The Audacity of … Tomatoes
22 September 2021: The Audacity of … Tomatoes
What can a tomato teach us in a time of great suffering?
A few summers ago, when most of us would never have imagined the pandemic that has swallowed our world, my family was plunged into our own health crisis. Like this pandemic, it was sudden, dangerous, and terrifying; it involved frequent hospital visits, emergency treatments, and vacillating and even contradictory medical advice; it caused us to hold onto the family member teetering on the edge of death as tightly as we could— for an indefinite, and thus seemingly interminable, length of time.
Thank God, we ourselves were also held tightly, by family from afar, and our church community close to home. On one weekend when the rollercoaster had temporarily slowed, I called a couple of friends, who came over with shovels, compost, and vegetable sprouts, and they helped me create a little garden. Not just for flowers, which we’d been growing for years (tulips, roses, and a few irises and peonies). For food. Something to eat, to actually put into my body, and before that, to tend, watch grow, and now and again take my mind off all but this little piece of Earth, which, for all its devilish bindweed and sneaky snails, seemed far more stable, manageable, controllable than the crisis we faced.
Gardening also connected me to where I’d expected to be that summer, the Dominican Republic. Many of my family and friends there are farmers— for their livelihood, that is, not amateurs like me. And even among those who are not, I can’t think of even one who doesn’t at least have a conuco (a Taíno word for vegetable garden adopted into Dominican Spanish). When everything began to implode for us, I was just weeks away from heading there to spend two months leading various service groups, as part of the work for my organization. A series of small miracles transpired to allow the programs to continue, including remarkable personal sacrifices by the three people I trusted most in the world to do that. I then had the space to devote myself to caring for this family member for the better part of three months. And in moments here and there, like the moments I’d try to take to pray, write, and exercise, I’d go to the garden. Day after day, it provided a way to get by.
And to heal. Or try to. A big hole had been blown in my heart by this tragedy, one too often rubbed raw by what my family member was enduring, hour after hour, because of the severity, complexity, and mystery of the illness, one on the level of a heart attack or major cancer. This would change our lives, because even in remission the illness required vigilance to keep at bay, lest it return just as suddenly and perhaps more violently than before.
There was another hole, not as big, that also needed care. All of a sudden I doubted my future path, vocationally. Spending summers in the D.R., leading these faith-based service programs— which felt more and more like pilgrimages—year after year for 15 years, had come to shape and even re-define my life. It granted me a profound measure of fulfillment, a deep sense of purpose: I was a bridge between rich and poor, helping meet real and dire health needs for the indigent, while opening up paths of spiritual formation and new justice-oriented professional aspirations for the privileged. I felt called, deeply, to this work, and well-used by God. Therefore God— went my logic— in her mysterious ways, would keep defying the odds, making a way out of no way, providing for the program’s indefinite survival, and my family’s.
As it happened, God did provide. Just in utterly unexpected ways, which initially felt like betrayal, and later disaster.
The same thing happened in the garden. Most everything failed— the lettuce quickly bolted, the melons never ripened, the peppers refused to play ball altogether. But the tomatoes, they were a marvelous gift.
Now, let me be clear: not every single tomato was marvelous. Some fell off the vine early, some got squirrel-nibbled or bird-pecked, and some were struck with that maddening killer, bottom rot (the tomato looks wonderful from the top and sides, inflating your hopes, then draining them when you pick it and the underbelly collapses like wet newspaper. Now I know better, and add some calcium to the soil every spring.) But those that do come to full fruition made up for all that, at least to me and my family (a professional grower might not have been so easily contented). Deep rich, soft but never mushy Beefsteaks; jazz-smooth and fragrant Romas; full and firm Cherries whose skin and intense flavor would pop wonderfully between your teeth.
(All this, mind you, is according to my wife, whose pleasure at eating a plateful of these beauties daily in August and September has been the unexpected best part of this whole garden experiment for me. Ironically, as much as I love Italian food, chili, barbecue, and most all things tomato-based, I don’t love the actual whole, raw fruit itself. Kind of like how I love coffee farmers and café culture, but will take my black tea over a cup o’ joe nine times out of ten, thank you very much. Yup, I’m weird like that.)
* * *
The Parable of the Sower has been a vital story to me as a writer, teacher, and activist, perhaps more so as time goes on. Jesus tells us about a farmer, who—perhaps rushed, distracted, or desperate for even the slightest opportunity and thus thorough to a fault—scatters his seeds everywhere. Considering the first three places Jesus tells us the seed fell— among thorns, on rocky ground, and even on the path where people and animals would walk— we might not be faulted for wondering what the heck this farmer is thinking.
I’m not enough of a historian or Scripture scholar to know exactly how his listeners might have heard this. But I do know something about language, and I’ve learned something from my Dominican friends about farming, and about God’s abundant, hidden-in-plain-sight small miracles. And it all makes me wonder if perhaps this farmer isn’t such a crackpot after all.
“The seed fell,” “los granos cayeron…” The various translations I’ve consulted in English and Spanish, across all three Gospel authors’ versions, all employ an active verb construction, with the seed (not the sower) as the subject. This is a quick, deft narrative shift— another brilliant stroke from the Master Storyteller-Healer. (Not to say that my research has been exhaustive… but hey, give this English major the benefit of the doubt for a minute and let’s see what happens.)
Farming land, working with it, depending on it for your sustenance, you can get to know it pretty well. You can, in truth, develop a relationship with it. Down to its particular elements and details. In fact, it’s extremely pragmatic to do so. The earth becomes very alive, highly intelligent and purposeful— very active, not passive— and you’d better try to work with this energy rather than against it, if you hope to eat.
So, “the seed fell” is emphatically not the same as “the sower planted.” The seed is active, the subject of its own life’s possibilities, and of this parable. In fact, it almost feels to me like a bait and switch, to call this the Parable of the Sower, when it’s so focused upon the seed and the soil it finds. But maybe that too is the genius of God, knowing that we humans need to be pulled in with self-interest, to get us to sit up straight and actually pay attention.
In this light, the Sower strikes me as shrewd, wise. He scatters rather than plants. She sets life loose, lets the seeds find their way… or not. Some, unfortunately, don’t find it at all: they fail to make a lasting, fruitful life, or get choked by worldly worries, or wither from lack of a nourishing faith.
And so for us humans, children of God. God lets us loose, to find our way, and sometimes— far too often— we get lost, over and over again, not only within our lifetime but within the same day, if you’re like me. Because let’s face it, life is hard, withering, and rocky, and sometimes relentlessly so.
But sometimes, we do find our way, and marvelously so. Sometimes, in tiny moments or even stretches of hours or days—or who knows, even longer— we find that deep, rooted, rich place within us where God speaks to our heart, and we let that word in, and it nourishes us again and again and again. Modern psychology has come to call this “flow,” a beautiful image with natural resonances, connecting us to rivers, breezes, even our very blood. In a spiritual sense, we might also think of alignment, or a participatory—not enforced—surrender. An intentional stepping into the river’s depths, a falling into— not away from— our God. (Richard Rohr’s wonderful book, Falling Upward, illuminates this marvelously.) When we do the math, it may look like scarcity, especially for capitalists indoctrinated in productivity. When Jesus does the math, however, it’s a different equation: the fruits of these “one-fourth” of the seeds the sower scatters “produced fruit a hundredfold.” They more than make up for what was “lost,” and Loaves and Fishes style, provide more than enough to share.
Here’s the thing: Only God knows our true depths. It’s part of our work as humans to discover them over time, with God, with a patient impatience (or an impatient patience). Anyone paying attention can see the jutting rocks and thick thorns already above the surface, but only by really digging in, with God, will we know what’s truly down in there, how fruitful we might be for ourselves and our world. And if we dare to think of our life as an on-going, co-created project with God— rather than a puppeted enactment of God’s pre-formed plan—things just might change a bit along the way, and even God might be surprised. (Free will, after all, holds worlds of mysteries.) So God sows in every little possible and “impossible” nook and cranny, hopeful the seeds fall into good, rich, multiplying soil, even against all odds.
* * *
About a year ago this time, I was feeling overwhelmed by, even despondent about, leading my organization into the fall and winter. The public health prophets of doom were warning we steel ourselves for the pandemic’s fierce rebound (wisely, we know now), which meant at least several more months of isolation and separation from everyone dear to me beyond the walls of my home (of whom, for as much as I love them, I was getting pretty weary). Except now in the Pacific Northwest we’d add the prospect of depressing weather, since November through February is the darkest, coldest, wettest time of year. I was home-schooling my 8th grade son (or trying to), which was wonderful in many ways but still draining, and therefore trying to work my job and occasionally exercise or write and read during the bookends of the day and in snatches of time that popped up and vanished whack-a-mole style. My organization was looking down the barrel of a year ahead like none other: no possibility of directing service groups in the D.R., which are part of the life-blood of our mission, vitality, and sustainability; no possibility of meeting the dire new needs in the D.R. for food, employment, and even basic water, sanitation, and medicine, because our annual dinner fundraiser of March 2020 found itself standing in just the wrong place at the wrong time, absorbing the full power of the pandemic panic when it exploded in Seattle and shut down all such events for months; no reasonable possibility of re-scheduling that event for later in 2020 or even 2021, given the precipitous rate at which people were getting sick, filling ICU’s, and dying across the country and world— with vaccines at that point still only in the “promising” stage, far from a reality. And as if for good measure, my dear friend and co-founder Papito had entered an ICU himself and wasn’t guaranteed to emerge, as I’ve written about in this journal previously.
In a quiet pre-dawn moment that fall, awake at my desk and practically throbbing with anxiety, I stumbled upon some words from dear Dorothy. “Every Catholic faced with a great need starts a novena.” And I thought, why not? I’ve got nothing to lose…
Of course I had heard of novenas, as a life-long Catholic, and especially given my time living in the D.R., where for many people I’m close to they are a part of life’s fabric. And I’d prayed them too, in conjunction with important feast days or church rituals. But I’d never gone into one on my knees, from some visceral, aching, awake-deep-in-the-night need like I had now.
This felt different. Which, strangely, gave me some hope.
It was a profound experience, opening a new dimension in what I’d already felt was my rich prayer practice. Like the way a parent’s heart can grow larger with the birth a new child. Before the nine days were complete, I knew I could not stop. At the end, I’d begin another, but in community.
I kept it simple, inviting just a few members of my birth and spiritual families, including my two co-founders in the Dominican Republic, themselves people of profound prayer. Separated by distance, we could not meet in person, but over nine days exchanged voice messages and phone calls and emails, sharing the personal, community, and global-level needs for which we prayed and asked the others to pray for as well. This was November, and when we concluded on Thanksgiving, I felt closer to all of them than I had nine days before. And I felt genuine movement, however subtle; some of the things I’d prayed with had felt stuck for years, but now I sensed a shifting, a loosening, some small difference being made, starting with how I felt about them. And I had an intuition that somehow, beyond the nine days, like a seed begun to sprout, with the right nourishment, that movement could continue. So I wondered about expanding the prayer circle yet again.
At this point, my organization was launching its holiday and year-end campaign, and my gut-churning feeling of desperation, lightened during the novenas, was tightening its screws again, not giving up quite so easily. Charitable giving at year-end is extremely important for most organizations; estimates vary, but 33% or more of all donations nationwide are made at this time. Yet throughout the country and across the charitable sector, this giving had been deflated the past two years because the new DdT-GOP tax law, by raising the standard deduction amount, had drastically reduced the number of people who could now actually count their donations as tax-deductible, and this, sadly but undeniably, reduced overall giving. So I wondered, would EAB’s giving drop yet again— or even drastically, because of the on-going pandemic’s clobbering of the middle-class economy? And if so, what then for us? Program cuts? Salary slashes, or even staff layoffs? The screws tightened, the anxious thoughts throbbed and grew.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that…” Martin Luther King’s words came to me as I prayed day after day in the literal dark of pre-dawn. They helped me push back on the gang of goblins in my gut, to keep them at the door of my mind as mere visitors, rather than giving them the run of the house (to borrow a wonderful metaphor from Buddhism). It was time to bring this into the light.
I invited a few dozen very loyal supporters, and many answered the call. Over nine days, timed to end on Christmas Eve (inspired by the Latin American tradition of Las Posadas), I invited us all to pray daily with one of the stories of Jesus’ birth, and offer intentions for ourselves, our families, our communities, and our global family— human and non-human. We met three times online— I made a fire in my family’s hearth and “hosted” from there— to share reflections and intentions. Some participants asked for their intentions to be written down and placed in our collective prayer bowl. On Christmas Eve, I offered those little pieces of paper to the hearth’s sacred fire, and on Christmas day scattered the ashes in my family’s fallow garden.
And I waited, through the remaining days of December, and kept praying, trying my best to keep the gut goblins from taking over. As my wife and children know all too well, of all the things I find difficult about my job, perhaps the hardest is the fundraising. In December it makes me particularly sad, and in recent years bitter, because I’ve struggled to keep my anxiety about it from smothering my Christmas spirit. As a boy, and even into my early thirties, I would anticipate and celebrate Christmas— all twelve days— with great joy. But once it became clear that EAB needed to try raising funds during the holidays, and expectations about the amounts began to build, I’ve found that joy diminishing year by year, and at my worst, souring to bitterness and resentment.
My deep desire to change this was my secret agenda for this December novena retreat. On the surface, it was a creative and hopeful way to practice the conventional wisdom about nonprofit “donor relations,” by offering something personally meaningful and mission-centered, with the potential to also be very pragmatic. Participants were not charged for access to the video and written reflections I created, since I wanted them to be freely available, not tied to any kind of transaction. But I’d be a big fat liar if I said I didn’t also hope they might inspire supporters to feel a bit more generous when they considered making their donations. Hidden to all but me was my hope that, by putting my best energies into the creation and leading of this novena, I’d have something active to look forward to, rather than something to passively and fretfully wait upon. In both cases, I’d need to try letting go of the results, but at least with the novena, I knew the process could bring me joy.
The results, I’m delighted to say, were even better than I’d hoped. Christmas giving was our highest in several years, almost 30% more than the previous year. And I got my Christmas joy back, especially on the morning of the 24th, when some members of the Dominican staff joined the virtual gathering, connecting me to the kind of salt-of-the-earth community in which Jesus actually lived his life, and reminding me in flesh and blood of why I started doing this work in the first place.
Like the Sower’s seeds finding good soil, I believe that our organization’s achievements in the following months came to bear in some small (or large, who knows?) way because of the novena, early evidence of the hundredfold harvest. I’ll tell you what happened; you can decide for yourself.
In addition to supplying many vulnerable families with food baskets and basic medicines, we were able to take a chance on an idea I’d previously set aside as impossible: hiring some recent Dominican college graduates— degree in hand but without a job, given the Dominican schools’ hiring freeze— to tutor young students struggling mightily with virtual schooling and on the verge of dropping out, who desperately needed the kind of help their parents (themselves denied schooling as children and thus barely or not at all literate) could not give them, even if they had the time. In January, we hired two of these new teachers (beneficiaries of our college scholarship program) to give weekend enrichment classes, in an outdoor environment complying with all public health recommendations. The experiment— the seed— was so successful, so quickly, that demand overwhelmed the teachers. After all, what parent would not want their child to receive compassionate, personal attention instead of being taught by a device? So EAB organized our spring fundraiser around expanding the project. For this, I offered— you guessed it— another novena, this time only with the Dominican community members— for nine days concluding on the fundraiser’s date itself. That seed also seemed to fall in good soil…
The event, though virtual, was still a mountain of work, and I wish I could say it went off without a hitch. Computers crashed, software hiccupped, but eventually, like shoots breaking through the soil, the evening found its rhythm, and the dollars from supporters (even some new ones) started coming in. Our net income still came in below an in-person event, but it was more than in 2020, and that made some new projects, also thought to be pipe dreams, much more imminently possible. We built some desperately-needed latrines for families with no access to sanitation. And helped by a grant we hadn’t expected to get, we could initiate an ambitious program to provide dozens more families with clean water filters and even more latrines. It also allowed us to open up more scholarship slots to aspiring college and high school students, and to expand the enrichment program, in the year to come.
Little by little, that pie-in-the-sky hundredfold began to look more and more like reality.
* * *
In May, my family finally got around to the garden. The school year, for all its gifts, had been so hard, and felt interminable, not to mention exhausting. Each weekend starting in mid-March, my wife and I looked at the yard, then at each other, and said, “Maybe next weekend.” But by mid-May, we knew our window of time to plant was almost shut, so we forced each other out the door, dragged our son with us, got some starter plants and fresh compost and new gloves, and dug in. We filled more bags than I care to remember of early spring weeds (which proliferate here even more than espresso pop-ups) and finally, by Sunday evening, got to the fun part— the planting. Strawberries, peppers, greens, basil, and of course, tomatoes.
Ever since taking up gardening, I’ve felt increasingly connected to this little piece of Earth we’ve been gifted to steward. This year, that has deepened, with the inclusion of the novena prayers’ ashes into the soil. In quiet moments when I’m truly present, I feel the company of all those people, and all of their spoken and silent prayers: joyful gratitude, anguished pleadings, and brilliant hopes.
Now, don’t get me wrong: Not every plant took, or bore great fruit, or did so for very long. We had our share of failures, including some bottom-rotted tomatoes and quick-bolting greens. But for the first time, we got peppers. And the strawberries burst forth for four weeks straight, almost as fast as we could eat them. And the tomatoes that did make it were (again, judging by my wife’s beaming smile and juice-dripping hands) divine. Truly.
The same could be said for my organization, Education Across Borders. We are still too lean: We need funding to bolster current staff salaries to full-time and livable-wage levels, and to hire additional staff as well; we need funds for two offices, in Seattle and in the D.R., and for people to help me run them more expertly than I can myself; we need a larger base of support and accompaniment, to truly fulfill the beautiful mission God has called us to, Dominicans and North Americans together.
Yet autumn, the season of releasing and harvest, arrives and settles in, I try to give thanks for the fruits of spring and summer, and keep sowing, in my life and work, even if not right now in our garden. After all, when we’re humble— literally, “of the earth”— enough to admit it, that’s about all we can control. Just the practice of sowing, tending, and stewarding, as best we can… and waiting to see what the harvest brings.
The Earth has a deep intelligence. As do her plants, animals, and other creatures. And the earth can respond to our needs, if we live with a humble, mindful practice of paying attention, and responding with love, sometimes softly, sometimes fiercely, sometimes in pure elation or anguish or surrender. Our task, as Mother Teresa taught us, is to focus on faithfulness to our practice of sowing, tending, and waiting lovingly. That itself is success.
The harvest, always beyond us, always mysterious, may not always satisfy our worried wants, but always, I believe, our deepest needs.