Forty years or more ago, when the infirmities of age led my grandparents to leave their ancestral Swedish immigrant’s farmhouse for assisted living in town, my mother decided to “rescue” a couple geraniums from the old dining room windows. (Technically, they are pelargonium, not geranium, but never mind.) In even my earliest memories of that house, there are geraniums in those windows. Perhaps my grandmother got them from her mother? What my mother did with them next, I’m not quite sure, but some years later she offered me a couple pots of cuttings from “Grammy’s geraniums” as we called them. I’ve never seen others quite like them. They have smaller, tighter flower clusters, and the color is a more scarlet red than anything at flower shops and garden centers (see photo below). They are not lovelier than modern geraniums, but they do have a kind of pre-hybridization simplicity to them. I like them mostly for emotional reasons, I admit, but others who see them blooming away on my deck almost always comment on them, and ask where we got them.
I have flowers, and my grandmother’s geraniums in particular, on my mind not just because summer is in extravagant colorful bloom right now, but also because of Sing For Joy programs coming up in July. One of those programs mid-month is full from beginning to end with music about the natural world. It begins with “For the Beauty of the Earth” and ends with “Sommersalm (The Earth Adorned),” with a setting of Isaiah 55 in between: "For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth." I suppose when orchardists think about a “watered earth” or “the earth adorned” they imagine heavily laden fruit trees, and Illinois and Iowa farmers imagine full-eared corn. I think about flowers.
“For the Beauty of the Earth” fills my mind’s eye with the sweep of any and every flower, but in early July our Sing For Joy program features several settings of early American folk tunes, and these are what set me to thinking especially about my grandmother’s geraniums. Folk melodies are not the grand and glorious hybrid flowers of the musical world. They are more like old-fashioned geraniums. Simple, reliable, easy to live with, beautiful in an inornate way. When performers try to gussie them up, these melodies often sound slightly embarrassed. They aren’t meant for the queen’s coronation banquet; they are meant to grace the supper table on the porch. In that setting they are just right. In the presence of daily life and love, they flourish. It is for good reason, therefore, that the Christian church has wanted to keep a few folk tunes around, just as my grandmother kept a few geraniums in her dining room windows.
Peace be with you,
Pastor Bruce Benson
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