[Dialogue] Find God in the ordinary

[kroegerd@aol.com]

July 13, 2005
Phyllis' Garden ? Finding Meaning in the Ordinary 

The threat of meaninglessness and the specter of eternal anonymity are two forces that, far more than most of us realize, drive human behavior. The vast majority of the world's population will live and die unnoticed outside their immediate families. In about three generations almost all of us will be forgotten. Consider, for example, the fact that each person has eight sets of great grandparents. Yet very few of us can remember a single thing about the lives of any of those 16 people? Is our fate to be any different? I doubt it. Most of us are quite ordinary, non-spectacular people. Yet society continues defiantly to set before us only heroic people to serve as our role models. Our response quite often is to be depressed since we know full well that few of us will be heroes. We human beings must learn to cope with our potential meaninglessness and to tolerate our relative insignificance. How can we make a difference in, or at least leave a mark, no matter how small, on our world? These are the deepest questions that we human beings ask. Recently, I met a woman named Phyllis Weller, who addressed these questions for me in a dramatic way. Let me tell you her story.
While walking through the English countryside last month, my wife and I came upon the village of Stoneleigh, near Coventry. It was mid-morning, the moment at which English life stops for morning coffee. We anticipated that such a treat would be available for us in this village for there is hardly a community in England that does not provide a coffee shop/tea room to meet this social need of its citizens. However, Stoneleigh was to prove the exception to this rule. It did not take much time to exhaust the boundaries of this village. A "T" at Stoneleigh's center offered exit from the village in exactly three directions. One did not travel far in any one of them before being back in the countryside.
Journeying into our final exit option, we spotted an elderly lady, bent over at the waist, digging in a small plot in front of her modest home. Approaching her, we asked if there were a coffee shop in the village. "Oh, no," she said, "we don't have anything like that in Stoneleigh but come in, I will make you a cup of coffee." We declined her gracious offer because it seemed like an imposition, but we stayed on the sidewalk and talked to her about her gardening. That is how we met Phyllis Weller, age 85. We discovered that her identity in the village was that she had developed what the people of the village now call, "Phyllis' Garden."
"Garden" is the name the English use for what Americans call, "the yard." The subtle difference between the two words points to a distinctively English attitude. There seems to be a compelling need for English people to beautify their surroundings, turning their "yards" into works of art. That space, however small, is carefully planted with bushes and flowers designed to bloom at different seasons to provide year round beauty. Garden shops dot the landscape of this country and television programs on gardening, that would never make it in the American commercial market, are regular features in prime time on BBC/TV. It appears to be everyone's patriotic duty to make his or her external environment something passers by can enjoy.
Phyllis Weller was no different, yet her "garden" was quite unique. In front of her senior citizen home was a street sign. It stood about 30 inches off the ground announcing in large letters, visible to travelers on foot or in automobiles, that this street was named "The Green." The parish church was half a block away, the public school closer than that. "The Green" was clearly an important marker. Phyllis Weller's front door opened on the paved sidewalk that was separated from the street by about five yards of grass in which this street sign was planted on its two metal legs. That set of circumstances enabled "Phyllis' Garden" to come into being.
Phyllis, clearly with public approval, had dug out the space beneath that sign. It was no more than 18 inches wide and 36 inches long. She had mulched that tiny plot and fertilized it. Then she had filled it with heather and verbena. The heather blooms in the early to late spring, the verbena keeps blooming through the summer. Every day she tends and beautifies this tiny area, making sure no weeds invade her "garden." Phyllis' dedication to keeping this small space lovely intrigued both my wife and me so we went back to revisit her three weeks later in order to learn something of her life and why this tiny garden was her identifying project.
We learned that Phyllis was born in 1920 in the village of Wootton Wawen, about 12 miles from Stoneleigh. She had lived her whole life inside those 12 miles. At the age of seven, her family moved to Stoneleigh. They were working class people and in 1934, when Phyllis at age 14 left school, she was apprenticed to a family in the village as a domestic servant. The worldwide depression was at its height and I suspect that this step was necessary both for her family's survival and for Phyllis'. At the very least this arrangement provided their daughter with a room and regular meals and lowered by one the number of mouths her family had to feed. Phyllis continued to work as a maid until in 1940 when, at the age of 20, she married a sheet metal worker. This was during the darkest days of World War II when Britain was standing alone against the German onslaught. The young couple moved to a nearby cottage but within a "fortnight," as she said, their home was damaged by German bombers as part of their pummeling of England. Coventry was a particularly important target for the Nazis, since it was the heart of England's automobile industrial complex, now shifted into the production of tanks and planes, vital to the war effort. As the war dragged on, these male metal sheet workers, including Phyllis' husband, put on the uniform of military service and were replaced by women, who became the English version of "Rosie the Riveter."
Phyllis' life was never to be rich in goods. Though her husband survived the war, he died of cancer in 1974 and now Phyllis, 31 years a widow, is an elderly pensioner living out her days in subsidized housing. I doubt if anyone a mile outside of Stoneleigh has any idea who she is. However, in her mind she still has a driving purpose. It is to beautify the place where she lives and so her daily energy is dedicated to transforming the 648 square inch plot underneath a road sign into being her contribution to the beauty of the world. This is Phyllis' way of saying, "I matter because what I do makes a difference." To be able to say just that is to know something about ultimate meaning. The Bible tells us of a man named Methuselah who, according to the sacred text, lived 969 years! Yet the only thing recorded about what he actually did in all of those years is that he died. Is that to be our fate? Is there an ultimate meaning to be discovered? Can we escape our destiny to be quite forgotten in three short generations? Does striving after acclaim, success or notoriety help? Even some of our fellow citizens, who achieved the pinnacle of political power and were elected president, are still quite forgettable. How many of us can relate a single fact from the life of James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan, three one-term presidents, who served this nation prior to the Civil War? Perhaps the author of Ecclesiastes was correct when he or she wrote, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." Most of our achievements do not actually endure. All of us at the end are simply ordinary people seeking meaning in tiny corners of a vast world by staking a claim of value against the apparent transitoriness of existence. Success for most of us is a time-warped illusion. The real question in life is what can I do that will endure? What can I do that will make a difference?
Perhaps the real human heroes that we ought to be lifting up are those who stand rooted in their time, their place and their circumstances, knowing that they are destined to be among the nameless, forgotten people of every generation and yet they make a difference by transforming the corner of the world that they inhabit. I now recognize that this takes amazing courage. That is what I found in Stoneleigh's Phyllis Weller. She has lived a humble life in a tiny English village. She has little education, little money, little power and little influence. Nonetheless, she has decided that her contribution to the world is to make beautiful a tiny piece of ground beneath a street sign and to that task, she has dedicated her energy daily. Her options in life by almost any standard are limited but her spirit is huge.
It is that spirit that led Phyllis Waller to transform her world with her flowers, her smile and her graciousness. Looking at the world through the eyes of Phyllis Weller enabled me to grasp life's essential meaning and ultimate purpose. That is the 'stuff,' I am convinced, of which real heroes are made. Through people like her we can glimpse what it means to be citizens of the Kingdom of God.
So Phyllis is my candidate for the title "ordinary saint," and "ordinary hero." Almost anyone has the ability to do what Phyllis did. The issue is that we so often don't. Perhaps if each of us could touch the world we inhabit the way Phyllis has touched her world, the beauty of the Creator could be seen in the likes of you and me and God might become visible in the tiny and humble human acts of graciousness, kindness, caring and love.
I invite my readers to affirm Phyllis by sending her a card or a letter (she does not do e-mail) and thank her for her inspiration and for her "garden." Her address is:
Ms. Phyllis Weller 2, The Green, Stoneleigh, CV8 3DP United Kingdom
You will cause her to smile and you will smile with her because people like Phyllis need to be recognized.
? John Shelby Spong
  
Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
Paul Ellis from Leeds, England, writes: 
What is the spiritual understanding of the Virgin Birth narrative as opposed to a purely literal interpretation? 
Dear Paul, 
My first question is why do you need one? I see nothing about the birth narratives, which appear only in Matthew and Luke that makes me think they are essential to the Church's life and work. I could even argue that there are many things in those narratives that are actually detrimental to the Church's life and work. For example, Paul seems to lack nothing of substance in his understanding of the Gospel, even though he appears never to have heard of the birth narratives.
The same could be said of Mark, the earliest Gospel. He also seems to know nothing of a virgin birth tradition and even goes so far as to show that the mother of Jesus thought him mentally unbalanced in his adulthood and moved to take him away to avoid continued family embarrassment.
John, who draws the picture of the Christ figure at his most divine, neglects to include a birth narrative about which he must certainly have known since he wrote so late. Yet on two occasions, he refers to Jesus simply as "The son of Joseph."
The question that I think is worth pursuing about the birth narratives is not their 'spiritual meaning,' but "what was there about the experience people had with the adult Jesus that caused them to think it appropriate to attribute a divine supernatural birth to him?"
I know of no reputable biblical theologian today, Catholic or Protestant, who treats the virgin birth stories in Matthew and Luke as history. The only problem is we haven't yet told this to the people in the pews.
? John Shelby Spong 
 
Dick Kroeger