[Parish] Save the Trees, Summer

[Malcolm Young]

Parish Email
24 June 2010
 
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
 
I don’t often ask for something so specific as I am tonight.  Even though they are mostly silent, the redwood trees bordering the lower lawn are an important part of our life together.  They are also dying because we haven’t been watering them.
 
You can’t do much about the ecological catastrophe in the Gulf, but there is something we can do as a community to preserve these magnificent trees for the future.  Could someone take on the mission of buying or giving us a water hose and taking the time to see that they are well-watered frequently?  I’m leaving next week for July, so this would have to be something that someone else got going.  It would be a shame to wait on this until I return on the first week of August.  If you take on this ministry, it would be good to let Jani Wild and Jim McKnight know what you are doing.
 
We are so blessed that while I’m gone Jim will be in charge.  We have some super summer BBQ’s planned and a wonderful event for Independence Day.  Alice Larse our Senior Warden and Marge Berglund also are people who can help if you have a question or good idea.
 
Tonight I’m trying to write a funeral sermon for someone I didn’t really know.  Thank God for all those many things that connect us all to each other and open windows into each other’s lives.  Please keep me in your prayers as you are in mine.
 
Love,
 
Malcolm
 
 
 
 
Not again in this flesh will I see
the old trees stand here as they did,
weighty creatures made of light, delight
of their making straight in them and well,
whatever blight our blindness was or made,
however thought or act might fail.
 
The burden of absence grows, and I pay
daily the grief I owe to love
for women and men, days and trees
I will not know again. Pray
for the world’s light thus borne away.
Pray for the little songs that wake and move.
 
Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997 (Counterpoint, 1998), 73.