I like to grow veggies. I find it so rewarding, being able to go out into my garden after months of planting, weeding, watering, and consistent care to find miraculous, colorful fruits and veggies ready to pick and eat. Since moving to my current house a few years ago, I’ve had so many frustrating problems keeping my veggies from growing. If it’s not the hoards of pill bugs eating all of my little seedlings before they have a chance to grow, it’s invasive roots depleting the loads of soil I’ve invested in along with the compost I’ve made, so that my plants just look anemic and don’t produce much of anything. Then, in the rare occurrence they do produce, squirrels and raccoons swing on by and eat every single tomato that actually ripened on the vine.
After moving my little 4×4 raised bed across the yard and putting down barrier cloth at the base, I thought I had resolved the invasive root problem. But after 2 years, I discovered the roots had taken over again. As I spent my Saturday afternoon moving all of the soil onto a tarp, and working through all of the clumps to remove the roots, I thought about how it parallels what is happening in our world right now.
Not long ago, I read No Nonsense Spirituality by Brittney Hartley. In her book, she shares her journey of being brought up in a fundamentalist religion to losing her faith while studying for a degree in theology. She writes about her existential crisis, having lost her bearings on whether anything had any meaning. At one point during this low period, she was building a sandcastle on the beach with her young son and realized that even though it wasn’t going to last, there was significance and meaning to that moment. She began to rebuild from there, creating spiritual practices around things she found meaningful, useful, beautiful, and helpful.
After reading about the many different ways we can build meaningful rituals and practices in our own lives that are no longer tied to organized religions that so often harm the most vulnerable, I started thinking about gardening as a spiritual practice. I broke it down into different practices. Watering as a spiritual practice; I enjoy the morning sun or the evening breeze as I water. I take the time to check in on what I’ve planted, admire the growth, talk to neighbors as they walk by, or look up at the sky and enjoy the time outside. Weeding as a spiritual practice; there is always something to improve, something that needs to be removed, things need to be tended to and maintained. If left to themselves, the weeds will get bigger and harder to pull. They’ll take over the plot where I want the salvia, euphorbia, daisies, and geranium to grow. Tilling the soil as spiritual practice; it’s not as easy as just plopping a seedling or some seeds in the ground. The soil around my house is clay. If it hasn’t had water or rain in a while, it’s rock hard. I broke two shovels trying to dig the front corner African violets out. I finally got a steel handled shovel which was up to the task. Sometimes, to do the work, we need better tools, and a friendly neighbor willing to come help.
As I sifted through the soil from my raised bed to remove the many invasive roots that had taken over, I thought about the invasive roots of disinformation that have grown throughout our communication channels. When I was a kid, I remember watching the nightly news with my dad. Every night at the same time, we had a choice of a few different news anchors who provided us with the news of our nation. Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Ted Copple, or Sam Donaldson. I grew up in a white, Christian, conservative, Republican household. It never occurred to me that those were all white men or that the people providing the news had an agenda that may have skewed the way they reported the news. It felt like we were all on the same page, because the only voices I was exposed to throughout my youth were at home, church, and in my Christian school.
In college, during summer and winter breaks, I worked for a printer who loved to listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity every day from nine to noon. When those shows ended, we had lunch break, then much of the rest of the afternoon was filled with my employer’s hot takes on whatever the political or religious topic was for the day. He was one of my parent’s best friends and even more fundamentalist than my family. He printed brochures for anti-abortionists and purity culture which were often the topics of my daily lectures.
Throughout college, and into my young adult years, I was still in the Evangelical bubble. It felt very “us” against those “liberals and feminazis”. It wasn’t until my very traditional marriage really started falling apart and trying to be the perfect wife in a patriarchal family just was not working that I discovered Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and any other liberal, feminist ideas. It wasn’t until my own young children didn’t present in the typical way boys are “supposed” to be boys that I read my first book by a progressive Christian. In Speaking My Mind, Tony Campolo actually questioned things like Christians being anti-feminist, affluence (is it actually ethical to hold onto billions of dollars while millions starve), and shunning the queer community.
Charlie Kirk was assassinated a couple days ago. Immediately and without any evidence, people on the right, including my friends on Facebook, politicians, and the president, blamed people on the left. A couple days later they caught the killer who turned out to be another white dude, raised in a religious, law enforcement, gun-loving family who was even more radically right than his victim. But the invasive roots of identity politics have so thoroughly taken over that the vitriol leveled at “the radical left” when the killer’s identity was unknown shifted to “we’ll pray for the salvation of this lost soul” when it turned out to be a right-wing white dude instead of a radical leftist like they assumed.
They can’t see their own hate. I couldn’t when I was in that cult. It gets whitewashed as God’s truth. “God hates divorce.” “It’s an abomination for a man to lie with a man.” “Wives obey your husbands.” “Women should be silent in church.” It doesn’t make sense to quote things written to an ancient society as law for today.
Housing is unaffordable, and now the talking head on Fox & Friends says, “we should just kill them” of the homeless people. There is no uproar about this. The invasive roots have taken over and strangled out any decency, any good fruit that might come from those who claim to follow Jesus who said so often to care for the poor, for the “least of these”, for the immigrant. The invasive roots of Christian Nationalism have completely overtaken the “Church” in America.
Jesus said “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Did Jesus mean, love other Christians? No, he explained that very clearly in the parable of the Good Samaritan who took care of his enemy (think Palestinian caring for an IDF soldier) while the religious leaders crossed to the other side of the road and shunned the dude needing help.
The people praising the legacy Charlie Kirk left behind have lost the plot if they claim to follow Jesus. Charlie Kirk caused incalculable harm to people in marginalized communities. He doxed professors he didn’t agree with. He spewed racist and misogynist ideology. He was hateful and caused many others to hate the LGBTQ+ community with his debates on so many campuses with high school and college students. He debated youth civilly, at times, because his agenda was to win them to his side. And he was very successful at it.
Maybe we’ve avoided a civil war for a few more weeks, now that we know the killer wasn’t on the left. But that’s like pulling out a couple weeds from a garden that has been completely overtaken by invasive roots from underneath. I don’t know how our nation comes back from here.
It is a tragedy that he was assassinated. No one deserves to die in this manner. This is awful.
Also, the things Charlie Kirk said and did were awful. He was a victim of his own ideology. He said “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every year so that we can have the second amendment…” Of Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Kirk made the racist statement, “you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously” without affirmative action. “You had to steal a white person’s slot.”
And the invasive roots…it’s disinformation, it’s the billionaires’ money and power grab, it’s the politicians grasping onto power at the expense of doing what’s right. It’s the way we all consume our news from our own echo chamber algorithm instead of from the same, honest sources. We are being played by the ultra rich and powerful. All of us non-billionaires need to unite against this. Take a look at who is profiting from this division.
After the death of Charlie Kirk, I had a pit in my stomach feeling like this might be like the assassination of Ferdinand and Sophie that started WWI. The next day was 9/11 and it was wild to realize what a juxtaposition we are in as a nation from that sad day 24 years ago when it felt like all of us Americans were so united and supportive of each other. I also realize I’m looking at those two dates from very different lenses. I realize now as I didn’t then that many were fearful of what would happen to the Muslim community following those events. I’m not who I was then and I don’t see things the same. Do any of us? Let’s keep growing in knowledge and understanding.
I don’t believe in him anymore, but God help us. Maybe she will.
