The Christian gardener: an Orthodox meditation - Cover Story

I am a theologian and a college professor. I like being both. But what I really love to do--what I get exquisite pleasure from doing--is to garden. I think that gardening is nearer to godliness than theology. I certainly desire the presence of God. But I Want the tomatoes and squash, also the wild geese and the chickadees who in winter find repast in the seeds fallen on the garden ground. The geese and the chickadees don't know this, but I regard them as a part of my garden. I think if we all gardened more, they and all of the other birds that fly in the air above and light in my garden below would be better off. I know that God values them no less than I do. So when I plant in spring I also hope to taste of God in fruit of summer sun and sight of feathered friends.

In desolate January when I look over the gray and frozen earth dream of green paradise. The prophet Ezekiel says: "The land now desolate will be tilled, instead of lying waste for every passerby to see. Everyone will say that this land which was waste has become like a garden of Eden" (37:34-35). That is my hope when I garden.

But I am not a romantic about such things. I take long hikes with Scarlett, my Irish setter, through a beautiful lay of woods a meadows where rare and unusual wildflowers grow on sparse rocky soil. Romantics say they find God in nature, and maybe they do. But one could just as easily not find God, just nature itself. Our natural surroundings possess, however, the remarkable capacity to rouse us from an insensate existence brought about by a slothful and deadening habit of sin. When I go hiking, the sylvan, beauty alone is not what stimulates my senses. There is the ache in the legs and the deep breathing of the hillside climb, the discomforting dampness of morning dew on my clothes, and the soiled sweat of afternoon sun on my brow.

When I garden it is nearly the same. In March I labor with spade and hoe and plant peas and cabbage in the chilly, damp clods of earth. By June the peas and cabbage are ready, but the weeds have sprung up too and the insects have arrived. I can hardly keep up with these invaders of my impossible paradise. In the heat of summer sun the sweat streams down my back. I am the first Adam expelled from Eden, not the second Adam in paradise.

The Christian knows that while tending the garden there are no easy strolls with God. It is not that gardening is valueless or purposeless or wants of reward. But the fruit of sweet communion comes after the gall and the vinegar. The mystical enjoyment comes not without the toilsome askesis of raking and sowing and pulling up the weeds.

In my garden the thistle grows more easily than the primrose. Sin grows in my body more readily than purity, and the keys to my garden do not admit me back through Eden's gate. Nevertheless, my garden is a place away from that first home, a spot where labor lends substance to my living while I remain in this mortal frame. Birth and renewal are signs, proleptic though they may be, of paradise.

The 17th-century writer William Coles commented, "As for recreating, if man be wearied with over-much study (for study is a weariness to the Flesh as Solomon by experience can tell you) there is no better place in the world to recreate himself than in a garden, there no sence but may be delighted therein." An academic can relate to that weariness of study; a gardener, to Coles's delight in the experience of the senses in the garden.

Many voices these days accuse the Christian faith of creating a barrier between "superior" human beings and "inferior" nature, and of fostering a science that views nature as something to be used and overcome in order to build the city of God, or at least the Elysian tracts of suburbia. In Why We Garden, Jim Nolan contends that "neither Judaism nor Christianity teaches us that nature is alive and capable of interceding in our lives in a positive, spiritually enhancing manner. We have never been taught what it means for us to commune with trees, to treat other species as peers with rights, to relate to mountains as animate, to live in balance with the air, to feel the pulse of the ocean in our own blood. We never have experienced a sense of give-and-take with the soil and the rock."

I do not know how literal Nolan wants to be. I suspect his real knowledge of biblical faith is sparse. Otherwise how could he forget the psalmist's intimacy with both God and nature?

Praise the Lord from the earth,

you sea monsters and ocean depths;

fire and hail, snow and ice,

gales of wind that obey his voice.

All mountains and hills;

all fruit trees and cedars;

wild animals and all cattle;

creeping creatures and winged birds.

(Ps. 148:7-10)

When I garden, earth and earthworm pass between my fingers and I realize that I am made of the same stuff. When I pinch the cucumber vine and the water drips from capillaries to soil, I can feel the blood coursing through my body.

My son Rafi is enchanted with cyberspace. But we are not disembodied mind and spirit, we are our bodies--and cruising the Internet won't teach us that. It even may trick us into thinking that having a body and a place is not important. But gardening teaches us otherwise. I do not mean industrial mechanized farming. I mean the kind of gardening that anyone of us can do with his or her hands and feet and the simplest tools.