A Land Called Beloved
*Friends, I discovered mid-week that my writing failed to send last week. I apologize deeply for this-it was not intentional. This week, I’m offering a revised version of the reflection talk I’ll be reading at my church for our youth led Sunday. You see, I am also the youth leader at this church but thought this might be a message for more than the folks inside those four walls. Part of the story will be familiar to some of you. Next week, I’ll return to an exploration of the senses with a new yoga and meditation practice for you.
There’s a tree in front of my home, it stands center of my front yard, positioned so I can watch it season after season from my kitchen window as I wash dishes. It was one of the first things I noticed when we moved into this house almost 14 years ago. That was August and I noticed it because it looked much like the Weeping Willow in the backyard of my childhood home. The branches of my childhood Weeping Willow held so many of my dreams and imaginations. I twirled in those branches, made up stories underneath them, daydreamed as I gazed at it from my parents’ bedroom balcony, imagined getting married under it someday. So, when I first saw the tree in the yard of this home I live in now, I instantly loved it for the memories it elicited. I’ve grown to love it more as I’ve learned its particular story.
That first year, the tree’s long, weeping branches created exactly the right circle of secrecy for my daughter, Ava, and became the first place we created a fairy garden. We sat by the tree’s shade for picnics and tea parties. She and her brother Michael eventually made forts there. The spring after we moved in, I discovered something magical about the tree—it wasn’t a Weeping Willow at all. As the wintered branches filled with gorgeous, bright pink blossoms I discovered it was actually something I’d never seen before—an ornamental Weeping Cherry tree.
But in the summer of 2018, we were hit by some powerful storms. And this is the part you may have heard before (it’s the part I never get tired of telling). During one storm, a bolt of lightning struck my Weeping Cherry and severed one large, long arm on the left side of the tree. That fall, the tree didn’t look so good. The following spring, it looked worse. With barely any buds and the branches looking scraggly, my husband, Greg, wanted to take it down. “I think the tree’s dead or it’s dying,” he told me.
I was afraid he was right but didn’t want to believe it. “I love that tree. Let’s give it some time,” I requested, stubbornly.
Less than a quarter of the tree eventually flowered and produced leaves that year. Greg was more than a little certain the tree would need to come down. Don’t we all assume this often when we see something looking dead, or not producing, or not showing up as we want it to—that the best of something or someone is gone or never existed anyway, so it’s best to let it go, cut them out.
Yet. There’s more to this story.
It took three more seasons of my beloved tree looking dead before we saw something that felt miraculous. Spring the following year after the tree’s death sentence, there were more blooms, though they were still sparse and they didn’t all look the same. There was something different about the center ones—they were paler colored and larger. Then, one summer morning, Greg called me out to the tree, slightly bewildered and excited—there were cherries! Real, edible, slightly sweet and sour cherries. What could we do but eat some and leave the others for the birds? I was giddy—the tree wasn’t dead after all; it had become something new. Now, the outer branches remain a decorative Weeping Cherry. But the center, where it was dead for a time, has become a fruiting cherry.
I don’t know what made me hold out hope for that tree. I am not a patient person. But I loved that tree, I loved the story of my own past and my children’s past, that it held. And because I did, it didn’t matter what story anyone else told of it, it was simply beloved.
This past spring my church youth group and I returned to the Glenwood Life Recovery Center / Methadone Clinic in Baltimore to work in their recovery garden and to reconnect with the people of this community who now feel like friends. My tree was in peak bloom and so was the recovery garden there. The woman who began this recovery garden, who was named Precious by her friends at the center, is no longer living, but her garden surely is. We joined with the garden volunteers who are determined to keep Precious’ vision of abundant life for this land thriving. With the volunteers, we recalled again the story of Precious. We recalled the story of the way this land was struck by its own kind of lightning—the practice of blockbusting and redlining that left it scarred, houses in ruins, grounds filled with trash, drug and alcohol refuse, poverty, and death.
Yet, there’s so much more to this story too. I don’t know how Precious saw what she saw in that space, but something in her own story and the story of that place allowed her to name it beloved. She removed trash, planted seeds, prayed over those seeds, befriended people who could and would help her. She stood by that land she called beloved until it became the giant vegetable and native plant garden it is today. And I’ll tell you something—I think this is the identity this space knows itself as now. Not only is there a large thriving garden in that scarred place, but there has also never, not once since the first time I was there, been any trash, any needles, or broken bottles again. New life has transformed it as it’s remembered its true, loved identity. The land knows its worth.
The word beloved means greatly loved, dear to the heart, highly esteemed, worthy of great love. It is also a verb meaning: to please, to love. It’s become a word that I have spent a lot of time trying to understand. To be loved, to love, much like to be patient or to be peace, are active responses we choose to engage in. We love greatly not in theory, but in the particularities. We begin by allowing ourselves to know the deep story of another, of ourselves—and trusting that this story can be redeemed not through the controlling effortful gaze of criticism, but through patient love. I’ve gotten this wrong so many times, that I’m beginning to understand it’s true.
Working with the youth has made me remember and resurrect a lot of my own teenage years. I look at my own teens and the beloved teens of our congregation and I remember my own scarred and broken past, the mess I was for so many of those years. I had my share of lightning strikes and lucky near misses, my share of self-sabotage and of self-harm. All I knew of myself then was how it felt to be the teenager I was. There was no way I could have seen the fruit my life would produce, the way I could be transformed over and again, into something new. I could never have imagined that someday I’d actually feel a sense of what it means to live as beloved. That’s not a name I’d have given myself back then, but I think God always was.
What happens when we believe THAT story-- when I take it on, and these teens take it on, when each of us, put on our identity as beloved? I can’t help but envision this as the beginning of our walk back to a journey of kinship, of becoming part of the beloved community, such that not one of us can be left out.
One of the best story tellers and humans I know, Father Gregory Boyle, tells of a kid named Johnny. Gregory Boyle founded and runs Homeboy Industries in California where gang members are given the chance to feel their worth, to know transformation through love and respect, to work jobs that allow them to choose to leave the street life behind. Johnny, he writes, was a kid he thought would never turn his ship around. But people often surprise us.
Johnny avoided Homeboy Industries and remained stubbornly attached to street life. By 15 he’d been through juvenile hall, then probation camp, Youth Authority, and finally prison. He walked out of prison at 20 years old and still refused to set foot in Homeboy.
Then, his mother was diagnosed with aggressive pancreatic cancer. During the last 6 months of her life, Johnny became her constant and tender caregiver and hospice point person. Father Boyle says he’d visit often and when he did, he watched Johnny care for his mother with deep, loving affection.
A week after she died, Johnny showed up at Homeboy Industries.
Four months into his stay, he came into Boyle’s office to tell him a story. “What happened to me yesterday has never happened to me in my life.” He went on to tell about his packed ride on the Metro as he headed to work. He’d managed to get a seat on the train and right in front of him, hanging on to a poll, was a gang member with identifying tattoos who was slightly drunk. Johnny was wearing his Homeboy Industries t-shirt with the large slogan “JOBS NOT JAILS” printed on it. The man stared at Johnny and asked if Johnny worked there. Initially, Johnny was hesitant to engage but he nodded and the guy then asked, “It any good?” Johnny responded—"it’s helped me. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to prison because of this place.” Then he found a piece of paper and wrote the Homeboy address on it for the guy, telling him, “Come see us. We’ll help you.”
The guy thanked him and left the train at the next stop. “What happened next,” Johnny told Boyle, “Has never happened to me in my whole life. Everyone on the train was lookin at me. Everyone on the train was noddin at me. Everyone on the train was smilin at me.” His lip trembled and a tear escaped. “For the first time in my life,” he said, “I felt admired.”
There is a Chinese proverb: “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right name.” We can name something dead, worthless, trouble. We humans can give up on something or someone, and still I think God is there knowing more of the story than we do. Naming us something more beloved than we can imagine. Sometimes, I would swear I hear God saying, “Hang in there. You may feel broken but I tell you: You are beloved.”