When my Uncle Terry died...
We placed sunflowers on his casket
When Uncle Terry died, we placed sunflowers on his casket. No children survived him, so he tithed his savings to the conservation of butterflies. The church was cold. There was old stones holding the stories of thirty or so generations: matrimony and lament, baptism and dedications. He was the last of his siblings, so now buried was a lineage like those sunflowers that he cherished. We printed a picture of him standing beneath one. And decided that was how he'd be remembered. All those memories now sunk beneath the soil. But when spring arrives and thaws the frostbound ground, they will not rise. Their time has come and gone. We are but butterflies, fluttering for a day and believing it is forever.
What can I say of a life that was so weathered And by that I mean, my uncle lived seasonally. How else do you plant a garden unless you submit to both the summer and the wintering? His calloused hands told the story of handling living things: the bleak cold mornings and that joy of welcome spring, the pain of mourning what could have been, and the joy in receiving the gifts the giver came to bring.
Are we not standing in the gardens planted by our forefathers? Are we not reaping a harvest we didn't sow? Are we not leaning on the limbs of an oak and standing within the shade of a forest that someone else chose to grow?
Martin Luther was asked, if you knew tomorrow the world would end and today would be your last, how would you spend it? And he said, "I would plant an apple tree." The Greeks believed a society only thrived when people plant trees they know they'll never live to see. So how fickle we have been, tossed by every changing wind, giving in before we have become a witness. Yes, there is the life we live, but there is the unlived life within us and between the two stands the resistance.
Nietzsche put it like this: it is long obedience in the same direction that brings heaven to our streets. So summon the critic. Bring me the cynic. I'll tell him this: blessed are the meek. Blessed is the one who still believes, childlike, impoverished, hardly able to even speak, but who has not forgotten Solomon's wisdom. For it is not the lack of wealth, reputation or esteem, but the absence of vision that brings people to their knees.
So distracted by our greed and our lust to succeed, we have gathered into barns instead of casting out our seed. And yet it is the back scarred by wooden beams and the sacrifice of fools that remind us of the actions that actually move us closer to the renewal.
Did you hear of Fukushima when the sea brewed and the earth hurled herself into the ground? A nuclear site erupted. An invisible storm rained down, contaminating the land and poisoning the food. And they evacuated thousands, but for those that couldn't move, they stayed housed in, surrounded by elusive clouds that lingered like ghosts, becoming suspicious of the air that they once innocently consumed.
And yet amongst the chaos, there was a monk dressed in crimson hues who walked through those fields planting sunflower seeds within the ruins. And over time they grew and they removed the poison. Sunflowers offering themselves as objects of both beauty and atonement. They drew the cancer from the ground into themselves until it was broken down, announcing where sunflowers lift their golden crowns, we find evidence of this hope. Even in the soil of decay, something beautiful can grow.
I hear the voice of an ancient prophet speaking to a depleted people housed in the walls of exile and defeat. They are longing for a home they've only heard of, a city they're unsure of, a country where they hope to be. And it is to them this wild man comes with fire on his tongue. He descends with a word from the God that they have almost forgotten and he says:
Do you want a revolution?
Do you want a revelation?
Do you want to renew your vision and reshape a broken nation?
Do you want to overthrow the systems that have polluted the minds of your children and your spirits?
Do you want to live in abundance and remember where you come from?
Do you want to do the will of God or at least undo the will of demons?
Do you want to see people prosper in every sphere and across every tier of meaning?
Do you want to live a life worth remembering? Do you want to leave a legacy? Do you want to offer something to future generations only now brewing in the wombs of their mothers and the hearts of their fathers? Do you want to be worthy ancestors? Do you want to answer the call and stand before kings, not as princes or princesses, but as jesters, making a mockery of power built on bricks towards heaven? Do you believe beauty can save the world? That the stories told within those trenches were more powerful in the hands of the soldiers than their weapons? And do you want to starve out the madness and restore man's appetite for sanity? Do you want to come back to clarity and conviction? Do you want to build a society on the foundations of wisdom instead of self-serving ambition?
Well then, plant a garden. Plant a garden in Babylon. Bury your seeds in the soil that you battled against for so long because this is the only world to which you will ever belong. So turn your exile into Eden and turn your sorrow into a song. Turn your rejection into the birth pains of restoration and mine from your frustration the potential of growth. Pull from your suffering a morsel of hope and forgive your captors. Forgive the ones that made you bleed. Let them go for it is time for us to build. No, it is time for us to sow. No, it is time for us to become the seed. To live in proximity. To lay our lives down so that others one day can simply breathe.
Empty the barns in which you've stored. Build a bigger table. Invite your enemies over for dinner and open up your doors. Love your neighbors like you love yourself. And love yourself like you love your neighbors. And for the love of God, remember the poor. Remember the poor. Remember the poor.
Sweep your streets like you're paving gold because in reality you are. How you do anything is how you do everything. Make your stand against injustice loud. No, make it deafening. Push the needle towards integrity. Pour Kintsugi gold into the hostage memory. Turn those ashes into confetti. Burn down the idols and craft wedding rings. Covenantal icons from the bed sheets of adultery and build tree houses for your children in the garden of Gethsemane.
I don't know if we have long left and I don't know if they'll remember me or you but we do have work to do and this may be our legacy. Sunflower shoots in Babylonian cemeteries. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. For they have built empires out of the dust from which they came and we have watched them fall time and again but we will not do the same. We have learned from their mistakes. In their place we will build not high-rise apartments or regal estates but gardens.
Because who is really in prison when steel bars become a trellis? When roses wrap themselves around the fences of a cell? That's when the fires of hell are drowned in the mountain springs that come down from heaven. When my uncle Terry died, we placed sunflowers on his casket and we let the tears dry on our skin. We vowed despite the powers in present darkness, we would not cower nor would we give in.
Sunflowers in Babylon, Joshua Luke Smith
You can watch the poetry performance here
Reading this with no experience of grief