A Good Potato

One of my spiritual ancestors is the inventor of the Burbank potato. Luther Burbank lived and worked not far from where I lived in Northern California and planted many of his famous heirloom vegetable varieties. He was a huge scientific celebrity in his time. In 1926 at the age of 77, he attracted controversy and even death threats when he referred to the radical Jesus as an “infidel.” Of course, liberal Christians promptly invited him to speak at the First Congregational Church of San Francisco, where he gave a public address to an audience of 2,500 people. Burbank stood before his haters and supporters and proclaimed these joyful words:

"I love everybody! I love everything! ... All things, plants, animals and men are already in eternity traveling across the face of time, from when we know not, to where who is able to say. ... Do you think Christ or Mohammed, Confucius, Baal or even the gods of ancient mythology are dead? Not so. Do you think Pericles, Marcus Aurelius, Moses, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Aristotle, Tolstoi, Franklin, Emerson are dead? No. Their very personality lives and will live forever in our lives and in the lives of all those who will follow us. All of them are with us today. No one lives who is not influenced, more or less, by these great ones, according to the capacity of the cup of knowledge which they bring to these ever-flowing fountains to be filled.”

I love Luther Burbank’s notion of immortality here. It is like Jesus insisting that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are not dead at all, because they live on in us (Luke 20:37-38). On the heels of my grandmother’s death, I have been consoling myself with the thought that if death was good enough for Gandhi, Jesus, Joan of Arc, it is good enough for her too. If every single great soul has gone through the gates of death before me, then it is good enough for me to follow.

with love, Pr. Chelsea