solidarity – R. Newell Searle

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“Always leave a place better than you found it.” Dad said it often and it was a guiding principle during his long life. It was more than a maxim; it was a spiritual guide to practical living. I first heard it at the age of six when he and I planted pine seedlings on a clay hill. Waseca County in southern Minnesota is not pine country, but he liked pines and that tiny corner of our farm was too small and steep for corn.

We set out one May morning with a space and a flat of red pine seedlings packed in sphagnum. He jabbed the spade deep into the soil, inserted a pine, spread its roots and sealed the slit with his foot. The process took only seconds. Then he asked me to do it. Satisfied, he went ahead with the spade and cut more slits. I followed, slipping the seedlings into the ground.

Planting trees became an integral part of the spring. We planted trees on damp days when we couldn’t seed in oats, corn or soybeans. As the years passed, and Dad rented the fields to a neighbor, he concentrated on planting more trees. Trees had permanency. They were beautiful as well as useful.

Clipping - trees As the neighbors correctly pointed out, he wouldn’t live long enough to harvest the trees. That didn’t matter, he said. Someone in the future, his children or grandchildren or someone else would cut them. Meanwhile, they would add beauty and a habitat for wildlife. The neighbors just shook their heads. Farming was hard enough in 1950 without fooling around with trees that didn’t make money. When Dad died in 2014, the first pines he planted were 65 years old and stood 50 feet tall with seedlings coming up.

Wherever I am, I plant seedings in the spring, just as I did 70 years ago. It’s an impulse that comes when the ground thaws and the air warms. Spring hasn’t happened until I plant something. The number of trees or shrubs planted matters less than the act of adding something new to the world. It’s almost sacramental.

I recently spent a few days opening our cabin north of Lake Superior. Walking the woods, I found half-a-dozen seedlings under the only white pine on my 40 acres. The mother tree is easily 80 feet tall and her seedlings struggle for light and nutrients beneath a thicket of maple saplings. I transplanted two badly-chewed seedlings closer to my cabin where I can nurse them toward maturity. If I survive this pandemic, I may yet see them reach ten or twelve feet. My children and grandchildren may see them reach 50 or 60 feet. By then, they will be shedding cones.

Planting for the future is an antidote to the pandemic’s dark overcast. The nightmarish clouds seem darker as each state and family fumbles forward for a way out. Meanwhile, our president fears defeat in November and abets rabid groups that demand an end to social distancing and equate social restraint with tyranny. The most dangerous ones say that “personal responsibility” is the surest way to stem the pandemic.

If only that were true. Medical experience shows otherwise. Like it or not, we must think and act as one, though it cramps our individualism. Obeying orders to keep distance, restrict movement and limit business requires disciplined responsibility. I haven’t fully discharged my responsibilities if I simply protect myself from the virus. My responsibility includes actions that protect others from contagion. A lone tree on a plain is vulnerable to the winds but it grows secure in a grove.

Planting is my antidote against the enervation caused by the grim drumbeat of the daily news. Green is the color of rebirth, regeneration and new life. Green is the color of hope. Planting is a restorative act of faith. Yes, I will enjoy what I plant, but so will others. Putting the common good above my immediate convenience makes the world to come a better place and, in the process, makes me a better person for it.

Janesv41[1] — Janesville, Minnesota, 1950

Good Friday? As a boy, I wondered why they called it good? What was so good about getting killed? As a ten-year-old in the 1950’s, I took certain things for granted because adults didn’t encourage questions about basic assumptions. And besides, we lived on a farm and I had other, more immediate things to do—like feed the chickens. That’s just the way things were.

Our family shopped in the Minnesota village of Janesville, population 1,100. It had a stoplight, a town cop, a volunteer fire department, a public school and one of every necessary commercial service: grain elevator, drug store, coffee shop, gas station, furniture store-funeral home, hardware, dentist, doctor, veterinary, butcher, beer joint, five and dime, feed and hatchery. There were three active churches: Trinity Lutheran (Missouri Synod), St. Anne’s Roman Catholic and St. John’s Episcopal.

In those days, your particular denomination defined you and your associations socially much more than it does today. Your church reflected your ethnic origins, beliefs, state of spiritual salvation (as seen by others) and whom you might marry. The German immigrants and their children attended Trinity Lutheran, the children of Irish and Polish immigrants went to St. Anne’s and the Yankees, like my family, belonged to St. John’s Episcopal. Ecumenism wasn’t in anyone’s lexicon and a “mixed marriage” was an anathema, a kind of cultural treason that could get your exiled from the family.
The Missouri Synod church was a particularly strict and conservative sect. When boys were invited to join the town Scout troop, the Lutheran pastor said “no!” because—God forbid—his boys might come into contact with Catholics! To keep the children faithful, the church had an elementary school (grades one to eight) conveniently located across the alley from the public school. We farm kids lived adjacent to each other and rode the yellow buses to our respective schools.

During recess on winter days, we public school boys took on the ‘Dutchies’ (for their ancestry) in epic snowball wars across the alley. We organized. Those with the strongest arms threw and the rest of us packed ammunition. It didn’t matter who threw first. The tribal response always came in force and dense salvos of hard-packed snowballs flew back and forth. Sooner or later, someone laced snowballs with pebbles. Tears and blood followed. When the bells rang, the day’s war ended and we returned to classes gloating over our victories. Later, we boarded the buses and sat with the foes we fought so viciously earlier in the day. No one held a grudge.

Despite our sectarian prejudices, Lutheran, Catholic or Episcopal, we reverenced Christmas, Holy Week and Easter. That said, we had no ecumenical services until after Vatican II, and then only on a limited basis. Instead of ecumenism, and despite the narrower opinions and preferences of that time, we gave each other space to observe holy days and ceremonies without interference or criticism.

Everyone celebrated Christmas in a cheery and quasi-secular way but Good Friday felt different. It passed as a subdued afternoon, as if a storm brooded, and adults said little and children were shushed. Whether by custom, ordinance or informal agreement, Janesville seemed to shut down between the hours of noon and three o’clock. The bank, drug store, five and dime, grocery and even the bar closed to observe the hours when Jesus suffered on the cross and darkness covered the land. Many of us sat in our respective churches, our altars bare, the crosses draped in black veils and listened to the Gospel lesson about betrayal, death and forgiveness—the same Scripture in each church. During these hours of sober self-examination rose the prayers asking forgiveness of our sins.

Now, looking back from a half-century on, I know our differences in ancestry, ethnicity and prejudice blinded us to what we shared in common. Maybe that’s why it was a good Friday. In those three hours, we were of one spirit in reverence for something we held in common even if we refused to recognize it. These days, three hours of publicly shared and reflective silence could help us all see some greater good we share lying just beyond our immediate prejudices and passions.

Tag: solidarity

Green is the Color of Hope

Why do they call it Good Friday?