The Problem with Gardening

It’s February and my garden is a mess. This is, in part, because February is a grey month in Virginia, as it is in many places, and my plants all look grey and dead. However, my garden is a mess also because I am in the throes of my yearly redesign. 

Every year, for at least the last 30 years, I have made some attempt to redesign part or all of my garden. And just to be clear, I am not talking about a useful garden, in which I grow vegetables or fruit and useful herbs — Rather I am talking about my outdoor space; a flower garden with a few trees, a pond, and places to sit and breathe and enjoy being outside. 

I do realize that I am utterly failing to follow the current law of our culture — that only useful and productive activity has value and meaning, and that …

“Activity that is not clearly, concretely useful to oneself or others is worthless, meaningless and immoral” (A Long Loving Look at the Real, Walter J. Burkhardt Sj.). 

This is particularly true for me because I realize that what I am really driven by is an insane and impossible desire to recreate paradise, so that, as a result, I am never finally able to be happy with my redesigns — though all the gardening books have promised me that I could achieve this result. And so, in spite of knowing better, for a few days every February, I spend time drawing up garden plans and looking at gardening design books, and thinking about how I am going to create or try to recreate paradise. 

Of course, as I have already said, I know that my attempts are always going to be doomed to fail. No matter how beautiful the blooms are or how well my garden looks in the spring, I know that the Japanese beetles will devastate them come June 1st, and that the mold and lichen will decay all my wood surfaces, that unless I spend hours pulling weeds they will take over, and that even if I do keep up with all the garden maintenance the heat and insects will make every effort to ruin my experience of being outside. 

Nevertheless, the longing is in me and, though I try, I cannot seem to escape it. My problem is that I have a longing of the soul. Not only do I have memories of beautiful places and experiences of being outside in the sunshine and the intoxicating lilacs in our backyard, which my mother carried me out to see and smell at age 3 or 4  — but there is, I believe, a deeper memory that drives my longing. I have a memory in my spiritual DNA of a garden in which souls could be utterly content and happy and free. A garden with trees and flowers and animals and rivers and the closest of companions which whom to enjoy it — the garden of Eden. 

Accounts of this garden, in Genesis chapter two, are amazing. God actually plants and prepares  the Garden in the land of Eden for Adam and the description of it is like the description of a garden for royalty or a garden of the gods — which is actually what is intended. In fact, in the ancient stories from Sumer (5,300-1940 BC) there is a description of a city called Dilmun, and a garden planted by the goddess Ninhursag, which are in the East, in Eden. But Dilmun and Ninhursag’s garden are only for the gods — not human beings. The story of Eden in Genesis is actually unique among the stories of the ancient world in many respects, but particularly in that human beings are given paradise as a gift from God and treated like royalty.

I was thinking about this on this February morning, and feeling a great deal of disappointment with my parents (Adam and Eve), for redesigning Eden into a place of weeds and thorns and frustration and pain and death by distrusting and rebelling against God, when a thought struck me. It suddenly occurred to me, with new force, what a statement Jesus was making when he said to his disciples…

“Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many rooms; if that were not so, I would have told you, because I am going there to prepare a place for you.” — John 14:1-2 

It isn’t that this was new information to me. I had read John 14 before and I know that Jesus said to the thief of the cross, “today you will be with me in paradise” (a garden). Rather what struck me was that… 

1. in saying this Jesus is making a very specific and intense claim to be the creator, a theme with which John begins his Gospel, and confirms over and over again, and that 

2. Jesus was saying to his disciples and followers that he was going in order to build a new garden-city for them/us — that same garden with trees and flowers and animals and rivers and the closest of companions which whom to enjoy it, with Him. 

Of course, anyone who has been a Christian for longer than five minutes already knows this and anyone reading this is now probably rolling their eyes and thinking, “You are just coming to this realization?!?” And if I have just wasted a few minutes of your limited time on this earth, I apologize — though, in my defense, it is February, and what else did you have to do today?. 

But maybe, on a day when you are looking out your window on a grey February afternoon at your dead looking flowers and trees and at the dirty snow piled up around your car… maybe it will be encouraging to stop and think that right now the most beautiful garden home is being prepared for you and that one day you will be there with the closest of companions in the presence of God, whose beauty and glory is at the heart of that garden for which we all are, and have always been, longing.