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Theology of the Tomato Time

Theology of the Tomato Time

Last updated on: August 10, 2026 at 11:23 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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Theology of the Tomato Time 2026-08-10T23:23:42-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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A tomato plant with five ripe tomatoes, all splashed with rain

image via Pixabay

It’s the time of year that I call ”the tomato glut.”

Tomato vines are strange, uncanny plants. I think they could take over the world if given half a chance. If you cut a small stem, called a “sucker,” off a tomato plant and stick it in a glass of water, it will grow roots within a few days, and you’ll have a perfect new seedling. If you leave the seedings in their peat planters a little too long, they start to grow hairy roots all up and down their stems, so you could stick the stem in the ground and have a short plant with great big well established roots. If you plant too many seedlings and just throw the extras onto the compost, they’ll take root and grow anyway. If you grow tomato plants in cages, they will find a way out of the cages and start creeping messily all over the ground. If you grow them in a planter on the side of a building with no cage, they’ll start cascading down over the wall like a tomato waterfall.

When a tomato vine is young and the weather is still cool, you have to baby them. You keep the seedlings inside if there’s even a chance of a light frost, and you cover them with sheets at night if the temperature goes below fifty. Once the summer starts up, they grow by several inches every time you turn around. Then there are flowers which self-pollenate, so all you have to do is pat them on top of the vine to let the pollen fall down. Then there’s a tiny little speck of a fruit and you start daydreaming of sauces and sandwiches. Over the course of several weeks, the green fruit swells and develops and then it goes a strange light shade that’s almost white. When they go white, you once again start planning your dinners, but there’s still a week or two to go. Finally, they get a bit of blush. Then they go ripe– one here, and one there, like the very first drops of summer rain, and finally, finally, there’s the deluge. All the tomatoes started going ripe at once, just about last week.

Just about last week was also when the rain came in.

Most of the time, late July and early August are droughty in northern Appalachia. This year, they’ve been like a monsoon. It’s a little too much, even for me. I love a good rainstorm, if I can sit in bed next to the ice cold air conditioner and listen to it pelt on my window. I don’t love stiflingly humid weather with a thunderstorm every few hours, so nothing ever dries out. I don’t like driving in the rain and I don’t like sprinting from the grocery store or the library to the car when a rainstorm catches me by surprise. But that was happening daily, as if I lived in a jungle.

Tomatoes are greedy and will soak up as much water as they get, never showing any moderation. The water from a great big heavy rain will sometimes swell the fruit until the skin starts to crack. That makes the larger fruits ugly, and the cherries you can lose entirely because bugs land on the cracks and spoil the whole thing. For days I was waiting for a break in the rain, then running out into the garden in the mud to pick tomatoes, then eating or cooking with the cracked ones right away so they didn’t go to waste. Sometimes I’d stuff them in the pockets of my shorts and accidentally make a few into ketchup before I got back inside. Sometimes they’d spill out of their bowl on the counter and go rolling around. Eventually I’d get a great big bowl of them and swirl them in the organic fruit wash just in case of bacteria, and plan their destination. Cracked tomatoes get made into sauce and the pristine ones get eaten raw. A freezer full of homemade marinara for me. A bagful for Jimmy’s boy, who comes daily now to eat raw green beans out of the patch and then play baseball with Adrienne. A bag for the Friendship Room who have lots of hungry mouths to feed and always want salad. A bag for Ms. B, who is as excited as if it’s Easter and I’m a bunny bringing her candy eggs. A bag for the man who brought water and his wife, who still let me use their hose, though I haven’t needed it for over a week.

Suppose that this glorious, generous time of year points us to the Creator.

Suppose that there’s a Creator so glorious, we can’t even speak about them without being a little bit wrong and a little bit right. Suppose that that Creator is so much bigger than I could possibly tell you, but one of the things that I could say and not be wrong is that the Creator is a great outpouring of rain. Suppose that the grace of God constantly rains down and down and down forever without being exhausted, but because God is infinite, there is nowhere for God to pour grace that isn’t also into God. God receives from God and returns to God, over and over like a waterfall that flows in a circle instead of straight down, and the word for the God who pours out is “Father,” and the word for the God who returns the outpouring is “Son,” and word for the movement of the pouring is “Holy Ghost.” A word for that eternal flood of generosity is “Trinity.” That is not exactly right, because nothing I could ever say about God will be exact. But it’s a little bit right.

Suppose that the Creator made all of creation to mirror the Creator, so that everywhere we look, we find signs of what God is like.

One of the things God is like is a world full of impossibly robust plants that take root wherever you put them and just keep making new seedlings. Another thing God is like is a glorious summer with torrential rainfall that never quite goes away. The rain pours down from Heaven and the plants keep soaking it up without end until the fruit bursts its skin. You wait, and you wait, and you wait, and then you have so many graces you can’t possibly carry them all.

Another thing God is like, is people. People bear the image and likeness of God as rain and tomatoes do. But unlike rain and tomatoes, we can choose to participate in that likeness, or not. We can be stingy and grasping with our gifts, or not. We can stay inside when it rains, or run out to harvest grace upon grace and stuff it in our pockets. We can keep all our crops for ourselves, or we can be like God and give them away to neighbors as freely as they were given to us.

Suppose that you don’t have to make the spiritual life complicated. Suppose you don’t have to have an “apostolate” or a “ministry” or a great big fancy work to call your own. Suppose that, in order to become a saint, you just have to grow where you’re planted, and greedily soak up whatever graces come, and give them away as generously as you were given them. Food for you and the neighbors. Be rain. Be a tomato.

It is easy to believe in God, this time of year.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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