Dead Foliage
I was sitting in my meditation spot on the grounds of St. Francis of Assisi Catholic church this morning when Sister Rose Kruppa walked by. We chatted for a few minutes. it’s always nice to see her, and the conversations are always meaningful. This one was no exception.
She told me that she had received several calls from her parishioners, mostly the older ones, who wanted to cut down the foliage that had been killed by our recent freeze. They thought it was ugly.
That led us to a conversation about regeneration, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Also, the subject of reality came into play. Yes, conversations with Sister Rose can be meaningful.
Reality is what is happening just before it enters our operating system. Once we perceive it, we change it to fit our view of the world. Dead foliage is a reality. It’s God’s work. “It’s ugly” is a personal construct.
Like most good conversations, this one didn’t end when it ended. As I walked back home, I was thinking about the biological miracle of regeneration that is birth, death rebirth, and its spiritual counterpart.
We all know about spiritual birth, death, and rebirth. We must lose our life to find it. We also know that those dead plants will regenerate themselves and probably come back better after the freeze.
We have many different beliefs about how we will regenerate ourselves after death. Why not think about our capacity to regenerate ourselves before we die? We all know examples, including our own, of people who have come back after terrible circumstances in their life by falling upward as Richard Rohr writes about in his book of the same name.
It seems to me that dead foliage regenerating itself on the grounds of the church would be a beautiful metaphor for any religion.
According to Richard Rohr, the word religion comes from the Latin which is re-ligio, which means to re-connect. What better way to reconnect to nature than to watch the rebirth of those frozen plants every day or week?
Too many of us are packing our bags in the second half of life like the end of a vacation. Why not let the miracle of regeneration take hold in our life?