Heaven in Chicago: North Pond

(Originally published in September, 2014, on the blog of St. Luke's Lutheran Church, Logan Square, Chicago.)

Near where I live is a pond ringed by a small number of trees and a large number of native prairie wildflowers.

I walked around the pond yesterday. As I often do, I set off there at a fast pace, but as I got close I slowed down, and eventually I was doing a slow-motion creep that allowed me to register each flower and butterfly and sun-basking turtle.

Black-crowned night heron

You make friends of a certain kind when you visit the pond. Yesterday I was pleased to see the black-crowned night heron in his usual place. A little farther along -- though I wasn't really looking -- I spotted a little green heron on a branch. Near the end of my circuit I saw a great blue heron, wading in the shallows; that was a special treat because I had spotted him only after making a short detour to get a close look at some wild columbine.

The limitation, if you can call it that, of the pond is that, well, one can't own it.  And I don't just mean own it in the legal sense, but also in the sense of having total dominion over it. "What was the name of that flower again?" "I don't remember the joe pye weed being THIS tall!" "The goldenrod is really EVERYwhere! (Will we ever be able to get ahead of it?)"

Of course, in another sense, the pond surrenders itself to a rather startling degree of "ownership."

"These are 'obedient plants'." (When I described to someone how they got their name, how you can bend them and they slowly spring back to their original shape, he said 'Shouldn't it be 'UN-obedient plants?')

"These are the wild senna, with their late summer yellow blossoms; they say that after the destruction of the atom bomb, it was the wild senna that came back and grew in wild profusion in Hiroshima . . . " 

"These are elderberries -- so beautiful with their rich purple-red branches -- I wonder what the old ladies' elderberry wine in Arsenic and Old Lace tasted like?"

"This is the path where I can disappear behind a screen of 7-foot tall compass plants and prairie grasses, even though I'm still just a few feet from the main trail!"

It's a place where one can nearly simultaneously lament the past ("All that's left of the bee balm is their skeletons; the summer sped by so fast!") and live in the expectation of what is to come ("Soon the purple asters will be EVERYwhere!")

Obedient plant

I ask myself if there is a gospel message in all of this. Perhaps material for a parable? I imagine Jesus saying, "The Kingdom of Heaven pond ringed by a small number of trees and a large number of native prairie wildflowers . . . ."

Read more about North Pond in Chicago.