The magnolia stands right outside my studio window. For 30 years I watched it bloom and then drop its leaves and eventually its seed pods. Feel the stems, they insisted. It fascinated them. The stem was soft and velvety to the touch. I, too, was fascinated by its peculiar property.

What I had been caught up in with the boys’ visit was the ‘joie de vivre’ they possessed, that magical excitement that’s generated in the experience of just searching – just looking around a place – for the first time.

Children seek with fresh minds, with curiosity devoid of preconditioned ideas or prejudices which inevitably are the fruits of aging. Imagine seeing something for the very first time, maybe the lunar eclipse, and since you and I may have had no history with it, the seeing contains a purity of excitement that’s rare in the adult world.

For all that, I decided that the best kinds of seeking we’ll ever do is the kind that has no agenda, no need for an acquisition. I suspect my little friend with wings like mickey Mouse’s ears, was all over my arm and hand just for the fun of it, nothing more than curiosity about this strange humanoid who occupies the porch and has hairy arms and fingernails as smooth as glass.

The wisdom in all this is that when the search itself is enough, then we find what we’re looking for.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

On the short walk to my studio at night, I’ll often look up to see the stars. It’s not some deep soul-searching thing – it doesn’t start that way, anyway – it’s usually an inconsequential glimpse to see ‘what’s up,’ up there.

Casual glimpses may become a soul-searching thing. It did one night.

The night was clear. The oppressive humidity had gone from the air, and the atmosphere was as transparent as glass. The stars were radiant; pure and glistening, the way jewelers speak of their finest diamonds as being of the “first water.” That’s a jeweler’s way of saying the diamonds are as pure and clear as a dew drop. Seeing stars on such nights as these, always stirs this recurring thought: the stars may have died billions of years ago, but their light continues on as if what flame they once generated was destined to continue through the universe and live forever. Light has a destiny. We have a destiny.

I like the thought.

Do you suppose that this is the way it is to be for us, too? The light, that life force that sets us into motion illumines the small circumference that our lives inscribe. Its beams continue beyond that circle into eternity even after we’ve ceased to generate light.

I reckon that’s why the universe is so inconceivably large – so that all the energy ever generated can continue on, unimpeded, and have a space to be accommodated as it continues on its journey. Fanciful to be sure and hardly scientific, but I believe it works something like that.

That our life force, once aglow, continues shining through the books whose authors are long gone; or in other ancient writings and scrolls, in architecture and the various artistic creations that we have unearthed from antiquity. But I mean something even beyond that.

It’s common to hear and read about light and it’s peculiar, almost magical properties, this stuff of the beginning of the universe. This was the essence of the big bang that produced all the building blocks of the created universe. For sure, in the beginning was light and it illuminated the whole universe. There was also a lot of noise, a big bang, actually.

I’ve read several theories about how light behaves and about its place in the created order, but little about sound and its role in creation. Our beginnings are called the big bang. I recall no commentary on just what the sound of it may have been like.

As I write, I’m listening to Louis Armstrong singing ‘It’s a wonderful world.’ It’s broadcasting from my Echo. To hear music, I need only to make a request out loud: “Alexa” I say, “play Satchmo.”

I imagine it’s like God saying, let there be music, and suddenly there it is.

Alexa’s pretty responsive. However, when I ask her for selections from Beethoven she comes up with the most dreadful music and I can find no reason, acoustically, for the confusion. I imagine she’s not always playing with all her chips. But when she’s on, she’s on.

Discounting sound’s import may have begun long ago when the big bang happened. There was no atmosphere and no way sound could be transmitted. If there was any sound (there had to have been) only God heard it. Strangely, he didn’t think enough of it to comment. He was definitely partial to light. When God finished the work of creation, it was “everything that he saw that he had made and behold it was very good.” It was clear that he liked what he saw. Whatever he heard, it wasn’t anything he thought was worth mentioning.

Sound, like light is a phenomenon of vibration, subatomic waves. Isn’t it possible that every time we open our mouths or play an instrument, cry out in joy or in wail in suffering, these vibrations, like light, find their way into the universe? Wouldn’t they continue on the immense journey to a destination we can only imagine? Traditionally, we think of prayer that way, but with this caveat; that our voices are supposed to wind up in God’s hearing. There is a lot of controversy about that very issue, particularly about voices not being heard, such as victims of gross injustice so common today.

In fact, echoes from the beginning of time do exist today in audible although very humble forms – static heard over some television screens and other electronic transmissions.

Madeleine L’Engle, reflecting on faith and art, tells this remarkable story.

In one of the early space explorations, the astronauts in orbit reported hearing some “old time” nostalgic music over their speakers. They enjoyed it, but wondered where it came from. They assumed NASA had aired it for their listening pleasure. The astronauts radioed the people at NASA thanking them. NASA responded saying they knew nothing about it. Their curiosity aroused, NASA began some preliminary investigations to try to identify what the astronauts may have heard. Their search included identifying any broadcasting stations that may have aired the kind of music the astronauts reported hearing. They found none. They went back in time to see if some earlier broadcasts may have made their way into space. Their research revealed that the particular program broadcasting the music had been aired sometime in the later nineteen thirties.

“Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him,” St. Paul once wrote as he stood awed at the majesty of creation. He was stunned by the sheer wonder of what’s sublime in the mundane, the glory in the ordinary. He expresses this awe and wonder beautifully in the context of his Christian faith. I think his vision applies well outside this context and has been expressed from the beginning of human existence, typically in music and art. It finds its expression in unexpected ways from the most unlikely people.

The stogy Anglican bishop of Birmingham, England was asked once what he thought was the most magnificent hymn ever written.

“Louis Armstrong singing, ‘What a Wonderful World’,” he replied in a heartbeat.

In the lyrics, Armstrong sings about what he sees, like, “trees of green, red roses too… skies of blue and clouds of white.” He also sings about what he hears – the sounds of common life – like people extending a greeting, “how do you do” or whispering, “I love you.”

This universe shimmers with light; but it also vibrates with sound, sounds like the liquid gravel voice of the one and only ‘Satchmo.’ He’s long gone, but his voice continues to be heard. The author of the music has expired, but the tones that emanated from him live on to bring us joy and send light into our lives.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

Should someone greet me saying, “Rest in peace.” I’d be offended and think they are hoping I’ll drop dead. And yet it’s one of the loveliest sentiments imaginable.

Too bad we invoke it only for the dead.

In today’s social climate, our emotions are determined largely by the daily assaults to our values, ideals and to common decency. I suppose it makes sense then that we might have to wait until we’re dead to rest in peace.

With some awareness, I think we can do better.

In The Talbot Spy on August 2nd, Maria Grant wrote a column titled “Weary of Outrage but Not Ready to Give Up.” I read it with interest.

She is outraged by the mindless enormities foisted on us by the present administration. She lists them. The list includes the denial of climate change, the migration crisis, continued sexual abuse, congressional inaction against Russian interference in our voting, and the hypocrisy of the religious right. I share her outrage.

“If you think about this too much, it can destroy you.” She warns us. “We can lose hope. What is one to do?”

To retain our own humanity and sustain hope, Ms. Grant suggests two things: that we engage in actions I would describe as serving others and nurture our hope by occasionally disengaging “from society’s incessant noise and seek beauty in nature, music and literature.” I think she’s spot on. Service and contemplation – food for the soul – is the proven formula for healing a troubled soul and mending a broken world.

Contemplation is not an exotic practice. It’s a common-sense phenomenon. It’s an uptown version of the old folk saying, “Just take a deep breath and count to ten.”

I’d also liken contemplation to how I deal with a computer. Whenever it misbehaves and begins driving me crazy by committing fatal errors, I get angry. I feel overwhelmed. I’m unsure what’s wrong or what to do. Finally, I unplug it. I wait a minute of two. Then I plug it in again. Things seem to sort themselves out.

Say, for instance, your mind is turbulent and bubbling after hearing another egregious tweet from the White House. Your mind fills with disturbing thoughts that seem overwhelming, even hopeless. I suggest letting this turbulent brew boil for a bit. Then shut off the heat. That means sit with the turbulence, but don’t obsess about it. Obsessing effectively turn up the heat. Just let it be. You’ll notice how the brew will eventually cool. The fatty and fetid stuff that makes the mix so disagreeable in the mind will slowly rise to the top and congeal. Scrape it off. The brew is now transparent. Now you can see just where and to what you want to give your attention. Spoon that part out.

Being outraged by what is outrageous is good for starters; it’s proper, directs our attention and facilitates giving the matter some serious thought. Being outraged does poorly, however, when that’s all that motivates our responses. Dealing with life’s inequities requires a cool head. Resting in peace is the proper attitude to cultivate. But in the Trump era, just how is the challenge.

Buddhism addresses this matter of maintaining mental equanimity during suffering and turmoil more pointedly than most other religious bodies. Peace is its core value. It teaches ways to rest in peace, to ride gently with adversity, not later, but right now.

A tenet of Buddha’s teachings was especially instructive for me: “Victory breeds hatred; the defeated live in pain. The peaceful give up victory and defeat.” The peaceful learn how to free themselves from the frantic cycle of winning and losing, of having to be right, not wrong. They get out of the race. It’s easier, then, to act justly and wisely.

The dead-end of the win/lose game came home to me once when I was watching clips of a Trump rally. The camera panned the crowd. I watched jubilant faces, some with hands raised in the kind of salute that chilled me. I’d see red MAGA hats everywhere and some with tee shirts that read “TRUMP” while others read, “JESUS IS MY SAVIOR – TRUMP IS MY PRESIDENT.”

My reaction was instinctive and virulent. It frightened me. It was reminiscent of the Bund rallies of the Third Reich. I got angry. I felt appalled. My mind raced and I felt agitated. In my mind, I found myself saying to this crowd: “You are all mad. Can’t you see that you’ve bought the Brooklyn Bridge from a con man? You’ve been had; we’ve all been had. He cares nothing for you, the country (or Jesus Christ, for that matter) except as any of them may be useful to him to gain another term. Can’t you see that, are you blind?” Then I’d begin building my case to convince this crowd how right I was.

Did this change anything? Hardly. Did I feel better for it? No, not a whit.

I was confronted instead with my own combative nature. My need to win, to be right, to defeat these people by my righteous wrath provoked it. The combative nature of the rally itself suckered me down into my own belligerent nature and I went wildly into the fray mentally ready to take my opponents to the mat. As the Buddhists would say of my emotional response: it was not skillful. St. Paul would say that I was “thinking of myself more highly than I ought.”

What then is skillful? How do I direct what I feel and guide how I think and act when confronted with egregious violations of my values and ideals? How can I be effective when I have only limited energy? It all comes back to first practicing contemplation – putting things in perspective and then seeking ways to serve others.

For right now, that remains for me the most enduring formula I know for promoting inner peace and being a sane voice in a mad world. When taking this road, I take small steps and, whatever else happens, something good eventually comes of it.

A Zen tale illustrates the point.

A farmer’s plow horse wanders off. He can’t find the horse. His neighbors lament his misfortune and the hardship it will bring on him. “We’ll, see,” the farmer says to them. A few days later the plow horse returns, this time with a mare. His neighbors say how lucky he is to have another horse to plow his fields and the promise of even more horses. “We’ll see” says the farmer. One day the farmer’s son decides to ride the mare. She’s feisty and pitches him off. The boy falls and breaks his leg. “How dreadful,” his neighbors say to the farmer and how hard it will be for you to have no help in the fields. “We’ll see,” he answers.

One day soldiers arrive at his farm. They are looking for Army recruits. Seeing the boy’s broken leg, they then ride off without conscripting him.

Our fortunes will come and go like waves. Best to ride them as they rise and fall. No one wave lasts that long.

RIP.