"Homegrown........................."

For the past week, a few hours at a time, I’ve been helping my brother-in-law put together some wire cages that will help protect his ninety tomato plants from becoming lunch for all the deer that roam this neck of the woods. He’s got six years on me and when I suggested to him that, for all the money he’s spending, his crop is costing him about five dollars a pound, he just laughed and said, “Yep; but next year they’re free!” His older sibling and his father, both, were in their eighties and still tending huge gardens when they passed. It’s a generational exercise, though, that seems to me about to meet its demise. Even if one has a yard big enough to hold a plot, who has time any more to tend to its needs? Farmers are few and, likewise, how many women yet possess any knowledge of preserving food for future use. Produce is shipped in from out of state and available at Wal-Mart. This is no longer your grandmother’s world and in more ways than one. Humanity remains humanity; people are still people; but we live as we think and our thinking is shaped as we go. It matters much, the environment around us. We speak of technological progress. We don’t consider that which is lost in the exchange. It is a slow process, an “evolution” not so much in the sense of physical transformation, but rather a spiritual one, a mental metamorphosis that slowly possesses us. I see it in the world. I see it in the Church. Not talking life changes here, but morals, ethics, the basic elements of who and what we are. Not so much individually, but as a society. Christ, alone, is an anchor-line and, even in Him, it is a stagger…….