t’s tough living in a fallen world. I have no words of wisdom to console parents whose child has died in a car wreck; or a husband whose wife is dying of cancer; or a child whose father never came back from a war, or a day at work. Years ago while I was rummaging through a bookstore in Charleston I was confronted by a pair of indignant high-school film-makers who wanted to know what I thought of bad things happening to good people. I remember remarking to their camera that I had never actually met a good person, but then expanded that to say it was also remarkable that more bad things did not actually happen to people. That’s my theology for the day.
I have always had a hard time with certain aspects of the world as it is. In 1964, I remember being very affected by a Life Magazine story of a man killed by a Great White shark off a beach somewhere south of the Golden Gate Bridge. Those were the days when I lived in California, and Life Magazine was still alive. I spent years being terrified of sharks. I was also terrified of poison oak, since it turned out I was hyper allergic to it and could get a massive case simply by passing within a hundred yards or so of a tiny plant.
Years later, after I became a Christian, I continued to have trouble reconciling things like sharks and poison ivy (I was no longer living in the west, with its poison oak, but the eastern ivy was just as bad) with God’s providence. I finally came to recognize the legitimate place of the shark as the vacuum cleaner of the seas, but poison ivy’s role in the world continued to elude me…until the other day.
I am starting to think that farmers everywhere – but especially in Buncombe County – must actually plant poison ivy at the corners of all their farm buildings, since it grows so lushly in all the places you need to get to in daily life on the farm. Or maybe it’s simply the case that farmers in western North Carolina are born with a lifetime immunity to the nasty stuff. Whatever the reason, I find it everywhere I need to be, and I have been diligently spraying poison ivy killer on all the glossy three-leaved masses of dense greenery I can find since the day we arrived on the farm. As I said in an earlier post, I got a pretty good case of it already, clearing the vines away from the future goat loafing barn so we could rebuild one of its collapsing walls.
Michael Pollan, in one of his early books, disputes the contention that a weed ‘is just a plant that is in the wrong place.’ He points out that weeds grow around human beings. (There is good theology in that!) and where people are, so are weeds. That is certainly the case with poison ivy. But I was not thinking of that the other evening after supper when I set out to expand my poison ivy eradication program on the farm. What I found was that toxicodendron radicans is indeed a plant that grows where humans have made their mark. I found it mostly along fence lines and in other threshold places. It rarely grows in the middle of a field.
So, as I progressed around the edges of the farm, blasting the three-leaved devilish weed wherever I could find it, I gradually found myself paying close attention to the farm itself. I noticed all sorts of things I would not have seen, had I not been looking for some specific thing. By the time I was about a quarter of the way around I stopped looking for poison ivy and was simply looking at the place. There will be plenty of time in the future to tame the awful stuff, but for now I am grateful it gave me the chance really to start looking at the land that we have. That is a blessing, not a curse.
Do not, however, think that I have made my peace with poison ivy. I still hate the stuff. Each time I get a case, I hate it more.