The garden is a personal place of retreat and delight and labor for many people. Gardening helps us collect ourselves, much as praying does. For rich and poor- it makes no difference- a garden is a place where body and soul are in harmony. In Inheriting Paradise Vigen Guroian offers an abundant vision of the spiritual life found in the cultivation of God's good creation. Capturing the earthiness and sacramental character of the Christian faith, these uplifting meditations bring together the experience of space and time through the cycle of the seasons in the garden and relate this fundamental human experience to the cycle of the church year and the Christian seasons of grace. The tilling of fresh earth; the sowing of seeds; the harvesting of rhubarb and roses, dillweed and daffodils-Guroian finds in the garden our most concrete connection with life and God's gracious giving. His personal reflections on this connection, complemented here by delicate woodcut illustrations, offer a compelling entry into Christian spirituality.
Inheriting Paradise
Meditations on GardeningBy Vigen GuroianWilliam B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 1999 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8028-4588-7Contents
Preface..................................................ixI. Inheriting Paradise...................................1II. Lenten Spring........................................21III. Fruits of Pentecost.................................31IV. Transfiguration......................................43V. Mary in the Garden....................................55VI. The Garden Signed with the Cross.....................65VII. In the Juvenescence of the Year.....................77Acknowledgments..........................................93
Chapter One
Inheriting Paradise
A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!
Rose plot,
Fringed pool,
Ferned grot —
The veriest school
Of peace; and yet the fool
Contends that God is not —
Not God! in garden! when eve is cool?
Nay, But I have a sign;
'Tis very sure God walks in mine.
Thomas Edward Brown, "My Garden"
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 enjoy a repast of the seeds that have fallen on the ground. The geese and the chickadees don't know this, but I think of 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.
Even in desolate January when I look over the gray and frozen earth, I dream of green paradise. The prophet Ezekiel says: "The land now desolate will be tilled, instead of lying waste for every passer-by to see. Everyone will say that this land which was waste has become like a garden of Eden" (Ezekiel 36:34-35, REB). That is my hope when I garden.
But don't get me wrong. I am not a romantic about such things. I take long hikes with Scarlett, my Irish setter, through a beautiful lay of woods and meadows near our home, where rare and unusual wildflowers grow on sparse rocky soil. Romantics say they find God in nature, and maybe they do. But one might just as easily not find God in nature, only nature itself. Our natural surroundings, however, possess the remarkable capacity to rouse us from an insensate slothfulness that sin has brought about. 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 cold damp clumps 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 struggle 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 am in this mortal frame. Birth and renewal are signs that anticipate and foreshadow paradise.
The seventeenth-century writer William Coles comments: "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 be 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 in our day accuse the Christian faith of erecting a barrier between "superior" human beings and "inferior" nature, and 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 Nollman 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 rocks."
I do not know how literal Nollman is wanting to be. I suspect, however, that his real knowledge of biblical faith is limited. Otherwise, how could he forget the psalmist's intimacy with both God and nature?
Praise the Lord from the heavens; praise him in the heights above. Praise him, all his angels; praise him, all his hosts. Praise him, sun and moon; praise him, all you shining stars! 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. Psalm 148:1-3, 7-10, REB
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. Man is a microcosm in whose flesh resonates and reverberates the pulse of the whole creation, in whose mind creation comes to consciousness, and through whose imagination and will God wants to heal and reconcile everthing that sin has wounded and put in disharmony.
Earth, sweet Earth, sweet landscape,
with leavs throng
And louchd low grass, heaven that dost appeal
To, with no tongue to plead, no heart to feel;
That canst but only be, but dost that long —
And what is Earth's eye, tongue,
or heart else, where
Else, but in dear and dogged man? —
Ah, the heir
To his own selfbent so bound, so tied
to his turn,
To thriftless reave both our rich round
world bare
And none reck of world after, this bids wear
Earth brows of such care, care and dear concern.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Ribblesdale"
My son Rafi is enchanted with cyberspace. But we are not disembodied mind or spirit, we are our bodies — cruising the Internet won't teach us that. It may even trick us into thinking that having a body and a place is not important. Gardening teaches us differently. I do not mean industrial mechanized farming, I mean the kind of gardening that any one of us can do with his hands and feet and the simplest tools.
* * *
I am an Armenian Orthodox believer and theologian. The Orthodox faith is a sacramental faith, and I have been trying to express its sacramental vision. When Orthodox Christians perform the great rite of the blessing of the water by ocean beach or riverbank, they behave, as the Armenian liturgy says, like the holy apostles who became "cleansers of the whole world." While God might have driven Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Paradise, God still ensured that the living waters issuing from the garden continued to irrigate the whole earth and cleanse its polluted streams and lakes. When we bless water, we acknowledge God's grace and desire to cleanse the world and make it paradise.
Water is the blood of creation. Our own bodies are eighty percent water. Water is also the element of baptism. St. Thomas Aquinas said: "Because water is transparent, it can receive light; and so it is fitting that it should be used in baptism, inasmuch as it is the sacrament of faith." By cleansing the water we make it clear again. By expelling the demonic pollutants we ready it for greater service to God. We tend not only the garden that we call nature but also the garden that is ourselves, insofar as we are constituted of water and are born anew by it.
We ought not to draw a line that neatly marks off nature from humankind. This is a modern heresy that we have inherited from the Enlightenment. Contrary to environmentalists' accusations of anthropocentrism, Christians believe that human beings are especially responsible for tending the creation. This is because God has endowed human beings alone among God's creatures with the rational and imaginative capacities to envision the good of everything and to see that that good is respected. This is no less a responsibility than the duty to care for our own bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit. God has given human beings this responsibility as an emblem of his own great love for all of creation. The fourth-century church father St. Ephrem the Syrian says in his Hymns on Paradise:
The fool, who is unwilling to realize
his honorable state,
prefers to become just an animal,
rather than a man,
so that, without incurring judgment,
he may serve naught but his lusts.
But had there been sown in animals
just a little
of the sense of discernment,
then long ago would the wild asses
have lamented
and wept at their not
having been human.
St. Ephrem does not condone an ecologically destructive anthropocentrism. He does not say that human beings are masters over creation with the right to use it solely for their own selfish purposes or comfort. Rather, he reminds us that everything comes from God and that without God's constant nurture, nothing would be and nothing could grow. "It is not the gardeners with their planting and watering who count," writes St. Paul, "but God who makes it grow." Indeed, we are not only "fellow-workers" in God's great garden; we ourselves are God's garden (1 Corinthians 3:7-9, REB). This is the ground of our humility as mere creatures among all other creatures loved by God.
Our Christian living ought to reflect an "oikic" ethos. The Greek word oikos means a dwelling or a place to live. The words "economy" and "ecology" come from this same Greek word. The oikumene, the whole creation, is the church's ethical concern. Our incarnational faith inspires a vision of humankind's relationship to creation that is sacramental, ecological, and ethical. In its elevation of bread and wine, the liturgy of the eucharist makes this connection clear.
The Armenian writer Teotig tells a story about the genocide of the Armenians during World War I. Father Ashod Avedian was a priest of a village near the city of Erzeroum in eastern Turkey. During the deportations, 4,000 Armenian men of that village were separated from their families and driven on a forced march into desolate regions. On their march to death, when food supplies had given out, Father Ashod instructed the men to pray in unison, "Lord have mercy," then led them in taking the "cursed" soil and swallowing it as communion. The ancient Armenian catechism called the Teaching of St. Gregory says that "this dry earth is our habitation, and all assistance and nourishment for our lives [comes] from it and grows on it, and food for our growth, like milk from a mother, comes to us from it."
Teotig's story is a reminder that we belong to the earth and that our redemption includes the earth from which we and all the creatures have come, by which we are sustained, and through which God continues to act for our salvation. If water is the blood of creation, then earth is its flesh and air is its breath, and all things are purified by the fiery love of God.
For the earth to bring forth fruit there must be water and air and the light and heat of the sun. Every gardener knows this, and so recognizes that the right combination of these elements lies beyond the control of science or contrivance. That is the wisdom and agony of gardening. God's creation cannot subsist without God's abundant grace. God has given human beings the sacred responsibility of mediating God's grace and by offering blessings to lift the ancient curse of Adam and expel the demons from every living thing and from the earth and its waters and from the air. No human science or technology can accomplish this, although we are constantly tempted to think so.
* * *
So let us be good gardeners and teach our children to be the same. Modern Christians have spoken a lot about "stewardship" of the earth. But I think we are overly practiced at the kind of management that this word easily connotes. We need another perspective, another metaphor. Scripture gives us the symbol of the garden. Adam and Eve were placed in a garden where they walked together with God and did not need to garden. But when they sinned and were expelled, gardening began. Gardening symbolizes our race's primordial acceptance of a responsibility and role in rectifying the harm done to the creation through sin.
The Armenian liturgy speaks of human beings as "co-creators" with God. But what is meant by this expression? Certainly not any kind of equality with God. God alone is the Creator. We are not literally co-creators, but sacramental gardeners. We garden in order to provide sustenance for ourselves and the other creatures. But we also use the fruit of our gardens to prepare the bread of the sacrament. In a petitionary prayer of the Armenian Rite of Washing the Cross, the priest asks: "Bless, Lord, this water with the holy cross, so that it may impart to the fields, where it is sprinkled, harvests, wherefrom we have fine flour as an offering of holiness unto thy Lordship."
The fruit of the garden is not restricted to what we eat. Every garden lends something more to the imagination — beauty. The beauty of a turnip garden may be more homely than the beauty of a tulip garden, but there is beauty in it nevertheless. Every garden holds the potential of giving us a taste of Paradise. Sometimes this comes as a grace that does not exact one's personal labor, but somewhere someone has labored with the sweat of the brow to make the garden grow. There is no ecstasy without first agony.
Jesus prayed in a garden and agonized there, watering it with his tears. His body, which was torn on the Cross, was also buried in a garden. And three days after his crucifixion, the women who wept as he hung on the Cross and anointed our Lord's body returned to that garden to find that the seed which they had lovingly prepared for planting had already borne a sweet and fragrant fruit. Every garden is an intimation of the Garden that is Christ's, that he himself tends in the hearts of those who welcome him in.
Even today on this earth of thorns
we can see in the field
the spikes of wheat which God,
despite those curses, has given:
cradled with them, the grains receive their birth,
thanks to the wind;
at the will of the most High,
who can perform all things,
does the breeze suckle them,
like a mother's breast it nurtures them,
so that herein may be depicted a type
of how spiritual beings are nourished.
St. Ephrem, Hymns on Paradise
The sensual breeze that breathes life into our earthly gardens is a type of the spiritual breeze that wafts through the Garden of Paradise. The breeze moves out and into the bitterest and most barren regions in which man and beast dwell. As St. Ephrem says, it "tempers the curse on this earth of ours."
That Garden is
the life-breath
of this diseased world
that has been so long in sickness:
that breath proclaims that a saving remedy
has been sent to heal our mortality.
Hymns on Paradise
Last of all, God also has planted within each human being a seed of hope that, if properly nurtured, grows into a confidence that all will be well, all manner of things shall be well. The breath of God reaches into even the smallest and most remote garden and human heart and infuses life. Even more, it brings salvation. The anemone and the rose grow in the earthly garden, but in the Garden of Paradise the anemone grows without the blood of the Cross and the rose has no thorns. The Armenian Epiphany hymn of the blessing of the water declares: "Today the garden appears to mankind,/let us rejoice in righteousness unto eternal life.... /Today the shut and barred gate of the garden is opened to mankind."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Inheriting Paradiseby Vigen Guroian Copyright © 1999 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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