Bag Drop
On Coit Road lay a plastic bag of leaves; the bag was split open and leaves were already scattering. The bag was still partly full, but it was clear that, with traffic and air currents, its contents soon would be emptied to the wind.
One presumes: Someone had used a leaf blower (or, less likely, a rake) and gotten the leaves into a pile; from the pile they were got into the bag; the bag was tied and on its way to its final resting place. Then, a bump, a vibration, who knows what—and off the bag rolled onto the road.
How hard it is to have anything to show for our labors in this life! We try to remove fallen leaves, and they just return to the blown-about world. They are no longer in our lawn, but they end up somewhere else, and other leaves come into ours. “Where is there an end to it?” T. S. Eliot asks, and concludes, in part, that there is no end. There is addition, one labor after another. One bails water out of a slowly leaking boat. One dusts the counter. One labors for a company, washes a car, prepares a report. We take the products of our labors and tie them up nicely in a bag . . . and the bag rolls off the back of the truck and our labors come to nought.
The bag in the road, dropped and split and failing in its purpose: it’s a lenten picture.
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What then is the work that endures? The saints tell us: Prayer, praise, concrete deeds of love, these are things that last. They last, I think, not because they are conclusions of activity, but because they contribute to a change of our heart. And a changed heart is the point of the Gospel.
How do you change people’s hearts? To put it in a line: you change them by dying for them.
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Out & About: I am to preach at St. Matthew’s this Sunday, March 30, at the 9 and 11:15 a.m. Eucharists.
Wednesday, April 2, at 6 p.m., I’ll be speaking at All Souls’ Church in Oklahoma City on “The faith of the church as lived out on the Camino today.” This is open to the public, as are their Eucharists the following weekend (Sat. 5:30 p.m., Sun. 8 and 10 a.m.) at which I will be preaching.
And on Palm Sunday, April 13, I am to preach at St. Augustine’s Oak Cliff, Dallas, at the 10:15am service.
The Good Books & Good Talk seminar next meets on Sunday, April 27, at 5 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, to discuss The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh. This short book from the great English satirist is set in mid-20th-century California and centers on a cat cemetery. What’s not to like?