Walk into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They don’t fuss with their appearance — but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them. If God gives such attention to the wildflowers, most of them never even seen, don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? [Luke 12: 27-28]

I used to work in midtown Manhattan at Saint Bartholomew’s Church. New Yorkers speak not of four seasons but of five. Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, and August which they call — I’m not making this up — “the season of weird smells.” All her asphalt collects the summer’s heat so that by August anybody who works in New York learns to walk on the concrete and not on the subway grates lest you get a pungent whiff of what bakes below. It can take your breath away.

August is quiet time in Washington. For me it’s not quiet, not now anyway. I’ve got a lot to do and a lot on my mind, not the least of it being that Gillian is soon leaving home for college. So I am arrested by this passage of scripture this morning. Jesus is whispering something about the lilies of the field, how they neither toil nor spin, and it is one of the hardest of his sayings. The least harsh or vatic — one of the most watercolor of all Jesus’s utterances — turns out to be one of the most radical and hard to swallow.

I had a dream last night, the kind I have rarely, that’s less a dream than a memory. Gabriel was two in the dream as in the memory. We were lying in bed. He was wearing swim goggles and twirling his hair. I was reading a story to him that he was eager to get to the end of not because he was disinterested but because he wanted to know how it would finish. He kept asking me to “Turn the page!” before I could complete the page we were on. Again and again he kept saying punctiliously “Turn the page!” until finally I asked him, “How do you know that the page we’re on is not the most important of them all?”