What would it feel like to be your truest, fullest self?

I don’t mean that in a glib way, like in a magazine article or an Internet link with a title like “10 Ways to Be Your Best Self Today!” What would it like to be utterly the self you were created to be, and utterly full of God? What would it be like to feel the Holy Spirit at work in you to unblock all your gifts and dissolve away all your stuck places like so many knots out of a stiff muscle?

We were created, the scriptural story suggests, in a green and flourishing garden. We were made to live eucharistically, blessing God for all that has been given into our care. But instead, whether through malice or simple carelessness, we tend so easily to turn it all into ash.

Sometimes it’s scripture that we need to wrestle with until we get a blessing. Where is Jesus in this story?

Last weekend I was at a family wedding in South Carolina. As soon as I stepped out of the airport I was struck by the climate, by the overall feeling of things: the heat. The humidity. The chirping crickets. And all around, the green, green, green. So different from the golds and greens of our California hills and evergreen forests: there it was deciduous trees, and vines growing on the deciduous trees, and more vines growing on those vines. Driving down the freeway was like being in a tunnel between two walls of solid vegetation. So much of that, of course, is thanks to just one plant: kudzu.

It takes a human being to be the articulator of the thanksgiving we offer on behalf of the whole creation: sun and moon, land and sea, plants and animals and all that is.

Back in 2005, when The Simpsons had just recently become the country’s longest-ever-running sitcom, there aired an episode in which Homer and Bart Simpson decide to convert to Roman Catholicism—lured in by pancake suppers, bingo, and an engaging young priest voiced by Liam Neeson.