Tomatoes and Spiritual Nourishment

Last week’s story of Swiss lettuce apparently hit a chord. Not only the comments, but individual emails to me stated lovely things, including your own adventures in international grocery stores. Someone asked, did I intend to write about tomatoes next?

Alas, my only tomato story is not delightful, although it will elicit a knowing “uh-huh” from anyone who is a real gardener. In the summer of 2020 (the shut-down summer), I tried to make a garden. Unlike similar attempts in Texas heat, my tomatoes flourished seemingly by themselves in the moderate climate of North Carolina. “How easy is that!” I chuckled, plucking baskets of gorgeous tomatoes upon which we gorged.

Of course, that was the last time it was easy. The next summer, I set vines into the same garden and watched the yield diminish by 60 percent. Learning nothing, I did likewise the following summer. I don’t think more than six good tomatoes resulted.

It’s called fertilizer, Carol. You, dear reader, knew that, right?

Well, I know it now. With the soil’s nutrients eaten up in the first summer, the next year’s vines lacked an ongoing line of support necessary to produce. Without that—sounding a bit biblical here—they would wither and die.

Okay, they didn’t wither and die, because they got plenty of water. But they surely didn’t produce tomatoes . . . which brings me to this quote from Calvin Coolidge. I bet you have seen it before:

It is hard to see how a great man can be an atheist. Without the sustaining influence of faith in a divine power we could have little faith in ourselves. We need to feel that behind us is intelligence and love. Doubters do not achieve; skeptics do not contribute; cynics do not create. Faith is the great motive power, and no man realizes his full possibilities unless he has the deep conviction that life is eternally important, and that his work, well done, is a part of an unending plan.

I had not seen these words until reading them in the blog of a dear woman, Charlene Notgrass (Daily Encouragement for Homeschool Mothers). Charlene, together with her husband Ray, has done a lion’s share of work over the decades promoting education in American history. We met as booth-neighbors in our first-ever conference season in 2009. Conference-booth neighbors are similar to friends at summer camp: proximity and shared experience draws you together for a short time, although the connection may not be ongoing. In this case, though, Charlene and I have kept a dear, if skeletal, friendship through emails, reading one another’s writings, and sharing quick, treasured hugs at busy conventions where her booth might be 14 rows away from ours.

Back to Coolidge’s quote. I found it breath-taking. Who today, in an elected position of authority, would dare pen such a statement? That’s one thing. Furthermore, look at the beauty of Coolidge’s famous terseness:

Doubters do not achieve; skeptics do not contribute; cynics do not create.

Admittedly, this assertion can be batted down with a wet noodle, if one chooses. The creative arts have long been the playground of skeptics, cynics, and doubters. Nonetheless, time has a funny way of leveling the playing field. The passage of time, in the long run, sorts out the works of weight and worth that endure. We call the most compelling of these masterpieces. Very few of them are based on doubt, cynicism, and skepticism. Instead, history places parentheses around “important” works rooted in that trio of negativity. Perhaps they made splashes in their time. Some may even have influenced the flow of styles. Yet, over the seasons, such art fails to provide ongoing nourishment to the vines.

Coolidge was not thinking particularly about the arts when he spoke his words in July 1924 within comments given via telephone to a group of scouts about to sail to Copenhagen for an international gathering of the Boy Scouts. He was exhorting them to be fine representatives of their families and their country, saying that:

You will make a great contribution toward a better understanding of our country, and receive in return a better understanding of other countries; for you will find in foreign lands, to a very large extent, exactly what you carry there yourselves.

Again, such elegant words seem impossible to hear in today’s public chatter. This is one reason why people from an astonishing breadth of backgrounds are re-embracing “the classics,” whether it be Gregorian chant, portraits by Vermeer, pungent poems by “Mother Goose,” texts by Chaucer, or the folk dances cherished by generations of our ancestors. We are all desperate for the solid nutrition that nudges vines to produce fruit, rather than flashy leaves. We believe that each of us, particularly each child, has an unfathomably broad, rich range of possibilities. The key is spiritual nourishment to cultivate the “conviction that life is eternally important.” And, to continue with Coolidge’s words, we have faith in the idea that our work, no matter how small, unassuming, or under-confident, when well done, is a part of an unending plan.