DEEP ROOTS
OUR MISSION Inspired by the love of Jesus, we are building the kingdom of heaven, where differing people live in community, serving God and each other.
DEAR PEOPLE OF GOD,
The roots of this church lie very deep. In 1834, a group of Christians wandered up Billy Goat Hill, near the place at the St Johns River where cows could cross. They saw the beauty of the vista and called this place holy, just as the Timucua tribe had done in years before. And they built a church.
The roots of this Cathedral lie at the heart of this city, in its urban core. Roots of ministry to the homeless and those in need, ministry to bring wellbeing and health, ministry to educate children and care for the elderly. And the deepest root of all has been a faithful practice of worship, prayer, and giving. It is from this heartbeat of worship — this deepest of roots — that all service grows and bears much fruit.
Let me name just a few ministries born from this Cathedral: Sulzbacher Center, HabiJax, AgingTrue, Meals on Wheels, the Cathedral Arts Project, Episcopal School of Jacksonville, Cathedral District-Jax, The Cathedral School, and so many more.
Our roots are now growing into the virtual realm, to an online community that reaches thousands every week.
But the question is not just about our roots, it is also about yours. Where did you begin? Where did you experience God’s love? Who are you deep down inside, and how can we nourish those roots together? Open these pages to ponder your own roots of faith…
God is so good. And no matter how hard the wind blows, a tree with deep roots will survive and thrive.
In Christ’s Love,
CLYDE BUTCHER
ROOTS
by John Piller
It’s easy to believe you can go back Whenever you desire, jump in the car And drive, arrive at dusk—the hour
You recall most vividly—and walk Among the buildings spread across the farm, Out toward the pastures, woods, and fields.
There is music in the leaves, in the dense Columns of green corn. The wind lays down The tune. You can play it, too, simply
By walking with eyes closed, arms Stretched out, lightly striking the stalks. Who wouldn’t desire, like the children
Lost in so many similar fields, To sit down on the turned earth and drift Away on the rhythms of his own
First possible death? Rescuing Voices come closer, veer off. Flashlight beams Strobe over your head. You do not care.
Each building you remember—hen house, Sheep shed, corn crib, barn—caved in upon itself, The walls and roofs collapsing with a final
Percussive clap, since you last walked those fields. No one you will ever know works that land now. It is as green as Eden. Life rises in the roots, in the leaves.
VAN GOGH | Tree Roots
HYMN STUDY FROM A CLOSER WALK
by Nancy Roth HYMN 588/589
Almighty God, your word is cast like seed upon the ground, now let the dew of heaven descend and righteous fruits abound.
Let not our selfishness and hate this holy seed remove, but give it root in every heart to bring forth fruits of love.
Let not the world’s deceitful cares the rising plant destroy, but let it yield a hundredfold the fruits of peace and joy.
From the earliest Christian hymn in our hymnal (See Hymn 302, 303, Proper 9) to the present day, poets have used the image of planting and growing to suggest the abundant life God offers us.
After all, it is, ultimately, only the amazing process of a plant’s growth that feeds us. Without the swelling of the seed, the downward thrust of the roots, the reaching upwards toward the sun, humanity would starve. We are utterly dependent on the process.
In our early history as a species, we gathered what we needed from field and forest – grain, berries, nuts, herbs, fruits – and hunted animals who had done the same. But at some point in time, our ancestors, invented agriculture: the deliberate cultivation of what they needed to sustain them.
As they experienced with agriculture, they discovered some rules: a plant needs good soil, water, and sunlight to be able to flourish. And it must be protected from predators and weeds. Growing it is, sometimes, a lot of work.
When Jesus told the story of the sower, he knew very well that nature, being part of the Creator’s design, would provide a wise pattern for the lives of those who would follow his Way. So it is no surprise that the parable of the
sower provides some good advice about both tilling and tending the soul. In fact, all three writers of the synoptic Gospels include comments after the parable about the story’s application to the lives of the hearers.
WHAT IS THE SEED GOD WANTS TO PLANT IN OUR HEARTS, THE SEED FROM WHICH AN ABUNDANT LIFE WILL GROW? I THINK THAT THE SEED IS THE POTENTIAL FOR LOVE: LOVE OF GOD, LOVE OF OURSELVES AS GOD’S CREATION, AND LOVE OF OTHERS.
Will we let it be snatched away, or trampled by the forces that militate against love? We do that when we reject love in favor of the negative ideas our culture often holds out to us: a selfish individualism, arrogant desire for power, or idolatry of earthly wealth.
Will we make it possible for love to put down roots, by providing the deep soil of prayer and reflection? Or will our religion, and probably our lives, be shallow and unfruitful?
Will we be willing to weed out of our lives those things that strangle our potential to grow: our overbusy-ness, our resentments, our thoughtlessness, our sin? In the garden, this is often the most difficult of our tasks, and it requires constant vigilance. In my garden, at least, weeds seem to spring up overnight!
Or will we cultivate our garden? The Sun is overhead providing free energy. For the garden is a partnership between the gardener and nature, our soul’s work and God’s gift. In that partnership, the rays of grace are the indispensable ingredient. We are drawn to God, growing in love and toward Love. It is a labor of love to do our part, as well.
WOLFGANG TILLMAN | Art on a Postcard
HAMMER AND NAILS
by The Indigo Girls
Clearing webs from the hovel, A blistered hand on the handle of a shovel. I’ve been digging too deep, I always do.
I see my fate on the surface; I look a lot like Narcissus. A dark abyss of an emptiness
Standing on the edge of a drowning blue.
I look behind my ears for the green, And even my sweat smells clean. Glare off the white hurts my eyes. I gotta get out of bed and get a hammer and a nail, Learn how to use my hands, not just my head.
I think myself into jail.
Now I know a refuge never grows
From a chin in a hand in a thoughtful pose. Gotta tend the earth if you want a rose.
My life is part of the global life. I’d found myself becoming more immobile When I’d think a little girl in the world can’t do anything. A distant nation my community, A street person my responsibility. If I have a care in the world, I have a gift to bring.
I look behind my ears for the green, And even my sweat smells clean. Glare off the white hurts my eyes.
I gotta get out of bed and get a hammer and a nail, Learn how to use my hands, not just my head.
I think myself into jail.
Now I know a refuge never grows From a chin in a hand in a thoughtful pose. Gotta tend the earth if you want a rose.
I AM THE SEED OF THE FREE. I INTEND TO BEAR GREAT FRUIT.
~ Sojourner Truth~
THE DUFF BETWEEN US: “JOY IS SUCH A HUMAN MADNESS ”
by Ross Gay
Or, like this: In healthy forests, which we might imagine to exist mostly above ground, and be wrong in our imagining, given as the bulk of the tree, the roots, are reaching through the earth below, there exists a constant communication between those roots and mycelium, where often the ill or weak or stressed are supported by the strong and surplused.
By which I mean a tree over there needs nitrogen, and a nearby tree has extra, so the hyphae (so close to hyphen, the handshake of the punctuation world), the fungal ambulances, ferry it over. Constantly. This tree to that. That to this. And in a tablespoon of rich fungal duff (a delight: the phrase fungal duff, meaning a healthy forest soil, swirling with the living the dead make) are miles and miles of hyphae, handshakes, who get a little sugar for their work. The pronoun who turned mushrooms into people, yes it did. Evolved the people into mushrooms.
Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things — the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this — joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and everything we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.
From “A COMMUNION WITH EARTH: GARDENING AND GRATITUDE”
by Catherine Ann Lombard
It took me a long time and a good deal of sweat to understand it — just how much our Earth is a sanctuary for our souls. This awareness evolved only thanks to Signora Giuseppa.
Having worked the land for more than seventy years, Giuseppa quietly and wisely guided me towards this realization while we walked around her campo, her fields. Through her simple and daily vigil of being with, caring for, and depending upon the earth, she initiated me into the profound experience of gardening and growing what one eats. For it is through this deeply experiential reality that we are best able to integrate the sacredness of the Earth with our own humanity.
Signora Giuseppa is a round but sturdy widow whose hands are small, yet broad and strong. Whenever she stands before you, her feet are firmly planted and her eyes steady upon you. She is 77 years old, and one of the few people I have ever met that is really present to all that is around her. Every afternoon you can find her tending her two-acre campo in the Italian countryside north of Rome. Since she was five years old, she has lived all her life (literally) off the fruits of her labor. From olive oil to fava beans to wine grapes and, of course, tomatoes, her harvest is as varied as it is delicious.
Whenever I visit, she chatters away in her Italian dialect as she heads out to feed her chickens with a bucket of soggy bread and milled corn in hand and an assortment of half-wild cats underfoot. She knows I don’t always understand, but what she seems to find more important is our time together. It is always a pleasure to visit her and see what she is sowing, planting, harvesting, gathering, drying, and feeding her chickens.
Only educated to the third grade (and thanks to Mussolini, she says, insisting that all Italian children learn to read and write), Giuseppa has managed to integrate life’s lessons. For some time now, I have declared her farm “The University of Gardening” and she la professoressa. Whenever I say this in front of the many visitors and relatives that often drop by, Giuseppa beams proudly and quickly adds, “I was never much educated, but I do have some esperienza.”
It wasn’t until I too had this esperienza of hoeing, planting, composting, weeding, watering, and finally reaping the harvest of my own garden did I come to understand how holy the Earth really is. My education evolved mostly from my following Giuseppa around her campo and simply watching. She used to tease me by telling everyone that I liked to come by and steal her secrets. Yet, while she showed me how far apart to plant tomatoes, when to harvest the garlic, and how to recognize a cauliflower that wouldn’t produce fruit, Giuseppa was also teaching me how to relate to the land; how to observe, care, tend, and support its needs; how to appreciate its bounty, receive its gifts, and surrender that which doesn’t survive.
Oh sure, I had been ecologically aware for years: bicycling to work, recycling my plastics, picking up tossed garbage left along the roadside, hanging up wash instead of using a dryer, and buying a fuel-efficient car. All these small conscious acts of conservation are vital to the planet’s ultimate survival. Until one actually works the Earth, one cannot appreciate the lessons it holds nor how fundamentally attached we are to it, nor how much working on the land can actually help us to become fully human. As Gandhi once said, “To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.”
What makes gardening such a precise mirror for the soul? There are many biblical parables that invoke the imagery of the garden — the pruning of vines, sowing of seeds, and harvesting of grapes. Taoists believe that miniature gardens are the earthly copy of Paradise. In Islam, the four gardens of Paradise — Soul, Heart, Spirit, and Essence — symbolize the mystical journey of the soul.
And then there’s my retired neighbor Angelo who once told me that gardening was the most humble of tasks:
“YOUR HEAD IS ALWAYS BOWED, AND SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO GO DOWN ON YOUR KNEES.”
While poised in this most humble of postures, we begin to work in parallel with God in the creation of the greater world and universe. Although God’s dimension is infinite and eternal while ours is contained and immediate, we, nevertheless, enter into the same act of creation, the word actually coming from the Latin creare: to produce, to make life.
As the gardener creates, so does the garden transform the inner life of its creator. The garden’s cycle mirrors our own growth, complete with floods, heat, drought, infestation; dying, resurrecting, blossoming, blooming, maturing, rotting; bounty, beauty, miracles.
In our deeper psyche, we tend to our life’s garden of sorrows and joys. We pull out, cut back, dig up, bury, sow, support, and nourish, hoping one day to harvest our life’s experiences into wisdom. Without all this soul/gardening work, our spirits are swamped under the weeds, our creative gifts choked, our true selves unable to flourish.
When I first started my own small patch of vegetables, I found myself constantly moving plants. They would start as seedlings in small containers on my balcony from where I could keep an eye on them. Then, once big enough, they were transplanted into individual and bigger pots. Finally, they were carried to the garden and planted in the earth. Sometimes I’d catch myself moving a plant four or five times, fussing to find the best spot for it to thrive.
Upon reflection, I realized that this farming trait of mine was an outward manifestation of something deep within my own nature. I am a person who, when faced with a crisis, moves. I get in my car and drive off. My life has been shaped by a series of crisis and moving, moving and crisis. Since I was 15 years old, I have had 37 addresses in nine different countries on four different continents. Perhaps this is why I tend to move plants. There is a longing for safety, for finding the right place, for coming home.
One afternoon, after Giuseppa dug up 50 new lettuce plants and gave them to me to take home and plant in my own garden, she said, “You know what they say, Caterì? ‘Metti in terra, spera in Dio. Put them in the earth and hope in God.’” That felt like a strong message for me to stop moving. I needed, at least for a while, to plant myself firmly in the earth and place my hope and trust in God and the universe that I would receive the nourishment that I needed and all would be well.
As we interact with hoe, shovel, and watering can upon our Earth, She is ready to teach us about ourselves. Working the Earth is like dreaming, it can act as a medium between self and soul. When we take time to garden, we are allowing our souls to speak to our conscious selves, to display outwardly where in the soul process we really are. As we gain in awareness, we can equally influence the soul to move to its next necessary task by outwardly performing the chore in the garden.
There were days when I found myself tearing at weeds, only moments later to feel the fierce roots of long-buried anger and resentment clinging to my heart. Other days I was filled with joy, longing to spill seeds upon every patch of bare earth. By gardening, we unearth a place where our inner and outer worlds can merge. In this space, with time and nourishment, we encourage the self closer to truth and ultimately closer to God.
HOLLEY | Grown Together in the Midst of the Foundation
LONNIE
From FINDING THE MOTHER TREE
by Suzanne Simard
Ecosystems are so similar to human societies—they’re built on relationships. The stronger those are, the more resilient the system. And since our world’s systems are composed of individual organisms, they have the capacity to change. We creatures adapt, our genes evolve, and we can learn from experience. A system is ever changing because its parts—the trees and fungi and people—are constantly responding to one another and to the environment. Our success in coevolution— our success as a productive society—is only as good as the strength of these bonds with other individuals and species. Out of the resulting adaptation and evolution emerge behaviors that help us survive, grow, and thrive.
NOTES FROM THE SUB-DEAN
I was recently talking to someone about redwood trees. They’re some of the tallest trees on earth. They can tower up to 380 feet tall, they can weigh up to 1.6 million pounds, and they can live for 2,000 years or more. And yet despite the colossal size of redwoods, they have an astonishingly shallow root system, with some of these roots only having roots that reach 6 or 12 feet deep into the ground. You see, a single redwood’s root system would never be broad enough or deep enough or strong enough to sustain its weight and its height. However, you never see a single redwood standing by itself. Redwoods grow in close proximity to one another, and their roots intertwine in the roots of the redwoods around them. They’re bound up in the roots of their neighbors, creating a vast and interconnected network of support. This provides incredible stability for redwoods, allowing them to withstand winds and floods and even earthquakes. We, too, need the support of a community. Our individual strength and resilience might seem insufficient at times. But when we intertwine our lives with those around us, sharing our burdens and our joys, and also our successes and our resources, we too can create a network that is robust enough to carry us through the greatest storms of our lives.
Excerpt from Father Mark’s sermon from June 10
THUMBPRINT
by Celeste Turner Wright
Almost reluctant, we approach the block Cleft from a stout sequoia; calculate By arches, loops, concentric rings the date Of Hastings, Plymouth, Gettysburg; the shock Darkens our eyes. As dying men a clock, We read the scornful summary of fate — Elizabeth an inch — and estimate How it will scant our chronicle and mock.
Redwood has fingerprinted Time, the seams Of his giant thumb: a circle grew With padres’ grapevines; when this curve was new, The miners waded California streams. Can all our aspirations and our dreams Leave but a filamentous line or two?
From A GATHERING OF SPIRITS NEWSLETTER
by Carrie Newcomer
Life has a way of becoming focused on our concerns, our troubles, and regrets. Everyone you meet is carrying something. We also live in a time when commercial media focuses daily on what is scary, tragic, enraging, or salacious—real or manufactured. How important it is to sink into what is so good in our lives and in our world. That doesn’t mean I don’t care or I’m not doing what I can to address what is hard or concerning in our world and in my own life. But what I am saying is that it is not the scary, tragic, enraging, or salacious that sustains us—it is the unabashed goodness of life that grounds us, revives us, gives us the courage when courage is needed.
Let us sink into what is refreshing, enlivening and life-giving. Let us delight in our relationships. Let us strengthen our communities because half a tree is beneath our feet and half a forest is under the ground.
Our cares, concerns, sorrows, and challenges will come. But let them live alongside the glory of a summer day, a moment in time when love, delight, and awe makes our hearts expand. Let it all come and let it be, here in the garden, here wherever you feel most connected and grateful. Let us appreciate and cherish what matters most.
Practice
Call or text a friend who makes your life better, who is a cherished part of that root system that keeps you grounded. You can make it brief – “Thank you for being you” or “You make me remember how good life is” or whatever you want to say. Or send a photo of something that you know will make them smile.
PHOTO FROM NORTH CAROLINA ARBORETUM
FROM MILK AND HONEY
by Rupi Kaur
for you to see beauty here does not mean there is beauty in me it means there is beauty rooted so deep within you you can’t help but see it everywhere
CATHEDRAL QUARTERLY EDITORIAL BOARD
Owene Courtney
Laura Jane Pittman
The Rev. Dr. Linda Privitera
ADVISOR
The Very Reverend Kate Moorehead Carroll
jaxcathedral.org
