Weekly Reflection

I enjoyed our class discussion with John Tallmadge last Wednesday. I didn’t really have the opportunity to say much, as I felt the rest of the class had it covered, but it was really interesting to listen to everyone’s opinions. However, there are a few things I wish I had the opportunity to throw in my two cents, for what they are worth, and I am a much better writer than orator.

The first was the concept of “Heaven”. Tallmadge discussed in his last chapter how he believed that Heaven was a state of mind. That we experienced it every day, “We experience it in the wholeness, harmony, and radiance of old-growth forests, in marriages that have endured for five decades or more, in the shining faces of beautiful old people who have weathered catastrophe and betrayal without losing their capacity to love.” That “Even Jesus refused to describe it”. Having attended Bible College, and grown up in the church, we were told that heaven was “complete communion with God,” and hell was “complete separation from God.” 

Complete communion with God, to me, includes everything created by God. Everything that is natural and pure. Love, nature, happiness, these are all good things created by a loving God. However, since the fall of man, we also experience hell on a daily basis. All of the evil things in this world; hatred, Ignorance, disease – these things were a result of the exile from the Garden of Eden. So yes, we have been living in Heaven all along, but we also live in hell. We stand on earth with a foot on either side of the fence. Obviously Jesus could not describe it, as humans, we have no concept of “pure good” or “pure evil”. We only know a mixture of the two. You cannot describe a rainbow to a blind person. We will never understand the idea of Heaven until we experience it ourselves.

The next thing I wanted to discuss was the concept of “legacy”. We danced around it during the discussion, but never fully explored it. We talked about how people want to be remembered after they are gone, but I think it goes deeper than that. We want people to know that we lived, that what we did mattered, and that we had some impact on this world. I think we all have, at the very center of our being, a desire to leave this world different than it was when we entered. We dream of making a difference in someone’s life or of being someone grand.

I am somewhat offended by one of the statements made in Tallmadge’s writing. “The only meaning here is carried by the mourners themselves. It’s their memories that invest the monuments with meaning.” Does this mean, once your mourners are gone, that your life and subsequent death has no meaning? I don’t think so. I look at the cemetery as a yearbook of sorts. I look at my high school yearbook, and there are many people I never met, and yet they are memorialized in a photo. Does the fact I didn’t know them minimize their impact on the world? The monuments are symbols that these people existed, and that has meaning of its own. I do believe that cemeteries are not for the dead, they are for the living, but there is more to it than simple comfort to the families of the person who is deceased. There is also comfort to us while we are living, to know that after we are gone there is a place for us, to show the mark we made on the world, and a place that we can be remembered. It is a comfort to us that our “legacy” will be documented.

Lastly, we had discussed the nature concept, and how the founders of Spring Grove thought that they could “improve” nature. Now, I consider myself a city girl. Starbucks, shopping, busy streets... Yes please.  I do enjoy a good walk in the woods every once in a while, but for the most part, looking at flowering plants and the like has me reaching for my Zyertec.

We discussed “artificial” wilderness. That is what Spring Grove is. It has been cultivated to appear the way it does, by a team of landscapers and designers. But nature will always win. We can attempt to control it, but never fully can. No matter what advances are made in tree grafting, some species are not going to grow here. We can cut the grass, but it will always grow again. We will have droughts, and we will have floods. The idea that we can “control” nature is preposterous. This is evidenced even in Spring Grove, in the trees that have been torn apart by Cincinnati’s version of a “Hurricane.” Despite our best efforts, nature will take over everything. Eventually, our efforts will become futile.

In the end, it all comes back to nature, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word. It is the nature of God and Heaven to be inherently good. It is the nature of Satan and Hell to destroy. It is Human Nature to want to be remembered. And it is the nature of nature to simply be what it is.