Pastor Don's Ponderings

I love the photography of my friend and colleague, Fr. Jerry Schweitzer, who resides in Northern Indiana. He publishes a daily meditation which includes his photographs and, truth be told, most days I find myself just looking into the pictures he provides and imagining my place in each setting. Jerry, and so many others like him, have the God-given capacity to see with God's eyes, to intuitively capture a moment, an event or an environment, and then invite others to marvel with them at the sight. This scene holds me fast . . . On the shoreline of Lake Michigan, at a place where once someone sat and took in its beauty and power, where a fence divides the land to the place where the waters cannot be divided, and where under snow and blustery winds there still resides the vestiges of summers past: The windswept grasses tell their tales and shifting sands reveal their secrets. Here we meet ourselves. Here we see our reflections. Here we tremble, not for Winter's wind, but fo...

Just the sight of Fall tillage makes me smile. Anyone connected with farming smells a picture like this as much as we view it, maybe more than we want to admit. There is something about ground being opened in the Fall, something about the manner in which soil rolls around the tillage tool, something in the sound of the tractor pulling the tool and something in the sound of dirt opening and closing behind you which makes a farmer's heart happy . . . and the smell, the smell of Fall time tillage is luxuriant.  Fall tillage is essential for the coming crop year. Though not every acre of soil can be tilled in the Fall, due to erosion risk and crop history, those acres which can be tilled, weather permitting, are often done at something of an angle to the planting direction to facilitate cutting through layers of compaction. Yet, more than that, deep Fall tillage buries some of the refuse from the previous years crop, allowing for a more rapid rotting of the plant into needed hum...