[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Horse Chestnuts

This is the most beautiful time of the year in these parts. Just about 
everything wild that can flower is flowering -- lilacs in great lavender 
racks throughout the landscape, ornamental cherries and crabapples, irises, 
columbine, and the peony buds are fattening up. The tulips and daffodils 
are just finishing up, and everything else is good to go.

Including the horse chestnut trees, which are now massively in bloom.  They 
have cone-shaped spikes of white flowers, quite large and elaborate and 
prominent and borne superbly upright; they remind me of 19th-century 
Christmas trees mounting their wax candles, pointing proudly skyward. I'm 
fond of these big, solid guys with their umbrils of substantial leaves; 
they have a certain generosity, do horse chestnuts. They are buxom. Their 
handsome, silky, red-brown nuts aren't palatable to humans, but they do 
nourish the squirrels.

I was admiring one such tree as I waited for the stop light. Each cone of 
flowers had, I don't know, a couple of dozen individual flowers, and the 
tree sported hundreds of cones. I wouldn't be comfortable trying to 
estimate the total number of potentially fruiting blossoms per tree, except 
that it's obviously in the thousands. Maybe even the five thousands. That 
tree had a *lot* of flowers.

I don't know how many flowers will fruit; likely most of them. The 
sidewalks and lawns below that tree will be littered with horse chestnuts 
come the fall. And likely only a few will have the chance to germinate, and 
the baby horse chestnuts that propagate will be yanked up by whoever's lawn 
that is. All that abundance of fruitfulness gone to naught, unless you 
consider the nourishment of squirrels.

There are a couple of opposite-end schools of thought about this sort of 
situation. There is the happy sentimental school, which crows about God's 
abundance and doesn't really seem to give much mind to the fact that all 
that abundance doesn't always work out. Yes, each person is God's precious 
child, but we're still a pretty dysfunctional bunch a lot of the time. Look 
at Darfur.  Of those gazillions of horse chestnuts, the overwhelming 
majority -- like 99.99% -- are never going to fulfil their potential to 
become big, buxom trees. And that's just horse chestnuts. Get into salmon 
eggs....

But then there's the equal and opposite persuasion, that sees only the 
cruelty and wastefulness of Creation, the mathematical models the predicate 
species' reproductive strategies: this is why cicadas boom every 17 years, 
or bamboos fruit only at long-awaited intervals, swamping their stands with 
seed mats so thick that *some* of them (even if it's only a few) will 
sprout. It's cool and calculated and strips out any notion of meaning, as 
well as all sentimentality, from Creation.

I'd rather side with stripped-out than written-in, perhaps because I have a 
degree in biology, and I like a healthy skepticism. But I do have to wonder 
if, perhaps, both sides of the issue are asking the right question.

There isn't an inherent moral thing about the abundance of Creation; we're 
attaching labels like "generosity" or "wastefulness" our of our own human 
need to justify or condemn God's ways, when we should instead be looking at 
our own.  Creation just *is*. We can model it, more or less successfully. I 
have few doubts about the mechanism of evolution, but evolution has nothing 
to do with purpose, only with fit -- just as an employee may be a wonderful 
human being, but not necessarily a great fit for the position. I have no 
doubts whatsoever about global warming or our role in it, but our 
relationship to this earth is a matter both related to, and other than, 
what we're doing to the climate.

There are fields appropriate for meaning and fields for which meaning is 
the wrong question. Both sides of the debate do ill when they dismiss the 
other side's perspective. Is there a God? I do believe so, and I do not 
believe that God is answerable for what human beings have done in God's 
name. Is there meaning in the profligacy of horse chestnut blossoms? I 
think that's between the horse chestnut and its Creator and is really none 
of my business.

I do know, though, that human beings have some sort of inherent drive 
towards beauty and meaning, and so we cultivate trees and other plants for 
what we see is beautiful in them, horse chestnuts included. Someone valued 
these trees enough to plant them -- and I've planted one myself, for the 
beauty. And I do believe that beauty, properly considered, points us 
Godward. So there is that link.

Meanwhile, I'll just enjoy. When I sat in church this morning, there was a 
lovely bunch of pure wild lilac in a plain vase a few feet away. You don't 
have to *do* anything with lilac, barring jamming it into a jarful of water 
and simply sitting with it. This, I think, is perhaps the best approach of 
all.