While I will always, in some sense, be a Texas girl at heart, I also love being out East. The spring brings blooming fruit trees and clusters of daffodils along the roads, and the fall has the gorgeous arrays of changing leaves. It’s breathtaking.

Summer also has lots of stuff in bloom, many things which wouldn’t grow in my arid hometown of Lubbock unless you spent the kids’ inheritance on irrigation. I especially enjoy the June-blooming daylilies under our bedroom window. But I was thinking today about the summer arrival that I most anticipate — the sudden bouquets of chicory in almost every corner of the city.
Chicory is really beautiful. It has sky-blue flowers that open every day. Its hardy, woody stems grow in nice clusters for good visual effect. And it seems to appear, without fail, just about everywhere. It grows alongside telephone poles, in vacant lots, and in cracks of sidewalk. It’s quite the survivor. During a recent city meeting on planting flowers to beautify Lexington for the World Equestrian Games, someone stressed the need to plant flowers which would thrive without constant attention, exposed to exhaust fumes and choking dust. I wanted to nominate chicory.

Interestingly, it doesn’t do well as a cut flower. Try to bring it home for the vase on your counter, and it just wilts. It needs to be connected to its context, to the stems, to the soil. It wants to stay where it was planted.

There may be some lessons here for the Church. We’ve become quite adept at planting and nurturing beautiful seeds, which smell nice and undoubtedly bring beauty and grace into the world. But so often they require so much time and attention that they exhaust our energy before we’ve even looked beyond our own doors. We need to take our cue, not from dainty blossoms that wilt under the baking sun or wither in the slighest drought, but from this hardy and intrepid pioneer. The Church needs no more hothouse flowers; what it needs is bunches of chicory.

One of my favorite things about my 3 year old daughter is her warm, convivial nature. Upon meeting someone new, particularly another child, she quickly begins referring to them as her “friend.” “Where’s my friend?” she asks. “Where’s my new friend? And what’s her name?” For her, friendship isn’t bound up in long acquaintances or even name recognition; it often stems from nothing more involved that the mere presence and personhood of the other child. Granted, she gets in your average number of spats with her friends both old and new, but her standard position is one of welcome.

There is something hopeful in this approach to life. In our community we often ask, “What is our reflex? What attitudes and postures are we attempting to cultivate?” If our initial thought about someone is “friend”, our interactions with them will have a fundamentally different tone than if we view them as “foe” or even as a neutral “unknown.” If we normatively grant others the privileged status of one who is included, the very trajectory of our interactions will be realigned.