Of Preachers and Pesticide

In the two months following my master-naturalist class, some images from that class keep coming back to me.   This morning, for instance, after listening to a refreshing, surprising and well-tattooed urban minister being interviewed by Krista Tippett, I found myself thinking about pesticides.  I know, I know--What the WHAT?!

Towards the end of the show, Nadia Bolz-Weber, former drug addict and current minister at Denver's House for All Sinners and Saints (a Lutheran church, for pete's sake!), spoke of her trepidation of telling her parents she was going to become a minister.  She feared, she said, that they'd throw the book--the Good Book--at her.  Her dad, indeed, reached for the Bible after hearing her pronouncement.  And he turned to the book of Esther  and read this passage to her:  "You were born for such a time as this."

Bolz-Weber then spoke through choked-back tears, saying it was one of the most profound moments of her life, to have been given a blessing to become something new.

. . . and the connection to pesticides would be. . . ?

During our lesson on entymology, the professor spoke about pesticides and their devastating effect on the 98 percent of bugs killed by a poison whose real target was the other 2 percent.   He said that, in recent years, they'd developed much more specific pesticides, such as those designed to do in roaches and termites, two insects that shed their exoskeletons as their bodies grow.  These new insecticides deliver a hormonal message to roaches and termites, essentially telling their exoskeletons to quit growing.  What happens next?  He said they basically blow up because they really weren't done growing, but there was no longer a place for all that new stuff to go.

As someone who is starting to write the final chapters of my working life, I think about all the ways we tell ourselves that we are done growing--even if we aren't--and all the ways our silence holds back the blessings others need to reinvent and grow themselves.  Without that simple, ancient sentence spoken by her religiously-traditional father, Bolz-Weber may very well have told herself that she was indeed done growing.  And, I suppose, in some form or another, she would have eventually blown up and died inside.

So many conversations I've had with friends this year suggest that we aren't done growing and that our shells are starting to feel too small for our lives.  Like the cicadas whose droning fills the late-summer air, we have started to look for a stronghold, a place, a blessing we can grab onto so that we may begin the hard and necessary work of growing our lives some more. 

It is an exhilarating time, one of danger and vulnerability, our stories still emerging from within us.