Posted 455 days ago

To Garden With God

by Christine Sine

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil.¹

I have always been a lover of creation, even though as a child I was a very reluctant gardener. In fact my mother is amazed at how keen I have become on gardening because as a child I was totally unwilling to go out and pull weeds for her. I think that it was really only when I moved to Seattle almost twenty years ago that I started to become fascinated with the view outside. And it’s only in the last few years that the garden has become one of my driving passions.

When my husband Tom and I were married, he had a few tomato plants growing in the side garden and a few scraggly ornamental shrubs in the front. For the first couple of years, I was constantly frustrated because I really wanted to replicate the garden I would have grown in Sydney, Australia, my hometown. The bougainvillea, hibiscus, and other tropical plants I tried just did not survive the winter freeze. So I started reading seed catalogs, and that was my undoing. The exotic photos of flowers and vegetables were a temptation I could not ignore. And as the plants started to grow, I discovered that there is nothing quite as delicious as fresh-picked greens in a garden salad or sweet cherry tomatoes straight from the vine. It is truly a spiritual experience.

My interest in the spiritual significance of gardens grew as I read about early monastic communities that attempted to re-create paradise on earth by planting walled gardens that resembled their idea of Eden. These enclosed spaces were rich with biblical imagery and often centered around an apple tree, representing both the Tree of Life in Genesis and the Cross of Christ. I also read about Celtic Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries who believed that nature was translucent and that the glory of God shined through it. I suspect that these beliefs were closely connected to the label ascribed to them: Celtic Christians were described as “God-intoxicated people”; as I breathe in the heady aroma of lilacs, I am not surprised. I read about plants that were renamed with biblical significance during the Middle Ages. My favorite is the passion flower, native to South America, which Spanish missionaries adopted as a teaching tool in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Every part of the flower’s bloom became a symbol of a different aspect of Christ’s crucifixion. The vine’s supporting tendrils represented the whips used to scourge Christ, and the flower’s radial filaments, the crown of thorns. The stigmata and anthers represented the nails and wounds. Even the blue and white colors of most passion flowers were symbolic of heaven and purity.

There is no place quite like the garden for connecting to the story of God. So many of Jesus’ parables and the events of his life, death, and resurrection take on new meaning in the garden. I read about the death and resurrection of Christ in the Bible, but I experience it every time I plant a dead seed, bury it in its earthy grave, and watch it burst into life. I read about the faithfulness of God to Israel in the wilderness, but I experience it every time I watch the rainfall nourish the seeds I have planted. I read about the miracle of the fish and the loaves, but I experience it every time I am overwhelmed by the generosity of God’s harvest. Most of the best spiritual lessons I learn these days come from the garden rather than from books—and from someone that loves reading as much as I do, that is quite a confession.

Unfortunately the religious experience of modern-day Christians is often totally disconnected from God’s creation. We confine our worship to small, stuffy church buildings and restrict our devotion to reading words about God without connecting to the glory of God all around us. We can try to re-create an experience of heaven in our buildings with bells and smells and rich ornamentation, but that doesn’t come close to the wonder of God experienced in the melody of birdsong, the fragrance of flowers, and the beauty of plants and animals.

In the last several decades, people have moving away from Christianity at time-warp speed, and I think it is precisely because we have divorced our faith from the rhythms and practices of the natural world. Most of our world’s population now lives in cities where life is totally disconnected from God’s creation and the rhythms of planting, growing, harvesting, and resting inherent in the garden year. We lose confidence in the story of God because we no longer enter into the constant reminders of death and resurrection that occur in creation.

But it seems that there is no better time than now to reconnect our lives to the story of God revealed through the garden. Tough economic times have sent people everywhere scurrying for garden books and packets of seed. Backyard gardening has become an important response of individuals and churches. Even the White House has planted an organic garden to supplement the presidential salads.

Genesis tells us that God created Adam and Eve and placed them in a garden “to work it and take care of it.” ² Even more intriguingly, we learn that God walked in the Garden of Eden with them, and I always feel that God still walks in the garden with me today. The more I look for God in my garden, the more I have become invigorated by the gospel story and the wonder of God’s plan for redemption. As I watch the days and seasons follow in their expected patterns, I am reminded of the faithfulness of a God who is with us through all the seasons and events of our lives. I am also reminded that our God, who poured out his great love in the complexity, beauty, and diversity of creation, still cares for us and all creation and will never abandon what he has made. Perhaps part of the reason that God created human beings to tend the garden is because God knew that we would connect most intimately to the character and ways of God there.

The gospel still comes to us in the midst of the created world, which was made through Jesus Christ and is being re-created through him. As God’s people, we are responsible to love the world with the same love that God has expressed through creation. As a consequence, we must accept God’s call to be stewards of all that has already been created.

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I have created a garden manual based on fifteen years of my reflections and activities as a backyard gardener. I am not an expert gardener, and my garden certainly never looks ordered and pristine like those you see in garden magazines. It is always full of weeds and messiness that would make a Master Gardener cringe. Neither am I a theologian. I always describe myself as a contemplative activist. I have learned my theology through plunging into situations that force me to ask questions about where God is and what God is saying. I suspect that makes me more like the average gardener and the average follower of Christ.

In the manual, I explore the rhythms of life, death, and resurrection revealed through the garden seasons. Every season of the year teaches new lessons about God that connect to the gospel story, but the manual is focused on the Northern Hemisphere. The seasons in the Southern Hemisphere are out of sync with the events of the Christian calendar, and so I would highly recommend reinventing a liturgical rhythm that flows more with the natural world in those areas.

The journey through the seasons begins in winter, the time when most of the natural world is drawing deep into itself and preparing to rest. The trees retract their sap and drop their leaves. Animals retreat to their lairs to hibernate, and birds flee the cold weather with their flocks. This is the time when we too are meant to slow down and reflect on our lives and our spiritual state. In the Northern Hemisphere, it coincides with the seasons of Advent and Christmas. It is a time for looking inward, for new beginnings and new depths of understanding.

Spring is a time to dig the ground, plant, and fertilize. Bulbs and trees burst into bloom with exultant enthusiasm for a new year. This is the season of greatest activity in the garden when we nurture newly planted seeds into life and tend the trees that we expect will later provide a rich harvest of fruit. In the Northern Hemisphere, it coincides with Easter, the celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection. This is the season when we plant and cultivate new seeds of faith that will one day blossom and bear fruit in our lives and in God’s world.

Summer is the season of fast growth and abundant productivity. This is when we begin to reap the harvest of our long hours of spring toil. In our spiritual lives, there are also seasons when everything seems to flourish and produce fruit in abundance without much effort on our part. It is a time for both work and fulfillment. In the church calendar, this season begins with Pentecost and the in-filling of the Holy Spirit whose enduring presence enables God’s life of love, compassion, and abundance to flourish in and through us. In the church calendar, Pentecost ushers in the second half of the year, what is sometimes called Kingdomtide, the season during which we are meant to live out the life of God’s kingdom. Unfortunately we tend to think that this season is forever, and when autumn comes, we want to force feed our lives so that they will continue producing fruit.

Autumn is also a season of great activity as the year culminates in the lavish harvests and the feasting that often accompanies them. In this season we are canning, drying, and preserving the harvest for the days of scarcity that lie ahead. In our lives we need to recognize these seasons when our physical work of gathering in the harvest of our efforts is tempered with the prayer and preparation needed to sustain us throughout the cold seasons of life that assail all of us at times.

Each section of the manual contains spiritual reflections, litanies, and prayers that relate to the season as well as practical suggestions on gardening and an occasional recipe. This is not an authoritative guide to organic gardening, however. That I will leave to the experts. I hope that it will help many who are dabbling in gardening for the first time recognize that we don’t need to be experts to enjoy and find satisfaction in the garden.

At the end of the book, there are guides for planting and harvesting that relate to Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, where I live, though they may be useful for other parts of the Northern Hemisphere as well. There is also a resource section that can connect you to some of the best resources I have discovered both on the web and in print.

My prayer is that this manual will not just improve your abilities as a gardener, but that it will also enable you to experience the gospel story in a new and compelling way.

Notes

1. Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur, Catherine Phillips, ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986), 128.
2. Gen 2:15 (TNIV)

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