Chaff
Serenity Dillaway
When we first built our garden, it was small. A few raised beds, a hobby to connect my husband to his rural roots, a place to grow some flowers and maybe a little lettuce. One anonymous zoning complaint from an irritated neighbor, an unwitting permitting violation, and some spiteful gardening later, we had 15 beds and now we grow everything from brussels sprouts to zinnias.
It’s so much work. Sometimes I try to count up the many hours we spend planting, weeding, harvesting, and fertilizing. Not to mention our futile efforts to make it suburban-friendly. New cedar mulch every two years, Pinterest-worthy painted stepping stones, even a few trellises for the more adventurous flowers. I’m not sure if it’s worth it some days. Like when I’m kneeling in the rain, putting in hoses that will be needed in a month or so, but need to be set up now. Or when I can hear the kids fighting in the house while I’m trying to spread straw in the hot sun to prevent water loss. Or when everything smells like compost from my husband’s latest foray into natural recycling. I doubt my commitment.
But the garden is a sacred space. Like most churches, sometimes it feels like it takes more than it gives. These days, as a churchless, ex-evangelical woman, it feels like the garden is the only thing taking or giving, the only sanctuary I have access to. It wasn’t always this way. My first memory of encountering God was in the high pulpit of my childhood church. Only used on Christmas, Easter, or when the old guy from the diocese came to give the sermon, that pulpit was the sacredest of the sacred places in a room that commanded reverence. It wasn’t during some sacrament that I met God for myself, however. That day, my mom was probably off doing some church mom thing, figuring out VBS or helping make Wednesday night dinner in the industrial kitchen. As the well-behaved only daughter of the family, I was trusted to wander around and entertain myself. (She probably didn’t know that I liked throwing paper airplanes off the balcony just as much as my brothers did).
I forget why I decided to kneel down in that pulpit of pulpits. Probably I knew if I’d been caught there, even my mom would have been in trouble. But I still wanted to see what it felt like, so I crouched down low, encircled by the simple white wooden panels. The red utilitarian carpet was softer here, from decades of not really ever being walked on. It was quiet, and smelled dusty, and I felt whole. Not just safe, not just loved, but like all the missing and broken pieces of my little nine-year-old self were just as they should be. I was just as I should be, hidden away but not alone. I’d never felt like that before and I knew even then that it was a transcendent moment.
I chased this feeling for a long time, through youth groups and Christian camps and college ministries. It took me even longer to realize that you can’t chase holy wholeness, you can only watch for it and welcome it in. Sometimes, I’m privileged enough to be the watcher, noticing that peace and pointing it out to another person. When that happens, I secretly envision myself reaching one arm out to God and another to my fellow human, blessed to be a part of this chain of goodness.
One of the best places for me to meet God these days is my garden. From the day we dug it, surrounded by laughing friends and dirt-covered children, it brought wholeness. Neighbors came to drop off extra seeds they had. People walking their dogs smiled and waved. It felt like a little sanctuary, except that it’s not private or quiet at all. The garden is bordered by a busy road and surrounded by the chaos of my home, scattered toys and rusting garden tools everywhere. There are even some pink plastic flamingos. Still, sometimes in August, when the plants grow high and I’m crouched down pulling weeds, it’s like there’s nothing else out there and this sacred space is all that exists.
A few years ago, I added that ex- to my evangelical title. The country was the midst of the family separation crisis and I knew that God doesn’t put up with that crap even if the churches do. That wildness called to me. I still bear the marks of that good little nine-year-old, but the kid that threw paper airplanes is in there too. I wanted to find the God that laughs when that plane makes it farther than it has ever been before. And that same God who destroys the powers and principalities that crush the vulnerable among us.
Leaving the church was tremendously painful, made no less easy by the fact that women like me were fleeing in droves. There were a lot of sermons at that old church about wheat and chaff and how God was winnowing the church and that people like me, the chaff, were being blown away. I spent a lot of Sundays out in the garden, doing the quiet work of grieving. I hope to find a faith home again someday. We’d started to try, but then the pandemic hit and once again, I found myself sanctuary-less.
A few weeks ago, I was out there saddened by, well, everything these days. While I picked the overabundant tomatoes, I made the mistake of listening to one of those old worship songs, the ones I can’t bear anymore because they paper over so many sins – our racism, our misogyny, our betrayal of the holy goal of building wholeness in all human beings – and I let the tears fall. There was no going back to the old safety of trite hymns again. Good – I’d learned better. Terrible – where was the chaff like me supposed to blow to?
Ten minutes later, I was harvesting the last tomato plant, reaching through musky leaves to get the one red tomato that’s decided to grow in the hardest to reach spot. Crouched down, hidden from the road, kneeling on the poky mulch, I noticed a stalk of grain. How had that gotten here? I had never planted grain of any kind, so it couldn’t be a remnant from a previous year. Unlikely to have come from our compost, given that we rarely throw out uncooked grains. My best guess is that one of my pieces of water-preserving straw cover must have had a seed in it and grown against the odds in a forest of tomatoes. I don’t know anything about grain production. I barely know about vegetables half the time. But here, in the most sacred place I have left, the discarded parts of the plants that I spread to help my more desirable crops pushed through and grew.
I brought it in the house cheering, as my befuddled family smiled at my enthusiasm. They didn’t know that I’ve labeled myself chaff. They didn’t know that I felt blown away, lost on the wind, waiting to be added to the compost or burned. They didn’t know that crouched down, hiding in the midst of plants, I’d be reminded that maybe that thing we thought was throwaway might still have a kernel in it, just waiting to grow. But I got the message loud and clear.
For a few moments, all the missing and broken pieces of my thirty-six-year old self were just as they should be. In one piece again, if only for a little while.