BACK TO THE GARDEN

摘要

In 2013, while walking through new york city on the Sunday before Earth Day, I received a visitation from the Holy Spirit. The occasion was an ordination ceremony over which I had been asked to preside. Two friends were taking the plunge into ordained ministry, and they had asked me-I'm a minister myself, at a 125-year-old church in Greenwich Village with a long history of progressivism and social activism-to give them a "charge," an inspirational mini-sermon, before releasing them into the wild as card-carrying clergy. But something strange happened to me that morning as I began assembling and arranging the robes, stoles, and Bibles that these two new ministers were to be presented with. It started when I couldn't help noting a poignant irony in the stylized symbols-doves, olive branches, rushing springs-that we churchfolk are forever emblazoning onto our sacred objects. These symbols were now laid out before me: metaphors, respectively, for Christian ideals of spirit, grace, and the rebirth of baptism.