From Our Correspondant
December 9, 2005
A.J. Nickel
As I stare out at the gloomy cloud cover, my body recalls the biting breezes of moments before. My mind forms a paradoxical memory, that sunny summer’s day when I decided to experiment with love and nature. Since creation, love has ordered our world. We have a myriad of potential situations and when we act in love and gratitude we are on our way to knowing Christ. Love is not simply an abstract ideal but a practical application of divinity, a naming of the Good in creation. I bought two sets of three identical tropical plants at $1.99 each. I bought myself a community of friends, three of which I would love, three of which I would isolate from my God-given calling to spread love.
I named all of the plants. I took inspiration from the book of Hosea, and named three of the plants after Hosea’s children. God commanded the names of Jezreel (foreshadowing punishment), Lo-Ruhamah (unloved) and Lo-Ammi (not my people). The other three I named Truth, Beauty and Growth. I situated the two groups in windows facing the same easterly direction, watered them all equally and at the same time. The loved ones were in the kitchen, a place of community, sharing and warmth. The unloved were condemned to the pandemonium of the rec room, sharing space with computers and the television, a place of remoteness and technology.
The need for love is so tightly interwoven into the fabric of the universe that I sometimes take it for granted. Yet reminders appear daily, in media, in new age drivel, songs by the Beatles and not least, the Bible. “What the Bleep Do We Know?” is a documentary about Quantum Physics which explores the boundaries of perception, and it introduced me to the water crystal theory of Dr. Masaru Emoto. His study of water crystals show that their structures changed significantly when exposed to language of love and gratitude or language of hatred. The loved water produced crystals of perfect symmetry and beautiful order. The ones to which he regularly said, “you make me sick” were nothing more than misshapen masses. (www.whatthebleep.com/crystals)
I sang to my loved plants, I thanked them daily for existing in the ultimate beauty of God’s truth, and I concentrated on their energy fields in order to let them draw my own positive energy into their nutrients. The unloved ones I told were ugly, that God hated them and that they made me sick. Sunlight and water were equally dispensed though an apartheid of love and hate divided the community. At last count, the loved plants stood tall, confident, and one of them grew an enormous yellow flower. Their beauty increased with each gift of my love. The unloved plants were clinging desperately to the sun through the illusion of the window, begging for growth, crying out for affirmation. Yet they did not die; perhaps the subcreating act of naming them was the saving grace. Or perhaps those plants knew that I didn’t actually hate them, that I loved them as much as the others. We can never be apart from God’s love and we can therefore never be fully lost. I plan to revive the plants now that the experiment is over, and I am sure that their redemption will be glorious in the magnitude of God’s plan.
Now you go...
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