Weeds and Trees

Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.

--“Beautiful Boy,” John Lennon

He has big plans for the future. She is ambitious, she is going somewhere, and she knows exactly where. Really? Have you ever noticed how much time you spend making plans? Staking out a future? Imagining your life over the rainbow? You and everyone else. And its fun. Couples planning a wedding make plans, students make plans, city planners make plans. Nurses do it, doctors do it. Financial planners make a living doing it. . Everyone is making plans: 5 year plans, 10 year plans, life plans. Have you noticed something? Plan as you will, it is impossible to control life. Life rolls on, regardless of plan. This can cause profound suffering: the harder you hold onto your plans the more frustrated you can get. What would life be like if you were able to hold your plans loosely? Jesus has a parable of transformation/koan that aims in the direction of our plans. With his Parable of the Mustard Seed, Jesus takes our plans, tosses them on their head and then turns them outside in.

(The kingdom of heaven) is like a mustard seed that a man took and tossed into his garden. It grew and became a tree and the birds of the sky roosted in its branches. Luke 13:18 – 19 as in “Re-imagine the World,” Bernard Brandon Scott

Gardeners plan. In January and February the seed catalogs arrives and gardeners pour over the pages, deciding what to plant this year. There are countless choices: upteen varieties of tomatoes, there’s rhubarb, peas, beans, potatoes. I wonder should I start that bed of asparagus this year? As it is now, so it was in Jesus’ time. Plans needed to be made for a bountiful harvest. People needed to eat. And there needed to be enough. And just as now every gardener needs to contend with weeds so it was then. Enter mean Mr. Mustard.

On its Head

Just as with Jack and his beans, it is an off-handed toss, or at very least, ill considered and not carefully planned. To invite such a plant into the garden, invites chaos; bringing an end to all planning. Mustard plants sprout quickly, reach maturity in a little over a month, and therefore spread like wild-fire. Mustard is a weed. Because of this the gardening manuals of the time – from Leviticus and the Mishnah, to the writings of Pliny the elder, proscribe planting this weed. So, any plan for planting mustard in the garden will qualify as an off-handed toss, ill-considered and not according to any acceptable plan. Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. And indeed, as you sow, so shall you reap. Now plans make no difference. And so, our first stopping point: wild and uncontrollable.

The growth of the kingdom of heaven is wild and uncontrollable, weed-like. The kingdom of heaven brings dis-order to the garden. How distant from our plans! You begin a fierce, driven movement into your career and then, you fall in love. This changes everything. You relax into retirement and the bottom drops out of your 401k. You make a routine visit to the doctor, you get a diagnosis. Is this misfortune apart from the kingdom of heaven? You might think so. Jesus is telling us otherwise: just this, what is before you is the kingdom of heaven AND it is beyond your control. A movement into life is a movement into the wild. At this point, plans may not help you. Being present in your life as it is, is the Way. Which brings us to our next stopping point: the unexpected.

Outside, In

At this point, you are invited to embody the parable in your life. Facing the wild and uncontrollable, there is no other way. Within Jesus’s parabolic world life is a wild ride and just this life as-it-is is where you live – plans no longer amount to a hill of beans. In fact the more you insist on your plans, the further you will be from your life. Yet, within this world of wild growth there is a big surprise. Call it a mustard tree. Of course there is no such thing. At best, mustard is a 4 foot weed. No large branches for nests, no bird song in the morning, paltry shade. Certainly, this is nothing you could plan for. A total outlier – that changes everything (see Nassim Taleb’s “The Black Swan.” For the first chapter see: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/books/chapters/0422-1st-tale.html) In this mustard tree the birds will roost and rest in the shade.

Can you show me the mustard seed? The plant? The tree?