To the Mentor: Seminary in My Backyard
Dear reader, please forgive me this week as I relax into some well-deserved wordiness in this post. You see, I'm undergoing a career change right now. I've been engaged in university and graduate school education for almost 20 years as a professor. I've engaged myself as a leadership educator with a highly focused sense of purpose and a well-informed and cultivated philosophy of teaching and learning. I have loved (yes, LOVED) those entrusted to me these decades; they are in my heart...and I have labored for their betterment and well-being. At key points in this career, I have been dispatched into the work of seminary: teaching and learning, helping folks investigate spiritual lifestyles of religious and community service. Often, seminaries in this ilk have been misunderstood as "campuses," or "career and professional schools" (where lay persons need not apply).
With the career change, I'm returning to the non-profit sector with hopes of being useful to families sentenced to poverty and squalor unless hope intervenes. With that comes the move to a new state, a new home. While setting things in place for my new living, I turned to preparing a place to grow herbs, vegetables, and plants beautiful to the eye. With the first pots purchased, the first seedlings in the dirt, and hands grubby with dark rich earth, it occurred to me I wasted no time re-creating on my back porch, the very thing I had been doing for two, almost three decades...I was re-creating a seminary. I was making room, with thoughtful intentionally and a covenantal expectation that I would do my part if the seed, sun, and soil did theirs. I was still expressing care for the young things.
Mentors, how do you partner with young things?
Young things need others to attend to their growing conditions. Maybe a baby dolphin or just-born calf can get right about the business of living independently within minutes of birth, but many growing things need a tremendous about of nurturing assistance to accomplish the most basic of survival demands. The human child seems to have one of the most protracted phases of dependency on the planet. Like some plants or crops, the human child benefits from a wise eye that understands and anticipates their needs while creating accommodations that will cause them to root, expand, respond, flourish, produce, and eventually reproduce. One farmer friend of mine likes to call this the "Covenant with the Seed." No one MUST plant seeds, and certainly no one needs to become a gardener or, more radically, a farmer. But IF you plant a seed, you enter into a kind of agreement to do for that seed, that growing bundle of potential, what it can't do for itself. Seeds grow; it's what they do. We are not confused about that. But some seeds (and later plants) do not thrive or survive because the few things, which might have assured their development, were attended to by no one. Nature is not jealous of those who recognize their roles in tending, cultivating, training, and protecting.
Young things need room to stretch out. If you are going to grow a daisy, perhaps you need only a small peanut butter jar filled with moist soil positioned near a kitchen window. But, if you would grow an oak tree, you might want to clear out a space large enough to park two or three cars on since oak trees can't grow in peanut butter jars, they need room and lots of it. The seed’s capacity determines the parameters for space, range, and location. Arborist, people who know trees, teach that some trees are as deep and wide beneath the surface as they appear above the surface of the soil. Thoughtful planters might begin their covenant with the seed by placing it in a small, sheltered space...for a time. They consider the seed's needs and anticipate. Thoughtful planters prepare (or will prepare) more hospitable conditions for the growing thing.
Young things need shelter. Risking the appearance that I'm contradicting what I just mentioned about letting the young thing stretch out, I must follow with: young things need cover, shade, protection...a break. I picked a strange name for this post. You might think..."Seminary? In my backyard?" Would it help if you knew the word "seminary" does not only refer to those schools that some Catholic school children in the Northeast attend or that professional school for the credentialing of career ministers? It's an old word with the Latin root, "Semia" simply referring to "a place where seedling" find time and space to take roots, to begin their journey toward maturity. The modern word we are more comfortable with is "nursery." Or the German word may add more clarity: "Kinder-Garten," a child garden. The "semantic" (oops...looks like I accidentally slipped in the word "seed" again) range of these words acknowledge that thoughtful parents and planets make room to stabilize conditions so the most vulnerable can get a chance to absorb the nutrients afforded them from well-portioned amounts of light, water, fertilizer, and tending.
Young things need to be pruned. Trimming back always sounds like bad news to most of us. In fact, the general drift of my own culture is indulgence, entitlement, convenience, and gratification without delay or (apparent) costs. If idols exist in my culture, they just might take the form of microwave ovens, credit cards, speed dating, and 24-hour convenience stores of all sizes. There seems to be hardly a voice of protest to be found which urges the immature to wait, the gluttonous to fast, or the greedy to give. Gardeners know better. They know that if they do not CUT, growth will be stunted. They do not deprive. Instead, they furnish, but they do so with elegance, with consideration, and with restraint. They get the portions right. Too much water, the seed dies. Too much fertilizer, the soil burns. Too many branches, the fruit is puny. They cut to assure growth.
Young things need someone who will groom them. "Organic" is all the rage these days. With the ever-increasing drive from businesses to make food grow faster, grow bigger, be less buggy-er, appear shinier, last longer, taste sweeter, ship farther, etc., more and more people are choosing to buy or grow food that is not modified by chemical treatments. And many who advocate the organic shift, can at times, become quite militant in their protests against too much human involving in the growing process—let it grow naturally. But wait, not everything that grows naturally or organically is desirable. Case in point: weeds. Weeds (and many other naturally occurring features of the growing scene like bugs and weather) are natural. But not all weeds are neutral to the desired hope for the plant. Weeds can compete for nutrients, block out needed light, and siphon off and consume moisture before it gets to the vulnerable roots choking off the best chance for a young thing's chance to thrive and survive. Maybe you'll evoke a misread of Darwin and insist that no human hand should reach in to stabilize conditions, that only the strong should survive. With that logic, every sick baby should be left in the crib until next Thursday. "Let’s see what Darwinism nature has in store for the little one," the absurd (and criminal) thinking person would have to insist. No, we step in. We interfere. We intervene. We respond, study, test, adapt, supply, and support. In short, we nurture nature.
Young things need training. What comes to mind when we think of training? Military troops or football teams being put through their paces? Manuals, classrooms, tests? Let's go back to the Latin again for a different image of training. Bear with this rather academic and lexical rabbit trail for a moment because either words mean something or their meanings are up for grabs and we are free to call a parrot a cruise ship. If you examine the root for the English word, "to train," you find a word that is at the same time unrecognized and yet familiar. The word is: "educe." Weird word, no one is likely to use it unless it's in s remake of Sherlock Holmes or Shakespeare. More familiar is the word "educate" or "education," or even "educator." Stay with me. Now let's connect this to training. The word “educe” means "to draw something toward, to train." If you've ever been to a vineyard or visited your grandpa's tomato patch, if they have been at it for any time at all, you'll see strings running all over the place. These strings serve as structures to help the young vines feel their way outward, BUT in the direction that the vinedresser or the gardener wants them to grow. Grapes on the ground don't become wine. Tomatoes in the weeds never become BLTs. Farmers know this, so the string "trains," they "train" the growing thing to go in the direction they should go to have the best chance of fruitfulness and productivity. The gardener interferes and redirects toward a better aim. The vinedresser EDUCES, literally draws toward or as we often say, was too mindlessly for our good, "EDUCATES" the natural path toward an aim that the young plant might not have ever had the strength or character to reach on its own native, uninterrupted path. To be clear, we MUST interfere with the natural path that young growing things might take if they would grow into all their generative potential.
Young things need. So what have we said? Simply: young things are needy things. Not always, not forever. But educators, mentors, you are at your best when you EDUCE toward, not being naive and deem young things to always be competent things needing no directive, authoritative, or winsome training.
In my backyard, on my porch, there sits a seminary. There, the covenant I have made with the growing things I have now partnered with will bless me, indict me, call to me. I have a feeling these natural plants will spur me to always find my proper place alongside the yet-grown things the world brings to me and I to it.
