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This past Sunday featured one of my favorite Gospel readings: the parable of the Sower and the Seed. It didn’t used to be one of my favorite readings. For a long time, I found it a bit boring. I mean, how many times can one hear the same passage year after year and find something new in it? There is some seed, a path, birds, gravel, thorns. Finally good soil. Be good soil. What more is there to say?

For my 7th birthday, thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in D.C. and Johnny Cash led a parade in my honor. Queen Elizabeth II stopped by with her husband Prince Philip to wish me well and the Fords paused their daily goings on to set off fireworks for a full 30 minutes. The U.S. Archivist Dr. James B. Rhoads cut into a giant white cake covered in red and blue stars and stripes. I had a matching sundress. It was fabulous and it was all about me. My parents and grandparents told me so. The people at Sunday Mass told me so. Neighbors told me so. And I believed them.

I have long been a fan of realism in the realm of art. In high school, I once saw the portrait of a girl in the St. Louis Art Museum that I could have sworn was a photograph until I came within a foot of the piece and realized it was a painting. Wow. How could the artist pull off such a feat? To reproduce with a paint brush what I would have mistaken as the work of a camera lens. Filled with awe and wonder, I knew I could never aspire to such a thing. I felt more at home in the room dedicated to Picasso’s work.

The Bible opens with the story of the Garden of Eden. A story about the beauty of the natural world that God created for us to romp around within to discover our own calling as humans. Given the harshness of daily life as adults, the Garden often feels like something of a far distant past. Perhaps something that has never existed at all… only a figment of our imagination. But then there will come these moments that open windows to the Garden and remind us of the kind of life God has dreamed for us from the very beginning. Last week was such a window opening for me.

It’s been so long ago now I can’t quite remember when, but on a plane I watched the Romcom movie 50 First Dates where Adam Sandler falls in love with Drew Barrymore in a sweet Hawaiian beach town. They hit it off. Love at first site. But then the next morning when he runs into her again, she has no memory of who he is and is alarmed by his friendly advances. How do you build a relationship with someone who can’t remember who you are? It was a fun movie. Can’t say that if I were you, I’d rush to go see it necessarily.

Yesterday I remembered an episode that happened over 30 years ago related to peanut brittle in the backseat of a car. It came to mind late in the afternoon when I was getting a bit hungry and perhaps hearing about peanut brittle gets your stomach rumbling as well. I wish I had some to give you, but I don’t, so I’ll just give you the story instead.

This past Sunday in the atrium, six-year-old G. was working with the sayings of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount again. “Knock and the door will be opened to you,” he read.

“I wonder what that could mean?” asked my fellow catechist.

“Hmmm,” said G. “Maybe it is the door to the Parousia.”

This child never ceases to stun me with his fresh takes on, well, just about everything.

One of the things about my life that I am most delighted by is the fact that I’ve gotten to visit all fifty states. I almost said “proud of” but really there is little I did to merit it. Most I visited because my parents took us camping there. Or a professional development conference took me. Or a CGS formation course. Or a work client. Then suddenly I was approaching my fiftieth birthday and I realized I only had a few states left and the “Fifty Before Fifty” effort became more focused. I started by coming up with a rubric for what counted as a “visit.” Did I have to stay overnight?

I spent ten years of my life working as a consultant on the topic of how to have constructive difficult conversations and receive feedback well. I can assure you that no one in the current U.S. executive branch was one of my clients. But many wonderful people of varied religious traditions (and no religious traditions) were.

As a child I loved Easter. There were jellybeans and chocolate bunnies and bright banners at Church which would be attended by me and my mom wearing flower corsages pinned on by my father. Not even sure they make those anymore. But the point is that Easter was a bright, sugary, joyous day. And I do mean day. I wasn’t aware that Easter was a whole season and would have had no understanding as to why the Church would have wanted to celebrate it longer than that. I mean how much could there to be to ponder about someone rising from the dead?