~ God the Gardener ~
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.”
~John 15:1
Dear Members and Friends,
By the time I’m old, I hope to be a real gardener. Oh, I’ve always kept a semi-feral vegetable garden. But that’s not what I mean. A true vegetable gardener knows which things to plant early, and which to plant late, and how to space and thin the plants, and when to do second plantings, and what to plant beside what. My summer gardens get planted once, erratically watered, and then ignored until they produce—which they do. My gardens “survive off hose water and neglect,” just as some say the children of Generation X were doing in the 1980s. My gardens are utilitarian, unpresentable, unruly. That’s not how I want it to be. I don’t just want to grow squashes and tomatoes. I want to grow plants no human will eat, plants whose only purpose is to beautify the world and to provide shelter and food for insects and birds. I want to be an old guy who dons a straw hat and spends his days pruning, sowing, and potting clippings in a backyard greenhouse. I want to be one of those people who plans a garden all winter long, then sits by a window in January and dreams while seedlings sprout on the windowsill.
Or maybe…I’m trying to want to be that person. I’m not sure if I have the type of patience or discipline it takes. I recently called upon some of you to help me identify a certain shrub that grows at my camp up north. You used to see this bush everywhere, but it’s long since fallen out of horticultural fashion. It’s a wild-looking thing that you still see growing ragged and unkempt along the foundations of rundown buildings. Folks take it for a large weed. Nurseries don’t sell it anymore. Turns out it’s called “forsythia,” and its day in the sun is about four decades past. (Who knew that the world of ornamental landscaping was as fickle as any other field?) Forsythia has gone the way of barberry and yews. It’s considered old-fashioned and dull, except in March when its yellow bloom is the first to brighten a gray world. I’m only interested in forsythia because I want to use it to create a dense thicket between my camp and the road. I’m going to take branches of the existing bushes and get them to put down roots, which I can then relocate to create a natural-looking hedge, woodsy and ungroomed. Late summer is a time to “propagate.” Growing things feels…holy, almost like participating in the divine act of creation.
In several places in the sacred texts, we see God as a gardener—Psalm 104, John 15. In the Bible, gardens tend to be places where transitions occur: Eden, Gethsemane, the garden where Jesus was buried. It’s a powerful image: the seed falling to the earth and dying in order to rise into new life. Also, people love to see a thing they planted bursting into life; it’s part of the divine nature within all humans. Interesting, too, that some plants even fall out of fashion, but still serve a purpose. In a sense, you are God’s garden. What’s taking root in the soil of your life these days? What are you planting? It’s a privilege to tend the living things that are committed to our care. It’s a sacred act.
Christ’s Peace,
~Brian
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