The Harvest Comes

+Porter Taylor

“The Seven of Pentacles”

by Marge Piercy

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

As the poet says, “This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always.” Our scripture is filled with the people of God living in the meantime—in the in-between time. There’s Moses and the Israelites wandering for forty years; and Holy Saturday and the period between Jesus’ Ascension and Pentecost. However, because we are mortal and because we live in time, this is the only moment we have to live a life for God regardless of what is going on in the world.

The psalmist writes, “Today is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” In the present moment, we may not see much growth, but it’s because “More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.” Instead we may feel as if the virus has hijacked our lives. However, what matters is our faith in what God has done, is doing and has promised to do for us and this world. Our faithfulness reminds us that this is only day we have to experience God’s love and mercy; this is the only day we have to be instruments of God’s grace; and this is the only day we have to grow closer to being the person God created us to be so that we might be instruments for God’s reign of grace, mercy, and justice to come on earth as it is in heaven.

Therefore, let us not lose heart. The transformation of the world is still going on even if it’s underground. Who is to say that our acts of connecting with our neighbors or insuring that through masks and maintaining distance we are fighting the virus or praying for God’s will to be done on earth---who is to say that these acts are not the very acts that enable the harvest to come.

Let us live the life that is before us. Let us keep reaching out; keep bringing in. For our faith is that after this long season, God’s harvest will come.

Practice: Notice the small acts you do during your day that give you life or make you more present. Give thanks for them as tools to bring the harvest in.

Prayer: Dear God, let every act of this day be dedicated to you and your purpose to make the world right.